The White House announced that neither the President nor any other United States government official will attend the 2022 Winter Olympics in China due to the ongoing human rights violations throughout the host nation.

While on paper, this is a good move. Yet for the current administration, it is the bare minimum they could do in dealing with their biggest adversary in the world.

The nation of China, occupied by the Chinese Communist Party since 1949, is one of if not the biggest violator of basic human rights throughout the entire globe. Daily, they subject their citizens to some of the most repressive systems the world has ever seen. Additionally, they do not limit their influence and control within their borders; but also in any place, they can gain power, such as in Africa and other third-world nations.

The United States should entirely boycott this Olympics and not even send a single athlete. I am aware the Federal Government does not have the power to do this, but if they were to call for it, it would become highly realistic. Ultimately the decision rests with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. They are the ones who now, at this point, need to pull the plug.

I understand this can be extreme and costly to the athletes who have been training for years through a global pandemic for these games. I can’t even imagine the devastation they would feel, but this is bigger than sports. It requires a firm stand which the Biden Administration failed to give.

It is only fair to outline the biggest issues to justify this response.
In March, the same administration did the right thing and declared the treatment of Uyghur Muslims genocide in the country.

Since 2014, the CCP has constructed “re-education” camps and moved over one million Uyghur to camps located in the western province of Xinjiang. In these camps, very little is reported about what occurs. The CCP restricts access to them from any outside visitors.

Based on a Reuters report, “thirty-nine of the camps almost tripled in size between April 2017 and August 2018; they cover a total area roughly the size of 140 soccer fields.”

This is in addition to the intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labor, and sterilizations, all reported by Reuters to occur to Uyghurs outside of the camps.

The reason they are being targeted, is simply that they refuse to lose their identity and who they are as a people. The CCP wants them to renounce their faith and traditions and become loyal subjects to the party. They refuse so they enact policies similar to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Now people will note how in 1936, the U.S. participated in the Olympics in Berlin. A great historical moment where Jesse Owens defeated the notion of an Aryan superrace almost single-handedly. This is undoubtedly true; however, the situations are different.

In 1936, social laws against the Jewish people were in place, but the holocaust we think of today did not truly begin until the Night of Broken Glass in 1938. If the games were in 1942, when Auschwitz was in full operation, it would be the same as China today.

How can we send athletes to play games in a country when at the same time, people are being forcefully sterilized and sent to labor camps?

This issue should be infuriating not just to Americans but to the entire world. However, people would be more outraged by not getting to watch another US-Canadian hockey game.

The issues with China do not end with their ongoing genocide. How can we forget the effects of COVID-19 on the world, an outbreak directly connected to the failures of the CCP? They promoted a ridiculous lie that someone who ate a bat caused the pandemic.

Where is the common sense in that?

If China was actually serious in proving its version of COVID-19 origins then it would take steps to do just that. Instead, they deny a further investigation into the Wuhan lab and pressured the World Health Organization to drop the matter altogether.

These aren’t far-right conspiracy theories. It is simple logic that either the entire CCP was behind it; or that a mistake happened within the lab, and the CCP is hiding it. Both of those outcomes demand the party be held accountable.

Yet, we still will send our athletes and media networks over to promote what will surely be Chinese Communist propaganda. This will be a major stimulus to the Chinese economy, which has struggled due to a trade war with the US and the pandemic.

The abuses don’t end here, unfortunately. Perhaps the most historic case of CCP abuses has been the treatment of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Hong Kong, which has long existed as part of China under the one country, two system model, has seen massive crackdowns in its democracy. This is due to the failure of CCP leadership under President Xi Jinping and the need for Hong Kong’s wealth.

Taiwan is the true China exiled there after the revolution following the Second World War. It is also a very prosperous island nation, which the CCP wants for financial and political reasons.

The CCP routinely launches military exercises in the South China Sea as an attempt to intimidate Taiwan. The Pentagon and many other western nations agree that the CCP will attempt to regain control of the island. This will undoubtedly lead to a similar situation for the Taiwanese as the Uyghurs.

Now common sense people may look at all three of these issues and ask why is nothing being done? Forget a boycott. These are borderline grounds for armed intervention.

Didn’t the world vow to never forget what happened in those camps throughout Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1940s? Well, it appears the CCP figured out how to get away with it when the Nazis could not. They made the entire world dependent on them economically. This is how to get away with human rights violations and genocide. Just make sure people receive their goods and money, and no one will ask questions.

The pandemic itself proved how dependent we are on the Chinese in this country.

It needs to end, no way around it. The CCP is dangerous and threatens the entire world every day it remains in power. A diplomatic boycott is perhaps the most useless idea anyone in the White House could think of. Hopefully, soon, someone in our nation’s leadership will have the courage to stand up to them.