In 2022, the Biden administration punished the Chinese Communist Party for abusing the human rights of Uyghurs in Xinjiang in Northwest China by declining to send government officials to the Beijing Winter Olympics. This amounted to less than a slap on the wrist for grave transgressions. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping could bask in the glow of the U.S. Olympians competing alongside graceful young athletes from around the world without having to bother with staid diplomats delivering their predictable mix of prepackaged blandishments and reproaches.

One should not, however, underestimate the complexities of the China challenge.

On the one hand, the Biden administration embraced former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang.” Issued in January 2021 shortly before Pompeo left office, the document enumerated the CCP’s crimes against humanity. They “are ongoing and include: the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilization, torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained, forced labor, and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement.” So severe and systematic were the CCP’s atrocities that they constituted “genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” stated Pompeo. “The governing authorities of the second most economically, militarily, and politically powerful country on earth have made clear that they are engaged in the forced assimilation and eventual erasure of a vulnerable ethnic and religious minority group, even as they simultaneously assert their country as a global leader and attempt to remold the international system in their image.”

On the other hand, the enormous global influence exercised by the People’s Republic of China greatly complicates the fashioning and implementation of a suitable response to PRC atrocities. As the “The Elements of the China Challenge” – published by the State Department’s Policy Planning staff in December 2020 while I served as director – lays out, the CCP’s ambitions go well beyond hegemony in the Indo-Pacific or even establishing China as the single “most economically, militarily, and politically powerful country on earth.” Xi has indicated in numerous speeches and writings – consistent with the ambitions of the........

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