    [Senate Hearing 116-230]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                                                            S. Hrg. 116-230

                          RULE BY FEAR: 30 YEARS AFTER
                                TIANANMEN SQUARE

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   BEFORE THE

                         COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
                              UNITED STATES SENATE

                         ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                                  JUNE 5, 2019

                                   __________

           Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                       Available via the World Wide Web:
                             http://www.govinfo.gov

                               ______

                 U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
    40-872 PDF            WASHINGTON : 2020

                     COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

                    JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho, Chairman
    MARCO RUBIO, Florida                 ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
    RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin               BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland
    CORY GARDNER, Colorado               JEANNE SHAHEEN, New Hampshire
    MITT ROMNEY, Utah                    CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware
    LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina       TOM UDALL, New Mexico
    JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia              CHRISTOPHER MURPHY, Connecticut
    JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming               TIM KAINE, Virginia
    ROB PORTMAN, Ohio                    EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts
    RAND PAUL, Kentucky                  JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon
    TODD, YOUNG, Indiana                 CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey
    TED CRUZ, Texas
                  Christopher M. Socha, Staff Director
                Jessica Lewis, Democratic Staff Director
                        John Dutton, Chief Clerk

                                   (ii)

                                C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------
                                                                       Page

    Risch, Hon. James E., U.S. Senator From Idaho....................     1

    Menendez, Hon. Robert, U.S. Senator From New Jersey..............     2

    Qiang, Xiao, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, China Digital Times,
      Berkeley, CA...................................................     4
        Prepared Statement...........................................     7

    Richardson, Ph.D., Sophie, China Director, Human Rights Watch,
      New York, NY...................................................    13
        Prepared Statement...........................................    15

    Walker, Christopher, Vice President for Studies and Analysis,
      National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC...............    18
        Prepared Statement...........................................    20

                       Additional Material for the Record

    Responses of Mr. Xiao Qiang to Questions Submitted by
      Senator Robert Menendez........................................    48

    Responses of Mr. Christopher Walker to Questions Submitted by
      Senator Robert Menendez........................................    51

    Suggested Reading for the 30th Anniversary of the Tiananmen
      Crackdown Submitted by Senator Robert Menendez.................    48

    Material Submitted for the Record by Senator Markey: Letter to
      Secretary Pompeo...............................................    53

                                 (iii)

                          RULE BY FEAR: 30 YEARS AFTER

                                TIANANMEN SQUARE

                                  ----------

                            WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5, 2019

                                           U.S. Senate,
                                Committee on Foreign Relations,
                                                       Washington, D.C.
        The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:17 a.m. in
    room SD-419, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. James E.
    Risch, chairman of the committee, presiding.
        Present: Senators Risch [presiding], Gardner, Romney,
    Barrasso, Young, Cruz, Menendez, Cardin, Shaheen, Coons, Kaine,
    and Markey.

               OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JAMES E. RISCH,
                        U.S. SENATOR FROM IDAHO

        The Chairman. Our committee will come to order.
        This morning we are going to, on the 30th anniversary, or
    the day after the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square
    massacre, honor all those brave citizens of China who believed
    in a freer future for their China. Please join me in a brief
    moment of silence for them, including those who lost their
    lives.
        [A moment of silence.]
        The Chairman. Thank you.
        In June 1989, the photo of a lone Chinese citizen standing
    down a column of People's Liberation Army tanks in Tiananmen
    Square was the snapshot seen around the world of the Chinese
    people's suffering.
        The Chinese Government's modes of repression today are
    perhaps more difficult to capture in a single image but are,
    nevertheless, omnipresent, pernicious, and increasingly brazen.
    Every day is Tiananmen Square, but you do not see the pictures
    and you do not see the way that they are treated because it is
    done surreptitiously. Though perpetrated by the Chinese
    Communist Party for decades, human rights abuses have
    intensified under President Xi Jinping.
        As we sit here today, there are between 1 million and 2
    million Muslims locked up by Chinese authorities in internment
    camps, where they face political indoctrination, isolation,
    abuse, and death. For every person in the camps, dozens more
    wonder what has happened to their loved ones.
        In general, freedom of religion is extinct in China. The
    Chinese Communist Party is bent on interfering in the selection
    of the next Dalai Lama. It has shut down churches and detained
    Christian pastors. And the Chinese Government is working on
    crafting so-called correct interpretations of the Bible. All of
    this is part of explicit government policies aimed at stripping
    religious organizations of their independence and forcing them
    to align with the Chinese Communist Party.
        Those who bear the greatest brunt of the Communist Party's
    disrespect for the rule of law are those who stand up to defend
    it. In the 4 years after the Chinese Communist Party's July
    2015 crackdown, numerous human rights lawyers and other
    advocates have received multiyear sentences. Those not in
    prison face restrictions on their freedom of movement and other
    forms of harassment and intimidation.
        Alongside these seismic abuses of power, we should not
    forget the injustices faced by all Chinese citizens each day.
    It is every censored Internet search or text message. It is the
    inability to buy a plane ticket because of a low, quote, social
    credit score, unquote. It is every facial scan.
        These examples demonstrate technology's role as an
    accelerant in the Communist Party's repression today. The
    Chinese Government and Chinese companies are pioneering an
    intrusive mass surveillance system. This is a serious challenge
    that we will pay particular attention to in this hearing and in
    the committee's work on command.
        Another challenge is the spread of Chinese human rights
    policies outside of the mainland. Chinese companies are
    exporting technology to regimes with poor human rights records
    and training authoritarian governments in information
    management and new media. China is seeking to redefine human
    rights norms at the United Nations, and it is exploiting the
    openness of advanced democracies to chill freedom of
    expression, particularly discussion about China itself.
        This is rule by fear. This is a regime that believes it
    bestows rights to its people and can take them away just as
    quickly as it bestows them. A regime that has appointed itself
    the judge of Chinese culture and identity, even though the
    birth of China predates the Chinese Communist Party rule by
    more than 5,000 years. And a regime that inserts the state into
    the facets of life that best promote human flourishing: faith,
    family, and civic engagement.
        The United States should make the defense of intrinsic
    values like fundamental freedoms and human rights a more
    central part of our approach to China. That we stand for
    freedom and human rights as well as prosperity is an advantage
    that we should not shy away from.
        I want to thank everyone for their interest in this topic
    and how we can stand up for the Chinese people, as well as
    protect our own societies.
        With that, I will turn it over to Ranking Member Senator
    Menendez for his opening remarks.

                  STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT MENENDEZ,
                      U.S. SENATOR FROM NEW JERSEY

        Senator Menendez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for
    calling this important hearing. And let me thank in advance our
    three extraordinary witnesses.
        The 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre
    provides an important opportunity to discuss human rights in
    China and the importance of a values-driven American foreign
    policy. Indeed, the events of 30 years ago continue to resonate
    because of our collective commitment to building a more just
    and decent world.
        Unfortunately, China has continued down the path it began
    that fateful day. With Xi Jinping declaring himself president
    for life, cracking down on civil society and human rights,
    introducing an Orwellian system of mass surveillance, advancing
    militarily in the South China Sea, and with predatory economic
    practices in Africa and the western hemisphere, China's
    trajectory is clear.
        Under the guise of the so-called reeducation campaigns, the
    CCP has brutally forced nearly a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang
    into heavily surveilled, forced labor camps, a model Xi may
    intend to expand throughout the country.
        Tibetans, facing wide-scale repression and harsh controls
    on religious, educational, cultural, and linguistic freedom,
    were in many respects the test subjects for the sort of ethnic
    surveillance we see in Xinjiang.
        CCP authorities likewise repress Christians and Falun Gong
    members who face forced labor and torture for their beliefs.
        Lawyers, journalists, students, labor activists, and human
    rights defenders are all at risk. And behind its Great
    Firewall, China has created a social credit system that rewards
    the, quote/unquote, good and punishes the, quote/unquote, bad.
        Sadly, China's authoritarian model is appealing in all too
    many places around the globe where dictators and despots are
    happy to accept China's assistance in repressing their own
    people. From Cambodia to Venezuela to Angola, we find the
    Communist Party of China sharing the technologies and
    techniques they have refined to crush democracy in their own
    country.
        Developing an effective policy that keeps our values at the
    center of our China policy is uniquely challenging and
    increasingly urgent. Just being more confrontational with China
    does not make us more competitive with China. Nor does simple
    confrontation help us resolve core human rights concerns.
        As we reflect on those lost and the events of Tiananmen, we
    must also look inward. We must ensure our values, grounded in
    international human rights, guide our efforts to strategically
    and coherently respond to China's rising power and growing
    authoritarianism.
        Unfortunately, the administration has simply failed to use
    our cherished time-tested principles and tools to universally
    and strategically support and promote human rights. And this is
    simply unacceptable. To confusion and dismay, last week
    Secretary Pompeo announced the establishment of a new
    commission to make sure that we have, quote, a solid definition
    of human rights. Well, the solid definition already exists. We
    do not need to redefine human rights. We need to defend and
    protect them.
        We must leverage all of our tools in our toolkit. We must
    cultivate robust diplomatic and security partnerships. We must
    bolster our own presence. We must address our own economic
    challenges and pursue more adroit economic statecraft abroad.
    And core American values must be the centerpiece of our foreign
    policy.
        We can start by investing in institutions that support
    democratic governance globally and stand with those who seek
    freedom.
        We must remember what made America a leader of nations. It
    was not just the strength of our military or the dynamism of
    our economy. It was the enduring power of our ideals.
        This committee must step up to advocate for more than a
    transactional approach to human rights because democracy will
    not defend itself.
        In the memory of those who died for their belief in
    democracy in China 30 years ago, we must remind ourselves of
    the sheer power of an informed democratic society living in
    freedom. We must lead with the values that made us great to be
    a beacon for those around the world. In doing so, we offer a
    better model, one which the people of China demonstrated 30
    years ago has universal appeal, not limited to a civilization
    or a particular nation. We must equally advocate, for example,
    for peaceful protesters in Sudan attacked by their government
    over the weekend.
        And it is these values that inspire others to partner with
    us and to rally with us in facing down the greatest challenges
    of our time.
        We owe those who stood in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago and
    the Chinese people nothing less today.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        The Chairman. Thank you.
        We now have three outstanding witnesses that are going to
    testify. We will hear from them, and then we will have a round
    of questions.
        First, I want to introduce Mr. Xiao Qiang. He is a research
    scientist at the University of California-Berkeley School of
    Information and the founder and editor-in-chief of China
    Digital Times, a bilingual China news website launched in 2003.
    Though a theoretical physicist by training, he became a full-
    time human rights advocate after the Tiananmen Square massacre
    in 1989. His current research focuses on state censorship,
    propaganda, and disinformation, as well as emerging big data
    and artificial intelligence-empowered state surveillance in
    China.
        Mr. Xiao, we would love to hear from you.

      STATEMENT OF XIAO QIANG, FOUNDER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, CHINA
                      DIGITAL TIMES, BERKELEY, CA

        Mr. Xiao. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and respectable members
    of the committee.
        June 5th, this very day, exactly 30 years ago, I was
    studying a Ph.D. program in the University of Notre Dame. After
    seeing on TV the PLA soldiers open fire on peaceful
    demonstrators in my home city, Beijing, I abandoned my
    astrophysics program and caught the first flight home to China.
    For 2 months in a time of terror, I tried to find out what had
    happened, contacting people in hiding, dodging police, and
    handing over donations raised abroad to the victims and their
    families.
        And I came back from that trip with one full realization. I
    realized that the name of the People's Republic of China itself
    is a lie. This government has never been the people's, nor is
    it a republic. China's National People's Congress is not
    elected by Chinese people. And China's People's Liberation Army
    only opened fire on people on the street of Lhasa, Beijing, and
    these days in the towns and villages in Xinjiang. When
    challenged, this lie could only be maintained through brutal
    violence and through the fear created through such violence.
        After 30 years, the Chinese communist regime has not only
    survived but also increased its power. Many Western politicians
    have been convinced that the wealth of the middle class and
    that the rise of the Internet will transform China from
    authoritarianism to democracy. But the reality is that Chinese
    rulers have taken advantage of their inclusion in the
    globalized trading process, significantly growing its economy
    under the CCP-controlled state capitalism and are refusing to
    allow any political liberalization.
        And President Xi Jinping today, after he scrapped the
    presidential term limits written in the Chinese constitution--
    he became the most powerful dictator in the world.
        And there is another threatening trend, threatening the
    hope of freedom of China. The digitalization of Chinese society
    is turning China into a surveillance state. Facial recognition,
    voice recognition, DNA collection, 200 million civilian cameras
    everywhere, social credit system, a new generation of digital
    technology, including artificial intelligence and big data
    analysis, is empowering the state to control, to monitor, to
    manipulate China's vast population in scalable fashion, at ease
    and with capacity to micro-target individuals. It can also help
    the state to identify and quash opposition in advance. China is
    exporting these technologies to other autocratic regimes around
    the world, normalizing and enabling a global authoritarianism.
        Ladies and gentlemen, the United States must develop an
    effective policy to stop this Chinese surveillance tech
    industry, disrupting its supply chains, and through working
    with allies, prevent China from using its government-controlled
    companies to advance its digital totalitarian interests in
    other parts of the world.
        We must have no illusions. It is the existence of the
    Chinese Communist Party dictatorship that abuses and threatens
    the liberty and the safety of Chinese people and people's lives
    anywhere in this increasingly interconnected globe. But this is
    not a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two
    different political systems, between democracy and a one-party
    dictatorship. We just need to look to Taiwan where Chinese
    civilization works well with democratic governance. We can also
    look to Japan, South Korea, and India.
        As a son of China and a proud citizen of the United States
    of America, I am asking each of you, when making the best
    possible China policy that defends the value and the interests
    of American people, please also make it align with and support
    Chinese people's struggle for human rights and freedom because
    we share a common humanity.
        Thirty years after Tiananmen, the Chinese Communist Party
    continues to rule China, rule Chinese people through fear. But
    those who rule by fear also live in fear. Last week, I was
    visiting Berlin and had some time to take a walk in the
    streets. Where the Berlin Wall once stood now there is a dark
    line on the ground through the city, some parts are hiking
    trails. But I also saw something else: names of victims of the
    Nazis engraved in shining brass plaques, 70,000 of them spread
    throughout Berlin city. I started to envision that one day in
    Beijing, the names of those who died during the Tiananmen
    massacre will be engraved into the city's roads, building
    walls, and parks and on Tiananmen Square, the gate of heavenly
    peace. I asked myself, where is Hitler's Nazi Germany now?
    Where is the former Soviet Union? Where is Suharto's Indonesia
    or Pinochet's Chile? They are all gone because the ultimate
    spirit of human dignity is more enduring than tanks and machine
    guns or even they are empowered by artificial intelligence and
    spaceships. Freedom will prevail in West or East, in Berlin or
    in Beijing.
        Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to ask
    you close your eyes for 1 minute. Just close your eyes. Can you
    see millions of Chinese faces on Tiananmen Square? Millions,
    peaceful, fearless, young, full of longing for freedom. Can you
    see the goddess of democracy standing tall in Tiananmen? Can
    you see the brave young man, his white shirt with two plastic
    shopping bags in his hands standing still in front of a column
    of moving tanks?
        Chinese people want, deserve, and demand human rights and
    freedom just like American people, just like people anywhere in
    the world. The only reason these voices cannot be fully heard
    is because they are being suppressed by the Chinese Government.
    Yes, it is the most powerful authoritarian state in the world.
    The regime is not just domestically oppressive, but it is
    becoming externally aggressive like an empire.
        I would like to end my testimony with a quote from Mahatma
    Gandhi, a great man from another great civilization.
        ``When I despair, I remember that all through history the
    way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants
    and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in
    the end, they always fall. Think of it always.''
        Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Xiao follows:]

                        Prepared Statement of Xiao Qiang

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

        The Chairman. Thank you very much. We appreciate that
    testimony.
        We will now hear from Sophie Richardson. She is the China
    Director at Human Rights Watch. Dr. Richardson is the author of
    numerous articles on domestic Chinese political reform,
    democratization, and human rights in Cambodia, China,
    Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Under her
    leadership, Human Rights Watch has documented a myriad of human
    rights abuses by the Chinese Government, including most
    recently the use of mass surveillance and the emerging
    technologies issue.
        Dr. Richardson.

