The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 35
NEWS REVIEW
In Xi Jinping’s China,the vanishing of
Peng Shuai, top, was not a surpriseliving at her home in Beijing, but would
like to have her privacy respected”.
Human rights campaigners accused the
IOC of complicity in a Chinese publicity
stunt. Lord Coe, an IOC member, argued
on BBC Radio 4 that a diplomatic boycott
would be a “hollow gesture”. He referred
to Jesse Owens’ four gold medals at the
1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, arguing
that sport could be a “powerful driver of
integration and change”.
Xi’s regime is acutely aware of sport’s
power to shape opinion. In 2019, after the
Houston Rockets’ manager, Daryl Morey,
posted on Twitter in support of pro-de-
mocracy protesters in Hong Kong, Chi-
nese broadcasters stopped streaming
some NBA games, causing the league
“substantial” financial damage.
Brands including Nike have faced boy-
cotts for expressing concern about forced
Uighur labour in cotton production. An
advertising veteran says: “Chinese mil-
lennials are not as favourably disposed to
the West as they used to be. It’s really the
opposite of globalisation.”
Beijing’s sensitivity particularly
applies to business. Jamie Dimon, the
boss of the Wall Street bank JPMorgan,
was recently given leave to skip Hong
Kong’s strict 21-day quarantine rule so he
could visit. On his return to the US, he
joked in a speech that both JPMorgan and
the Chinese Communist Party were 100
years old, and “I’ll make a bet that we last
longer”. It is not clear whether he got a
slap on the wrist from Beijing itself or JP
Morgan’s own headquarters in China, but
he issued two elaborate apologies the
next day. HSBC and Standard Chartered,
based in the UK but dependent on China
for most of their profits, put out state-
ments in support of Beijing’s restrictive
Hong Kong security law last year.
A chief executive who spent decades
working in China says the regime tends to
flex its muscles against foreign compa-
nies by punishing transgressors without
explanation or warning. “You get put in
the freezer for a while,” he says. “You’ll
be taken off a particular transaction or
you’ll be waiting for regulatory approval
and you’ll get put to the back of the
queue. It’s passive aggressive.”
Even as Xi’s government becomes
more controlling, attacking companies in
areas such as education and technology,
investment giants such as BlackRock and
Fidelity are piling into the country, con-
vinced China’s burgeoning middle class
holds the key to future profits.
The former UBS economist George
Magnus, author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s
China is in Jeopardy, says: “More and
more, companies are going to be drawn
into a very awkward space where they’re
going to have to choose whose laws
they’re going to follow and whose laws
they’re going to flout.”
Of the 13 Olympics sponsors listed on
the IOC’s website, 12 did not reply or
declined to comment when contacted by
The Sunday Times, including Visa, which
makes great play of its work to help
women access finance. The insurer Alli-
anz said its sponsorship was a long-term
commitment that ran until 2028. It said:
“We stand behind the Olympic move-
ment and its athletes, and our longstand-
ing support for its ideals will not waver.”
Even if a diplomatic boycott of Febru-
ary’s games comes to pass, many doubt
whether it would have a serious impact.
While the gesture would no doubt sting
Beijing, most foreigners — and therefore
spectators — are banned from attending
under China’s strict Covid rules.
Michael Payne, a sports consultant
who was head of marketing at the IOC for
two decades, says: “There’s a bit of mis-
understanding, because the only country
that actually sends an official political
delegation is the United States. And the
view within the sporting world is that if
the politicians decide they don’t want to
come, that’s their call. It’s going to have
zero impact on the staging of the games
and the athletic performance.”
The chief executive with deep experi-
ence of China says: “I don’t think they’ll
lose sleep over the threat of a boycott.
The West fails to understand how confi-
dent China feels. When I started my
career and China was at the very early
stages of opening up, the leadership rec-
ognised they needed the West because
they needed the technology, the knowl-
edge and the capital. Now they’re a lot
more self-sufficient. If anything, the
dependency is reversed. So this notion
that the West can strong-arm China into
behaving in a different way is misplaced.”NEWS REVIEW
DOES THE WEST
DARE GIVE XI AN
OLYMPIC-SIZED
SNUB?
teams seen in the boycotts of the 1970s
and 1980s. Will it happen? And if it does,
will it make any difference?
Until this month, Peng was best known
as the first Chinese player to be world
No 1. She won the ladies’ doubles at Wim-
bledon in 2013 and again at the French
Open in 2014. On November 2, she wrote
a 1,600-word post on Weibo accusing
Zhang Gaoli, China’s former vice-premier
and a key figure in the Winter Olympics
bid, of forcing her into sex after inviting
her home after a game of tennis. Peng, 35,
said this had led to an on-off affair with
Zhang, 75 — but after three years, he had
dumped her. “Even if it’s like striking a
stone with an egg, and courting self-de-
struction like a moth to a flame, I will tell
the truth about you,” she wrote.
