Coca-Cola and China’s Olympics

Ninety-four years ago, Coke sponsored the Olympics for the first time. The Summer Olympics, held in 1928 in Amsterdam, saw the arrival of a freighter from the United States bearing the U.S. Olympic team and 1,000 cases of Coca-Cola.

The Coca-Cola Company has been sponsoring the Olympics ever since. That has meant straddling political and human rights issues when the hosts of the Olympics are authoritarian countries whose governments are engaged in repressive, suppressive, and even genocidal actions against their citizens.

Coke and the other 12 multinational corporations that were China’s official partners for this year’s Winter Olympics had to face that dilemma again.

In 2008, when China held its first Olympics, the issue for which it was being lambasted was its suppression of Tibetans and Tibetan culture. Fourteen years later, China faces an even worse charge from many of the world's democracies: genocide of the Uyghur people, a Turkic ethnic group native to Xinjiang. Accusations of human rights abuses are based not only on unassailable evidence from researchers around the world, but also on Chinese government sources themselves. It is clearly the aim of the current Chinese government under the Chinese Communist Party to “sinicize” Uyghur identity, language, culture, architecture, history, and its overall identification with Islam.

All of the Olympic sponsors have come under criticism and scrutiny for their partnership with a government that is engaged in repression on such a massive scale. But Coke, with its long history of Olympics sponsorship, is in a class of its own.

In 2008, when Coke sponsored the first Beijing Olympics, Neville Isdell, then-chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola company, was unapologetic about the company’s financial support, despite global outrage over China’s treatment of Tibet and the Tibetan people.

Isdell told the Financial Times then that he had no regrets over Coke’s Olympic sponsorship. He went on to say that Coke, the world’s biggest soft drinks maker, supports the general “credo” and ideals of the Games, and makes its deals years before the venues are known, according to coverage of the interview published by marketing company WARC.

In fact, Isdell doubled down on Coke’s commitment to support the Olympics regardless of the political climate of the host nation.

Had he been chairman of Coke at the time, Isdell would have backed Coke’s sponsorship of Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Games.

According to WARC, Isdell said of those Games: “The sponsorship would have been committed four or five years ahead of that, and don't forget Neville Chamberlain was in Berlin on a very popular mission to talk to Hitler.

“Not everything was known in 1938 and the Olympics were in 1936.”

In 2008, Isdell said he believed the Beijing Olympics would help to open China. He maintains the Games are a net positive: “If they were not a force for good, we would not sponsor them.”

The Coca-Cola Company clearly doubled down on that premise with its sponsorship of Beijing 2022. So much so, in fact, that it became a joint worldwide partner with Mengniu, China’s leading dairy manufacturer. The Olympics website says that it was the 10th largest dairy company globally in 2017.

Mengniu is a majority state-owned enterprise under food-processing giant COFCO, a global Fortune 500 company. COFCO itself comes under the direct supervision of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) of China’s State Council. Yet COFCO's logo is proudly found on the Coca-Cola Company's website, where it is listed as one of Coke’s bottlers for the Asia-Pacific market.

In other words, Coke has not only teamed up with the highest levels of the CCP to continue its Olympics sponsorship in China, but has also brought the party into a joint Olympics sponsorship. Through a state-owned enterprise, the CCP itself will be a sponsor of future Olympics – thanks to Coca-Cola.

Many corporations confronted with the malfeasance of supporting regimes that terrorize their people often say they have no choice, as they must look out after their stockholders’ interests. But few ordinary stockholders carry much weight in the corporate decisions made by the boards of directors. An individual with 100 or even 1,000 shares in NBC, the American television network that carried this year’s Winter Olympics, may earn dividends on the profits, but won’t have a place at the decision-making table that resulted in those profits.

This is how multinationals spread mass culpability for the financial support that they give to the bad actors of the day. Millions own their stocks; some may not even realize that they do if their money is tied up in mutual or retirement funds.

Coke has come under the greatest pressure of all of this year’s Olympic sponsors for supporting a current Chinese government that has imposed the most restrictions on rights and liberties of individual citizens since Mao. The corporation has had a lot of practice in managing its public profile when accused of supporting immoral regimes during their turns hosting the Olympics. But what if Coke itself were boycotted?

Probably the most successful international boycott of modern times is the campaign that ultimately played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa. Why couldn’t something like that work on multinationals turning a blind eye to the CCP’s human rights abuses?

The numbers tell the story. According to the Coca-Cola Company itself, the Asia-Pacific accounts for approximately $281 billion in retail sales annually. China and Mongolia represent 42 percent of that total, thus $118 billion. Mongolia, with a population of only 3.27 million, will be only a tiny fraction of that revenue for Coca-Cola. China’s 1.4 billion people, re-introduced to Coke in 1979 after a 30-year hiatus, are now Coke’s third largest market.

There is one crucial difference between the extraordinary human rights abuses that were occurring in South Africa and those that are happening in China today. That key distinction is that the disenfranchised, highly oppressed majority of Black South Africans supported the boycott, despite the economic impact they disproportionately suffered in contrast to the real target of the boycott: the minority ethnic European population and its stranglehold on the levers of financial and political power.

In contrast, the vast multitude of Chinese citizens do not overtly support a boycott of the Chinese government over the issue of the Chinese Communist Party’s mass incarceration, forced “re-education,” and worse of the Uyghurs. First, the Han majority in general are suspicious of the Uyghurs and identify them as purveyors of domestic terrorism. Although willing to get along with them, they prefer Uyghurs to adopt the language, dress, and customs of the Han Chinese.

In addition, the majority of China’s population does not know the depth and details of what has been happening to the Uyghurs, and those that have heard the descriptions of abuse from foreign sources often do not believe it, putting it all down to Western scare-mongering over China.

One of the problems of the Uyghur issue is that there is no real face to it. There is no single “poster child” that brands the issue, burning it indelibly upon the world’s conscience. There is no Nelson Mandela, around which the anti-apartheid movement was able to galvanize worldwide support. Closer to home, the Uyghurs have no equivalent to Tibet’s Dalai Lama, a widely recognized spiritual leader of his people residing abroad where he is free to speak and advocate on their behalf.

The Coca-Cola Company declares that its purpose is “to refresh the world and make a difference.” From its beginnings in 1886, that purpose, Coke says, became “refreshment not just in a physical sense but also in spirit, and not just to refresh people but also communities.”

Indeed, “The Conscience We Follow,” says Coke's purpose poster, is to “DO THE RIGHT THING.” That means letting “our values shape the conscience we follow,” using “our global scale for leadership and for good, for progress,” and “when we make mistakes, own them, put them right, learn from them, and grow.”

One wonders if Coke’s purpose might need a little refresher course itself. In the case of China, it certainly seems to have chosen cash over conscience.