     STATEMENT OF SOPHIE RICHARDSON, Ph.D., CHINA DIRECTOR, HUMAN
                       RIGHTS WATCH, NEW YORK, NY

        Dr. Richardson. Chairman Risch, Ranking Member Menendez,
    members of the committee, thank you for inviting us to join you
    on this very somber anniversary.
        Among the most disturbing aspects of President Xi's rule is
    Chinese authority's development and deployment of surveillance
    technology that aspires to engineer a dissent-free society.
    Authorities deny people any meaningful privacy rights from the
    government's prying eyes, and coupled with a deeply politicized
    judicial system, the lack of a free press and the denial of
    political rights, people across the country have no ability to
    challenge these developments or even truly understand how
    society is being transformed until it impacts them or their
    families directly.
        What are some examples of this technology? One of the
    Ministry of Public Security's most ambitious and privacy-
    violating big data projects is the police cloud system, which
    appears to be national. The system scoops up information from
    people's medical records to their supermarket memberships to
    delivery records, much of which is linked to people's unique
    national identification numbers. The police cloud system aims
    to track where the individuals have been, who they are with,
    and what they have been doing, as well as make predictions
    about their future activities. In effect, the system watches
    everyone, and the police can arbitrarily designate anyone a
    threat who requires greater surveillance, especially if they
    are deemed to be undermining stability.
        The Chinese Government is also developing a national social
    credit system that rewards good behavior and punishes the bad.
    At present, it is a blacklisting system in which behaviors the
    authorities disapprove of, from abnormal petitioning to eating
    on the subway, can affect one's ability to obtain services such
    as getting mortgages or traveling on high-speed trains, or even
    enrolling children in public schools.
        To what extent the social credit system will evolve and how
    it will interact with the police systems of mass surveillance
    remains an open question.
        In December 2017, we reported on Xinjiang authorities'
    compulsory collection of DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans,
    and blood types of all citizens in the region between the ages
    of 12 and 65, in part under the guise of a free public health
    care program. That campaign significantly expanded the
    authorities' collection of biodata beyond previous government
    efforts in the region. It did not appear that the government
    disclosed to the public or to participants the full range of
    how the collected medical information would be used and
    disseminated or for how long it would be storied, and it
    appears that people were given little information about the
    program or the ability to opt out of it.
        We discovered that a U.S.-based company, Thermo Fisher
    Scientific, had sold DNA sequencers to the Xinjiang Public
    Security Bureau during this period. After inquiries from Human
    Rights Watch, Members of Congress, and the New York Times, the
    company agreed to stop selling that particular technology in
    that particular region. However, it remains unclear whether it
    has adopted due diligence policies that might prevent such
    problems in the future.
        Most recently, Human Rights Watch reverse-engineered an app
    used by the police and government officials in Xinjiang that is
    connected to a police mass surveillance system called the
    Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, which aggregates
    information about all residents of Xinjiang under the guise of
    providing public security. Our research into the app revealed
    that the authorities consider many ordinary and legal
    behaviors, such as, quote, not socializing with neighbors,
    quote, often avoiding using the front door, using WhatsApp or
    simply being related to someone who had obtained a new phone
    number, as suspicious. The app then flags such people for
    interrogation, some of whom are then sent to Xinjiang's
    political education camps where they are arbitrarily and
    indefinitely detained.
        The consequences of these technologies across China are
    enormous. The state is now not only able to peer into virtually
    every aspect of a person's public and private life, but is also
    clearly using information gained that way to reward and punish
    people outside any discernible legal scheme.
        Major Chinese tech companies now operate around the world.
    In 2014, we documented ZTE's sale of telecom surveillance
    technology to the Ethiopian Government, which used that
    equipment to monitor its political opponents. IFlytek, one of
    China's major voice recognition companies, which is helping the
    Ministry of Public Security in building a national voice
    pattern database, is also working MIT. China Electronics
    Technology Group Corporation, a state-owned defense
    conglomerate behind Xinjiang's IJOP system, has numerous
    subsidiaries, including Hikvision, a major surveillance camera
    manufacturer whose products are used around the world,
    including in the U.S.
        What can be done about any of this?
        To combat the Chinese Government's expanding use of
    surveillance technology in the commission of human rights
    violations, we urge the United States to impose appropriate
    export control mechanisms, including by adding companies to
    existing export control lists and imposing targeted sanctions
    under the Global Magnitsky Act.
        We also encourage consideration of end-user bans.
        U.S. companies and universities working in this sector
    should be encouraged to adopt due diligence policies to ensure
    that they are not engaged in or enabling serious human rights
    violations.
        We urge the swift adoption of the Uyghur Human Rights
    Policy Act, which we were very glad to see was voted out of
    this committee.
        While there is much work for the U.S. to do to limit
    Chinese Government and Chinese Communist Party encroachments on
    human rights abuses in the United States, particularly with
    respect to realms such as academic freedom, those strategies
    must place at their core welcoming and protecting the rights of
    people from China who come here in order to be able to freely
    exercise those rights.
        Finally, the U.S. and ideally members of this body today
    should recommit their support to independent civil society
    across China. That community is under sustained assault and it
    needs sustained attention from the U.S., including both
    Congress and the executive branch. People from that community
    paid a terrible price at Tiananmen. They have paid it over the
    past 3 decades. Yet, they have not abandoned the Tiananmen
    spirit and nor should the U.S.
        Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
        [The prepared statement of Dr. Richardson follows:]

                 Prepared Statement of Sophie Richardson, Ph.D.

        Chairman Risch, Ranking Member Menendez, members of the Committee,
    thank you for inviting me to testify on this somber anniversary.
        Human Rights Watch began reporting on human rights violations
    committed by the Chinese government in the mid-1980s, and while many of
    us had hoped that the government's greater interactions with the
    international community and institutions over the subsequent years
    would eventually lead to greater respect for human rights, the reality
    is the reverse: under President Xi Jinping, not only is the state
    carrying out gross human rights violations, including heightened
    repression of peaceful activists and the arbitrary detention of one
    million Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, it is also aggressively attempting
    to undermine international institutions critical to protecting the
    human rights of people around the world.
        We now know that the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre was not an
    aberration, but an expression of deep-seated authoritarianism embraced
    by successive administrations in Beijing. The U.S. response to
    Tiananmen was strong and principled, not just in rhetoric, but in
    actions. Over time, however, the fate of the sanctions imposed by the
    U.S. in response to Tiananmen represented a wavering commitment to
    pressing for reform in China: those sanctions have been slowly eroded
    on paper, superseded by business interests, and are hardly reflective
    of Chinese authorities' technological prowess. The sanctions, which
    were designed to limit the export of ``equipment or instruments related
    to crime control and detection,'' meant that the U.S. could not sell
    gear, such as handcuffs. But they do not limit the export of the kinds
    of technology Chinese police now deploy to maintain ``public order''--
    equipment like DNA sequencers, the sale of which remains permissible
    under U.S. law.
        Our research is only a snapshot of an evolving system of mass
    surveillance: these systems are generating massive datasets--
    unprecedented in human history--of personal information, people's
    behavior, relationships, and movements. The Chinese police are
    researching ways to use such information to understand in a more fine-
    grained way how people lead their lives. The goal is apparently to
    identify patterns of, and predict, the everyday life and resistance of
    its population, and, ultimately, to engineer and control reality.
                    human rights under president xi jinping
        Since President Xi assumed leadership as the Chinese Communist
    Party (CCP) general secretary in late 2012, his government has actively
    sought to roll back all of the modest human rights gains made over the
    previous decades.
        Inside China, Xi's government unleashed a ferocious crackdown on
    independent civil society, arbitrarily detaining and prosecuting, on
    harsh and baseless charges, human rights lawyers, writers, journalists,
    and feminist activists. Repression of ethnic minorities and religious
    communities has grown exponentially, leading to the current crisis in
    Xinjiang. The government has adopted a slew of blatantly abusive laws,
    many of them in tension with China's international obligations and its
    own Constitution. It has killed off legal reform, strengthened the
    Party and Xi's control over state institutions; in March 2018, the CCP
    removed term limits on his presidency. Space for any independent
    activism or peaceful criticism is virtually gone, perhaps best embodied
    by the July 2017 death under guard of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate
    Liu Xiaobo, or the dramatically shrinking space for human rights in
    Hong Kong.
        Outside China, Xi's government has aggressively engaged in
    undermining key international human rights institutions, particularly
    at the United Nations. Beijing's trillion-dollar Belt and Road
    Initiative has no human rights safeguards; its development banks,
    including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, are notoriously
    weak in this regard. Human Rights Watch has detailed Chinese government
    and Communist Party efforts to limit academic freedom and undercut
    labor standards outside China. As important, Beijing tries to control
    and intimidate diaspora communities, ranging from pressuring
    governments to forcibly return people seeking asylum to censoring
    WeChat communications between democratically elected representatives
    and their constituents.
             mass surveillance technology inside and outside china
        Among the most disturbing aspects of Xi's rule and the current
    situation: Chinese authorities' development and deployment of
    surveillance technology that aspires to engineer a dissent-free
    society. Chinese authorities deny people any meaningful privacy rights
    from the government's prying eyes, and, coupled with a deeply
    politicized judicial system, the lack of a free press, and the denial
    of political rights, people across the country have no ability to
    challenge these developments or even truly understand how society is
    being transformed until it impacts them--or their families--directly.
        What are some examples of this technology? One of the Ministry of
    Public Security's most ambitious and privacy-violating big data
    projects is the ``Police Cloud'' system, which appears to be national.
    The system scoops up information, from people's medical history, to
    their supermarket membership, to delivery records, much of which is
    linked to people's unique national identification numbers. The Police
    Cloud system aims to track where the individuals have been, who they
    are with, and what they have been doing, as well as make predictions
    about their future activities. It is designed to uncover relationships
    between events and people ``hidden'' to the police by analyzing, for
    example, who has been staying in a hotel or travelling together. In
    effect, the system watches everyone, and the police can arbitrarily
    designate anyone a threat who requires greater surveillance, especially
    if they are seen to be ``undermining stability''--an alarmingly
    ambiguous construct. It's critical to understand that there is no
    transparency in such a designation, and no way to challenge it--this is
    not the same as predictive policing in the U.S.
        The Chinese government is also developing a national ``social
    credit system'' that rewards ``good'' behavior and punishes the
    ``bad.'' At present, it is a blacklisting system in which behaviors the
    authorities disapprove--from ``abnormal petitioning'' to eating on the
    subway--can affect one's ability to obtain services, such as getting
    mortgages and travelling on high-speed trains. The system already has
    rights implications. We documented a case in which Li Xiaolin, a human
    rights lawyer, was put on a blacklist for failing to apologize
    ``sincerely'' to a plaintiff in a defamation case. In that case, the
    penalty was exacted in an arbitrary and unaccountable manner:
    authorities failed to notify him that he had been blacklisted, leaving
    him no chance to contest his treatment.
        To what extent the social credit system will evolve, and how it
    will interact with the police systems of mass surveillance, remains an
    open question. It is important to note that the social credit system
    and the mass surveillance systems were envisioned as part of the
    Chinese government's bigger vision for ``better'' ``social
    management''--meaning, social control.
        In December 2017, Human Rights Watch documented Xinjiang
    authorities' compulsory collection of DNA samples, fingerprints, iris
    scans, and blood types of all residents in the region between the ages
    of 12 and 65, in part under the guise of a free public healthcare
    program. That campaign significantly expanded authorities' collection
    of biodata beyond previous government efforts in the region, which only
    required all passport applicants in Xinjiang to supply biometrics. It
    did not appear that the government has disclosed to the public or to
    participants, the full range of how collected medical information will
    be used and disseminated or how long it will be stored, and it appears
    that people were given little information about the program or the
    ability to opt out of it. We discovered that a U.S.-based company,
    Thermo Fisher Scientific, headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, had
    sold DNA sequencers to the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau during this
    period. After inquiries from Human Rights Watch, members of Congress,
    and the New York Times, the company agreed to stop selling that
    particular technology in that particular region. However, it remains
    unclear whether it has adopted due diligence policies that might
    prevent such problems in the future.
        Most recently, Human Rights Watch reverse-engineered an app used by
    police and government officials in Xinjiang that is connected to a
    police mass surveillance system, called the Integrated Joint Operations
    Platform (IJOP), which aggregates information about all residents of
    Xinjiang under the guise of providing public security. Our research
    into the app revealed that the authorities consider many ordinary and
    legal behavior, such as ``not socializing with neighbors,'' ``often
    avoiding using the front door,'' using WhatsApp, or simply being
    related to someone who has obtained a new phone number, as suspicious.
    The app then flags such people for interrogation; some of whom are then
    sent to Xinjiang's ``political education'' camps where they are
    arbitrarily and indefinitely detained until authorities deemed them to
    have become sufficiently loyal to the Chinese Communist Party.
        The consequences of these technologies across China are enormous:
    the state is now not only able to peer into virtually every aspect of a
    person's public and private life, but is also clearly using information
    gained that way to reward and punish people outside any discernible
    legal scheme. It's not just the case that it's now ``suspicious'' if
    you go out your back door instead of your front door in Xinjiang, it's
    that the authorities can know that and investigate and punish you for
    it, even though it's legal. You are not only suspicious if you question
    state policies, your level of suspiciousness is also dependent on who
    you are related to, who you spend time with.
        Like other human rights violations committed by Chinese
    authorities, tech-related abuses no longer stay inside China. In recent
    years major Chinese firms have sold surveillance technology and
    provided training to other abusive governments; in 2014 we documented
    ZTE's sale of telecom surveillance technology to the Ethiopian
    government, which used that equipment to monitor its political
    opponents.\1\ iFlytek, one of China's major voice recognition
    companies, which works with the Ministry of Public Security in building
    a national voice pattern database, is working with universities in the
    U.S.; \2\ it is unclear whether that cooperation is subjected to due
    diligence strategies to ensure that that collaboration is not
    inadvertently contributing to human rights violations. China
    Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a state-owned defense
    conglomerate behind Xinjiang's IJOP system, has numerous
    subsidiaries.\3\ These subsidiaries in turn have joint ventures and
    research and development partnerships abroad. One of CETC's
    subsidiaries is Hikvision, a major surveillance camera manufacturer
    whose products are used around the world, including in the U.S.
                                recommendations
        We now find ourselves confronted with a powerful Chinese government
    willing to deploy extraordinary resources to deny people inside and
    outside China their human rights.
        Human Rights Watch appreciates that many congressional
    interventions on China and human rights have long been bipartisan and
    bicameral, and that in recent years members of Congress have stood on
    principle to protest human rights violations even when administrations
    would not.
        To combat the Chinese government's expanding use of surveillance
    technology in the commission of human rights violations, we urge the
    United States to impose appropriate export control mechanisms to deny
    the Chinese government--and Chinese companies enabling government
    abuses--access to technologies used to violate basic rights, including
    by adding companies to existing export control lists, and imposing
    targeted sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against individuals
    linked to serious violations of human rights. U.S, private companies
    and public universities working in this sector should be encouraged to
    adopt due diligence policies to ensure they are not engaged in or
    enabling serious human rights violations.
        It is imperative that Congress keep up the pressure on the
    administration to promote universal human rights; certainly, your
    multiple inquiries as to the administration's approach to Xinjiang have
    helped. This is particularly important when it comes to international
    institutions that have a role in protecting human rights, including the
    United Nations Human Rights Council, which I know can sometimes be
    difficult for members of Congress to do. It is important for you to
    recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from that body, in particular, has
    made it much more difficult to develop international pressure to end to
    the crisis in Xinjiang, and the Chinese government has moved swiftly to
    occupy this space.
        We urge the swift adoption of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act,
    which I was glad to see recently passed out of this committee, and
    vigorous implementation of the Tibet Policy Act, the Reciprocal Access
    to Tibet Act, and the Hong Kong Policy Act--all three regions are under
    enormous pressure from Beijing and face serious encroachments on human
    rights.
        While there is much work for the U.S. to do to limit Chinese
    government and Chinese Communist Party encroachments on human rights in
    the United States, particularly with respect to realms such as academic
    freedom, those strategies should place at their core protecting the
    rights of people from China who seek an opportunity to exercise those
    rights--not make assumptions about or limit them as a result of their
    nationality or ethnicity. This is a mistake the U.S. has made in the
    past, and it should not be repeated.
        Finally, the U.S.--and ideally members of this body, today--should
    recommit their support to independent civil society across China. That
    community is under sustained assault, and it needs sustained attention
    from the U.S. government--including both Congress and the executive
    branch. People from that community paid a terrible price at Tiananmen;
    they have paid it over the past three decades. Yet they have not
    abandoned the Tiananmen spirit, and neither should the U.S.

