Hi China Watchers. We’re just two weeks away from the opening of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games so we’re kicking the tires of Biden’s diplomatic boycott, previewing the upcoming Lunar New Year’s (literally) explosive movie openings and paying tribute to China’s newly crowned “King of Quarantine.”
Let’s get to it. — Phelim
The Biden administration’s diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics aims to thread the needle. It’s intended to convey U.S. revulsion toward human rights abuses in China while still allowing U.S. athletes to compete. But Republican lawmakers and rights advocates say the administration has squandered the opportunity to build an effective coalition that would actually get Beijing’s attention.
Only nine other nations have joined the boycott so far — fewer than the number of countries that supported the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games — and the international response has ranged from indifference to scorn.
That paltry showing undermines U.S. credibility as an effective coalition builder against authoritarian repression and rendered Washington the perceived loser of a geopolitical influence contest that Beijing is peddling as a propaganda victory.
“The reason the diplomatic boycott has been largely a failure is because the U.S. wasn’t leading [and] instead, the Biden administration spent a year twiddling its thumbs and had provided no top cover to the world at large,” said Rep. MICHAEL McCAUL (R-Texas), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The only other option is the president tried to get our allies on board and failed, [and] if we tried to get France or Germany or others on board with this diplomatic boycott and we weren’t able to do so,…