During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged to put human rights at the forefront of his foreign policy. Then-President Donald Trump, Biden claimed, had befriended dictators to the detriment of sacred American values.
If the new president were honest about that commitment, he would associate his words with action. For a start, Biden should endorse the resolution newly introduced by Republican Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Todd Young of Indiana to strip China of the 2022 winter Olympic Games. Biden should then call on Senate Democrats to offer their own support of that resolution.
It really should be a no-brainer.
Documenting the Chinese Communist Party’s extraordinary disregard — indeed, active disdain — for human rights, the resolution makes a clear assertion. Namely, that “unless [China] demonstrates significant progress in securing fundamental human rights, including the freedoms of religion, speech, movement, association, and assembly, the International Olympic Committee should rebid the 2022 Winter Olympics to be hosted by a country that recognizes and respects human rights.”
The International Olympic Committee might be a gleeful supplicant of Beijing, but the moral cause behind the Senate’s action is undeniable. It was again emphasized on Wednesday, with new BBC reporting on the evil China has imposed on its Uighur citizens in Xinjiang province. Interviewing credible witnesses and victims previously incarcerated in China’s vast network of concentration camps, the BBC documents how guards sold women into sexual slavery. This is just the latest dystopian tale from Xi Jinping’s Uighur ethnocide. In his obsessive quest to purge Uighur culture and individuality, Xi has had these innocent people forcibly sterilized, used for slave labor, and simply killed. As Young put it to me, in the face of “abuses such as modern day slavery, reeducation camps, and subjecting women to horrors such as rape, forced abortions, and sterilization … the IOC must seek out a new host country that respects the most basic human rights.”
The Senate resolution recognizes that this Uighur tragedy is just one element of the tapestry of terror that defines Xi’s China.
In Hong Kong, Xi is shredding China’s treaty commitments and ending human freedom. In the South China Sea and along the Mekong River, Xi denies borders while pummeling, and sometimes killing, impoverished fishermen. Around the world, Xi is destroying wildlife habitats as far away as the Galapagos Islands and constructing bridges and buildings that then collapse. When it comes to Africa, Xi depletes fishing stocks, bribes corrupt politicians, and tolerates Communist Party racism. In mainland China, Xi claims to foster creative thinking but silences his best and brightest for being too creative or simply too funny. That this evil is supported by American public affairs firms and enabled by the European Union is an indictment of the West. We should stop listening to Yang Jiechi’s lies and start defending our values and interests.
The Olympics are supposed to celebrate the intersection of human skill, courage, and community. Except for its skill at stealing and subjugating, Communist China is the antithesis of those values. It must be stripped of the 2022 Olympics. It’s time for Biden to lead.