    ------------------
    Notes

        \1\ ZTE did not respond to Human Rights Watch's letter of inquiry.
        \2\ iFlytek did not respond to Human Rights Watch's letter of
    inquiry.
        \3\ CETC did not respond to Human Rights Watch's letter of inquiry.

        The Chairman. Thank you very much.
        We are going to hear now from Christopher Walker, who is
    Vice President for Studies and Analysis at the National
    Endowment for Democracy. Prior to joining NED, Mr. Walker was
    Vice President for Strategy and Analysis at the Freedom House.
    Mr. Walker has also served as an adjunct assistant professor of
    international affairs at New York University's Center for
    Global Affairs. He has been at the forefront of the discussion
    on authoritarian influence on democratic systems, including to
    what he has termed ``sharp power.''
        Mr. Walker.

    STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER WALKER, VICE PRESIDENT FOR STUDIES AND
       ANALYSIS, NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY, WASHINGTON, DC

        Mr. Walker. I would like to thank Chairman Risch, Ranking
    Member Menendez, and other esteemed members of the committee
    for the opportunity of presenting testimony on the impact of
    China's international engagement on democracy.
        For many years now, the paramount authorities in Beijing
    have tightened their grip on Chinese society. At home, the
    Chinese Communist Party has taken steps to intensify its
    control of media and free expression and sharpened repression
    more generally. The authorities have enhanced their ability to
    do so through the application of modern technologies.
        China in the post-Tiananmen era has been viewed by external
    observers largely through an economic development lens. The
    democracies' headlong rush into unconditional, rather than
    measured and principled, engagement with China has resulted in
    evident problems. The central assumption was that by deeply
    engaging the People's Republic of China and welcoming its
    integration into the global economic system, its government
    would be encouraged to move in the direction of meaningful
    political reform. But this approach has not turned out the way
    we anticipated.
        Although today China intersects in many ways with the
    global system, it has not become more transparent and
    accountable under the CCP's rule. Rather, it has developed
    policies and practices that can corrode and undermine
    democratic standards. Thus, we are at the same time facing
    systems integration and systems competition.
        For too long, observers in free societies have viewed these
    trends with China as divorced from developments from beyond the
    PRC, but this narrow view is misguided and has led to a
    dangerous sense of complacency. Beijing has internationalized
    its authoritarianism in ways that affect us all. On this
    important anniversary of the brutal crackdown on Tiananmen
    Square, we are obliged to reflect on the China that has emerged
    over the past 3 decades and on how the country's leadership is
    pursuing its ambitions beyond its country's borders.
        A critical aspect of China's development is the massive
    resources the authorities have invested in modern technologies.
    Such investments over the years have been central to the
    repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is
    functioning now as a technology-animated police state. As China
    scholar Samantha Hoffman notes, investment by the Chinese
    authorities in other parts of China, including in Tibet, over
    an extensive period of time has enabled the building of the
    formidable arsenal of surveillance that today is evident in the
    Uyghur region.
        Indeed, today the Uyghur region itself serves as an
    incubator for the testing and development of cutting-edge
    technological tools of oppression that are invariably feeding
    back into other parts of the PRC but also having impact beyond
    China's borders, including in places such as Latin America and
    Africa.
        Apart from the sphere of technology, Beijing has refined
    and scaled up its instruments of influence and, with them, its
    ability to manipulate the political landscape in other
    countries. As the leadership in Beijing has become more
    repressive domestically, China has grown more ambitious
    internationally in ways that are anathema to democratic values
    and the rule of law. Such behavior is at direct odds with the
    notion of China as a responsible stakeholder.
        Under the direction of the CCP, China has established
    platforms abroad for educational, cultural, and other forms of
    influence within open societies. It has been noted during the
    course of the discussion so far that China is sharing
    technologies and know-how with other authoritarian regimes,
    which is true, Cambodia, Angola, Venezuela, and the like. But I
    would stress that the wrinkle today that should really concern
    all of us is that China is sharing these technologies in more
    open societies. We can talk more about that, but this is really
    critical to the understanding of China's evolution and its
    ambitions.
        So I will just say a brief word about some of this in the
    media sphere where China has learned to manage political ideas
    within its own borders quite effectively, as my colleagues have
    noted. They are now bending globalization in a way that
    manipulates discourse abroad both in wide open democratic
    societies but also in authoritarian settings.
        In Africa, for example, China has intensified its
    engagement especially in the region's media sphere, expanding
    its presence in state-owned media outlets in the region,
    hosting exchange programs, and training for journalists, and
    acting as a supplier for Africa's telecommunications
    infrastructure. I would note, however, that the Chinese
    Government's training of journalists is not what we imagine it
    to be. It is not real journalism education. Instead, the focus
    is on talking up Chinese achievements, big infrastructure
    projects and the like, and on learning how to report from the
    Chinese Government's perspective. Such patterns are also
    evident in Latin America.
        I would note that in the United States in 2015, it was
    reported that China Radio International, which is Beijing's
    state-run radio network, was operating as a hidden hand behind
    a global web of stations on which China's government controls
    much of the content.
        This is in line with the patterns we are seeing in terms of
    China's engagement around the world. And this is defined by
    opacity and secrecy. So in Panama, just to give a couple of
    other examples, and El Salvador, when these governments
    switched their diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the PRC,
    key government, private sector, and civil society actors in
    those countries were kept in the dark until after official
    announcements were made.
        In Argentina, a deal reached, when Cristina Kirchner was in
    power, saw the People's Liberation Army given a 50-year lease
    to build and operate a space observation station with dual-use
    capabilities in Patagonia. After recent reporting revealed the
    agreement provided the Argentine Government with no mechanisms
    for oversight or access to the station, Argentina's national
    congress launched an investigation and is seeking to revisit
    the agreement. The key issue here is that in none of these
    cases was there a public discussion of these very important
    issues before the deals were cut, and this plays out across
    examples we see where China is engaged.
        So what do we do about the challenge? I would say the
    following.
        First, I think it is important to emphasize that we have
    entered into what is a global struggle over whose values will
    predominate. On the one hand, we have those of the CCP that
    privileges state control, censorship, and rule by law. On the
    other hand, we have democratic systems that privilege openness,
    free expression, and the rule of law. How this contest plays
    out will define the character of the world we live in.
        I think as principal steps to get at this, first, we need
    to address the large knowledge and capacity gap on China that
    exists in so many settings. We need to support journalists,
    civil society, policy elites so they can handle the burden that
    they are facing now in their own countries in Africa, Latin
    America, the Balkans, and elsewhere.
        Second, we need to move beyond transparency. Enhancing
    transparency is a way of safeguarding democratic societies
    against undesirable Chinese party state influences, a necessary
    but insufficient step.
        Third, we need to prioritize democratic solidarity.
        And finally, we need to accelerate learning through
    cooperation with democratic partners.
        Thank you for your attention.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Walker follows:]

