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By Renju Jose and Gabriel Crossley
SYDNEY / BEIJING (Reuters) – Australia joins the US in a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday as other allies took similar steps to denounce China’s human rights record.
The United States said on Monday that its government officials would boycott the Beijing nL1N2SR0F6 Olympics over China’s “human rights abuses” a few weeks after talks to ease tensions between the two superpowers.
China said the US would “pay the price” for the nL1N2SS22N decision, and warned of “decisive countermeasures” in response.
Morrison said Australia is struggling to reopen diplomatic channels with China and to discuss alleged human rights violations in Xinjiang and Beijing’s moves to slow down and block imports of Australian goods.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Canberra said “some Australian politicians” were taking a “political stance”.
“The current state of Sino-Australian relations lies with Australia,” they said in a statement.
Other allies have been slow to pledge to join the diplomatic boycott.
Britain is considering accepting limited government participation in the Beijing Olympics on February 4-20, which would be left out of the full diplomatic boycott, The Telegraph reported on Wednesday.
A complete ban on ministerial and diplomatic representation at the Winter Games remains an option, the report says.
Japan is considering not sending cabinet members to the Beijing Winter Olympics after the US announced a diplomatic boycott, citing unnamed government sources in Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper on Wednesday.
The administration of President Joe Biden referred to what the United States calls the genocide against Muslim minorities in the western Xinjiang region of China. China denies all rights violations.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in a media briefing on Tuesday that his country is opposed to the US diplomatic boycott and has called for “firm countermeasures”.
“The U.S. will pay the price for its wrongdoing,” he said, without giving details. “Let’s all wait.”
The Winter Games will begin about six months after the end of the Tokyo Summer Games, which were delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We always urge the political world to have the utmost respect and the least possible intervention,” said Juan Antonio Samaranch, the COI Coordinating Committee for the Beijing Olympics. “We need to be reciprocal. We respect political decisions made by political organizations.”
The United States is hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and is preparing to host the 2030 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Asked if China would consider a diplomatic boycott of the U.S. Olympics, Zhao said the U.S. boycott had “damaged” the basis and atmosphere of sports exchange and cooperation at the Olympics.
The US diplomatic boycott, which has been pushed for months by some members of the U.S. Congress and rights groups, despite efforts to stabilize relations between the world’s two largest economies, comes with a video meeting between Biden and Xi Jinping of China last month.
“ONLY OPPORTUNITY”
Bonnie Glaser, a Chinese expert on the German Marshall Fund in the United States, said in a U.S. congressional hearing on Tuesday that failing to join the boycott of other countries would undermine the message that China’s human rights violations are unacceptable.
“Now I think the only option we really have available is to try to get as many countries as possible in this coalition,” Glaser said.
Announcing Australia’s plans, Morrison said Beijing had failed to respond to a number of issues raised by Canberra, including alleged human rights violations.
“So it’s no surprise, then, that Australian government officials are not going to China to attend these games,” Morrison told Sydney reporters.
Relations between Australia and China, its main trading partners, are on the decline after Canberra banned Huawei Technologies from its 5G broadband network in 2018 and called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
Beijing responded by imposing tariffs on a number of Australian products, including coal, beef, barley and wine.
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