The post was taken down within 20
minutes, but not before it had begun to go
viral among Peng’s 574,000 followers. As
the furore grew, she vanished from pub-
lic view. On November 17, after the
Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and
stars such as Billie Jean King voiced con-
cern, Chinese state media released an
email purportedly from Peng. It
retracted the accusation of sexual assault
and said she was “not missing, nor am I
unsafe. I’ve just been resting at home and
everything is fine.”
Photos and videos followed, including
clips of Peng apparently having dinner
with a group of people in a Beijing restau-
rant on November 20 and signing auto-
graphs at a teenage tennis tournament
the following morning. On Tuesday,
China’s foreign ministry insisted the Peng
case was “not a diplomatic matter” and
accused “certain people” of “malicious
hyping, let alone politicisation”.
Western responses highlight the two
schools of thought when it comes to deal-
ing with China. One says we must stand
up to Xi’s regime at every opportunity
over its aggressive behaviour towards
Taiwan and Tibet, its crushing of dissent
and its mistreatment of Uighurs. The
other says that our relations with a key
player in climate change and global
finance must be defined by realpolitik.
Advocates of this approach argue that if
we’re prepared to send a football side to
the Qatar World Cup next year, there’s no
reason to give Xi a bloody nose with a dip-
lomatic snub at the Winter Olympics.
The WTA, backed by players such as
Serena Williams, said the restaurant
video of Peng was “insufficient” evidence
of her wellbeing and that it remained con-
cerned her allegation of sexual assault
was “being censored and swept under
the rug”. The WTA boss, Steve Simon,
told CNN the women’s governing body
was “at a crossroads” with China. “We
have to start, as a world, making deci-
sions that are based upon right and
wrong, period,” he said. “We’re defi-
nitely willing to pull our business and all
the complications that come with it,
because this is bigger than the business.”
Three years ago, the WTA signed a ten-
year deal with China said to be worth $1
billion. The nine tournaments held there
in 2019 included more than $30 million in
prizes — big money in a game where
female stars have long fought to be paid
in line with men.
However, the International Olympic
Committee (IOC) issued a statement last
Monday saying its president, Thomas
Bach, had spoken to Peng via video for 30
minutes and that she was “safe and well,After the disappearance of the tennis player
Peng Shuai, murmurs about a boycott of China’s
winter games are growing louder. But do the
politicians, sponsors and sporting authorities
have too much to lose, asks Oliver Shah
J
ack Ma might quietly sympathise
with Peng Shuai, the Chinese
tennis star who disappeared
after alleging that she was sexu-
ally assaulted by a former senior
Communist Party official.
The billionaire behind Ali-
baba, China’s answer to Ama-
zon, committed a cardinal sin
when he criticised Beijing’s
financial regulators colourfully and pub-
licly in October last year. The planned
stock market float of Alibaba’s payments
business, Ant Group, was cancelled — and
Ma went missing for three months. When
he reappeared at a rural school in Janu-
ary, the previously outspoken tycoon
declared: “My colleagues and I have been
learning and thinking, and we have
become more determined to devote our-
selves to education and public welfare.”
Alibaba is among 13 corporate giants
feeling heat over their sponsorship of the
Beijing Winter Olympics, due to begin in
February, amid western unease over the
Peng affair. In President Xi Jinping’s auto-
cratic and paranoid China, the vanishing
of a high-profile figure who displeases the
regime is nothing new. Actresses, artists,
insurance bosses and police chiefs have
been taken away for what one British
former expat describes as “rehab”, often
returning to make grovelling apologies
and face fines or jail sentences. But
Peng’s post on the microblogging site
Weibo, and her disappearance, have
caused a #MeToo scandal that has cap-
tured the West’s attention — months
before a event that was a source of con-
tention due to China’s human rights
abuses and posturing towards Taiwan.
Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and the Aus-
tralian prime minister, Scott Morrison,
are said to be considering the first boy-
cott of the games since North Korea led
communist countries in refusing to
attend the South Korean Olympics in- Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, is
said to favour a hardline stance, having
privately accused China of genocide over
its treatment of Uighur Muslims. This
time, though, it would be a diplomatic
cold-shouldering, not the withdrawal of
na’s
e
es
ILLUSTRATION: HAYLEY DALRYMPLEHow about some scented
tree ornaments promising to
fill your home with “the real
smell of Christmas” that
come with the warning:
“Harmful to aquatic life, with
long-lasting effects”?
