The California congresswoman has been pushing for the sponsors of the upcoming Winter Olympics to speak out against the violent and genocidal policies of the Chinese regime.
Congresswoman Michelle Steel (R – CA 48th District) has been turning up the heat on the corporate sponsors of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, publicly condemning their silence in the face of China’s serious and well-documented abuses of its citizens’ rights.
Steel wrote an open letter to more than a dozen major Olympic corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Samsung, Nike, Toyota, and Bridgestone, encouraging them to use their public platforms and advertising budgets to call out the numerous human rights violations of the Chinese Communist Party.
The violations cited by Steel include the forced internment of nearly 2 million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region of China, who have been subject to slave labor, sterilization, and political indoctrination, among other such acts. In addition, Steel made reference to the repeated use of police brutality in Hong Kong, which has seen peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators arrested and journalists silenced.
On Twitter, Steel wrote that “the backdrop (of the Winter 2022 Olympics) is one of genocide, violence and terror.”
Writing for Fox News, Steel also called out China for the apparent disappearance of Peng Shuai, an athlete who accused a major figure in the Chinese Community Party of sexual assault. Steel praised the Biden administration’s decision to implement a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Olympics, and encouraged the Olympic sponsors to take a similarly strong public stand.
While acknowledging that these sorts of campaigns are difficult for corporations to undertake, Steel wrote that “we cannot let the CCP use the Olympic stage for their communist propaganda. Not while millions of people in Communist China are suppressed, intimidated, silenced and abused.”
These issues are not new for Steel, who has previously helped pass legislation that banned imports from Xinjiang, condemned China for its treatment of the Uyghur people, and called on the International Olympics Committee to uphold its stated human rights commitments.
