Boycott questions over Beijing Winter Olympics raise eerie echoes of 1936 | Sean Ingle

China’s treatment of Uighurs has been deemed by Canada as genocide. Are we about to legitimise the regime responsible?

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I am staring at two bundles of newspaper clippings – one present day, one past – and feeling a deepening chill. The first pile details China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang, where more than a million people have been “re-educated” in camps, as well as the calls for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be stripped from Beijing. The second is from the Manchester Guardian in 1935, recording the abuse of Jews in Germany and demanding a boycott of the Berlin Games. The echoes are eerie. The looming question, then as now, is what the world should do.

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China is also ranked 177th in the world press freedom index – below only Eritrea, Turkmenistan and North Korea