You may have heard there is an Olympics happening. Amidst the biennial discussion of athletic splendor, wasted tax dollars, and corruption, there's an additional thread to this year's narrative: These Olympics are taking place in Beijing, the capital city of the nation whose socioeconomic success most threatens America's status as the global hegemon. This has led to very dumb commentary in all the places you would expect to find very dumb commentary. But rather than using my time to discuss all that nonsense, I want to focus on one sometimes decent (?) publication who has apparently spent their entire ad budget on promoted Facebook posts. That's right, we're talking about Slate dot com.
Based on the headline above you might not be surprised to learn that Slate has a bit of a reputation for unapologetic contrarianism and provocation. While there definitely is some of that going on here, the majority of the problems with Slate's Olympics coverage are relatively mundane and subtle. But this is actually more damning than their normal levels of cringeness, as these arguments and the underlying assumptions that support them appear to reflect some combination of willful ignorance and unquestioning fealty to American foreign policy interests.
The first article in their story stream is a good warm-up. It starts with an odd discussion of China's COVID measures. It's too sloppily written to infer the author's precise intent, but it reads like the New York Times' repeated criticisms of those policies which also tend to ignore the benefits of those policies (namely that almost no one in China has died of COVID). It then refers to China as an "increasingly brazen authoritarian state" without a) any immediate justification or b) any sense of awareness of our countries' own authoritarian practices. It mentions the artificial snow without any reference to similar conditions at the last two winter Olympics. Finally, after a little more COVID-trolling and several non-specific references to "human rights," the author cites their specific grievance with China:
"The government’s repressive moves are well-documented. There are the harsh crackdowns on dissent in Hong Kong, and of course the detention of nearly 2 million Uyghurs and other Muslims in a northwestern region of China. The U.S. State Department determined last year that China’s actions amounted to genocide and that its government had been committing crimes against humanity since 2017."
I'll talk more to the specifics of this later, but it's important to note that the author stakes the entirety of this claim on the word of the U.S. State Department, who I would not treat as credulously as they do.
The next article makes an attempt to introduce perspective to the proceedings, detailing the varying level of atrocities associated with every recent Olympics. But it wheels out many of the same arguments to stoke fears of China. The only justification it can give for accusations of genocide is that it's "pretty well acknowledged" to be happening. The country is taking "iron-fist, authoritarian" measures to achieve the sinister ends of...protecting its citizenry from COVID. The games themselves are "an authoritarian flex, a chance to show the world just how efficient and organized an Olympics can be when you can literally just tell everybody what to do and they have to listen to you." As opposed to America (or anywhere), where labor is never coerced out of anyone. The author even dips his toes into the lab leak conspiracy, which is the most obviously false red-baiting theory of them all. It also mentions the Peng Shuai incident, which....well OK that one is undeniably bad, being extremely weird at best and a shameless cover-up of a crime at worst. You got me there, Slate.
Next up is this article about the Uyghur torch-bearer, the spectacle of which is compared to the hypothetical of Germany choosing "a Dachau prisoner to light the cauldron at the 1936 Berlin Olympics." Ignoring the grossness of invoking the Holocaust for a dumb analogy, the Nazis explicitly did not do that because they hated the Jewish people and wanted to eradicate their entire race. We also should remember that the actual opening ceremonies in Atlanta were capped off by Muhammad Ali, a man literally imprisoned by our government for refusing to participate in the Vietnam War.
Now for the article from the screenshot above. It's clear the author is doing a bit of schtick here, which...whatever. But regardless, this passage is both wildly patronizing and suggestive of some malign influence for which he cites no evidence:
"Her age also raises questions about the extent to which this decision was hers alone. We don’t know what sort of advice she got, what sort of pressure she was under, and whether this was actually someone else’s choice that she went along with and now can’t take back."
The author also compares China to the U.S. which he says "has its problems, sure, but is still an actual democracy.'' To which I would say, are you sure? But the worst part of the article combines these two impulses to disastrous effect:
"After having competed for the United States during the 2018–19 World Cup season, Gu announced that she would henceforth be representing China. “The opportunity to help inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love,” she wrote on Instagram. “Through skiing, I hope to unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendships between nations.”
That’s nice! Who doesn’t love communication, friendship, and common understanding? Chinese President Xi Jinping, for one. Since well before 2019, China’s leader has presided over a massive surveillance state and has subjected the Uyghurs in Xinjiang to what the United States and other international observers have deemed a genocide."
Here let me re-write that last part. Let me know what you think:
"That’s nice! Who doesn’t love communication, friendship, and common understanding? American president Joe Biden, for one. Since 2021, America’s leader has presided over a massive surveillance state and has subjected the Palestinians in Israel to what Amnesty International and other international observers have deemed apartheid."
The last article I'll remark on is unironically the best one of the bunch. I am biased because I listen to the author's podcast, but I think it's pretty clearly that this piece has a balanced perspective appropriate for the subject matter at hand. But still, he couldn't resist including this very dumb line:
"The next few Olympic sites are in democratic countries that are not currently committing genocide (France, Italy, the United States)"
I already remarked on the foolishness of calling ours a "democratic" country, but I wouldn't really tut-tut about "not currently committing genocide" when we did genocide indigenous people (both here and abroad), we're currently doing something genocide-adjacent at our southern border, and we've let more than a million citizens die of a largely preventable disease.
After reading through all these articles, it's clear that Slate's case against China rests on the mantle of "human rights violations." And the main violation being cited on that front is the genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as reported by the State Department, New York Times, and others. To be clear, I don't think Slate has a central directive from on high to push this specific angle; rather, I think it's mostly a reflection of the prevailing sentiment in America. In this light, it's important to hold the media accountable for being unwitting accomplices to American threat inflation. So then if you as an American have gone along with that fundamental suspicion of China, you should ask yourself one question: How do you *know* there is an ongoing genocide?
To be extremely clear, I do not know what precisely is happening in Xinjiang, so I'm not going to be offering a specific "correction" to the official narrative. And to be even more clear, I think it's extremely unlikely that what the Chinese government is doing in Xinjiang is writ large good. At best it is a justifiable modernization project being executed without the requisite amount of care for or input from its subjects. But because our government claims to definitively know that China is up to something very bad, I think it is incumbent on us as citizens to ask questions of an institution that's lied to us in similar fashion before. And when you start to ask those questions, you might find that some of the more extreme claims of the US government will begin to unravel. What's more is that a lot of the evidence being used by the accusers has been provided by a single person with a clear agenda. And aside from the obvious geopolitical effects, such posturing leads to smears of "genocide denial" for those that question the narrative, and racial strife for those not even directly involved.
The ultimate point of all this is not to bash Slate, cheerlead for the CCP, or downplay crimes against humanity. Rather, we should all strongly consider why American institutions are pushing this specific narrative and what side effects such rhetoric has on, among others, Asian-Americans. It's been nearly a year since the advent of the "Stop Asian Hate" slogan. A specific thing we can do to materially stop this hatred is to be highly critical of these pervasive assumptions that implicitly ask us to do the opposite.
