The Winter Olympics in a Divided World Quick Take GZERO Media

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The Chinese felt confident enough to have an ethnic Uyghur lighting the Olympic flame. • Subscribe to GZERO on YouTube: http://bit.ly/2TxCVnY • Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: • Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and a happy start of the week to you. Got your Quick Take to get you going on a Monday, and why not talk about the Olympics, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, so different from the Summer Olympics that they hosted back in 2008, when the American president was there, and was enormously impressed, and this was China coming out onto the world stage, and seen as a global leader. Though the presumption in the West was still as they got wealthier and more powerful, and we let them into global leadership roles, including hosting the Olympics, they would eventually become more of a free market and more democratic. And of course, that was wrong. • In fact, that was probably the single most wrong thing, most wrong view that was held over the past couple of decades by the foreign policy establishment of the West, irrespective of what side of the aisle you're on. But anyway, here we are in 2022, and it is a much more divided world. It is a much more geopolitically fractious world, and it's a world where a lot of people are saying and saying things that are pretty unhappy about Beijing hosting this Winter Olympics. People thought it was going to be very geopolitically fraught. So far, that's not been the case. It's been more or less Olympics as pandemic usual, which means no crowds kind of lockdown, but also means not a lot really happening on the political front. • So there have been a handful of diplomatic boycotts of the Olympics by the United States and a few allies. Most Europeans chose not to go along. The Japanese chose not to go along. Countries like Australia, for example, the UK have. And then the surprise on that front, India, but this was really self-inflicted by the Chinese government. The Indians were planning on sending a delegation, and then the Chinese government decided to include among the torchbearers a Chinese soldier that had been injured in the territorial dispute up in the Himalayas between India and China, and actual fighting between the two sides, which the Indian see as overwhelmingly having been precipitated by the Chinese. So once that happened, the Indians said, We're out. • But I mean, frankly, the fact that the Chinese felt confident enough to do that, the fact that the Chinese felt confident enough to have an ethnic Uyghur lighting the Olympic flame, I mean, these are signs of confidence, signs of, we don't care what you say or do, the West. And frankly, no athletes decided to boycott, and no corporate sponsoring decided to boycott. And so you put all of that together, and well over 90% of the countries of the world did not join in a diplomatic boycott. So I think the Chinese government feels pretty comfortable in all that. Where they feel much less comfortable is how this closed-loop Olympics is going to work, and whether or not they can ensure, first of all, minimum case spread inside the Olympics itself, therefore minimum disruption of the Olympic events. So far, reasonably good marks on that. Probably B+, A-. • And also most importantly, can they ensure that there is no spread from the Olympics into the Chinese population at large? So far, that looks good. Certainly no reported cases. If it was a very small number of cases, I doubt we would find out about it. The Chinese government would have high incentive not to make that known. But nonetheless, so far, if you are the Chinese leadership, you're feeling pretty good about the way all of this is going on. • I will say, by the way, I've watched a little bit of the Olympics. I'm not one of these people that says, Oh, there's a diplomatic boycott, and so we should cut everything off. First of all, I don't believe in punishing the athletes who have spent their entire lives training for this moment, in most cases, and taking it away because we are politically unhappy with the Chinese government. Seems like they should not be the people that suffer. • Sign up for GZERO’s free newsletter on global politics, Signal: http://bit.ly/gzerosignal • Subscribe to the GZERO podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... • Like GZERO on Facebook: / gzeromedia • Follow GZERO on Twitter: / gzeromedia • Follow GZERO on LinkedIn: / 18385722 • GZERO Media is a multimedia publisher providing news, insights and commentary on the events shaping our world. Our properties include GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, our newsletter Signal, Puppet Regime, the GZERO World Podcast, In 60 Seconds and GZEROMedia.com • #QuickTake #BeijingOlympics #ChineseGovernment

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