US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has urged American athletes not to speak out on China’s human rights record while competing in the Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, citing the risk of retaliation by the Chinese government. “You are there to compete; do not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government because they are ruthless,” Pelosi said on Thursday during a hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC). “I know there is a temptation on the part of some to speak out while they are there,” Pelosi continued. “I respect that. But I also worry about what the Chinese government might do to their reputations, to their families.” Her remarks echoed advice rights advocates gave at a January event hosted by the US-based Human Rights Watch. But Thursday’s warning carried extra weight coming from Pelosi, the leader of the House of Representatives and one of Capitol Hill’s most prominent critics of Beijing. Asked about Pelosi’s comments, a representative for the Chinese embassy in Washington called on US politicians to stop “attacking and smearing China” and “unethically taking the athletes hostage in the name of ‘free speech’”. “China welcomes all athletes to the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, and will act as a good host country, which will ensure the personal safety and legitimate rights and interests of all athletes, and provide them with warm and thoughtful services,” the representative said. Winter Olympics: China restricts activists’ social media ahead of Games Pelosi’s call followed a warning in January by a senior official in the Chinese organising committee that participants whose actions or words violated Olympic rules or Chinese laws or regulations would be subject to “certain punishments”. International Olympic Committee (IOC) rules governing athletes’ behaviour prohibit protests during sporting events, but allow personal expression before the events begin, during engagement with the press and on social media. Leading up to the Games, Chinese authorities have detained some human rights activists and reportedly restricted the social media accounts of others. “In less than 24 hours the Beijing Winter Olympic Games will commence, and usher in weeks of pageantry designed to showcase a shining facade, the face the Chinese government and the Communist Party want the world to see,” Senator Jeff Merkley, the Oregon Democrat who chairs the CECC, said at the start of the hearing, which examined rights abuses in China. US lawmakers ramp up the pressure for a Beijing Olympics boycott The hearing was the latest effort by the panel to argue that China’s alleged trampling of human rights should bar it from hosting the prestigious global event. Every day for the past two months, the commission has posted information and photographs of human rights campaigners now detained in China, including Hong Kong activists such as Joshua Wong Chi-fung , rights defenders like Guo Feixiong , and citizen journalists like Zhang Zhan . Lawmakers have also pushed the administration to diplomatically boycott the Olympics – a measure the White House adopted in December when it announced it would send no official representation to the Games. Athletes, though, were permitted to participate. Beijing’s hosting of the Games has drawn criticism for a variety of alleged human rights violations but chiefly because of the Chinese government’s actions in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, where Uygurs and members of other ethnic minorities have been reportedly subject to widespread detention, political indoctrination and forced labour. The administration of US President Joe Biden has endorsed a determination by his predecessor Donald Trump’s White House that Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang constitute “genocide”. China denies the allegations and has portrayed facilities there as education centres offering vocational training. At the CECC hearing, Pelosi recalled a 2019 exchange with Trump. She had pressed him to convey to Chinese President Xi Jinping the bipartisan congressional concern about Beijing’s Xinjiang policies. Pelosi said Trump later told her: “I spoke to President Xi about that, and he said: ‘The Uygurs like going to those camps.’” Jewher Ilham, daughter of the jailed Uygur economist Ilham Tothi, told the panel that in any engagements with Chinese officials lawmakers should raise cases of specific detained Uygurs. Another witness, the Hong Kong activist Nathan Law Kwun-chung, who now lives in exile in London, reserved particular criticism for corporate sponsors of the Winter Games like Airbnb, Coca-Cola and Intel. It was “disheartening” to see such sponsors – along with some heads of state – rolling out a “red carpet” for the Games, said Law, a former Hong Kong legislator who is wanted for alleged violations of the city’s sweeping national security law. “It is not just about the Winter Olympics, or the Chinese human rights violations,” Law said. “It’s about how we can retain the integrity and the idea of democratic values.” Thursday’s hearing coincided with a number of protests against the Beijing Games, including in New York City, where some 100 people carrying banners and shouting slogans congregated outside the Chinese consulate before marching to Times Square. Joining them was Representative Tom Suozzi, Democrat of New York, who told gathered crowds that the “fireworks” and “parades” of the imminent opening ceremony should not distract from scrutiny of Beijing’s actions. “Instead, it is up to us to make it a spotlight, a spotlight on the human rights violations that are taking place all across the many time zones of China,” Suozzi said. Also on Thursday, some 70 lawmakers from Europe, North America and Australasia released a joint statement calling on their respective governments to “take tangible steps to hold the Chinese government accountable”. Such steps should include pressuring the United Nations to expedite the release of its long-awaited report into rights violations in Xinjiang, banning imports from and restricting investments in Xinjiang, and imposing further sanctions on Chinese officials, the lawmakers said. Additional reporting by Mantai Chow and Robert Delaney