[Congressional Bills 117th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 500 Introduced in House (IH)]

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117th CONGRESS
  1st Session
H. RES. 500

     Condemning the Chinese Communist Party for 100 years of gross 
  violations of human rights and standing with the Chinese people in 
                      their struggle for liberty.


_______________________________________________________________________


                    IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                             June 25, 2021

 Mr. Gallagher (for himself, Mr. Gallego, Mr. McCaul, Mr. Gottheimer, 
Ms. Stefanik, Mr. Golden, and Mr. Fitzpatrick) submitted the following 
   resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs

_______________________________________________________________________

                               RESOLUTION


 
     Condemning the Chinese Communist Party for 100 years of gross 
  violations of human rights and standing with the Chinese people in 
                      their struggle for liberty.

Whereas, in 1930, during the Futian incident, cadres who had opposed Mao 
        Zedong's purges stemming from the Anti-Bolshevik League incident were 
        detained and executed;
Whereas, from 1942 to 1945, during the Yan'an Rectification Movement, thousands 
        of cadres were detained, tortured, and in some cases executed as Mao 
        Zedong centralized control over the Chinese Communist Party;
Whereas, during the siege of Changchun in 1948, during the Chinese civil war, a 
        People's Liberation Army military blockade of the Manchurian city of 
        Changchun cut off access of food and supplies leading to the starvation 
        and death of more than 100,000 civilians;
Whereas, in the late 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party oversaw a massive land 
        reform movement campaign, in which landlords and others deemed to be of 
        the ``bourgeoisie'' were beaten and murdered, with Mao Zedong himself 
        claiming that as many as 2 to 3 million citizens were killed;
Whereas, in 1949, the People's Liberation Army forcefully incorporated the 
        western region of Xinjiang and coerced the local government with aid and 
        support from the Soviet Union;
Whereas, in 1951, the People's Liberation Army annexed Tibet and in 1959, put 
        down an uprising, killing thousands and forcing the Dalai Lama and 
        Tibetan government into exile;
Whereas, during the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns in 1951 and 1952, the 
        Chinese Communist Party launched movements aimed to target loyalists to 
        the Republic of China Government and those deemed as being members of 
        the ``capitalist'' class, resulting in over 100,000 deaths from both 
        execution and forced suicide;
Whereas, from 1950 to 1953, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries saw 
        the Chinese Communist Party launch a political operation to arrest and 
        detain those deemed loyal to the Republic of China Government, with 
        official estimates putting the number of deaths by execution or forced 
        labor at over 700,000;
Whereas, from 1955 to 1957, the Sufan campaign led to hundreds of thousands of 
        noncommunist intellectuals being persecuted during a Mao-directed 
        purging of ``counterrevolutionaries'';
Whereas, from 1957 to 1958, the Anti-Rightist campaign led to the indiscriminate 
        detention of millions of intellectuals and ``capitalists'' who were 
        forced into hard labor, resulting in countless deaths;
Whereas, during the 1958 Xunhua incident in Qinghai, forces of the People's 
        Liberation Army massacred as many as 400 civilians following a protest 
        against the decision of local officials to impose strict rules for 
        socialist transformation and the detention of local religious figures;
Whereas, from 1958 to 1962, Mao Zedong's ``Great Leap Forward'' resulted in one 
        of the worst man-made catastrophes of all time, in which Mao's 
        collectivization of agriculture resulted in a catastrophic famine that 
        led to the death by starvation of as many as 20 to 40 million citizens;
Whereas, since 1958, the implementation of the Hukou Registration Regulation has 
        categorized both urban and rural populations, strictly mandating where 
        citizens and their families can work, travel, and attend schooling, with 
        a particular impact on the rural population in terms of deep wealth and 
        social disadvantage;
Whereas, from 1966 to 1976, Mao Zedong's cultural revolution saw the arbitrary 
        arrest, torture, and execution of millions of citizens, with estimates 
        ranging from 1 to 35 million;
Whereas, in August 1966, more commonly known as Red August, more than 1,700 
        citizens across Beijing, primarily consisting of school teachers and 
        principals, were killed by radical Red Guard paramilitary forces in a 
        campaign that was launched following a meeting between Mao Zedong and 
        Red Guard leaders, who then acted to enforce his policy of destroying 
        the ``Four Olds'';
Whereas, in the summer of 1975, the Shadian incident saw a crackdown on the Hui 
        ethnic minority population of Yunnan Province, wherein members of the 
        Hui community demonstrated for religious freedoms and attempted to 
        forcefully reopen mosques that had been shuttered by the local 
        government, and 10,000 troops of the People's Liberation Army were 
        summoned to crush the movement, killing an estimated 1,600 civilians 
        including 300 children;
Whereas, from 1979 to 2015, the Chinese Government's ``One Child Policy'' 
        inhibited millions of families from having more than one child, and to 
        which local governments were granted the ability to require the use of 
        forced abortions and sterilization in addition to immense penalties and 
        fines for violators;
Whereas, in the spring of 1989, following the death of pro-reform former General 
        Secretary Hu Yaobang of the Chinese Communist Party, nationwide student 
        protests demanding greater freedoms were met with a violent crackdown, 
        culminating on June 4th as forces of the People's Liberation Army 
        butchered students and protestors in what is now known as the Tiananmen 
        Square Massacre;
Whereas, since 1999, the Chinese Communist Party has enacted a widespread 
