U.S. government officials will boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing because of China's human rights "atrocities", the White House said on Monday, just weeks after talks aimed at easing tense relations between the two superpowers.

 The United States will not send government officials to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, a slap at China for human rights abuses.

The diplomatic boycott allows American athletes to compete, but it is seen as an affront and one of President Biden’s most public condemnations of Beijing. China said it would respond with “resolute countermeasures.”

Pressure has been building for months from members of Congress in both parties to hold China accountable for abuses of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region and crackdowns on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Those calls only intensified after the disappearance from public life of the tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a top Communist Party leader of sexual assault.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said administration officials did not believe it was appropriate to send a delegation of U.S. officials to the Games in February after “genocide and crimes against humanity” in Xinjiang.

China has reacted angrily to the US government’s diplomatic boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics, as more countries said they would consider joining the protest over Beijing’s human rights record and New Zealand announced it would not send representatives to the Games.

Chinese officials dismissed Washington’s boycott as a “posturing and political manipulation” and tried to discredit the decision by claiming that US diplomats had not even been invited to Beijing in the first place.