The last time China hosted the Olympics, the Summer Games in 2008, it used the opening ceremony to stage a gigantic and memorable regime-enhancing spectacle. Beijing promised reforms to get awarded the games and then, true to form, engaged in yet more heavy-handed repression.

If the 2008 Beijing Games were ill-advised, next year’s Winter Olympics are a complete travesty. The atrocities in Xinjiang Province are a matter of public record and the squashing of Hong Kong proceeds apace. No one who crosses the regime is safe from imprisonment or worse. China openly menaces Taiwan with an invasion. Indeed, China could conceivably be in a shooting war with the United States within a year or two of using the presence of our athletes, among others, to enhance the rule of its dictator-for-life.

Bach insists that the IOC must always be politically neutral. As Michael Mazza of the American Enterprise Institute points out, though, the IOC banned apartheid-era South Africa from the games. There is no such thing as neutrality when dealing with an all-encompassing police state for which politics is a life-or-death matter. The games aren’t being hosted by Switzerland or Norway — nice, law-abiding countries with good ski slopes — but a revanchist power that tramples on human dignity and is a clear and present danger to international peace.