They are a product that
make the British Christmas
Tree Growers Association
shudder. “Surely we all want
to get rid of plastic,” says the
association’s chairman, Hans
Alexandersen, who grows
and sells trees in Surrey.
“Why ship a plastic tree in
from China or America when
you can have a product
grown in this country that
will be fresh and helps the
environment, not just withW
ill Good King
Wenceslas look out
onto snow that is
deep and crisp and
even? Or a melted
puddle, courtesy of the
climate catastrophe hitting
Bohemia?
This weekend, as millions
go shopping for a Christmas
tree, many will start to
question whether dragging
6ft of Norway spruce or
Chinese PVC into their sitting
rooms is really eco-conscious.
Shouldn’t we, this festive
season, be lighting our homes
with nothing more than the
warm glow of our vegan
smugness, rather than 12ft of
fairy lights?would you grow a tree for ten
years and then cut it down to
use just once? Renting a tree
is so sustainable.”
For £50 you can rent a 6ft
tree and have it delivered and
picked up after Christmas.
“We keep it simple. We say:
don’t put it next to a fire or
radiator, and water it
regularly,” Lucking says. “It’s
a very small percentage of
trees that don’t make it — last
year it was 5 per cent.”
Alexandersen was
sceptical of that claim. “I’d be
surprised if it wasn’t closer
to 80 per cent dying,
because if you don’t look
after them, they will
dehydrate.”
He points out that if
you drive every year to
pick up and return
your tree, you’re
causing emissions.
Indeed, if the round
trip is 22 miles ormore, hiring a tree is no
better than cutting one down.
This is as fiendish a
problem as trying to untangle
a set of tree lights. But there
may be a solution: an eco
Christmas tree, one that is
neither real nor fake. A
Schrödinger’s tree, if you will.
Laura van Ree, 38, is one of
a growing number of people
who make trees out of
driftwood or waste materials.
In her case coppiced hazel
forms the branches,
which she slots into a
central wooden trunk.
“The hazel is cut as
part of woodland
management
anyway. You can
reuse it year on
year, but no
trees are
harmed in the
making of
the tree.
They are
proving
very
popular,”
she says.Based in Norfolk, Eco
Christmas Tree is appealing,
she says, “to environmentally
conscious people who are
looking for something a bit
different”. They are as close
to zero emissions as no tree
at all. They are beautiful, if a
little stark. And, at £395 for a
six-footer, they are very much
the Tesla of festive
decorations.
For many of us, though,
the magic and smell of a bit of
real greenery brought inside
the home during the darkest
month are irreplaceable.
And, yes, a tree may not be
perfect for the planet, but it is
by no means the biggest
festive ecovillain.
If you’re the sort who
enjoys a whole stilton on your
Christmas cheeseboard, your
indulgence will cost 160kg
CO 2 e. That’s even worse than
a pink, flashing plastic tree
covered in lametta.christmasonthehill.co.uk;
loveachristmastree.co.uk;
ecochristmastree.co.ukcarbon but with wildlife?
Why clog up landfills with
plastic?”
However, “Plastic bad, fir
good” is too simplistic, says
the Carbon Trust, which has
crunched the numbers.
It reckons a 6ft 5in tree
grown in the UK, once you
take into account the
fertiliser, tractors, chainsaws,
plastic netting and transport,
generates about 5kg of
CO 2 e, or carbon dioxide
equivalent, the standard unit
of measuring a carbon
footprint. That’s the
equivalent of driving 22 miles
in an average petrol car.
Tiphaine Aries, a
consultant at the CarbonTrust, says concerned buyers
should look for a grower
registered with the Forest
Stewardship Council, which
will ensure fertiliser is kept to
a minimum.
A fake tree of the same size
is more damaging, because of
the plastic and metal used in
its production, the shipping
from (invariably) China or the
US and the transport to a
retailer’s warehouse. In total
it causes 40kg CO 2 e.
It’s not a clear win for real
trees, though, because if you
can make a fake one last for a
decade (and many have a 10-
year guarantee), the 40kg of
CO 2 e suddenly drops to 4kg a
year, and fake pips real on the
finishing line.
A new craze gets round this
tricky equation — hiring a real
tree. Christmas on the Hill in
London says it cannot keep
up with demand from the
wokearati.
Alastair Lucking, 68, who
runs Love a Christmas Tree
with his wife, Diane, in
Leicestershire, says: “WhyReal, plastic or recycled: which
tree does the eco fairy prefer?
The carbon footprint of your Christmas tree is far more
complicated than ‘fake bad, fir good’, writes Harry Wallop
A driftwood tree,
left, is far pricier
than a real one