► Although the past cannot tell us how to act in the present, it might be useful to reflect upon the global history of the boycott to think more clearly and creatively about what is at stake in navigating South Korea's current dilemma.

► The original spirit of boycott would require more than a snub by government officials: it would demand a shunning by the international community as a whole.

► While it is questionable how much a diplomatic boycott could achieve, the potential impact of a corporate boycott, prodded on by a consumer boycott, seems considerable.

There would seem to be no easy answer for South Koreans mulling how to respond to nascent calls for a so-called diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, scheduled to open on February 4, 2022. Although the past cannot tell us how to act in the present, it might be useful to reflect upon the global history of the boycott from its anti-colonial origins through high dramas of Cold War Olympics. The patterns, contingencies, and ironies of history can help us think more clearly and creatively about what is at stake in navigating our present dilemmas. This essay is offered in that spirit.

A Weapon of the Weak

         A literal history of the boycott begins in County Mayo, Ireland, in the late summer of 1880. Mayo was poor even by Irish standards, still recovering from the horrific potato famine (when future US President Joe Biden’s great-great grandfather emigrated from Mayo to Scranton, Pennsylvania). To protest rents they could not afford working land they could not own, tenant farmers decided to shun the local land-agent, Charles Boycott, after he sent out eviction notices. With prodding from grassroots activists, the community banded together, refusing to farm Boycott’s land, clean his manor, or deliver his mail. Boycott’s supporters in London and Ulster organized a “relief expedition,” guarded by a large contingent of British soldiers, to harvest the crops that locals refused to touch. But the Mayo folk’s communal act of ostracism was already spreading to other parts of Ireland, strengthening the cause of land reform and calls for “home rule.” The local priest named it “a boycott,” and the English language got a new word.[1]  

By the early years of the 20th century, boycotts were breaking out around the colonized world as a “weapon of the weak,” to borrow the phrase from political scientist James Scott.[2] In Shanghai, a city whose sovereignty had been subdivided into foreign concessions, Chinese merchants initiated a consumer boycott of US companies and goods in 1905 to protest America’s racist immigration laws and imperialist privileges enjoyed by expatriates in China (described recently by historian James Carter in his SupChina blog). That same year, Indian nationalists in Calcutta began a movement, known as swadeshi, linked to a boycott of British cloth. Under the charismatic leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, the boycott movement would not only help liberate Indians from centuries of colonial rule, but also inspire the civil rights movement in the American South led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., which got its start with the legendary Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955.[3]

To Play or Not To Play

In the first decade of the 20th century as Bengali and Shanghaiese consumers stopped buying the products of Anglo-American imperialism, boycotts were beginning to nibble at the edges of the Olympic revival, the fin de siècle brainchild of French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin.

Fittingly, some of the earliest Olympic protests were staged by Irish athletes, unhappy about competing in the fourth Olympiad, to be hosted in London in 1908, if required to compete on behalf of Great Britain. As it turned out, Irish-born athletes were the medal sensation in London ‘08, led by US track and field star Martin Sheridan, born in—you guessed it—County Mayo. Sheridan used his Olympic status to lobby for the Irish cause, but died tragically only a decade later in a Manhattan hospital, an early American casualty of the Spanish Flu pandemic.[4]

Campaigns to boycott the host country, ban certain teams, or protest one’s own delegation would bedevil Olympics throughout the century, as we are seeing still today. The darkest moment—the moral nadir of international sport—was undoubtedly the Nazi Olympics hosted by Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1936. Nazi propaganda organs worked diligently to stage a spectacle to the greatness of the Third Reich and mythologized Aryan race. The dominant performance by African-American sprinter Jessie Owens was a dazzling refutation of Nazi theories of racial superiority (and homegrown racism awaiting Owens on his return to the US). But the victory of African-American and Jewish athletes in Berlin only magnifies the collective failure to deny Hitler the privilege of hosting the Games, an indelible stain on the history of sport.

Berlin ’36 also saw the first Korean gold medalist, marathoner Sohn Kee-chung, who bowed his head on the victor’s podium and clutched a laurel wreath to cover the Japanese flag on his uniform in a silent act of symbolic resistance. By then, the International Olympic Committee had already voted to accept Imperial Japan’s bid to host the 1940 Games in Tokyo. Even after the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre as Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937, the Tokyo Olympics was only called off at the initiative of the Japanese government, not the IOC.[5]

Two Chinas, Two Superpowers

The world war brought on by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan forced a dozen-year hiatus in holding the Olympics. By the time the Games were safe to resume in 1948 (back in London), a new “cold” war was already underway. Boycotts and bans would become a standard feature of Olympic diplomacy throughout the Cold War era.

