Why are Americans participating in the Winter Olympics while the host nation, China, perpetrates a genocide and menaces its neighbors?
The Biden administration has announced a diplomatic boycott, meaning no “high-level” U.S. officials will be going to China. But American athletes are still going, along with diplomatic, consular, and security personnel to protect them. NBC Sports is still televising the Games. Corporations such as Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Visa are still paying millions of dollars to sponsor them. Why?
China is a rapacious, genocidal, socialist regime. It is killing its Uyghur citizens in Xinjiang and attempting through brutal repression, including concentration camps, to erase their culture. This is the very definition of genocide. China is brutally suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, swindling African nations out of resources and key infrastructure, stealing waters and lands in the South China Sea, and threatening Taiwan without invasion.
Beijing intends for the Olympic Games, by being held on Chinese soil, to legitimize its every bad act listed above. That is all these Games will do. It is impossible to participate without legitimizing and being corrupted by China’s behavior.
Look at what one must accept to be part of the Games. Athletes’ uniforms are produced by slave labor. Their communications are controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. The official Olympics smartphone application monitors and records every communication.
So why are so many people indifferent to what this year’s Games represent? It is because they consume so many goods made in China — televisions, smartphones, electronics, and the like. The pandemic has also underscored our economic dependency on China for medicine and medical equipment.
This is incompatible with the strategic necessity of checking Beijing’s global ambitions. And the Olympics would have provided an ideal moment to begin decoupling the U.S. economy publicly from China’s.
NBC should be shamed for broadcasting and promoting the Games. Coca-Cola, which pressed the MLB to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta over false and trivial concerns, should be shamed for sponsoring the Games. The athletes who have spent their entire lives training to be at peak performance, and who, as a result, have more of an excuse for wanting to be in Beijing, should nevertheless, at a minimum, speak openly and often about the crimes of the communist government.
We will be marking the Games with daily reminders of the threat China presents to the world and to freedom everywhere. Each day, we will publish an item about some aspect of China’s tyranny, including its international surveillance, its involuntary seizure of citizens abroad, and its covert political interference in other countries.
The threat from China is real and growing. America, and Americans, must play a leading role in combating it.
