U.S. government officials should boycott China’s 2022 Winter Olympic Games unless the communist state ceases persecuting religious minorities, a report released Tuesday to the State Department recommended.
The annual report, authored by officials at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federally sponsored watchdog, surveys religious freedom violations worldwide. This year, as in 2018 and 2019, it found China to be one of the worst offenders, particularly because it continues to imprison and torture Uighur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists.
The report detailed China’s imprisonment of more than 1 million Uighurs in camps where many say they were raped, tortured, or sterilized. Chinese authorities have also destroyed many mosques and suppressed any practice of Islam, which it considers to be extremist.
The treatment of Tibetan Buddhists is similar, the report found. The government continues to destroy temples and monasteries, displacing more than 6,000 monks. It persecutes anyone who refuses to denounce the Dalai Lama and represses public displays of his image.
USCIRF Commissioner Johnnie Moore criticized Western countries for lacking a response to China’s abuses, citing a “pursuit of self-interest.” Moore wrote that for several decades, China has been permitted to “play by its own rules” when “there is no question that China is the world’s foremost violator of human rights and religious freedom.”
“This is absolutely inexcusable, and those nations around the world who ignore China’s malevolence may eventually find themselves subservient to it,” he wrote. “It is past time for our world bodies, and our liberal democracies, to demand more from China.”
In addition to calling for a boycott on the Olympics, the report recommended that the United States sanction communist party leaders in the Xinjiang, an autonomous region of China where the majority of Uighur prisoners are held in concentration camps. The report also urged members of Congress to support legislation seeking to provide aid to Uighurs and other persecuted religious minorities.
Past reports from within China have found that the country’s religious persecutions have only worsened during the coronavirus pandemic. Uighurs in Wuhan, the city where the virus originated, were forced to continue working in factories while the rest of the city was shut down. Other Uighurs who were quarantined were denied food or were forced to pay for basic necessities.
An official within the State Department told the Washington Examiner that the rapid spread of the coronavirus reveals the “devastating consequences” of China’s policies toward imprisoned religious minorities, as well as of its lack of transparency in reporting abuses.
“The Chinese government still silences and punishes those who veer from the official line — with potentially deadly consequences,” he said. “This pandemic highlights the vital importance of open, transparent information-sharing and reliable data to global health security.”
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, an ardent critic of China, argued in an April op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that China’s lack of transparency likely is what led to the virus’s outbreak in the first place. Cotton previously told the Washington Examiner that the communist state’s opaque attitude toward sharing information is in part what made it possible for it to imprison Uighurs in “gulag reeducation camps.”
