Beijing Olympics should not distract from China’s human rights controversies: experts

Behind the athletic spectacle, China's human rights record and democratic crackdowns continue to be scrutinized, with many activists still calling for the Games to be boycotted.

As the Beijing Winter Olympics get underway, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed Thursday that his country will deliver a “streamlined, safe and splendid Games.”

Yet behind the athletic spectacle, China’s human rights record and recent crackdowns on democracy in places like Hong Kong continue to be scrutinized, with many activists still calling for the Games to be boycotted or even cancelled.

Experts say that while it will be tough for China to make the world ignore its recent controversies, the Olympics could become a starting point for a renewed diplomatic push to improve the country’s record.

“(China) has a lot of headwinds, and those headwinds they have in large part created for themselves,” said Robert Adamson, a faculty member at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., who studies China’s impact on the world.

“This is a long game for the Chinese Communist Party … to show the rest of the world that they deserve their position in the world, despite their track record.”

Here are some of the issues that have sparked calls for a wider, international boycott of these Olympic Games:

China is accused of detaining more than a million Turkic Muslim Uyghurs in the western Xinjiang region as part of a campaign to wipe out their traditional culture, language and beliefs.

Foreign experts, governments and media have documented the detentions, as well as the demolition of mosques and forced sterilization and abortion.