Nothing sums up the Biden administration better than the video of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen prostrating herself before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Sunday. The sight of one of America’s most powerful Cabinet members groveling before her counterpart in one of the world’s most evil empires was enough to sicken anyone. The moment was so appalling that even the media’s backlash was swift.

“The sight of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen bowing and scraping before Chinese officials was just an awful sight,” Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow complained. Journalist Tom Elliott insisted that her bowing “is an embarrassment to every non-communist American.”

For Republicans, it was the living embodiment of Biden’s foreign policy weakness. Yellen, who bowed so much she looked like a political bobblehead, outraged patriots like Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who said her subservience was “emblematic of this administration.” “What country does Secretary Yellen work for??” Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) demanded to know.

Imagine the fragility this projects, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) fired back in a Twitter video. “We need to send a message that we, the United States of America, are strong. That we’re resolute. That we are the global superpower, and we will not let the Chinese Communist Party displace us.”

If America’s own leaders don’t recognize our nation’s sovereignty and standing on the world stage, it not only jeopardizes our foreign policy and national security, it also endangers the lives of the vulnerable. To the citizens of this country, Biden’s timidity on the international scene is horrifying — but to the believers and religious minorities around the world who rely on the United States’ advocacy, it’s deadly.

Displays like Yellen’s don’t simply undermine American interests, they embolden repressive governments like China’s. Which of our enemies could possibly take us seriously when our country cowers in the face of their tyranny? How can we possibly stop Xi Jinping’s genocide when we can’t even look his officials in the eye?

Thanks to GOP leaders, the new Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is pulling back the curtain on some of the CCP’s worst barbarism. As recently as Wednesday, Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) hosted a group of interfaith leaders to highlight the brutal persecution in China. I had the opportunity to testify about the threat China poses to religious freedom alongside Mayflower Church Pastor Pan Yongguang, Bob Fu, and several members of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which I chaired.

As I and so many witnesses attested, China’s horrifying treatment of Christians and other minorities continues to grow more nightmarish in scope. There’s the ghoulish trafficking of human body parts, a black market built on the violent removal of organs from the CCP’s youngest prisoners, often without anesthesia. Between 2.5 and 5% of 28-year-olds in China’s concentration camps “disappear” every year from this form of execution, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) has warned. We’re talking about “100,000 people per year,” he explains, “and that number is going up.” “[They] take their organs — two to three per person. It is barbaric. It is Nazi-like. It’s going on right now. And they target the healthiest people, who happen to be religious people [because] they have an extreme prejudice against them.”

During my time on USCIRF, the stories would send chills down even the most stoic spines. Routinely, witnesses say, doctors would be paged in the middle of the night to come to their hospitals. New truckloads of dissidents would have arrived — Falun Gong, usually, but sometimes Uyghurs or Christians. Annie, who escaped to the U.S., talked about her surgeon husband, who used to wake up screaming from the things he’d been asked to do to living, breathing people. “He told me, ‘You have no idea of my agony. It would be okay if we removed organs from dead bodies, but these people were truly alive.’” She estimates he forcibly removed over 2,000 corneas alone.

The most excruciating forms of torture are still happening behind barbed wire walls that Beijing has tried to hide. Thousands of internal documents reveal a rigid system of “absolutely no mercy” that harrowing eyewitness accounts and testimonies confirm. And for the millions of people trapped inside their network of camps, the only hope they have to escape their tormentors is international attention and pressure. 

Those savage tactics are an open secret now, thanks to whistleblowers like Jiang, who shudders to think of what he saw as a police detective. Every night, he told CNN, his teams — armed with assault rifles — would fan out, knocking on the doors of Uyghurs. “We took [them] all forcibly overnight,” he explained. “… It’s all planned, it all has a system.” Handcuffed and hooded, they’d be taken to headquarters, where police would “kick them, beat them [until they’re] bruised and swollen… Until they kneel on the floor crying.” The policemen, one survivor explained, would take the pretty girls away with them, raping them until they couldn’t sit down. Young men would be sodomized, repeatedly. Everyone new was pummelled, Jiang said somberly, even teenagers.

Those fortunate enough to evade China’s torture chambers live in a state of constant fear, as the government destroys house churches in raids and nationwide crackdowns. This month, news broke that churches in the Zhejiang Province have been ordered to display signs “declaring their love for the Communist party” if they want to stay open.

Elsewhere, congregations are subjected to CCTV monitors, where secret police can monitor every word. As Open Doors explains, a lot of house churches have simply stopped meeting or split into smaller, more clandestine groups.

Outside the church, the faithful also suffer under China’s infamous social credit score, which blocks dissidents and nonconformists from everyday transactions; low scores have barred 23 million Chinese from traveling.

This is the reality of the Chinese Communist Party — the same bloodthirsty empire this White House is showing deference to in public.

American leaders should do nothing that suggests we honor a regime that sees human rights as an impediment to political power and control.

The Biden administration should not be kowtowing to China — they should be holding them accountable for their systematic and egregious violations of fundamental human rights, chief among them religious freedom.