In February 2022,
Beijing will host the Winter Olympics.
The Chinese Communist Party will use
those games as a grand propaganda
spectacle to boost its domestic
legitimacy
and to boast of China's inexorable rise
on the international scene...
or so Xi Jinping hopes. Given the ongoing
human rights abuses in China, the Party's
culpability for the COVID-19 pandemic,
and its obvious inability to guarantee
the safety and well-being of Olympic
athletes,
an international effort to move, cancel,
or boycott the Beijing games is in order.
The 2022 Winter Olympic Games will take
place just months before the 20th
National Congress of the Chinese
Communist Party.
A cancellation or significant boycott of
the Olympics might further weaken Xi
Jinping
in ways that make a leadership challenge,
however remote that possibility,
somewhat more likely. Even if a boycott
or cancellation fails to put significant
pressure on Xi,
absenting ourselves from the 2022 games
is the right thing to do.
The alternative is to send team USA to
Beijing, and
in so doing, choose complicity in China's
worst abuses.
Do you think the United States should
boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics?
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