In February 2022, Beijing will take its place in history as the first city in the world to host both the Summer and Winter Olympics. With only three months left until Tokyo's postponed hosting of the games, it's no surprise this festival of athletic ability and internationalism is on the minds of so many.
Regrettably, that has included those of NGOs calling for boycotts of the Winter Olympics to be held next year in response to allegations over Xinjiang. Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department walked back remarks that it was in talks with allies to form a coordinated approach to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, implying a boycott, but it hasn't as of yet outright declared the option off the table. Such a move would be a mistake.
Although the International Olympic Committee has long sought to keep politics and political expression separate from the games, seldom has this been the case. The Olympics has always offered a means for governments to project soft power and credibility as a major country, but it's also been an opportunity for friendly exchanges at the people-to-people level in the form of athletic competition and tourism. Citizen exchange is vital to building the broad public support needed to sustain healthy bilateral relations, making it folly to leave such a task solely to diplomats and foreign ministry representatives. Limiting citizen exchange with isolation tactics results in further mutual misunderstanding, leading to further mutual mistrust and further isolation, and so on. Increased exchange between citizens of China and Western countries, not less, is key to producing the positive feedback loop needed for stabilizing Sino-Western relations. This remains as true today as it was in 1971 when the fateful encounter between ping-pong players Glenn Cowan and Zhuang Zedong, which involved the sharing of gifts and stories about each other's countries, led to the normalization of Sino-American relations which many regard as the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century.
This is something I not only witness in my own work, bringing together Chinese and Western youths for the Global Youth Ambassadors Program which aims to instill cross-cultural awareness in addition to English language competence. It also plays a part in my day-to-day interactions as an American in Shenzhen. In building friendships with my neighbors, colleagues, and even those I may share a table with at a restaurant or a seat on the bus, those friendships are the seeds from which a more positive and productive relationship between our countries might grow.
President Xi Jinping said, "Friendship between world people is a fundamental force for promoting world peace and development and a basic prerequisite for win-win cooperation." It is only in this spirit that we should approach the Olympic Games as well as one another. With tensions as high as they are now, there's no gain to be made in a boycott, only missed opportunities.
(The author, from the United States, is the program director of Shenzhen Global Culture Exchange Ltd.)