                  Prepared Statement of Mr. Christopher Walker

        I would like to thank Chairman Risch, Ranking Member Menendez, and
    the other esteemed members of the Committee for the opportunity and
    privilege of presenting testimony on the critical subject of the impact
    of China's international engagement on democratic institutions,
    principles, and ideas.
        For many years now, the paramount authorities in Beijing have
    tightened their grip on Chinese society. At home, the Chinese Communist
    Party has taken steps to intensify its control of media and free
    expression, and has sharpened repression more generally. The
    authorities have enhanced their ability to do so through the
    application of modern technologies.
        China in the post-Tiananmen era has been viewed by external
    observers through an economic development lens. The democracies'
    headlong rush into unconditional--rather than measured and principled--
    engagement with China has resulted in evident problems. The central
    assumption was that by deeply engaging the People's Republic of China
    (PRC) and other such regimes and welcoming their integration into the
    global economic system and key international political institutions,
    the autocracies would be encouraged to move in the direction of
    meaningful political reform. But this approach has not turned out as we
    had anticipated.
        Rather than reforming, China has deepened its authoritarianism, and
    in an era of globalization is now turning it outward. Thus, we are at
    the same time facing systems integration and systems competition.
    Although China today intersects in many ways with the global system, it
    has not become more transparent and accountable under the CCP's rule;
    rather, it has developed policies and practices that can corrode and
    undermine democratic standards.\1\
        For too long, observers in free societies have viewed trends within
    China as divorced from developments beyond the PRC. But this narrow
    view is misguided and until now has contributed to a dangerous sense of
    complacency. In an era of globalization, Beijing has internationalized
    its authoritarianism in ways that affect all of us. On this important
    anniversary of the brutal crackdown on Tiananmen Square, we are obliged
    to reflect on the China that has emerged over the past three decades
    and on how the country's leadership is pursuing its ambitions beyond
    its borders.
        A critical aspect of China's development is the massive resources
    the authorities have invested in modern technology. Such investments
    over the years have been central to the repression in the Xinjiang
    Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is functioning now as a technology-
    animated police state.\2\ As China scholar Samantha Hoffman notes,
    investment by the Chinese authorities in other parts of China,
    including in Tibet, over an extensive period of time has enabled the
    building of the formidable arsenal of surveillance that today is
    evident in the Uyghur Region.\3\
        In an environment without meaningful checks on state power, the
    Chinese authorities have wide latitude for testing ever more elaborate
    methods of censorship and social management. As powerful technologies
    exert greater influence, the U.S. and other democracies are engaged in
    complex and difficult debates involving civil society, government, and
    academia over issues of privacy, surveillance, and security. Such
    debates, for all practical purposes, do not occur in China, opening up
    an enormous space for systematic abuse of the kind that has taken shape
    in Uyghur Region. As machine learning and other technological advances
    accelerate, the precision with which the Chinese government will be
    able to modernize censorship is bound to grow. Indeed, today the Uyghur
    Region itself serves as an incubator for the testing and development of
    cutting- edge technological tools of repression that invariably are
    feeding back into other parts of the PRC, but also having an impact
    beyond China's borders, including in Latin America and Africa.\4\
        Apart from the sphere of technology, Beijing has refined and scaled
    up its instruments of influence and, with them, its ability to
    manipulate the political landscape in other countries. As the
    leadership in Beijing has become more repressive domestically, China
    has grown more ambitious internationally in ways that are anathema to
    democratic values and the rule of law. Such behavior is at direct odds
    with the notion of China as a ``responsible stakeholder.''
                           a new era of contestation
        In this new era of contestation, China has claimed a larger role on
    the global stage and has sought to promote its own preferred ideas,
    norms, and approaches to governance. Beijing's unexpected ability to
    carry out digital censorship, to use economic leverage to mute voices
    in the democracies, and more generally to influence democratic systems
    abroad has created a need for fresh ways of thinking about and dealing
    with this new situation.
        As China's leadership has placed greater importance on shaping the
    political operating environment overseas, it has spent many of billions
    of dollars over the past decade to shape public opinion and perceptions
    around the world.
        Although information is increasingly globalized and internet access
    is spreading, China and other authoritarian states have managed to
    reassert control over the realm of ideas.\5\ In China, the state keeps
    a firm grip on the media environment, and the authorities in Beijing
    use digital technologies to press their advantage at home and,
    increasingly, abroad.
        Under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party, China has
    established platforms abroad for educational, cultural, and other forms
    of influence within open societies. Over time, it has become clearer
    that such initiatives tend to be ``accompanied by an authoritarian
    determination to monopolize ideas, suppress alternative narratives, and
    exploit partner institutions,'' what is now understood as ``sharp
    power,'' \6\ an approach to international affairs that typically
    involves efforts at censorship and the use of manipulation to degrade
    the integrity of independent institutions.\7\
        The authorities in Beijing have cultivated economic leverage as a
    tool for getting others to play by their rules. Beijing's approach
    seeks to reduce, neutralize, and preempt any challenges to the CCP
    regime's presentation of itself. Its state-funded research centers,
    media outlets, people-to-people exchange programs, and network of
    Confucius Institutes often mimic civil society initiatives that in
    democracies function independently of government. Meanwhile, local
    partners and others in democracies are often unaware of the logic that
    underpins China's foreign policy and how tightly the Chinese
    authorities control social groups, media, and political discourse at
    home.
        Today, the corrosive effects of China's influence beyond its
    borders are increasingly apparent in a number of crucial domains,
    including publishing, culture, academia, and media--sectors that are
    essential for determining how citizens of democracies understand the
    world around them. China's influence activities aim to discourage
    challenges to its preferred self-presentation, as well as to its
    standing or its policies. Limiting or muting public discussion of
    issues deemed unwelcome by the Chinese party-state is a critical
    characteristic of sharp power.\8\
                                     media
        Having learned to manage political ideas within their own
    countries, authoritarian regimes are now bending globalization to their
    own ends by manipulating discourse abroad, especially in the wide-open
    information space afforded to them by the democracies. Massive
    investments in overseas media infrastructure play a central role. China
    has scaled up a multifaceted effort to shape the realm of ideas.
        State dominance over political expression and communication is
    integral to authoritarian governance. Such control enables the
    promotion of favored narratives across media platforms, as well as
    through the words of state officials and surrogates. In an era of
    global information saturation and fragmentation, the authorities in
    Beijing understand the ``discourse power'' that can be exercised
    through focused and amply funded information initiatives. As the PRC's
    media platforms expand and its largest internet firms go global,
    Beijing's ability to curate information in a systematic and selective
    manner will only grow stronger, especially in places where local media
    organizations are vulnerable.
        One such place is Africa.\9\ There, China has made major
    investments in media infrastructure, and Chinese censorship tactics are
    being deployed in matters that Beijing deems sensitive. Throughout sub-
    Saharan Africa, Chinese state-media outlets have bureaus with two sets
    of editors: There are African editors on the local payroll, but a group
    of Chinese editors in Beijing vets their decisions, at least regarding
    stories that the PRC feels strongly about. The Chinese government gives
    African journalists ``training'' and brings them to visit China. Real
    journalism education, however, is not the goal. Instead, the focus is
    on taking in Chinese achievements (cultural sites, big infrastructure
    projects) and on learning how to report from the Chinese government's
    perspective.\10\
        This is part of a global pattern that is also visible in Latin
    America. China's president Xi Jinping has said that he wants to bring
    ten thousand Latin American politicians, academics, journalists,
    officials, and former diplomats to China by 2020.\11\
        One example relevant to the United States was reported in November
    2015, when it came to light that China Radio International (CRI),
    Beijing's state-run radio network, was operating as a hidden hand
    behind a global web of stations on which the Chinese government
    controls much of the content. According to a Reuters investigation, 33
    stations in 14 countries ``primarily broadcast content created or
    supplied by CRI or by media companies it controls in the United States,
    Australia, and Europe.'' As part of this elaborate Chinese-government
    effort to exploit the open media space, more than a dozen stations
    across the United States operate as part of the CCP's ``borrowed boat''
    approach, in which existing media outlets in foreign countries are used
    to project China's messages.\12\
        Through its formidable global media apparatus more generally, China
    is spreading messages abroad, using a variety of tools, about
    alternatives to democracy as models of governance, how the media can be
    controlled, and value-neutral internationalist positions in debates on
    issues such as internet governance.
                              confucius institutes
        Chinese authorities portray the Confucius Institutes as being
    similar to the British Council or the Goethe-Institut, both of which
    receive government funding to give language and culture classes. Yet
    unlike those freestanding organizations, the Confucius Institutes are
    embedded within educational institutions, most of which are committed
    to the type of free intellectual inquiry that is impossible at
    Confucius Institutes themselves.
        Many casual observers of the Confucius Institutes might not realize
    that the Confucius Institutes' constitution, found on the website of
    Hanban (the Chinese arm of the government that directs them), implies
    that Chinese law applies within the premises of the Institutes.\13\
    Moreover, the Confucius Institutes employ staffers who at times have
    sought to block host universities from holding discussions on sensitive
    topics such as Taiwan or Tibet.\14\
        Little about these institutes is transparent; it is hard to say,
    for instance, what amount of Chinese government money goes to
    individual host universities. It is also unclear what level of control
    universities have over curricula within the Institutes because the
    agreements between these parties often remain confidential.\15\
            incubating and sharing technology toward repressive ends
        Beijing's considerable influence is increasingly evident in the
    digital space. China and other autocratic regimes have applied the
    online tools and techniques that they have refined for domestic use
    internationally as well. As noted at the outset of this statement, many
    of the techniques that are applied abroad are first incubated at the
    domestic level by the Chinese authorities. Through the online
    censorship system known as the Great Firewall, Chinese authorities have
    long been able to manage and restrict what China's people--the world's
    largest number of internet users inside a single set of national
    borders--can access when they go online. Now the government is
    increasingly applying machine learning to combine censorship and
    surveillance into comprehensive social management, a development that
    will increasingly impact global freedom of expression.\16\
        Beijing's paramount aim, it seems, is to exert control over key
    information spheres and the tools for manipulating thoughts, images,
    and ideas. Its management model is centralized and unitary.\17\ As the
    authorities in Beijing deepen their artificial intelligence (AI)
    capacities, including through massive data collection, they are likely
    to apply these technologies to devise ever more precise methods of
    social management, including predicting individual behavior and
    potential collective action.
        A recent case in Ecuador suggests some of the potential risks.
    Ecuador's negotiation under President Rafael Correa of a Chinese-
    financed loan to acquire surveillance equipment and technology to power
    its ECU-911 monitoring system took place in the absence of meaningful
    public debate, and civil society is only now in a position where it can
    begin to grapple with the potential ramifications of such an extensive
    system that has already been put into place. There is evidence to
    suggest that the ECU-911 system is being used to monitor civil society
    activists and critics of the government, much as these systems are used
    in China.\18\
        In China, the companies responsible for developing these
    technologies are not only partnering with the state security apparatus,
    but are intertwining themselves within key institutions in democratic
    societies, giving them an increasing stake in the platforms and
    algorithms that determine speech on a worldwide basis. China's ambition
    to become a global powerhouse in big data, AI, and other emerging
    technologies has significant ramifications for democratic governance
    globally, yet much of civil society involved in the governance of
    emerging technologies has yet to engage on this issue in a meaningful
    way.\19\ Democracies have yet to develop a comprehensive response to
    China's plan to build digital infrastructure across key parts of the
    globe, creating a ``Digital Silk Road,'' and allowing China immense
    power over the future of the digital world.
                 the corrosive effects of authoritarian capital
        Many emerging and vulnerable democracies face challenges in
    governing foreign direct investment, including weak accountability in
    public spending, opaque corporate governance, poor procurement
    oversight, and lax anti-corruption enforcement. These challenges are
    easily exploited by authoritarian regimes intent on using state-
    connected financial resources for reasons other than development or
    mutual economic benefit, leading to potentially disastrous outcomes for
    open and democratic governance. When investment and foreign assistance
    is part of a meaningful public discussion involving civil society in
    developing economies, the effect can be to strengthen such essential
    features of democratic governance as citizen voice and participation,
    and transparency and accountability. If the authoritarian-linked firms
    and institutions driving the capital flows ignore or even undermine
    liberal-democratic values and concerns, however, the durability of
    democratic governance can suffer, corruption can flourish, and
    authoritarianism can find fertile ground.
        In regions such as the Western Balkans where the interests of local
    political elites, who retain power by catering to key patronage
    networks, overlap with China's high tolerance for corruption, Beijing's
    way of doing business exacerbates existing problems surrounding
    transparency and accountability.\20\ The situation in Central Europe
    and the Balkans, where young, aspiring or vulnerable democracies
    predominate, is also relevant. In countries throughout those regions
    there are indications that China has sought to utilize various forms of
    capital inflows, including equity, debt, and aid, to achieve
    geostrategic aims and divert the region from a trajectory of
    integration into the community of democratic states. Regional
    initiatives, such as China's ``16+1'' initiative (now ``17+1'' since
    the recent addition of Greece to this grouping) to strengthen bilateral
    ties with primarily former Eastern Bloc countries, offer Beijing an
    easy alternative to dealing with the EU as a whole.\21\
        In countries where projects under BRI auspices have turned sour,
    its combining of infrastructure financing with geopolitical aims has
    raised doubt and opposition. In December 2017, for instance, the
    government of Sri Lanka admitted its inability to repay the US$8
    billion that it had borrowed from Chinese firms to build a deepwater
    port at Hambantota, handing the project to Beijing on a 99-year lease
    in an instance of what critics have called ``debt-trap diplomacy.'' In
    other cases, Chinese financing for infrastructure projects under the
    BRI have seen countries take on unsustainable debt levels for projects
    of questionable economic viability. For example, in Montenegro a
    project financed by China's Export-Import Bank to link the coastal port
    of Bar by road to Serbia has been dubbed ``the highway to nowhere''
    after the government could not afford to take out further loans to
    complete the overruns of the project.\22\
                          opacity and secrecy as norms
        Such deals with China tend to be characterized by an essential lack
    of transparency. This opacity allows China to work with partners who
    have few other options because of their poor credit ratings and
    reputation for corruption, and also, by agreeing to inflate project
    cost, Beijing is able to funnel a portion of its investment to
    influential elites in partner governments.\23\ Patterns across regions
    and sectors have taken shape that illustrate the extent of the problem.
    Several other recent cases have come to light, for instance, which
    demonstrate how Beijing's preference for working directly and
    exclusively with executive branch elites in its engagement with foreign
    governments and how this can have had a corrosive effect on the
    integrity of institutions and governance more broadly.
        When Panama and El Salvador switched diplomatic recognition from
    Taiwan to the People's Republic of China, key government, private
    sector, and civil society actors were kept in the dark until after
    official announcements were made. In the case of El Salvador, its
    congress has launched an effort to review and halt the advancement of
    an accompanying agreement to establish a special economic zone that
    would comprise 14 percent of the country's territory in strategic areas
    along the coast and give preferential benefits to Chinese firms.\24\
    Only a few weeks ago, more than a dozen other agreements that the El
    Salvadorian president had reached with China were made public for the
    first time, spanning from promoting the Belt and Road Initiative, to
    scientific and technological cooperation, and educational exchange,
    among others. In all of these cases, civil society and policymakers
    have been forced to play catch up in order to understand the
    implications of how such agreements may impact their countries and to
    retrofit monitoring and accountability mechanisms.
        In Argentina, a deal reached with the Cristina Kirchner
    administration saw the People's Liberation Army given a fifty-year
    lease to build and operate a space observation station with dual-use
    capabilities in Patagonia. After recent reporting revealed the
    agreement provided the Argentine government with no mechanisms for
    oversight or access to the station,\25\ Argentina's national congress
    launched an investigation and is seeking to revisit the agreement.\26\
    In Africa, agreements on major deals also fit the pattern.\27\
        The pattern of China's engagement that has taken shape globally has
    not eluded the U.S. In recent years, reports of influence that were
    once episodic have become more frequent as journalists and other
    observers have begun to look more closely; the patterns of opacity and
    manipulation that have characterized China's engagements in other parts
    of the world have come to light here. China's Influence and American
    Interests, a report produced by the Hoover Institution and the Asia
    Society and released in November 2018 found that ``in certain key ways
    China is exploiting America's openness in order to advance its aims on
    a competitive playing field that is hardly level. For at the same time
    that China's authoritarian system takes advantage of the openness of
    American society to seek influence, it impedes legitimate efforts by
    American counterpart institutions to engage Chinese society on a
    reciprocal basis.''
        This report further observed that ``China's influence activities
    have moved beyond their traditional United Front focus on diaspora
    communities to target a far broader range of sectors in Western
    societies, ranging from think tanks, universities, and media to state,
    local, and national government institutions. China seeks to promote
    views sympathetic to the Chinese government, policies, society, and
    culture; suppress alternative views; and co-opt key American players to
    support China's foreign policy goals and economic interests.'' \28\
       acknowledging, and competing in, the emerging contest over values
        Given China's rapid emergence on the world stage and its more
    visible authoritarian internationalism, it seems we are approaching an
    inflection point. If anything, the challenge presented by China and
    other ambitious, internationalist autocratic regimes has grown in the
    most recent period. At the same time, the democracies are only slowly
    waking up to the fact that they have entered into an era of serious and
    strategic contestation based on governance models.
        The conflict over values that has taken shape globally is one
    between autocratic regimes, on the one hand, whose animating governance
    principles favor state control, management of political expression, and
    privileging ``rule by law'' over rule of law, versus democratic
    systems, on the other, whose principles are based on open societies,
    free and independent expression, and rule of law. In an era of
    globalization, the struggle over these fundamental values is being
    waged in every region and across diverse polities. How this battle
    plays out will define the character of the world we live in.
        To date, much of the response to the China challenge from the
    democracies has focused on the trade and military dimensions, both of
    which properly deserve attention. But we must deal with the fact that
    much of Beijing's activity in recent years may be related to but is
    distinct from these domains. In order to compete, the U.S. and other
    democracies will need to address this gap in the sphere of values. And
    at a fundamental level, any response to this global challenge also
    needs to consider the essential importance of democratic development in
    China itself.
           developing a comprehensive response to the china challenge
        Given its corrosive impact on critical democratic institutions,
    China's authoritarian internationalism poses both a rule-of-law and a
    national security challenge. The following are key steps, drawn from
    the International Forum for Democratic Studies' sharp power report,
    which can be taken to address the Beijing's influence efforts:
        Address the large knowledge and capacity gap on China. Information
    concerning the Chinese political system and its foreign policy
    strategies is limited in many of the societies where China is deeply
    engaged. This asymmetry places societies at a distinct strategic
    disadvantage. There often are few journalists, editors, and policy
    professionals who possess a deep understanding of China--the Chinese
    Communist Party, especially--and can share their knowledge with the
    rest of their societies in a systematic way. Given China's growing
    footprint in these settings, there is a pressing need to build capacity
    to disseminate independent information about China and its regime.
    Civil society organizations should develop strategies for communicating
    expert knowledge about China to broader audiences.
        Deepen understanding of authoritarian influence. China's sharp
    power relies in part on disguising state-directed projects as
    commercial media or grassroots associations, or using local actors as
    conduits for foreign propaganda or tools of foreign manipulation. To
    respond to these efforts at misdirection, observers need the capacity
    to put them under the spotlight and analyze them in an independent and
    comprehensive manner.
        Move beyond transparency. Enhancing transparency as a way of
    safeguarding democratic societies against undesirable Chinese party-
    state influence is a necessary but insufficient step. Once the nature
    and techniques of authoritarian influence efforts are exposed,
    countries should build up internal defenses. Authoritarian initiatives
    are directed at cultivating relationships with the political elites,
    thought leaders, and other information gatekeepers of open societies.
    Such efforts are part of Beijing's larger aim to get inside such
    systems in order to incentivize cooperation and neutralize criticism of
    the authoritarian regime. Support for strong, independent civil society
    is essential to ensuring that the citizens of democracies are
    adequately informed to evaluate critically the benefits and risks of
    closer engagement with Beijing and its surrogates.
        Prioritize democratic solidarity. Beijing and its surrogates are
    exerting pressure on independent institutions within free societies to
    an extent that would not be imaginable during the Cold War. The
    leadership of institutions essential to the functioning of the public
    sphere within democratic societies--publishers, university
    administrators, media and technology executives, and others--in the
    past did not need to take into account to such a degree the prospect of
    manipulation or censorship by external authoritarian powers. Today,
    however, the exertion of sharp power makes it necessary for them to
    renew and deepen their commitment to democratic standards and free
    political expression. To address this challenge, common standards must
    be developed, with the aim of reducing these institutions' exposure to
    divide and conquer dynamics in order to safeguard their integrity over
    the long term.
        Accelerate learning through cooperation with democratic partners. A
    number of countries, Australia especially, have already had extensive
    engagement with China and can serve as an important point of reference
    for countries whose institutions are at an earlier stage of their
    interaction with Beijing.\29\ Given the complex and multifaceted
    character of Beijing's influence activities, such learning between and
    among democracies is critical for developing responses that are not
    only effective but consistent with democratic standards.