        campaign to eliminate the practice of the Falun Gong religious movement 
        both within China and around the globe, utilizing methods of suppression 
        including arbitrary detention, forced labor, physical torture, 
        nonconsensual organ harvesting, and in some instances even death;
Whereas, in 2008, Chinese police and military forces led a violent crackdown on 
        Tibetans who were protesting the Government's treatment and persecution 
        of the local population, resulting in an untold number of civilians 
        killed and the illegal detention of activists, many of whom reported 
        that they were tortured and forced to falsely declare that the exiled 
        Dalai Lama had paid them to orchestrate the protest;
Whereas, since 2008, the Chinese Communist Party has persecuted various 
        individuals linked to Charter 08, a manifesto calling for greater 
        transparency and freedoms for the people of China, and in which one of 
        the signatories, 2010 Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Liu Xiaobo, was 
        imprisoned by the Chinese Government and later died of liver cancer 
        after being denied foreign medical treatment;
Whereas, since 2013, the Chinese Government has cracked down on the practice of 
        Christianity, forcing churches to remove their steeples, and persecuting 
        practitioners and forcing house churches to shut their doors;
Whereas, in the summer of 2015, the ``709 Crackdown'' led to abductions, 
        arrests, and persecutions of over 200 prominent human rights activists 
        and civil rights lawyers across China, dealing a devastating blow to the 
        nation's rights-defense movement;
Whereas, since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has conducted ``Operation 
        Foxhunt'', a covert global campaign designed to silence dissent and 
        pressure foreign governments to extradite individuals under the guise of 
        anticorruption, in which the Director of the Federal Bureau of 
        Investigation, Christopher Wray, in July 2020, described the operation 
        as a ``sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals 
        whom he sees as threats'', and that families of these targets ``have 
        been threatened and coerced, and those back in China have even been 
        arrested for leverage.'';
Whereas, in the fall of 2015, 5 staff members of Hong Kong's Causeway Bay Books, 
        an outlet selling books covering the salacious lives and rumors of 
        elites of the Chinese Communist Party, were secretly abducted only later 
        resurfacing inside China and expressing coerced confessions to various 
        crimes, and of these individuals, Gui Minhai currently remains in 
        Chinese custody;
Whereas, since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party has committed grotesque human 
        rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, 
        and estimates state that over one million Uyghurs have been refined to 
        ``re-education'' camps and forced to give up traditional religious and 
        cultural practices;
Whereas, in July 2020, China's rubberstamp National People's Congress directly 
        implemented a draconian Hong Kong National Security Law that aims to 
        curb citizens of Hong Kong freedoms, and silence all forms of political 
        speech, opposition, and dissent, paving the way for arbitrary arrests 
        under ill-defined allegations of subversion, secession, and colluding 
        with foreign powers;
Whereas, in the fall of 2020, Chinese police forces arrested and suppressed 
        demonstrators in inner Mongolia following protests against the 
        Autonomous Region government's decision to replace the Mongolian 
        language as the medium of instruction in favor of standardized Mandarin, 
        viewed by many Mongolians as an attempt to erase the region's unique 
        history and culture in favor of forced assimilation with the majority 
        Han culture;
Whereas, in December 2020, lawyer-turned-journalist Zhang Zhan was sentenced to 
        4 years in prison for her independent reporting on the situation in and 
        the Government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the city of Wuhan;
Whereas Ms. Zhang's reporting countered the propagandist narrative set by state 
        media outlets and gave millions an inside look at what was truly 
        happening in Wuhan during the earliest stages of the pandemic;
Whereas, in January 2021, the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo determined 
        that the Chinese Government's human rights abuses in Xinjiang amounted 
        to crimes against humanity and genocide;
Whereas, in February 2021, Canada's House of Commons unanimously declared that 
        the Chinese Government's actions toward the Uyghur people in Xinjiang 
        was genocide;
Whereas, in March 2021, the United States, the European Union, the United 
        Kingdom, and Canada imposed sanctions on senior Chinese officials and 
        members of the security apparatus over human rights abuses directed 
        toward the Uyghur people in Xinjiang;
Whereas, in March 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Department of 
        State affirmed the judgment of the previous administration, declaring 
        that the Chinese Government's actions in Xinjiang against the Uyghur 
        people constituted crimes against humanity and genocide; and
Whereas, in April 2021, the United Kingdom's House of Commons voted to declare 
        that it is their belief that China's actions in Xinjiang amount to 
        genocide: Now, therefore, be it
    Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
            (1) condemns the Chinese Communist Party for 100 years of 
        gross violations of human rights, including repression, 
        torture, mass imprisonment, and genocide;
            (2) supports the inherent right of the Chinese people to 
        self-determination and free political expression independent of 
        one-party rule;
            (3) calls on the Government of the United States and like-
        minded allies and partners to support human rights in the 
        People's Republic of China, including through the use of 
        technology to support and enable free expression and 
        information; and
            (4) looks forward to the day that the Chinese Communist 
        Party no longer exists.
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