Op-ed: The upcoming Hong Kong Gay Games should be canceled
The organizers, by embracing the authoritarian regime, are sacrificing human rights, not promoting them
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Today, I published an op-ed with four other Hong Kong human rights activists calling for the Gay Games Hong Kong, a global event scheduled to take place in November, to be canceled. You can read the full op-ed here at Vox Media’s OutSports.
The Games were originally awarded to Hong Kong in 2017, before the 2019 protests and 2020 National Security Law. But since them, in an effort to still hold onto the Games, the GGHK leadership team has sacrificed the Games’ core principles of inclusivity and human rights:
We believe that the GGHK leadership team has betrayed the values and principles of the Gay Games, which purport to celebrate inclusion and promote human rights. Instead, they have aligned themselves with pro-authoritarian figures responsible for widespread persecution against the people of Hong Kong. As a result, they are providing dangerously misleading information to potential participants about their safety if they attend the Games.
Last year, the organizing team held a gala honoring authoritarian senior official Regina Ip and pro-Beijing businessman Alan Zeman. Ip, famously, was the architect of the earliest iteration of the National Security Law when she was security secretary, and has been an outspoken supporter of the political crackdown and imprisonments of opposition figures. She has also regularly defended China’s Uyghur concentration camps.
In addition, much of the public facing work for the Games is being handled by PR executive David Ko, who is the GGHK team’s Director of Marketing and Public Relations. From our op-ed:
David Ko is an outspoken anti-democracy advocate, concentration camp denialist, and an avid supporter of the government’s crackdown on Hongkongers. He has said that he prefers dictatorships like the PRC because he believes they appoint officials based on “merit,” while democracies do not. As for the Uyghur concentration camps, Ko goes even further than Ip, calling them a “debunked myth.”
With friends like these, it’s no wonder the Games have failed to live up to their principles.
Most critically, this turn towards authoritarianism by the leadership team is putting athletes at risk.
No one, including officials themselves, know what is or is not illegal. This is by design, as it allows Beijing to order the arrest and indefinite detention of virtually anyone if it is politically advantageous to do so. With respect to the Games, which undoubtedly will be seen as a political event by authorities, the National Security Law’s vagueness means that Beijing could decide to either ignore the event entirely, or order arrests of participants for sedition or subversion—and there is simply no way to know which direction it will choose until the event itself.
Even separate from the political nature of the Games themselves, China critics risk arrest if they attend. The entire Taiwan team has already pulled out of the event for safety reasons, and any athlete who has criticized the Hong Kong or Chinese governments in the past cannot attend, as they risk arrest for sedition or NSL offenses.
The Games should be canceled, yet doing so would not be as difficult as it might seem.
With the Games already hosting an alternative event in Guadalajara this year and enrollment in the Hong Kong Games still relatively low, it would cause minimal disruption to simply cancel the Hong Kong games and host all events in Mexico. Unless the Games’ new motto is “rights for me, but not for thee,” we strongly urge them to do so.
I encourage you to go read and share the article on OutSports.