    ------------------
    Notes

        \1\ Christopher Walker, ``Authoritarian Regimes are Changing How
    the World Defines Democracy,'' Washington Post, June, 13 2014.
        \2\ Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur, ``How China Uses High-Tech
    Surveillance to Subdue Minorities,'' New York Times, May 22, 2019.``How
    Mass Surveillance Works in Xinjiang, China,'' Human Rights Watch, May
    2, 2019. Gerry Shih, ```Police Cloud': Chinese Database Tracks Apps,
    Car Location and Even Electricity Usage in Muslim Region,'' Washington
    Post, May 2, 2019. Josh Chin and Clement Bubrge, ``Twelve Days in
    Xinjiang: How China's Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life,'' Wall
    Street Journal, December 19, 2017.
        \3\ Samantha Hoffman, ``China's Tech-Enhanced Authoritarianism,''
    Testimony before House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,
    Hearing on ``China's Digital Authoritarianism: Surveillance, Influence,
    and Political Control,'' May 19, 2019.
        \4\ Authur Gwagwa and Lisa Garbe, ``Exporting Repression? China's
    Artificial Intelligence Push into Africa,'' Net Politics Blog, Council
    on Foreign Relations, December 17, 2018. Simon Allison, ``How China
    Spied on the African Union's Computers,'' Mail and Guardian, January
    29, 2019. Evan Ellis, ``Chinese Surveillance Complex Advancing in Latin
    America,'' Newsmax, April 12, 2019. Angus Berwick, ``How ZTE Helps
    Venezuela Create China-style Social Control,'' Reuters, November 14,
    2018.
        \5\ Xiao Qiang, ``The Road to Digital Unfreedom: President Xi's
    Surveillance State,'' Journal of Democracy, no. 1 (2019): 53-67.
        \6\ Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig. ``The Meaning of Sharp
    Power: How Authoritarian States Project Influence.'' Foreign Affairs,
    November 16, 2017.
        \7\ International Forum for Democratic Studies, ``Sharp Power:
    Rising Authoritarian Influence'' (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment
    for Democracy, 2017).
        \8\ Christopher Walker, Shanthi Kalathil, and Jessica Ludwig,
    ``Forget Hearts and Minds.'' Foreign Policy, September 14, 2018.
        \9\ See, for example: Andrea Vega Yudico, ``China's Multi-Billion
    Dollar Telecommunications Investment in Africa Poses Threat to
    Independent Media,'' Center for International Media Assistance, October
    24, 2017. Nick Bailey, ``East African States Adopt China's Playbook on
    Internet Censorship,'' Freedom House, October 24, 2017.
        \10\ Emeka Umejei, ``Will China's Media Influence African
    Democracies?'' Power 3.0, 2 April 2018.
        \11\ Juan Pablo Cardenal, ``China's Elitist Collaborators,''
    Project Syndicate, 17 April 2018.
        \12\ Koh Gui Qing and John Shiffman, ``Beijing's Covert Radio
    Network Airs China-Friendly News Across Washington, and the World,''
    Reuters, November 2, 2015.
        \13\ Rachelle Peterson, ``Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes
    and Soft Power in American Higher Education,'' National Association of
    Scholars, June 2017.
        \14\ Ibid.
        \15\ Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, ``House Proposal Targets Confucius
    Institutes as Foreign Agents,'' Foreign Policy, March 14, 2018.
        \16\ Paul Mozur, ``China Presses Its Internet Censorship Efforts
    Across the Globe,'' New York Times, March 2 2018.
        \17\ Qiang, ``The Road to Digital Unfreedom: President Xi's
    Surveillance State.''
        \18\ Paul Mozur, Jonah Kessel, and Melissa Chan, ``Made in China,
    Exported to the World: The Surveillance State,'' New York Times, April
    24, 2019.
        \19\ Lindsay Gorman and Matt Schrader, ``U.S. Firms are Helping
    Build China's Orwellian State,'' Foreign Policy, March 19, 2019.
        \20\ Kurt Bassuener, ``Pushing on an Open Door: Foreign
    Authoritarian Influence in the Western Balkans,'' National Endowment
    for Democracy, May 2019.
        \21\ Martin Hala, ``The 16+1 Initiative: China's Divisive Equation
    for Central and Eastern Europe,'' Power 3.0, June 5, 2018.
        \22\ Noah Barkin and Aleksandr Vasovic, ``Chinese `highway to
    nowhere' haunts Montengro,'' Reuters, July 16, 2018.
        \23\ Jonathan Hillman, ``Corruption Flows Along China's Belt and
    Road,'' Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 18,
    2019.
        \24\ Benjamin Russell, ``What a Controversial Deal in El Salvador
    Says About China's Bigger Plans,'' Americas Quarterly, April 23, 2019.
        \25\ Cassandra Garrison, ``China's Military-Run Space Station in
    Argentina is a `Black Box,''' Reuters, January 31, 2019.
        \26\ Cassandra Garrison, ``Argentine Lawmakers Seek Greater
    Oversight of Chinese Space Facility in Patagonia,'' Reuters, March 29,
    2019.
        \27\ ``Report: Kenya Risks Losing Port of Mombasa to China,'' The
    Maritime Executive, December 20, 2018.
        \28\ China's Influence and American Interests: Promoting
    Constructive Vigilance, ed. Larry Diamond and Orville Schell, the
    Hoover Institution, November 29, 2018.
        \29\ See, for example, John Fitzgerald, ``China in Xi's ``New
    Era'': Overstepping Down Under,'' Journal of Democracy, no. 2 (2018)
    and John Garnaut, ``How China Interferes in Australia,'' Foreign
    Affairs, 9 March 2018.