Perhaps no one staged more boycotts of the Games during those decades than the respective governments of China. The Republic of China (ROC) government in Taiwan boycotted Helsinki 1952 when the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—founded in Beijing in October 1949 after the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War—was also invited to participate. For the next three decades, however, it was Beijing that refused to play in the Games, while Taipei fielded national teams (sometimes unhappily) under a variety of names dictated by the IOC: Taiwan, Formosa, China-Formosa.

Although the United Nations General Assembly voted to switch the China seat to Beijing in late 1971, the name and flag of the ROC was permitted again at Munich 1972. But at Montreal 1976, it was Taipei’s turn to boycott again due to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s insistence on the team-name Taiwan. The PRC, meanwhile, joined the US-led boycott of Moscow 1980, and then finally made its long-awaited Olympic return for the Lake Placid 1980 Winter Games. The ROC gave up its boycott at Sarajevo 1984, accepting the formula “Chinese Taipei” still in use today. As historian Xu Guoqi summed it up, “Beijing and Taipei used sports as an important vehicle for proclaiming their political legitimacy to the world.”[6] Knowing this history makes it harder to swallow the insistence today from Beijing on the separation of sports and politics.

Growing up in late Cold War America, I was too young to appreciate the dueling “two-Chinas” boycotts by Beijing and Taipei, or the anti-apartheid boycott by African nations of Montreal ‘76, or even the “Free World” coalition’s boycott of Moscow 1980 (in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). But I can still remember my disappointment as a patriotic, sports-obsessed California kid when “the Ruskies” decided to boycott the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984. In hindsight, it is hard to see compelling evidence that the boycotts of Moscow or LA generated the ideological or geopolitical impact intended by political leaders at the time. The burden was born, it would seem, by crestfallen athletes unable to compete on the world stage and disappointed fans unable to root for them.

From a historical perspective, it is ironic to observe how far the meaning of the term boycott had drifted from Mayo 1880 to Moscow 1980. The word was born out of a resistance movement by landless Irish and spread as a subaltern practice to places like treaty port Shanghai and colonial Calcutta. A century later, the Cold War Olympic boycotts were less “weapons of the weak” than soft power swords and shields wielded by the superpowers.

Seoul ’88/ Beijing ‘08

For South Koreans of a certain age, talk of an Olympic boycott might bring back memories of Seoul 1988, when North Korea failed to convince the Socialist bloc (with the exception of Cuba) to protest their southern rival’s big moment on the world stage. As it turned out, Pyongyang’s boycott campaign was a sideshow—the real pre-Olympic drama was coming from university campuses like Yonsei University in Seoul where I happen to teach. Student protestors and democracy activists leveraged the upcoming Olympics as a public relations weapon against the authoritarian rule of former general Chun Doo-hwan. They staged mass protests that pressured Chun to step down and that ensured his anointed successor, former general Roh Tae-woo, would hold a fair election. Although Roh won at the ballot box in the winter of 1987, the election itself marked a giant step forward in Korea’s transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The global scrutiny involved in hosting the Games was credited as a spur to democratization in the host country.

Seoul ’88 became a model for the how the pressure of playing sports host could catalyze political progress, and thus encouraged democratic daydreaming after China won the Olympic bid in 2001.[7] In fairness, China in the early 2000s looks in retrospect like a comparatively relaxed and open period—with promises of a more “harmonious” approach to governance, expanding space for civil society organizations, and experiments in local and “intra-Party” democracy. The aughts also witnessed a kind of second honeymoon between China and the US, as the searing images of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre faded from view. This enthusiasm about a new era of US-China friendship was underwritten by economic interests on both sides that stood to profit from a booming Chinese economy eager for access to Wall Street capital and US consumer markets. Hosting the Beijing 2008 Olympics fit the narrative of an increasingly harmonious China that promised the world it would rise peacefully.

There were a few discordant notes in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics. Celebrity activist Mia Farrow, for example, led a high-profile campaign to pressure Beijing for shielding the Sudan government against criticism over atrocities in Darfur. Yet even this effort to label Beijing 2008 as the “Genocide Olympics” was not a boycott movement, but rather a pressure campaign (as influential columnist Nicholas Kristof explained at the time).

