Last week I wrote about Gloria Jean’s Coffee - and yesterday found a Facebook Group organising a boycott. Consumer companies need to fear public backlash. The goodwill that propels a brand to stardom can be fickle. It turns quickly.
Beijing is in the throes of boycott avoidance. The Tibet uprising couldn’t come at a worse time. Over the coming weeks the Olympic flame will visit most major cities - to provide a searing reminder of the issue of human rights.
I am old enough to remember the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Then the USSR had invaded Afghanistan and was subjected to a global boycott. Many Eastern European nations retaliated in 1984 by avoiding the Los Angeles games.
Today athletes are under pressure to consider personal boycotts of the games. Nations stand like dominoes ready to topple in succession. Each awaits the other’s move.By the Northern Hemisphere summer we’ll see a succession of boycott calls. And many individuals will heed the call. Soon after pressure will grow for nation states to follow.
Don’t book your hotel rooms in Beijing quite yet. It won’t be a politically correct place to visit this year.
2 responses so far ↓
Milorad Ivovic // Mar 25th 2008 at 3:56 pm
Olympic boycotts are always an incredibly bad idea.
I think it’s quite short-sighted to use a sporting event intended to promote unity and cultural exchange as a political hostage.
OK, so China isn’t behaving like we want them to. Isn’t an exchange of non-political representatives with no agenda other than sport THE best way to provide an otherwise isolated people some exposure to other world views and ways of life?
Changes to society happen from the bottom up. I think too often people (and indeed regime-changing war-machines) believe that societal change happens from the top down.
I’d like to see tanks stop hip-hop from getting on chinese MP3 players.
Nadia // Apr 9th 2008 at 6:59 am
I have personally taken a stance and boycotted the Olympics in Beijing for the aforementioned human rights issues but also for their cruelty towards cats. Owners are abandoning their pets on the streets and a collection team gathers all stray and previously owned cats into cages too small for them. They are abandoned and left to die. A kindergarten teacher beat 2 pregnant cats to death with a stick in fear that the children will get bitten and the disease that these cats are so called afflicted with will be transferred. This is being done all for the sake of cleaning up the streets for the Olympics. Now I hear that they are shifting the elderly from the cities into the suburbs.. I suppose boycotting the Olympics may be working against its agenda but people have to take a stance against China’s inhumane stance on human and animal rights! I am still waiting to see how this issue/crisis is going to be dealt with by the Chinese government.
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