        The Chairman. Well, thank you so much. All three of you
    have provided a perspective for us and corroborates what a lot
    of us have read from time to time. It is a chilling picture
    that starts to emerge of what is happening in China as far as
    people's privacy, as far as the surveillance, and their real
    inability to do anything that the government is not looking
    over their shoulder on.
        Mr. Walker, you raised an interesting point. I would like
    you to expand on that a little bit, if you would, and that is
    the proliferation of technology to open countries as far as
    their use of these technologies to surveil their own people.
    Could you talk about that for a couple minutes?
        Mr. Walker. Thank you, Senator.
        This transcends the technology issue but it is a critically
    important part of the discussion.
        So the focus on what we might call the authoritarian
    fraternity where repressive states deal with repressive states
    is one part of the discussion. But if we think about how the
    relationship between China and countries such as Ecuador today
    or Argentina or countries in the Balkans is evolving, in Serbia
    where there is far deeper engagement with China today than
    there was, say, 5 or 6 years ago, these are essentially open
    settings. They have struggles to achieve democratic reform, but
    all of these societies are looking to do so. In each of these
    cases, the privileging of secrecy, the transferring of
    technologies, as we have learned in the Ecuadorian case that,
    in fact, can have applications that are used for purposes that
    are not consistent with privacy and the rule of law. This is
    something that needs far greater scrutiny.
        And my fear is that because the expertise we have available
    today either knows China, on the one hand, or some of the
    countries we are talking about, on the other hand--there is
    what I would call a strategic gap in meaningfully addressing
    some of the issues that countries in Latin America, sub-Saharan
    Africa are facing.
        Sophie mentioned Ethiopia and ZTE. Ethiopia right now has
    the promise of democratic reform but itself, as I understand,
    has ZTE, Huawei, and StarTimes as its principal tech and
    content providers. So it is solely China that has both the
    ability to create choke points for content in that setting and
    also to manipulate the tech environment.
        The Chairman. You made reference to rule of law. Very few
    countries, if any, other than the United States, have the kind
    of laws that provide for privacy of their own citizens. So how
    does that play into that? I mean, if they go to a country that
    does not have those kind of laws, really there is nothing to
    stop the government from converting themselves into an overseer
    of the population.
        Mr. Walker. So I think it is true that in authoritarian
    settings, the safeguards that one would hope for do not exist
    on rule of law, privacy, and other such issues. In some of the
    countries we have been discussing that are weak democracies or
    vulnerable democracies, they may well have laws on the books
    that provide such safeguards, but I would suggest that they are
    in greater jeopardy through this deep engagement with China and
    that this provides a vulnerability that was not really in view
    as recently as 5 or 6 years ago and it is something we are only
    coming to terms with now.
        The Chairman. Senator Menendez.
        Senator Menendez. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Thank you all for your testimony.
        I agree that China's so-called long arm and influence
    abroad is having implications in human rights issues around the
    world. For example, we recently saw that Amnesty International
    was denied a lease in New York after a Chinese state-owned
    enterprise was involved. Just a few days ago, more than 1,000
    Twitter accounts associated with Chinese human rights activists
    and defenders were mysteriously shut down. We have seen the
    Chinese Government pressure Southeast Asian countries to detain
    and deport activists or ethnic minorities, such as Uyghurs.
        So the question is, are we equipped to confront these
    global human rights challenges that China presents? Are there
    things that we can better do with our partners, allies, and
    activists on the ground to tackle this issue across the world?
    I would like to hear, Ms. Richardson, if you have some
    perspectives on that.
        Dr. Richardson. Thank you, Senator. It is a broad question.
    Maybe I can give you an example that speaks to your question,
    also what the chairman was just asking about.
        Earlier this year, we were looking into censorship of
    WeChat, which is a social media platform that is used by
    Chinese speakers all over the world, particularly Chinese
    speaking diaspora communities, including in the U.S. And we
    came upon an example in which a Canadian member of parliament
    who is herself of ethnic Chinese descent had been communicating
    with her own constituents through her WeChat account, and she
    had posted both on her WeChat account and on her Facebook page
    some remarks that were sympathetic towards the pro-democracy
    movement in Hong Kong. And it was not until we contacted her
    office to point out that the messages that had been posted on
    WeChat, which is of course owned by a large Chinese company,
    had been censored. We were not able to ascertain who exactly
    had done that. She and her staff had not been aware of it.
        But I think it is a very powerful example partly of the
    phenomenon that Chris is talking about, about spaces in
    democratic countries that are being exploited partly because
    they are not being watched very carefully. It is not the habit
    of elected members of bodies in democratic countries to worry
    about their communications with their own constituents being
    censored especially by entities in some other country. So I
    think there is much to be done in the realm of simply being
    vigilant to these threats.
        We did some work earlier this year about threats to
    academic freedom outside of China but as a result of Chinese
    Government pressure. Every single school that we spoke to
    certainly has honor codes and codes of conduct that speak to
    issues like cheating and plagiarism. We could not find a single
    one that had on its books any particular rules or instructions
    or guidelines to even look for examples of embassies
    threatening students or demanding that they share information
    with the nearest consulate.
        So the problem now is not even so much about changing or
    updating the laws but being vigilant to these kinds of threats
    and taking steps to guard against them.
        Senator Menendez. Let me ask you, Mr. Walker, in this
    regard, the NED's report on sharp power, a document to how the
    Chinese Government is using the space provided by open
    societies to infiltrate and spread their propaganda. And the
    lack of reciprocity in U.S.-China relations is evident not only
    on trade issues but also when it comes to freedom of
    information, movement, and academic freedom.
        Do you think that the Congress should explore further ways
    to enforce reciprocity in U.S.-China relations beyond trade?
    Does the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act and its implementation
    provide a model for other areas?
        Mr. Walker. So I think the Tibet issue is emblematic of the
    larger challenge. And I would commend everyone here to a report
    produced by the Hoover Institution and the Asia Society which
    focused on this very issue. And it observed that the Chinese
    authorities systematically deny American institutions access to
    Chinese society, whether we talk about educational exchange,
    cultural exchange, media engagement. We know this from both the
    harassment that our independent media faces, as well as our
    public broadcasters that are seeking to reach Chinese
    audiences. And at the same time, American counterpart
    institutions are not afforded the same opportunities.
        I think this is not, in my view, a binary choice between
    simply denying China access here as a way of responding. I
    think we need to be creative, and we need to think about ways
    to publicly shine a light on the fact that China is so stingy
    with access to our institutions. I do not think we have done
    that enough. That is a first step. That does not cost too much
    to make a point that this is the way their system is operating.
    This is the way they treat their own people, denying them
    access to perfectly legitimate conversations about a range of
    issues, corruption, human rights, press freedom. They do not
    permit such freedoms there, and they do not permit it for their
    own people. They do not permit it for democratic institutions.
    I think the first step is to have a much more robust discussion
    to engage on this, and I think that would go a long way towards
    setting some wheels in motion.
        Senator Menendez. Finally, what should we do about U.S.
    companies that are involved in providing equipment and other
    forms of elements of the surveillance that China is using at
    home and promoting abroad? What should be our policy in that
    regard?
        Dr. Richardson. I think at least until such time as we can
    determine, or an independent credible entity can determine,
    that the political education camps in Xinjiang have been
    closed, I think an end-user ban on selling just about anything
    to any part of the Xinjiang government is appropriate.
        Longer term, the UN has set out guidelines for business and
    human rights that require that each company have a due
    diligence strategy in place to assure that the company does not
    have policies or practices or is conducting business in ways
    that contribute to or enable human rights.
        We have had a lot of conversations in the last couple of
    years with many different kinds of companies, and while most of
    them have some form of a corporate social responsibility
    policy, when you ask for an actual due diligence strategy, what
    steps is that company taking to see who it is selling to, what
    it is selling, most of them do not have it.
        And it is worth pointing out that Thermo Fisher had all the
    right export licenses to sell what it did. We were never
    contesting that. But the problem with a lot of current export
    controls is that they have not kept up with what technology is
    in demand by Chinese authorities for abusive purposes. So while
    it is still illegal, as a result of the Tiananmen sanctions, to
    sell, for example, handcuffs to the Public Security Bureau, it
    is perfectly legal to sell DNA sequencers. So there are big
    gaps I think in the export controls that can and should be
    closed.
        Senator Menendez. Thank you.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        The Chairman. Thank you.
        Senator Gardner.
        Senator Gardner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very
    much for holding this incredibly important hearing.
        And thank you to the witnesses for your testimony today.
        I was proud to work with you, Mr. Chairman, the ranking
    member, and many members of the committee on Senate Resolution
    221 to remember the tragic events at Tiananmen Square 30 years
    ago, and I hope this resolution is something that we can pass
    out of the Senate as quickly as possible in recognition of
    that. And I urge all my colleagues to support it. We have to,
    as a Senate, as a country, continue to demand that the
    Communist Party of China account for this activity and respect
    the basic human rights of the Chinese people. We should empower
    people around the globe to know the truth of Tiananmen.
    Tiananmen was not a fake. It was not a fake moon landing. It
    was not a figment. It was real. People were killed by an
    authoritarian state. We must continue to share the truth and
    not to allow crime against humanity to be censored away.
        Just a couple days ago, hundreds of Chinese dissident
    voices had their accounts suspended on Twitter. You can see the
    firewalls that have been put in place, the banishing of chat
    groups and discussion groups and websites that just seem to
    undergo routine maintenance right around the time of the 30th
    anniversary of Tiananmen Square.
        As evident from the abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, China's
    human rights record has only worsened in the last 30 years.
        This is why the administration and Congress must now act to
    send a strong message to Beijing that the United States will
    not abide by such abuses. The Gardner-Markey Asia Reassurance
    Initiative, signed into law on December 31st, authorizes the
    administration to impose sanctions against any individual or
    entity that, quote, violates human rights or religious freedoms
    or engages in censorship activities. We should take up this
    language immediately.
        Section 409(a)(2) of ARIA also authorizes funds
    specifically to promote democracy, the rule of law, and human
    rights in the People's Republic of China.
        I want to follow up on what Senator Menendez had talked
    about. The Wall Street Journal just reported not too long ago
    that many U.S. companies continue to do business in Xinjiang
    and perhaps are either wittingly or unwittingly complicit in
    the violations that are taking place, the violations of human
    rights that are taking place there.
        But we have even more challenges because as Beijing
    encourages investment in Xinjiang to draw jobs there, there are
    subcontractors who are very much a part of the supply chain
    that are going to Western companies headquartered here that are
    participating in human rights violations.
        We know that China is going to try to interfere in Taiwan's
    election coming up over the next several months.
        We know that several pension funds in the United States are
    involved and make investments in one of the largest
    surveillance companies in China that is actively being used to
    violate human rights of Uyghurs and beyond.
        We have authorized a lot of legislation, a lot of funding
    to help address this and meet this challenge.
        I would love to hear from you. How do we make sure that we
    best tailor the funds that we have authorized to address these
    human rights violations and what we can do to support human
    rights defenders in China? I would just open that up to any of
    you.
        Mr. Xiao. Senator, thank you for starting to say we should
    continue to tell the world about the truths of Tiananmen. We
    know that in China that truth has been repressed. And through
    my own work, I watch--my China Digital Times team--watch the
    Chinese Internet very closely. Over the past 8 years, every
    year, that by the time near June 4th and the last 3 weeks,
    there is always intensified suppression of the online content
    about Tiananmen. Chinese do speak out, but they are being
    suppressed.
        I give you the examples, just examples. Over 264 words are
    blocked by the Sina Weibo search engine. By the way, Sina Weibo
    is like China's equal on Twitter, 600 million users. And also
    on the Wall Street index, it is the company here. Look at what
    kind of words are being blocked. Yes, of course, ``64,''
    ``89,'' ``8x8,'' ``65-1,'' or ``98,'' not only ``June 4th'' but
    ``May 35th'' to translate to June 4th. The Chinese are using
    those words to create conversations, but they are being stopped
    by the censor and deleted. There are more, ``anniversary,''
    ``pay respect,'' ``mourn,'' ``candle,'' ``public square.'' And
    how about this? Near the date to June 4th, there will be a ban
    of the word ``today'' or ``that day.'' Why? Because once you
    search that ``today,'' most of the discussion is about June
    4th. The censors are not quick enough to delete them. So they
    just ban the search words. And ``move'' and ``fire'' and there
    is a Chinese character that looks like a tank that means point.
    So anybody say ``point, point, point,'' that means ``tank,
    tank, tank.'' That is the code word that has been banned.
        So it is not that Chinese people are just born to be
    creative to speaking those things. It is because they have a
    motivation to speak, but the technology and the censorship and
    the repression is much harder to suppress those voices.
        Now, a government like that cannot face the truth and
    accountability to Tiananmen, how can the world trust its myth
    of a peaceful rise. No. You treat the Chinese people this way
    when you are getting powerful. That oppression is not going to
    stop by the Chinese border. And this is what we are facing.
        And you are asking how do we appropriate funds effectively.
    I will start from freedom of expression, free flow of
    information on the Internet. Yes, the Chinese state is
    powerful. I keep on saying that, but it is also fragile and
    insecure. Simply when you meet a Chinese leader, if they are so
    powerful, why do they not just take off, stop the Great
    Firewall just for 6 months? Try it. Let the information flow.
    Let the Chinese people access all the other content on the
    Internet for just 6 months. Why do you not take down the Great
    Firewall? The regime cannot afford it. It is that fragile, and
    that is why that is so brutal.
        Senator Gardner. Thank you for sharing that Tiananmen
    truth.
        The Chairman. Thank you so much.
        Senator Shaheen.
        Senator Shaheen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        And thank you to each of our witnesses for being here
    today.
        Last February, a number of us journeyed to the Munich
    Security Conference. One of the meetings that we had was with
    the prime minister of Greece. And one question that we had for
    him was about Greece's acceptance of support from China for the
    Port of Piraeus. And one of his responses was very memorable to
    that. He said I asked for help from the European Bank, and I
    was denied. I asked for help from the United States, and I was
    denied. The Chinese were willing to help me.
        So can any of you speak to the ways in which China uses its
    economic leverage to spread its political system and whether we
    are doing enough in the United States to respond to that? Mr.
    Walker, do you want to begin?
        Mr. Walker. Thank you, Senator.
        I think that example is illustrative of a much larger
    challenge. You spoke in a strategic port context, but I think
    one of the things we have not touched on yet, which is so
    critical, is that China is investing enormous resources into
    people-to-people exchanges, into media, into educational
    initiatives. And there was a time when observers of these
    things, going back not that long ago, were quite dismissive of
    these issues. But now it is impossible to travel to Africa, to
    Latin America, to Central Europe and not to meet someone who
    has got this sort of opportunity. And what they say is, look,
    we are getting these opportunities. They are paying our way,
    and we are not getting these opportunities from our democratic
    partners, including the U.S.
        And I think if we are serious about competing and meeting
    the values challenge, we have to be more deeply engaged across
    all of these areas. It is something we have to come to terms
    with.
        Dr. Richardson. Thanks, Senator, for the question.
        I will just have one other example which is that it used to
    be in our universe a fairly easy thing to do to ask the
    European Union to speak with one voice about human rights
    issues in China. That has become exponentially more difficult
    in recent years largely as a result of Chinese financial
    developments in Southern Europe and the rise of institutions
    like the 16 plus 1. It is clearly there to try to split EU
    solidarity. I think we see that across not just blocs like the
    EU but even within individual governments that have
    historically been reasonably strong on these issues where
    people within those governments are clearly feeling the
    pressure between possibly losing out on a trade deal and taking
    a principled position. Often what we try to point out is that
    they can do both. Typically they can get away with doing both.
    But increasingly people within governments are convinced that
    they cannot and they have stopped trying. And that is a serious
    challenge for human rights advocacy.
        Senator Shaheen. And so are we doing enough in the United
    States to counter that economic commitment that China is making
    to many of these countries?
        Mr. Walker. So I think fundamentally no. But it goes
    beyond, in my view, the economic question. I think there has
    been a misapprehension over the last generation that China was
    pursuing its interests solely on the basis of economics, and
    China's engagement in all the settings we look at comes without
    other features, including politics and values. This was another
    misapprehension. The values that come with China's engagement
    aims to get partners to set aside certain subjects, sideline
    civil society participation, and otherwise, in one way or
    another, to censor discussion on certain issues of importance
    to the CCP. And this is critically important because this
    censorship starts to grow roots, it becomes a larger problem.
        Sophie alluded to this idea of divide and conquer that has
    emerged within the context of the 16 plus 1 in Central Europe
    which is now the 17 plus 1 because Greece has joined that set
    of countries. China uses this essentially as a bilateral
    initiative to operate with the 17 countries. This is happening
    both at the state level as well as within states where our
    universities and cultural institutions and media enterprises
    are finding is that they too can be picked off when they are
    engaging with China.
        And so we need to cultivate the capacity that was not
    necessary even a decade ago, which is ways to create common
    standards and greater solidarity among our democratic
    institutions because if they are faced with the China party
    state on their own, they are going to have a really hard time.
        Senator Shaheen. My next question I think is--and I only
    have a little bit of time left, but for you Mr. Xiao. Certainly
    we read reports in the United States about efforts on the part
    of Chinese who are trying to speak out against the repression
    that is going on in China. One of the things that we have seen
    reports on in the last decade or so has been an effort in China
    to respond to schools that are collapsing because of shoddy
    construction and children being killed, to the environmental
    concerns that the Chinese people have, to health issues that
    are there. Is the surveillance state also squashing those
    movements as well?
        Mr. Xiao. If they are independent movements from the civil
    society and pressing the government and giving real pressure,
    then yes.
        At the same time, the technology development in China also
    does services, also make the economy growing, also make
    people's lives smoother. And the government provides better
    services really as long as they do not challenge the one-party
