Olympians Will Be 'Punished' For Protests & Here's What China's Censors Don't Want To Hear
Even Winnie the Pooh isn't safe from China's censorship rules.
The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics are here and China is sending a clear message to foreign athletes and press: don't call us out.
In fact, China doesn't want to be called out on a lot of issues, and it can usually silence those issues at home because it censors its own internet.
But censorship is harder to enforce when the whole world is suddenly visiting, so China is cranking up the political pressure to keep everyone else in line.
That's why a Chinese Olympic official recently issued a harsh warning to foreign athletes about protesting at the Games.
"Any behaviour or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against the Chinese laws and regulations, are [...] subject to certain punishment," Yang Shu, a top Olympic official for the Beijing Games, said on a conference call last month.
China is also suspected of keeping an eye on athletes wherever they go in Beijing, thanks to the MY2022 app that every visitor is required to install on their phones.
The app is meant to help China track potential COVID-19 cases. However, it also has security holes that can be easily breached, and a built-in list of so-called "politically sensitive" terms that can be reported, according to a report by The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
"The app also includes a censorship keyword list, which, while presently inactive, targets a variety of political topics including domestic issues such as Xinjiang and Tibet as well as references to Chinese government agencies," Citizen Lab says.
And the surveillance fears don't end there. The FBI has warned that athletes should bring burner phones because of security risks in China.
Human Rights Watch has also warned in a report that "athletes participating in the Games will be surveilled, and their rights to free speech and protest severely curtailed."
But what are all these human rights abuses that people are talking about?
Well, there's China's mass persecution of Uyghurs, an ethnic minority of Muslims, in the country's west. There's also China's takeover of once-democratic Hong Kong, those two Canadians that it almost killed and the alleged silencing of tennis player Peng Shuai in a sexual assault case.
And then there's the ongoing censorship of everything within China. Censors don't allow any pornography, violence or political dissent on their closed version of the internet, and they are always watching out for keywords that might make the government look bad. The state also completely controls all media outlets.
People in China can't even share images of Winnie the Pooh, after the character was used to make fun of Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.
Seriously.
We still don't know how many of those rules will be applied to foreign athletes, or what will happen when someone steps out of line.
However, it might be only a matter of time before we find out.