This year's Olympic Games have come to a close but athletes and enthusiasts are already gearing up for the next round of competitions come 2022. This time, the highly anticipated games will take place in China, which in the past year has received bad press for the mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak and the human rights violations against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
It is for this reason that many human rights activists and leaders in the U.S. are calling to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
"China's crimes against humanity, including genocide, are comparable to what the Third Reich did prior to the mass exterminations that began in 1941. These are atrocities that the world has not seen in decades," China expert and author Gordon Chang told CBN News.
In 2014, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched the "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang Province, Human Rights Watch reported. Under this banner, Chinese authorities committed crimes against humanity, which are "considered among the gravest human rights abuses under international law."
Such crimes the CCP committed include "torture and other ill-treatment, cultural and political indoctrination, and forced labor," as well as "a pervasive system of mass surveillance, controls on movement, arbitrary arrest and enforced disappearance, cultural and religious erasure, and family separation."
China has denied such allegations hurled at the communist state despite report after report showing evidence of genocide and other human rights abuses. At one point, the communist state tried to improve its human rights record but eventually intensified repression.
"They realized they had gotten everything they wanted, which was the approval of other countries, so the same thing is going to happen now," Chang warned. This is why many leaders, including Republican Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, are calling for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
He argued that at the moment, more than one million Muslim Uyghurs are being held in concentration camps, where "women are partitioned off when they get there, forced into abortions, forced sterilization, mass rape campaigns."
This is not to mention the intense persecution Christians in China face from the Chinese communist government.
"It's horrific and disgusting," Rep. Waltz told CBN News. "The Chinese communist party is in an absolute war with any type of religious liberty."
Rep. Waltz said he "can't imagine seeing the American flag flying there," in land where dictators and communists rule and where they "[turn] a blind eye" and say genocide and human rights abuses and "all of that is OK." He added that in the past, the U.S. failed to boycott a host country, causing dictators to be "emboldened when the world turns a blind eye." Rep. Waltz referred to the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, Germany, just after the Russian invasion of the Crimean Peninsula.
Calls to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing have also resounded in Canada, where a new survey from Nanos Research for CTV News revealed that 45% of respondents said Canada should boycott the games because of tensions between the country and China. An additional 19% said they would somewhat support the boycott.