    dictatorship. That is the part that they will put a foot on.
        So on the issue of whether Chinese people see whether there
    is privacy that should be protected or whether the technologies
    should be implemented in a society, the problem is there is no
    public discussion. It would not allow it.
        For example, the social credit system everybody is talking
    about. We know how Orwellian this can be. But right now, they
    have not quite gotten there. They have not connected to the
    central database facial recognition and all of these together
    yet, but it is on its way. But the idea has been started from
    even 2004, as early as that. As soon as they see they want to
    introduce it in the western America, for example, the credit
    system from financial transactions, immediately the government
    see they can expand that to the social area, and that becomes
    an entirely different issue. And then as China does many
    things, they have a general policy goal, but then they let the
    local governments do the experiment, pilots, to experiment how
    those things will play out, and they will pick what works or
    not and then expand.
        So there is one county in 2004 in Jiangsu Province. That
    party secretary went ahead to have the social credit system
    within his county, put credits on everybody, on the ordinary
    people. If they have a petition to the government, that is a
    negative credit. If they do something, disobey the government
    regulation, that is a social credit. And that experiment was
    reported in China by the Chinese media, and it generated a huge
    controversy. And there was a lot of criticism and discussion at
    the time because the Chinese media at that time had a little
    room. And the public discussion is no different than what we
    see now. Hey, this is violating people's rights, and this is
    too much power for the government. Because at the time, it was
    a local government doing the experiment, the people would just
    take advantage and say, hey, it is just the local government
    that went too far.
        But that discussion was being censored later on. For a
    couple years, it was there in official media, but then now it
    has disappeared. Nobody says negative things about the social
    credit system anymore. And that local government has continued
    experimenting on social credit. They may modify it. They may
    revise. But the experiment continues.
        Now there are over 40 pilot projects and expanding, but the
    public discussions on those issues, zero. And that is what is
    happening in China.
        The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Shaheen.
        Senator Barrasso.
        Senator Barrasso. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        The Chairman. John, just a second. Before you start, for
    those of you who see us coming and going, I want to explain
    that for a minute. The leadership recently scheduled four votes
    over the top of this meeting. But because of the importance of
    this particular issue, we decided not to put the meeting off.
    We are going to continue on. So we are going to have to step
    out and vote from time to time, but various members will
    preside.
        So, Senator Barrasso, I am going to go vote and Senator
    Romney you can chair, if you would.
        Senator Barrasso. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        This weeks marks the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen
    Square massacre. People around the world continue to remember.
    On June 4th, 1989, the Government of China sent tanks into
    Tiananmen Square to violently suppress and forcibly disperse
    peaceful demonstrators. The Chinese Government's infantry
    troops opened fire on students and on activists who were
    standing up for their fundamental freedoms. The horrible events
    resulted in the death and injury of hundreds of courageous
    Chinese citizens who were killed, tortured, and imprisoned due
    to their participation in a peaceful democracy movement in
    Tiananmen Square.
        The Chinese authorities to this day continue to block and
    censor public discussions and events marking the anniversary of
    Tiananmen Square.
        But despite those efforts, the world has not forgotten. You
    go to the front page of the Wall Street Journal today and here
    it is. Hong Kong remembers Tiananmen Square victims 30 years
    on. You go to the front page of the New York Times today with a
    picture of the crowds in the streets. A perilous anniversary.
    Thousands gather Tuesday in Hong Kong on the 30th anniversary
    of the crackdown of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. You go to the
    Financial Times, front page picture of the candles lit and
    held. Hong Kong pays tribute to Tiananmen Square.
        So the world has not, nor will it ever forget. We will
    always remember. We have not forgotten the courage, the pain,
    the brutality of the Government of China that it imposed. In
    fact, those who suffered and died, I think, inspired future
    generations to proudly demand freedom and democracy across the
    globe, which is why I am happy that the three of you are here
    today speaking out.
        The United States has a long record of championing liberty
    and freedom around the globe. We must continue to support
    individuals who are demanding freedom of speech, freedom of
    assembly, freedom of religion. And the harassment, detention,
    and imprisonment of Chinese citizens exercising their rights
    continues today, and we will continue to speak out.
        So the question to the three of you is what is the most
    effective approach in your minds for us to engage the
    Government of China on human rights and fundamental freedoms.
        Dr. Richardson. Thank you, Senator, both for the lovely
    remembrance and the question.
        This is not a time in history when the Chinese Government
    is eager to have an honest conversation about human rights
    because it knows it does not have a good story to tell. And we
    are certainly aware that many governments, including the U.S.,
    continue to try to have that conversation, but frankly, I think
    those discussions veer on the perverse if not the
    counterproductive because often the Chinese Government will
    take what is said to it by another government about human
    rights issues and twist it or misreport it. And I think that
    can be very discouraging for people across the country to see
    if, in fact, they are able to know about it at all.
        I think there is much to be said at this point in time for
    governments pursuing, for example, things like shadow human
    rights dialogues with independent activists. There are many
    people standing in Washington right now who would be incredible
    to have debates with about the trajectory for the rule of law
    in China, how to deal with certain kinds of social issues, how
    to deal with press freedom. And I think for governments to
    engage those people at a level and with a degree of recognition
    that might normally be reserved only for another government, I
    think, does a couple of different things. First, it empowers
    that community and gives it the recognition it deserves. And I
    think arguably most important, it sends a message to Beijing
    that those are not the only actors to have these conversations
    with.
        Senator Barrasso. Anyone else want to add?
        Mr. Xiao. Yes. To answer the question of how to best
    empower the Chinese people who are fighting against the
    communist regime, let us learn from our enemy. President Xi
    Jinping this February had an important meeting to his cadre. It
    is about preventing potential risks, severe risks. And in that
    speech, some of it made public, he highlighted two things that
    he worried about as risks: one, Internet; two, youth. He is
    afraid that a new generation of Chinese youth are having
    different value systems that he would not like these people to
    have. He has his fears, but his fears should be our advantages.
        His dream of a China dream, that empire dream, repressing
    the Chinese people and putting surveillance cameras everywhere
    that the Chinese Communist Party can last for another 100 years
    is a nightmare for the Chinese citizens. It is a nightmare for
    the entire world. Everybody values freedom. So to go against
    that is the right way.
        Senator Barrasso. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Senator Romney [presiding]. Thank you.
        Senator Markey.
        Senator Markey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much.
        Thank you all for your work. Mr. Xiao, we salute your
    personal commitment to stand up for human rights after the
    Tiananmen Square massacre. This anniversary really gets focused
    on in America maybe not as often as it should on these human
    rights abuses.
        Ms. Richardson, we appreciate the reporting by Human Rights
    Watch on China's high tech surveillance efforts against the
    Uyghur and other communities. Last month, the New York Times
    described how Beijing is exporting its mass surveillance model
    to other governments. And a Rohingya human rights activist told
    the East Asia Subcommittee in April that it was worried that
    China could export this surveillance technology to Burma to
    further repress the Rohingya.
        I wrote a letter to Secretary Pompeo asking him to clarify
    the administration's actions in terms of countering China's
    actions. As we wait for a response, I would like to ask you,
    what do you think the administration should do as China exports
    surveillance technology and surveillance training to other
    countries?
        [The information referred to is located at the end of
    hearing.]
        Dr. Richardson. Thank you, Senator, for the question.
        I think at the absolute top of the to-do list is making
    sure that U.S. companies are not in any way engaged in or
    supporting any kind of censorship itself.
        It may be of interest to you that I think about 2 weeks
    ago, it was reported that the City of Mandalay was actually
    contemplating partnering with a Chinese company to build a
    smart cities network in that particular area. That is a term
    that is used to describe a very comprehensive surveillance
    architecture in particular areas. Often it is presented as
    being in service of public safety, but it allows for enormous
    surveillance.
        Senator Markey. Mr. Xiao, what would you want the United
    States to be doing?
        Mr. Xiao. First of all, now we are starting to really need
    to have a very clear eye on what China's--those trade practices
    are, both domestically and internationally. It is just a
    political project. It is not just about free trade. Even they
    are under the disguise of private companies, but the state has
    what they call a strategic goal for national willingness or
    national will. And that strategic goal, grand strategic goal,
    will translate into subsidizing some of those strategically
    important private companies to go to the One Belt and One Road,
    to the other countries developing certain technologies, build
    up certain trade relations, and taking advantage of open
    society that the rule of law or the diversity of society and
    the free trade and all of that.
        Senator Markey. We are kind of time limited. Thank you and
    thank you for the insight. We very strongly received your
    message here.
        The New York Times suggested U.S. officials have been
    shelving sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for
    abuses against the Uyghurs out of concern that punitive
    measures will undermine trade talks. If true, what message does
    our inaction send not only to the estimated 3 million detainees
    around the world but also to the Chinese Government and
    international community about the commitment that we have to
    protecting human rights in China?
        Dr. Richardson. Senator Markey, I do not know how many more
    times we can say to the administration we are waiting to see
    Global Magnitsky sanctions in response to the gross human
    rights violations taking place in Xinjiang. I literally do not
    know what else the administration is waiting for.
        Senator Markey. Mr. Walker.
        Mr. Walker. I do not know if I have anything to add to
    that.
        Senator Markey. Mr. Xiao, what is the impact in China of
    the administration's policy?
        Mr. Xiao. On what? I am sorry.
        Senator Markey. What is the impact of this policy of the
    United States to kind of turn a blind eye.
        Mr. Xiao. The trade war?
        Senator Markey. Yes.
        Mr. Xiao. It is, of course, a huge issue, and the
    authorities are also using it to fan the nationalism. And with
    the repression and the censorship on the Internet and the
    Chinese media, you can only hear one side of voices. My team
    has been really working hard to go through the deleted
    contents, the censored materials to listen to the other voices
    that Chinese people looking at trade war. There are. There are
    liberal voices. There are more clear eyes. They are the ones
    who believe that letting the Chinese Government to follow those
    rules, to letting the foreign companies in to compete maybe is
    bad for the government, for the state enterprises, but it is
    good for people. It is good for consumers as a matter of fact.
        Senator Markey. So thank you.
        There is a Dickensian quality to all of these technologies.
    We invented them. Facial recognition, Internet, all of it. It
    can degrade. It can debase. It can enable. We as the inventor
    of these technologies cannot turn a blind eye to the degrading,
    to the debasing of cultures using our technologies. Thank you.
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Senator Gardner [presiding]. Thank you, Senator Markey.
        Senator Coons.
        Senator Coons. Thank you. I would like to thank both
    Chairman Risch and Ranking Member Menendez for holding this
    important hearing today on the 30th anniversary of the
    Tiananmen Square massacre.
        Mr. Xiao and Dr. Richardson, Mr. Walker, thank you for
    taking time to speak with us today about human rights and in
    particular about China's human rights record.
        Senator Tillis and I as the co-chairs of the Senate Human
    Rights Caucus yesterday issued a statement honoring and
    remembering the Chinese students who raised their voices to
    call for freedom 30 years ago. Like most of us, I remember the
    horror I felt watching that brutal government crackdown, as
    well as the inspiration I felt of the lone, anonymous man
    standing courageously in the path of a column of tanks. His
    brave act is an important reminder to all of us that all humans
    struggle for a basic measure of dignity and freedom.
        So it is deeply disappointing the Chinese Government
    refuses to acknowledge what happened 30 years ago. The fact the
    government is working diligently in China to erase all mention
    of what happened in Tiananmen Square makes it all the more
    important for those of us blessed with freedom and the right to
    speak freely to do so.
        It is also a reminder that there are many in China who
    believe in the universal values of liberty and freedom. We have
    a disagreement not with the Chinese people but with the
    authoritarianism and the Chinese Communist Party. Tiananmen is
    an important reminder. Many Chinese still want and hope to work
    for a transparent and accountable government, and not all
    Chinese believe the propaganda they hear frequently. And we in
    the United States should find ways to lift up these brave
    voices.
        I found particularly compelling Senator Menendez's opening
    in which he reminded us that it is the power of our example as
    a nation rather than the example of our power that has built a
    global network of values-based alliances. And whether it is in
    Sudan where protesters who were peaceful were mowed down by
    their army just in the last few days or whether it is 30 years
    ago on the square at Tiananmen, we need to stand up for human
    rights.
        Dr. Richardson, if I might. You have had a number of my
    colleagues question you about the administration and their sort
    of inconsistency. Your testimony underscored the importance of
    having Congress keep up the pressure on our administration to
    promote universal human rights and to not be selective. I
    applaud Secretary Pompeo for issuing a strong statement about
    Tiananmen Square, but remain concerned the administration's
    highly selective failing to speak out on human rights abuses in
    North Korea or in Saudi Arabia, for example.
        How much of our credibility, Dr. Richardson, depends on
    being consistent as a nation when we speak on human rights, and
    what happens to our credibility when we are selective, when we
    only condemn human rights abuses in a few countries and,
    obviously and frequently, overlook them or ignore them in other
    countries?
        Dr. Richardson. Thanks, Senator, for the question.
        I mean, clearly being consistent on human rights is
    essential. If you are selective about it, then you are leaving
    yourself vulnerable to criticisms that you only care about
    these issues in one place for political reasons rather than for
    principled ones. And it undermines the idea that human rights
    are indeed universal.
        I think given the scope of my particular work where the
    U.S.'s absence recently has been most acutely felt has been at
    the United Nations Human Rights Council where the U.S.'s
    withdrawal has made it exponentially more difficult to advance
    any steps towards fact finding or accountability or a longer-
    term strategy----
        Senator Coons. I will just say one of the more inspiring
    aspects of my opportunity to serve alongside Senator John
    McCain was hearing him articulate the way in which human rights
    is not just one of many interests, it is sort of the principal
    interest that the United States has to continue to consistently
    advance around the world. It is what defines us, our
    willingness to advocate for human rights even when it is not in
    our narrow or short-term economic or strategic interest.
        Mr. Walker, I found your comments about the ways in which
    the technology of control and authoritarianism is now being
    exported by China globally to reinforce things I have seen
    particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. One of my concerns is that
    the ways in which the repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang is
    playing out, as you testified in detail, is now going to be
    replicated in other countries around the world fairly quickly.
        One of my concerns is that we have dedicated ourselves to
    deploying the mechanics of elections to middle income and to
    lower income countries and that there is a concerning, now,
    possibility of real overlap between the biometric data capture
    in order to validate elections and the machinery of repression
    that you described.
        How can we come up with standards of conduct for
    governments for this century in order to help their citizens
    have confidence that, by participating in what seems to be a
    public health screening or by participating in voting, they are
    not in fact handing over their own personally identifying
    information in a way that makes it easier to track and repress
    them?
        Mr. Walker. So it is a terrific question, Senator, and it
    is not an easy one to answer.
        I would say it speaks to the need for democratic solidarity
    at a very basic level. I believe that all the democracies are
    in this together, and to the extent you have democracies in
    sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, which are now adopting the
    technologies from China but also the norms that come around
    them, it is terribly important that we understand this. It is
    not just the hardware. But when China comes in, they come with
    know-how and a certain set of standards and norms that in my
    view are anathema to democratic and human rights norms.
        This is going to take a lot of work because in countries
    that have deep institutional roots and therefore, at least to
    some degree, more of an ability to respond to precisely the
    sort of issue you touched on, they will be better positioned,
    but not entirely positioned, as we learned in our own country
    with the vulnerabilities of our election system, which is true
    in all democracies now. I think this is going to speak to the
    need for new models of cooperation that would go across
    disciplines, and this is something that is terribly important.
    It cannot just be regional specialists. You need technologists.
    You need data scientists. You need people who understand
    privacy law and rules. And this is an area of work we are going
    to have to get better at in the coming period.
        Senator Coons. I will say this. In visits to the Baltic
    States and to Eastern European states that have faced
    persistent and broad-scale interference in their media and
    communication systems and their electoral systems from Russia,
    there is a sharing among democracies of the means of resisting
    undue influence. I think we need to rapidly develop and deploy
    something comparable.
        Your comment on Chinese training of journalists in Africa
    was a reminder that we are far into what is now a competition,
    not a clash of civilizations, Mr. Xiao, as you correctly
    pointed out, but a clash of competing visions of the role of
    the individual with regard to the state and society.
        I am well over my time, and we have another vote called.
    Mr. Xiao, I will simply say I found your comments inspiring. I
    would love to give you a minute, if I might, to simply share
    with us--given that I am confident that young Chinese in
    mainland PRC continue to yearn for the same things as those a
    generation ago did in Tiananmen Square, what can we do here in
    the United States to help them?
        Mr. Xiao. Before I answer that question, I want to
    respond--not respond--commenting on your----
        Senator Gardner. If you could be brief with your responses.
    I know we have got limited time and a vote coming on. Thank
    you.
        Mr. Xiao. Sure, okay.
        The United States should put many, many pro-democracy human
    rights programs, including the educational area, that have an
    agenda to engage the Chinese youth to a more open world. Today
    many young Chinese, even they come to the United States, they
    live in their Chinese social media world. They are still not so
    open to the life here and the political system and values here.
    So there is much more a program can do even to the Chinese
    students and overseas Chinese around the world studying in this
    country.
        Senator Gardner. Thank you, Mr. Xiao.
        Senator Kaine.
        Senator Kaine. Thank you and thank you to the witnesses.
        I know you have testified and there have been questions
    asked about the Uyghur situation, but I just want to return to
    it. The reporting that we have had for the last couple of years
    about this sort of mass suppression of Uyghurs in northwest
    China has just been chilling. The involvement of some American
    companies in helping provide China with technology has been
    very, very disturbing. And it strikes me that if Uyghurs were
