Sustainability, Climate Action, and Green Technology
At the beginning of 2022, within the context of the international system, a series of events caught media attention worldwide: the Russian threat looming over Ukrainian territory, the Omicron variant of COVID-19 more contagious, but less lethal and the slow global economic recovery from the pandemic.
Additionally, the scientists reported that the previous six years had been the warmest on record and that there had been a rise in the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) that cause climate change.
Such events became evidence of a difficult global situation, and were complemented by a couple of singular events within China. On the one hand, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the first country to withstand the worst of COVID-19 but also the first one to control it (in March 2020), faced a second wave in the last months of 2021. This was much worse than at the beginning of the pandemic: the initial peak came in February 2020 when cases reached 30,648; however, in the first week of March 2022, 448,131 infections were confirmed (Coronavirus Resource Center, Johns Hopkins University 2022).
On the other hand, the PRC also caught international media attention due to the Winter Olympic Games, held in Beijing and Zhangjiakou from February 4-20, 2022. In addition to the cyclic interest these sporting events carry, this edition of the Olympic Games had an important effect when the organizers emphasized the importance of hosting a ‘green’ Olympics; it was presumably the first ever event of such a nature to be completely carbon-neutral.
In addition to the difficulties posed by the transportation of almost three thousand athletes from numerous countries (91) in the face of a pandemic, only a few Heads of State attended the opening ceremony in the company of host Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan, contrary to the tradition in these events. Such a snub was a result of the diplomatic boycott requested by the US president from his allied counterparts, who were assured that the Chinese government had perpetrated human rights violations and crimes against humanity toward its own citizens in the northwest region (Cha 2022). However, the situation was balanced out by the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose foreign policy towards Ukraine caused a warlike and uncertain context, thus placing himself in the eye of the storm and leading to international upheaval.
Other international actors present in the ceremony were Antonio Guterres, Secretary of the United Nations, and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director of the World Health Organization (WHO) (BBC News 2022). Even if this was not the first time a UN representative had attended such an event, it is likely that Antonio Guterres had an additional agenda in accepting the invitation to attend the Winter Olympics: to closely observe the Chinese promise to hold different sports activities using green energy with zero GHG emissions. In the meanwhile, the presence of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of WHO, was deemed as supportive of the Chinese organizers during the COVID-19 pandemic he had also appeared a few months earlier in Japan at the Tokyo Olympic Games, during the Delta variant surge.
This paper introduces the following question: What were the foreign policy motivations behind the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing in 2022? We propose the following hypothesis: by delivering a green Olympic Games, Chinese foreign policy sought to address international demands for stronger actions to stop climate change and thus strengthen its leadership in that area. However, the aggressive US foreign policy towards the sporting event and Vladimir Putin’s support for China overshadowed China’s aspirations to become a global champion of the fight against climate change in the eyes of the international community.
This paper is structured as follows: the first part analyzes the political component of the sporting event, using concepts such as sports diplomacy and diplomatic boycott.
The second part analyzes the rapprochement between China and Russia, which is turning them into a consolidated bloc in the reconfiguration of multipolarity in the international system. The third part, in turn, deals with the current climate change context within the international system and describes the eco-friendly efforts made during the Olympic Games that presumably earned China the achievement of holding the first-ever green Olympic Games and demonstrated PRC’s leadership in the fight against climate change. The last section offers some conclusions.
12 febrero, 2025 por Ana B. Cuevas Tello
