In 1936, Adolf Hitler opened the Summer Olympics in Berlin, a propaganda campaign to project to the world a positive image of Nazi Germany. For the first time, a torch relay was held from Olympia, Greece, to the hosting city, a tradition that remains to this date. A film documenting the Games was made by Leni Riefenstahl, and it was lauded as one of the most innovative films of the era. Despite threats of boycotts, most countries did send athletes to the Games. The United States Olympic Committee president at the time, Avery Brundage, insisted that “politics has no place in sport”.

In 2008, the Summer Olympics was held in Beijing. Showing to the world an increasingly confident, open, and powerful country, the Beijing Games belied the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime’s lack of regard to human rights. Eleven years since the Games, the world has now learned their appalling violation of human rights: concentration camps for the Uyghurs, the suppression of Muslims and Christians, the imprisonment of human rights activists and lawyers, including Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in jail, a walled-off internet which tolerates no dissent, and more recently, the heavy-handed approach in response to the protests in Hong Kong.

Politics may, and should, have no place in sport, but when Daryl Morey, the general manager of Houston Rockets, provoked angry reactions from China after he voiced his support for Hong Kong’s protesters, the world must make it clear to CCP that enough is enough. Seventy years since the rule of the CCP, tens of millions of people had been killed, exceeding even the Nazi Germany, yet the world stood by and did little. In 2022, Beijing will be hosting the Winter Olympics, and we believe it is a mistake to let it happen. Thus we hereby demand the the revocation of Beijing’s right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.