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The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has become the most senior American politician, calling for a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics to protest China’s human rights violations in 2008. Xinjiang.
Pelosi urged the United States and other countries not to send high-level delegations to increase pressure on the Chinese government to persecute Uyghurs, and the Biden government would persecute Uyghurs.
Pelosi said at the hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Committee of the House of Representatives: “We cannot be as correct as participating in the Olympics.” “In the past three decades, we have made it clear that we cannot continue to place high hopes on China. Hope their behavior will change.”
The Biden administration has conducted preliminary negotiations with allies including the United Kingdom and Australia. Diplomatic boycott, But officials said that no decision has yet been made on the game. The State Council said last week that the Chinese government had turned Xinjiang into Xinjiang. “Open Air Prison” The Biden administration is reviewing its options to ensure that it will not help China use the Olympics to win propaganda.
Beijing has rejected widespread claims that it restricts more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs and other minorities in detention camps in the northwest region, which in some cases are used for forced labor.
The diplomatic boycott will involve the government’s refusal to send officials or heads of state to participate in the Olympics. An option used in the U.S. During the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, protest against Russia’s anti-gay laws.
Pelosi said: “Let us not let the head of state go to China to pay respect to the Chinese government.”
Several Republican lawmakers have proposed a diplomatic boycott, but Pelosi, who has long been critical of China’s human rights record, is the highest congressman to promote this result.
“As the Speaker of the House of Representatives and someone who has been working on China and human rights issues for decades, this is very important,” said Sophie Richardson, Director of Human Rights Watch China.
“As the Chinese government doubles or even quadruples human rights crimes, coupled with the stubbornness and obsession of the International Olympic Committee, no one will be surprised by this result.”
Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, serves as the chairman of the committee and wants the Olympics to be withdrawn from China. He said that he will convene American companies involved in sponsoring the 2022 Olympic Games to testify before Congress.
Smith said in an interview with the British “Financial Times”: “We will require all key companies in the United States to testify,” Smith told the British “Financial Times”. The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee, not the International Olympic Committee.
“They may lose some money, but they need to realize that the money brought by the dictatorship that kills the people is an illegitimate gain.”
The Financial Times recently contacted more than two dozen companies that have Olympic sponsorship rights, but most be rejected comment.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee did not comment on Tuesday. But it has previously expressed its opposition to boycotts. The last time the United States fully boycotted it was withdrawing its athlete delegation at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
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