At their best, the Olympics are a celebration of the human spirit. We saw this last year when Japan, a country where I served as U.S. ambassador from 2017 to 2019, demonstrated the strength of its recovery from the 2011 Fukushima disaster by hosting over 15,000 international athletes for the Summer Games despite a yearlong delay caused by the COVID pandemic.
In a jarring contrast, the 2022 Winter Olympics are being hosted by China, a country whose Marxist-Leninist dictatorship is perpetrating ongoing genocide against Uyghur Muslims and other minorities, in addition to other major human rights violations in Tibet and Hong Kong.
The Chinese Communist Party, with the complicity of the International Olympic Committee and corporate media, is already using the Winter Games as an international propaganda exercise to bolster its legitimacy while silencing criticism.
Witness Yang Shu, the Beijing Organizing Committee’s deputy director general of international relations, who recently threatened foreign athletes with “certain punishment” for “[a]ny behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against the Chinese laws and regulations.”
It is unconscionable that an international competition intended to promote peaceful relations and celebrate human dignity was awarded to a totalitarian human rights abuser that will use the event to launder its image on the world stage. That’s why Americans should turn off their televisions rather than reward the CCP’s behavior.
Sadly, China’s threats against athletes are having their intended effect. Noah Hoffman, a former two-time U.S. Olympian cross-country skier, said athletes are “nervous” and “not speaking to the media about anything related to human rights.”
For the CCP, there’s more at stake than silencing critics. Holding successful Winter Games is another step in the decades-long march to achieving “the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation” – and displacing American primacy – by 2049, the 100-year anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
As exerting total internal control and crushing all dissent are core components of the CCP’s vision for national rejuvenation, China – which shocked the world’s conscience with the Tiananmen massacre of its own citizens in 1989 and its draconian cover-up of the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 – continues to go to chilling extremes to subjugate and eliminate what it perceives as threats from within.
Beijing has blatantly erased Hong Kong’s autonomy and democracy in violation of international agreements, including diplomatic understandings with the U.S. and other nations and a legally binding 1984 treaty with Britain.
Moreover, General Secretary Xi Jinping and the CCP threaten to take over democratic Taiwan, by force if necessary. With uncharacteristic bluntness, China’s ambassador to the U.S. recently warned of “military conflict” with the U.S. over Taiwan.
The CCP’s use of the Winter Olympics speaks to a broader strategy in which China hijacks international institutions and enlists them to its own geopolitical objectives.
While I support the diplomatic boycott the U.S. and a small group of nations have undertaken, I believe the Biden administration should have done more.
But the administration prefers the pursuit of “managed competition” with Beijing – in other words, returning to the failed strategy of all carrot, no-stick enticement of China to become a so-called “responsible stakeholder.” The American people should demand more, and boycotting the Olympics would have sent a much clearer message.
Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican, was elected in 2020 to the U.S. Senate.