![]() China has used similar tactics to sway a wide range of international institutions, from the WHO to the U.N. "And some senior officials have conflicts of interests."Ĭhina's multi-year effort to influence the IOC-ranging from a Samaranch memorial park the size of five football fields to lucrative deals with Chinese tech company Alibaba-provides a cautionary tale of how China uses its global influence to co-opt international organizations. "The IOC benefits a lot from Chinese business and Chinese government," Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer who attended the October meeting, told the Free Beacon. In the last decade or so, the Chinese state fostered corporate sponsorships, personal ties, and institutional connections with Olympics executives, making it difficult for any games to be held without Chinese support. ![]() While the IOC failed to influence China, the communist regime has managed to co-opt the IOC. Since the 2008 Olympics, the authoritarian country has only strengthened its grip over society, inflicting genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang and violent repression in Hong Kong and Tibet. "To try to leverage on the Olympic Games to obtain a number of political agendas is very dangerous," Salisachs said during the October meeting. Salisachs refused to consider discussions about Chinese human rights abuses, telling activists the Olympics is not the place to deliberate "political agendas," according to the meeting minutes. The IOC has abandoned even the pretense of using its influence to reform the Chinese regime. The senior Samaranch, remembered today in China as a "dream-maker," for years turned a blind eye to Chinese state repression, telling reporters in 2008, "If we are talking about human rights, many countries that attack China should look at themselves." When pressed, the senior Samaranch often switched up his arguments, saying that the IOC can leverage its international prestige to nudge China to improve its human rights record. Salisachs's comments echoed those made by his father-Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former president of the International Olympics Committee-in the years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The October meeting was far from the first time an Olympics official dismissed Chinese human rights concerns. "We were all in shock-they were so disrespectful to us." " was talking to me as if he knows so much better than we do," Frances Hui, a Hong Kong activist who attended the meeting, told the Free Beacon. That is not what we do," Salisachs told activists, according to meeting minutes obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. We cannot go and say and endorse one or the other. "The world lives under very many political systems. ![]() When Juan Antonio Samaranch Salisachs, the 2022 Beijing Olympics chief, met with Chinese dissidents in a closed-door October meeting, he firmly rejected their plea to relocate the games out of China to protest human rights abuses.
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