Peng Shuai's "controlled interview" during the Winter Olympics and a Xinjiang athlete at the opening ceremony are among the stories included in this daily brief of Human Rights Watch.
This statement was originally published on hrw.org on 7 February 2022.
As Chinese athlete Peng Shuai emerged again during the opening weekend of the Beijing Winter Olympics for a “controlled interview” with French sports magazine L’Equipe and a dinner with International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials, the world cannot know what surveillance, coercion, or duress is being applied to her, or what she would say if she lived in a country where voices are not systematically silenced. But we do know that no Beijing-supervised interviews, or meetings with officials can mask the Chinese government’s ugly repression of activists, journalists, and athletes.
Peng Shuai, who accused a senior official in the China Communist Party of sexual abuse in a social media post published and quickly removed in November, “may or may not be saying what she actually thinks — we simply don’t know,” comments Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch. International organizations such as the IOC and media outlets like L’Equipe “should think twice before engaging with her. Don’t ask a person how she feels knowing she can’t speak freely.”
The opening ceremony in Beijing on Friday marked another troubling Winter Olympics low. One of the final two athletes who lit the Olympic torch is from Xinjiang, where the Xi Jinping regime is committing crimes against humanity.
