RSF slams sponsors of Beijing Winter Olympics

The Olympic Games involve prestige, sporting exploits, money, and often political propaganda. As Beijing’s national stadium prepares to host tomorrow’s 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, and with the games about to get under way, RSF is drawing the public’s attention to the gulf between the slogans advertising the world’s leading brands and the reality of a regime that stifles press freedom. RSF also wants to show that the sponsors have been caught in the act of contradicting the values they profess and their commitment to social responsibility.

The campaign consists of visuals circulated on social media that respond to the advertising slogans and catchphrases of the sponsors, in each case showing how absurd they seem when you know the repressive nature of the regime basking in the aura of these games. For example, to the Panasonic slogan “Ideas for life,” RSF responds, “What about the lives of Chinese journalists?”. To the Airbnb slogan “Belong anywhere”, RSF responds: “In China, journalists do not belong anywhere but in jail”. Like most of the original slogans, the language used in RSF’s visuals is English.

“The multinationals helping to fund these Winter Olympics cannot disclaim all responsibility for the use that the regime will make of the games,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. “We ask them to not behave like accomplices to the propaganda, and to not support the suppression of the right to news and information in China.”

On 7th December, RSF published a damning 82-page report entitled “The Great Leap Backwards of Journalism in China” that exposes the scale of the Chinese regime’s crackdown on the right to be informed and the increasing rate with which it is violating its international obligations in regard to freedom of opinion and expression.

China is ranked 177th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2021 World Press Freedom Index, just two places above North Korea.