Boycott the Olympics? China’s Games See Bipartisan Backlash

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. If the 2008 Summer Games — also held in the Chinese capital — marked the arrival of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a major power, this event will undoubtedly be used by Xi Jinping to showcase the PRC’s viability as global hegemon. Given the CCP’s role in unleashing the coronavirus on the rest of the world, its expansionist aims, and the ongoing genocide it is prosecuting against its Uyghur Muslim minority, that possibility should already be off the table. Yet as a consequence of the economic and military power it wields, the PRC remains the chief challenger to American leadership on the world stage.

Senator Mitt Romney has a few ideas for how to limit its ability to use the 2022 Olympics as a public-relations coup without robbing American athletes of the opportunity to compete. He laid them out in a New York Times op-ed on Monday:

So if we shouldn’t forbid American athletes from competing, then how should we meaningfully repudiate China’s atrocities? The right answer is an economic and diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics. American spectators — other than families of our athletes and coaches — should stay at home, preventing us from contributing to the enormous revenues the Chinese Communist Party will raise from hotels, meals and tickets. American corporations that routinely send large groups of their customers and associates to the Games should send them to U.S. venues instead.

Rather than send the traditional delegation of diplomats and White House officials to Beijing, the president should invite Chinese dissidents, religious leaders and ethnic minorities to represent us.

An economic and diplomatic boycott should include collaboration with NBC, which has already done important work to reveal the reality of the Chinese Communist Party’s repression and brutality. NBC can refrain from showing any jingoistic elements of the opening and closing ceremonies and instead broadcast documented reports of China’s abuses.

We should enlist our friends around the world to join our economic boycott. Limiting spectators, selectively shaping our respective delegations and refraining from broadcasting Chinese propaganda would prevent China from reaping many of the rewards it expects from the Olympics.

Finally, America and the nations of the free world need to have a heart-to-heart with the International Olympic Committee. The I.O.C. has hoped that awarding Games to repressive regimes would tend to lessen their abuses. But hope has too often met a different reality — in Hitler’s Germany, Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China. In authoritarian states, the Olympics has more often been a tool of propaganda than a lever of reform.

It’s an ambitious agenda — less severe than withdrawing from the games entirely —but also more complicated. Romney’s plan would require a concerted effort from the federal government as well as a patchwork of many different individuals, advocacy organizations, and corporations. If steps like these are going to be taken, we’ll need consensus — and quickly. On the right, there should be few qualms with embracing such a course of action. The Republican ranks are filled with presidential hopefuls eager to burnish their credentials as China hawks.

There’s evidence that on the furthest reaches of the Left too, there is a willingness to use the Olympics as an opportunity to expose the CCP as the collection of genocidal sociopaths they are. Look at what “Squad” member Ilhan Omar retweeted the other day:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, recently delivered a speech on the House floor in support of Tibet — another region of the PRC where the CCP is engaged in gross human-rights abuses against a religious minority.

Our political class should set aside its pointless, destabilizing wars over abolishing the filibuster and overhauling the country’s election processes and instead opt to spend its time on important projects like the one Senator Romney proposes. They may not be catnip for either side’s political base, but they’re both important and achievable.

Clearly, there exists a bipartisan consensus over the CCP’s nature. Less obvious is whether our leaders have the ability to come together and craft a policy agenda for confronting this manifestly evil regime.