Then in March—just months before the opening ceremony was to take place in Beijing—clashes in Lhasa and a harsh clampdown by Chinese security forces on Buddhist monasteries and Tibetan communities sparked international concern. The careful staging of the global tour of the Olympic flame (the Torch of Harmony) descended into shoving matches between Tibet sympathizers, human rights critics, and Chinese nationalists from Paris to Seoul. Despite this, a boycott movement did not gain traction. US President George W. Bush attended the opening ceremony—the first time in history for a president to travel abroad to do so. Trying to keep the focus on sports and away from politics, the former baseball executive gushed to NBC about the “very uplifting experience” of attending the Games.    

The Beijing Summer Olympics was a giant success precisely in the way intended by its host state. If Seoul ’88 showed how the Olympics could help empower forces for democratic liberalism in the host nation, Beijing ’08 seemed to demonstrate exactly the opposite. An authoritarian state could gain global prestige and domestic credibility for successfully hosting the world’s athletes for an ostensibly apolitical event.

Many China watchers today look back a series of developments around the time of and including the Summer Olympics as part of a shift in the administration of President Hu Jintao toward a more assertive approach to the neighborhood. Under his successor, Xi Jinping, assertiveness advanced into an often combative posture toward the world, enshrined in the concept of “wolf warrior diplomacy,” amidst tightening repression and surveillance to ensure “stability” at home.

It Takes A Village

Advocates of an Olympic boycott cite a litany of human rights abuses by the Chinese government focusing on repressive policies in three borderlands—Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. The most disturbing reports have come from Xinjiang, where journalists for The Wall Street Journaland other outlets began reporting on extreme surveillance four years ago. The creation of a mass detention program to “re-educate” Uyghur and other non-Han Chinese Muslims was confirmed by The New York Times in leaked documents dubbed the Xinjiang Papers as well as satellite imagery in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by Buzzfeed. Meanwhile in Tibet, controls placed on Buddhist monasteries and Tibetan communities after the March 2008 uprising became enduring features of life on the plateau.[8]

Concerns over repressive tendencies hit closer to the world of sport in recent weeks when explosive charges by Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai against a former top-ranked official were swiftly scrubbed from public view, starting with the athlete’s own social media presence. The IOC was widely criticized for releasing a photograph of a video call with Peng, seeming to do the work of propaganda organs for them. The Women’s Tennis Association moved in the opposite direction, announcing the suspension of all tournaments in China until Ms. Peng’s safety and freedom are assured.

Strong arguments can certainly be found running against an Olympic boycott. Some insist on upholding the principle of separating sports and politics. Others point to the futility of previous boycotts (Moscow 1980 in particular). No one wants to deny an athlete the opportunity to compete after years of training and dedication. Both as a sports fan and proponent of engagement with China, I can appreciate their logic. Indeed, my own expectations of what a boycott might achieve in terms of slowing or reversing the repressive tendencies evident in the governance of China would be quite low.

But as the grandson of an emigrant from County Mayo, residing now in Korea among a people whose parents and grandparents endured a half-century of colonial dispossession, I personally find it hard to look past the agonies and indignities suffered by Tibetans and Uyghurs. And as a professor at a university whose alumni once braved tear gas on our campus in the fight for Korean democracy, it has been painful to watch the quelling of idealistic young people in Hong Kong and to see that city’s rich local culture of openness and cosmopolitanism be undermined, even crushed.

Contemplating these tragic developments, in fact, leaves one with the feeling that a diplomatic boycott is insufficient to the moral test. Perhaps if the majority of governments around the world collectively expressed their disapprobation by sitting out the Games, it could be a meaningful statement. But if only a handful of governments, encouraged or even cajoled into it by the United States, opt not to send envoys to cheer on their athletes, at a time when renewed pandemic fears are making international travel a rarity once again… can we even call that a boycott? It would be a far cry indeed from Mayo ‘80, when a whole community—farmers, shopkeepers, housemaids, postmen, priests—acted in solidarity to shun an agent and symbol of injustice.

The original spirit of boycott would require more than a snub by government officials. It would demand a shunning by the international community as a whole—television broadcasters like NBC and corporate sponsors like Samsung, international sports federations and national Olympic committees, athletes, pundits, and fans. While it is questionable how much a diplomatic boycott could achieve, the potential impact of a corporate boycott, prodded on by a consumer boycott, seems considerable. In that sense, a diplomatic boycott lets the rest of us off the hook. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes the global village to stage a real Olympic boycott.