Penalize, Don’t Reward, Xi’s Malevolence

Fresh from his appalling summit with one tyrant – Russia’s Vladimir Putin – President Biden’s administration is signaling that another one is in the works with China’s Xi Jinping.

This comes in the immediate aftermath of Xi’s latest attack on what little remains of freedom in Hong Kong. Police raided last week the offices of the former British colony’s most popular pro-democracy paper, Apple Daily, seizing equipment and arresting five editors without bond. They seem doomed to join their courageous boss, Jimmy Lai, in the Chinese Communist Party’s equivalent of the Soviet gulag archipelago.

A bilateral summit will inevitably legitimate and reward Xi for such ruthless oppression at home and his increasingly aggressive behavior internationally. If we don’t want to invite more of both we should, instead, penalize him by decoupling the U.S. and Hong Kong dollars and boycotting next February’s Olympic “genocide games.”

This is Frank Gaffney.