Imagine giving a speech about China and failing to mention Cardinal Zen or Jimmy Lai, not mentioning the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not mentioning labor unions or TikTok, not mentioning the secret police station China was operating at New York City, not uttering the word freedom.

Then imagine that the speech was given not by some Chinese Communist Party functionary, but by the American Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, speaking on American soil, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. 

It turns out you needn’t imagine this: It’s not some dystopian glimpse into an alternative future in which America loses confidence in its own values. It actually happened, and recently. You can go on the Treasury website and read the speech or watch video of Ms. Yellen delivering it.

“Just pathetic,” Senator Cotton proclaimed. “The Biden administration’s appeasement of China is embarrassing and making the U.S. weaker.” Ms. Yellen “and the whole Biden administration are completely out of touch with reality,”  Mr. Cotton said.

China hawks on the left were similarly dismayed. Robert Kuttner, writing in the American Prospect, called the speech “oddly soft-line and ill-timed.” He suggested that the Biden administration is split internally about China, with Secretary Blinken and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, favoring a tougher policy while Ms. Yellen “has been the softest of the soft-liners.”

“Ill-timed” is understating it.

Just days before Ms. Yellen’s speech, Senator Marshall of Kansas released a 300-page report disclosing that the Chinese government was working on a Covid-19 vaccine — and urgently providing remedial biosecurity training to workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — weeks before telling the rest of the world about the virus outbreak.

Also days before Ms. Yellen’s speech, the Department of Justice announced the unsealing of a criminal complaint charging two people with “opening and operating an illegal overseas police station” at Manhattan. China’s ministry of public security used the office to monitor and attempt to intimidate dissidents, prosecutors said.

“It is simply outrageous that China’s Ministry of Public Security thinks it can get away with establishing a secret, illegal police station on U.S. soil to aid its efforts to export repression and subvert our rule of law,” the acting assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, Kurt Ronnow, said. “This case serves as a powerful reminder that the People’s Republic of China will stop at nothing to bend people to their will and silence messages they don’t want anyone to hear.”

The day of Ms. Yellen’s speech, Bloomberg Businessweek published a stunning dispatch about how the Chinese-controlled TikTok app in America drives teenagers to depression, eating disorders, and suicide. By contrast, according to the report, a sister platform for use in China “is known to send teens positive content, such as educational posts about science experiments and museum exhibits. It also has a mandatory time limit of 40 minutes a day for children under 14.”

Video of the Treasury secretary’s speech shows Ms. Yellen racing off the stage without entertaining questions from students or faculty members. This is particularly ironic at Johns Hopkins; its president, Ronald Daniels, wrote a book, “What Universities Owe Democracy,” proposing that colleges and universities “infuse debate into campus programming.”

Instead of “prioritizing lone speakers,” Mr. Daniels wrote, universities should “instead construct debates around policy.” Of Johns Hopkins’s roughly 31,000 students, the federal government counts about 5,000 with foreign visas; in general, China sends by far the largest number of foreign students to American universities.

Perhaps Ms. Yellen was in a rush to get to her next appointment. Or perhaps she was worried some brave student might ask her why, among the “three principal objectives” she mentioned in her speech, supporting the spread of freedom and democracy in China was not among them. There was some language about “human rights abuses” but, as Messrs. Cotton and Kuttner both perceived, it was weak.

The point is not to get America into a hot war with nuclear-armed China. The point is that the cause of freedom needs a president who can put China on defense. Where is “the big guy” President Biden when you need him? Setting China policy right could be a project for the president’s second term — if embarrassments like the Yellen speech don’t cost him the chance at one.