    Christians and the Chinese Government was placing officials in
    the homes of Christians to monitor whether they engaged in
    religious observances or not, in the United States we would be
    absolutely taking to the streets about this. I think the fact
    that they are Muslims and the fact that the information that we
    get is a little bit harder to access for some has maybe
    suppressed the degree of outrage among the American public.
        But I have worked on legislation with colleagues to get
    more reporting from the State Department, letters to the
    administration to ask them to do more.
        What might we do that would better raise in the American
    public's conscience the just shocking violations of these
    people's basic human rights? I mean, a million-plus in
    concentration/reeducation camps. But again, the placing of
    officials in people's homes to monitor their religious
    observances is just unheard of. What can we do to spread the
    word more and generate global outrage about what is happening?
        Mr. Walker. So maybe just a brief observation. I think the
    reporting that has been done in papers like the New York Times
    and the Wall Street Journal, which has really been phenomenal
    bringing to light in graphic detail the way in which this, as I
    called it, technology-animated police state has emerged in
    Xinjiang, is critically important.
        I think the next step is for all of us to understand that
    what is happening there cannot be seen in a vacuum. What is
    happening there has been happening in other parts of China
    already and has informed development in the Uyghur region, and
    it is informing developments beyond China now in all the ways
    we have been discussing. And that is central to this, that this
    is now I think relevant for all of us who value privacy, who
    value human rights, that the surveillance mechanisms under
    which the Uyghurs are suffering is in the view of the
    leadership in Beijing are something that can be applied
    elsewhere. And that should really chill all of us.
        Senator Kaine. I am going to ask a second question, and I
    am going to finish on time because I have to vote on this vote.
        And the second question is this. So give us some advice.
    Here is something that we hear often from the administration if
    we raise human rights issues with respect to Saudi Arabia, for
    example. They will say, well, look, if we insist on tough human
    rights standards, they will just go to China or Russia because
    China and Russia will do all kinds of business with them
    without any human rights standards. That argument always makes
    me furious. I want to be true to our values. I do not care. I
    hate dictators of the right, left, or whatever, or the cults of
    personality, and I think we ought to stand for something
    different.
        But how do you respond to that argument when somebody makes
    the argument that, hey, there are a lot of countries around the
    world that are perfectly willing to do all kinds of business
    with you with no human rights expectations? Why should the U.S.
    still insist on high human rights standards?
        Dr. Richardson. Well, Senator Kaine, thanks for the
    question.
        I have been at Human Rights Watch since 2006, and I have
    heard that argument from just about every government and every
    administration we have worked with since then in the U.S. and
    beyond. Nobody wants to be in the lead irking the Chinese. It
    sort of depends on who is in the hot seat that particular day.
        I think governments are at a point now, though, where there
    is a much greater recognition of the threat the Chinese
    Government presents not just inside but outside China. And the
    question now is how to channel, I think, an agreement that
    there is not going to be convergence on established
    international norms to translate that into forceful policies
    that prioritize, among other things, human rights.
        I would tweak your point of comparison a little bit. We
    found ourselves saying a lot if any other government in the
    world was locking up a million Muslims simply on the basis of
    their identity, let us imagine what the global response would
    look like and aspire to that.
        Senator Kaine. You got a good point.
        Dr. Richardson. Very quickly, two things I can think of off
    the top of my head that this committee and others can do.
        First of all, I think the Uyghur diaspora community across
    the U.S. is in desperate need of recognition, attention,
    support, and that ranges everywhere from trauma counseling to
    databases of missing family members, simply a recognition of
    their problems.
        The other is really to reach out to your counterparts in
    other governments to find commonality. We cannot find many
    governments that disagree that the situation in Xinjiang is
    incredibly serious and problematic. It is very hard to get
    anybody to step up and make the first move in pushing for any
    sort of joint response that presumably would put greater
    pressure on China.
        The Chairman [presiding]. Thank you. I appreciate those
    important questions. I am going to do a follow-up on that when
    I get a chance. But now, Senator Romney, you are up.
        Senator Romney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I very much
    appreciate the committee and the chairman for hosting this
    hearing. It is such an important topic. And I apologize just as
    a Member of the Senate for the fact that we keep on emptying
    the room up here, but there are votes going on. So we keep on
    having to run back and forth to vote. And the good news is that
    your responses are kept in the record and will be available to
    us and to people throughout the world that have interest in
    this topic, as I think many, many do.
        I, for one, was inspired by the extraordinary bravery that
    was demonstrated 30 years ago at Tiananmen Square and was
    impressed with the courage of the individuals who stood and
    expressed their desire for freedom and recognized a sense of
    vitality and energy among the people in China to consider
    alternative paths. Clearly, the whole country was not looking
    to become a democracy in our form, but they were looking at
    alternatives.
        My perception today is that that may no longer be the case,
    and I wanted to get your thought about what the mood and the
    perception is among the people in China. I say that because
    with the Uyghurs being incarcerated, with the effort to create
    civic scores for individuals, there is a sense that perhaps the
    spirit of Tiananmen has been crushed and that it is forgotten
    among the people of China.
        I have a very close colleague who is a professor at a
    business school. He has several Chinese students that are in
    his business school class. Their classmates ask questions about
    freedom of expression, about the freedoms that they hope to
    have. And almost to a person, he says they defend the
    government. They suggest that it is totally appropriate to
    prevent the Internet to foment anger among the Chinese people,
    that they should be united. So he said it is extraordinary to
    see that there is very little discussion of alternatives among
    the Chinese people.
        And so I turn to you who watch closely what is happening in
    the country and would ask for your perception as to whether or
    not there a dissent movement within the country. Is there an
    openness to change? Is there a desire for change, or has it
    been crushed by the government? Please.
        Mr. Xiao. When social media just got into China around
    2003-2004, and there were a few hundred, a few thousand Chinese
    blogs, I asked my student researchers to say, look, there is
    political discussion on Chinese blogs. He came back to say no.
    They only talk about money and business. Really?
        After 10 years, by the time of 2009, 2010 and 2011 when
    social media became, like hundreds of millions of users, even
    the censors were working so hard, the online main voice opinion
    leaders are public intellectuals holding liberal political
    values. They have the maxim of the follower. But that leads to
    President Xi Jinping to have a full-scale crackdown on the
    Chinese Internet. So if the control is not strong enough, those
    voices not only coming out, not only dissent, but popular and
    massive.
        Second, yes. We heard all of this about Tiananmen in the
    past. We forgot about Tiananmen. Some people say I changed my
    mind, and some people say I do not know anything about
    Tiananmen. But really? Do you really believe that? Why does the
    Chinese Government try so hard to suppress every single word
    about Tiananmen on the Internet? Do not say that the Chinese
    Government is making a mistake, wrong judgment on this. They
    know as soon as they can let that repression a little bit off,
    the memory do comes back. People do remember. People that are
    now remembering are not telling you they are remembering
    because of fear. And they rule by fear.
        Senator Romney. Any other comments? Yes.
        Dr. Richardson. Just a quick observation, Senator, that I
    think one piece of the current puzzle really is about people
    who leave China for more open environments precisely because
    they want to know about or become exposed to different
    political systems or have the opportunity to study in places
    that ensure academic freedom. And I think it is imperative for
    the United States and other democracies to think of those
    people in terms of solidarity. I think it is a complicated
    discussion now with concerns about national security or whether
    people are acting as agents on behalf of the Chinese
    Government.
        But I really feel very strongly, especially given that this
    is a mistake the United States has made in the past to
    arbitrarily target people based on their citizenship or their
    ethnicity, to not repeat that mistake at this particular
    moment. There are people who come here precisely because they
    want the rights and the freedoms, and I think there are people
    who are feeling uncomfortably targeted. And it is imperative,
    in keeping the Tiananmen spirit alive--part of that lies here
    too in keeping this environment open for them.
        The Chairman. Thank you.
        Senator Cruz.
        Senator Cruz. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
        Thank you to each of the witnesses for being here today.
        This week marks a dark occasion in world history. 30 years
    ago, thousands of Chinese protesters gathered in Tiananmen
    Square demanding freedom and demanding democracy. The Chinese
    Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army slaughtered
    them. To this day, we still do not know exactly how many
    perished on that bloody dawn, as Nobel Peace Laureate Liu
    Xiaobo described it.
        Today the CCP continues its war against the people of China
    and treats the rest of the world with similar disdain.
        In my view, China poses the greatest long-term geopolitical
    threat to the United States. They have to be dealt with and
    dealt with with clear eyes. We cannot break off relations with
    Beijing, but we must begin to rethink the assumptions that have
    guided U.S. policies toward China since Tiananmen Square.
        Let us start by addressing an uncomfortable reality here at
    home: the role of U.S. technology in China's oppression of its
    people.
        Dr. Richardson, Human Rights Watch recently released a
    report where your colleagues reverse engineered a Chinese
    censorship app for smart phones. This app, called the
    Integrated Joint Operations Platform, is a primary tool of mass
    surveillance in Xinjiang. In this report, you referenced U.S.-
    based companies that contribute to the censorship apparatus in
    Xinjiang. This week, I plan to introduce legislation, the
    Tiananmen Act of 2019, to restrict China's access to such
    technology.
        In your judgment, how widespread is U.S. technology in
    modern day Chinese surveillance and censorship?
        Dr. Richardson. Senator, thanks for that question. I wish I
    had a perfect answer to it. When we are done reverse
    engineering things, that is the next on our list of research
    projects.
        But I think the fact that we do not have clarity about that
    and that it is not easy to get clarity about that is a problem
    in and of itself. And we have discussed this morning the need
    for due diligence strategies from all manner of companies,
    whether they are tech companies, whether they are
    infrastructure extractives, about what exactly the nature of
    their business is and how they can be sure they are not
    enabling or contributing to human rights violations.
        Senator Cruz. If you google ``Tiananmen Square'' in China,
    do you learn anything about the massacre, about the slaughter?
        Mr. Xiao. You see all the tourists and the tourist
    pictures.
        But remember this. The Chinese Government does not only
    suppress those discussions, they are also guiding and inciting
    and sort of channeling the public opinion to the ideological
    foundation that is supporting the regime. Only under the fear
    and under such technological support is that strategy is
    effective.
        But now we have a game changer, which is the new layer of
    the artificial intelligence, big data technology. Yes, the U.S.
    is still ahead of China in artificial intelligence, in many
    areas, but not in our implementations of facial recognition,
    not in voice recognition, not in some of the other metrics of
    collecting because China has a large set of data. They are
    training their algorithms to make the application much more
    precise and comprehensive and fast. And this is the danger.
        Senator Cruz. Well, and many of us are concerned that U.S.
    companies are actively aiding and abetting China's suppression
    of its people and censorship of free speech. Indeed, days
    before the Tiananmen Square anniversary this year, reports
    began to circulate that Twitter had suspended the accounts of
    dozens of Chinese political dissidents. Twitter reportedly had
    run a sweep for bots.
        How would you describe the Communist Party's efforts to
    coerce American companies into assisting the party censorship
    activities?
        Mr. Xiao. On Twitter, I can say this. I do not know what
    has recently happened inside the Twitter company. I think they
    should tell the public by giving a report on that.
        But I do know that the Chinese espionage and intelligence
    communities have developed the tools, the technologies to
    infiltrate Twitter, Facebook, gmails, to create fake accounts,
    create fake tweets, and to penetrate anybody's Twitter account
    or Gmail account or Facebook account--they have that
    technology.
        Senator Cruz. Mr. Chairman, if I may ask one more.
        The Chairman. Please. Go ahead.
        Senator Cruz. Mr. Walker, you have warned about China's
    sharp power, and you have described the Chinese infiltration of
    American higher education institutions. This is an issue that
    concerns me greatly. Just this week, I introduced the Stop
    Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act, which gives the FBI
    and DHS new authorities to address the issues.
        My question for you is what steps should universities take
    to insulate themselves from Chinese espionage, and what steps
    should the U.S. Government take to protect higher education
    from these threats?
        Mr. Walker. Thank you, Senator. I think the question you
    have asked is related to the previous one as well, that this is
    a pattern of either inducing or cajoling or coercing open
    institutions, independent institutions in open societies to
    behave in ways they would not otherwise behave. And so you have
    alluded to some of these issues that are relevant to the
    stealing of technology and related things. But there is a full
    spectrum of challenges that have emerged that transcend those
    issues which can induce educators, students in our open
    societies to sidestep certain issues or to not talk about
    certain things that are not welcome by the Chinese authorities.
        I think this is something that we need, as I have alluded
    to in previous writings and earlier today, to find ways to
    develop more durable democratic solidarity so that no single
    institution is exposed to the entreaties and the influence of
    the Chinese party state. That is the most effective way over
    time to have these institutions feel as though they can say no
    and essentially uphold liberal democratic standards.
        Senator Cruz. Thank you.
        The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Cruz.
        In closing up, let me just talk about a couple things.
        Number one, are all three of you aware of the Micron
    Technology case, the case that emanates from Idaho? Micron
    Technology is the second largest maker of DRAM memory chips in
    the world, and the Chinese have stolen their trade secrets and
    their technology and gone home and patented them in China and
    now are suing them in China over the use of their own
    technology. Are the three of you aware of that?
        This is a poster child for what they are trying to
    accomplish with China 2025. You ought to get familiar with
    that. It is on the radar of the administration at the highest
    level and obviously here in Congress. We have taken it up with
    the Chinese ambassador here who is--he was born to be an
    ambassador. He is defending the undefendable.
        Let me just close up with a point that I want to raise that
    we just barely touched on, and that is the fact that all of us
    on this committee and me maybe more so than others get touched
    by virtually every country in the world. We get the head of
    state, the number two, the commerce person, defense person,
    foreign secretary person. And when you talk about what China is
    doing in their country, first of all, you find that China is
    doing something in every country. I mean, they are ubiquitous
    around the world. But when you talk to them about what they are
    doing and you bring up the Sri Lanka case where the Sri Lankans
    lost the port--they took the money mistakenly and now have lost
    that port. They come back and say, well, the United States is
    not doing enough. China shows up with a bushel basket of money
    and the United States does not.
        You sit and you listen to that. And these are people that
    desperately need money in some places like Sri Lanka. What is
    your response to that? What do you say to somebody like that?
    Ms. Richardson, I think you started. Why do you not touch on
    that for a minute, please?
        Dr. Richardson. I find myself saying often in interviews
    that we are all familiar with the phrase that nature abhors a
    vacuum. Nature has got nothing on the Chinese Communist Party,
    which will move into any space it is granted. And I think any
    government that is serious about defending human rights needs
    to get out and become very aware very quickly of all of the
    spaces that the Chinese Government and Communist Party have
    moved into and defend them vigorously now while they still can.
    Many of the key institutions that the United States relies on,
    that people in China who want democracy rely on, that people in
    Sri Lanka who want human rights rely on are under threat
    specifically as a result of the Chinese Government pressure,
    and that should be a priority for the U.S.
        The Chairman. Good answer. One of the problems is there is
    only so much money, and the Chinese seem to be able to pick out
    places where they can put money. They do not do it like we do.
    I mean, it has got nothing to do with human rights. It has got
    nothing to do with democracy. It has got nothing to do with the
    rectitude of the government that is in power. All they are
    looking for is the wedge to put the money into. And it puts us
    at a real disadvantage as we go out and do that. And that is
    particularly true in American--I hear this from American
    companies all the time. They go out and bid on a job or what
    have you. They do not have a Corrupt Foreign Influences Act
    (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) in China, as you probably know.
    So our companies are at a disadvantage there when they try to
    compete.
        Mr. Xiao. Not only about money. These countries, including
    their government, need to understand or recognize the danger of
    being so in debt or controlled, potentially being controlled
    and manipulated by the Chinese authoritarian regime. That is
    not a rules-based game. They have oppositional parties--many of
    them. They have a civil society. They have a relatively open
    media. Their people need to know this is not just about who
    provides more money. And Chinese--a lot of those investments
    are also eroding the democratic systems in those countries.
        So if there is some kind of public education throughout
    those different countries China goes to, that public campaign
    to recognize what the Chinese Government is capable of doing to
    control the countries--in those countries for China's interest,
    then there is certain resistance that can help.
        The Chairman. I think that is appropriate.
        I do not want to risk an international incident, so I am
    not going to mention countries. But there are some countries
    that are much more susceptible to this than other countries,
    and I think that is a good point.
        Mr. Walker, do you want to close it up?
        Mr. Walker. So I think one way to think about this,
    Senator, is that it is about the money in certain respects but
    it is not only about the money. And for so many of the
    countries that we are talking about and as my colleagues have
    alluded to, they are now deeply engaged with China on a wide
    range of levels in many spheres, and it is not just about the
    infrastructure investment. It slowly becomes about the way
    their media and technology spheres develop. It is about the
    degree to which perhaps weak political opposition can continue
    to sustain itself. It is about the way in which civil society
    can operate, for example, in countries in sub-Saharan Africa
    and Latin America.
        And I would put it this way. I do not think the United
    States and its partners have the luxury of not doing anything
    because China is projecting and exerting its values in a
    vigorous and purposeful way. To the extent we are not
    vigorously pursuing our own values and helping our partners
    defend them in solidarity, it will be a losing proposition, and
    we are going to find ourselves 5 years from now, say, if we do
    about what we are doing now, in a very unpleasant position.
        The Chairman. Well said.
        Thank you all for being here today.
        For the record, I will state that I am going to keep the
    record open until close of business on Friday. Members may have
    questions to submit. If you would be so kind as to respond to
    those at your earliest convenience, we would greatly appreciate
    it.
        This has been a very good hearing. I think that it is going
    to be watched around the world probably, and I think it has
    underscored the challenges that we are facing.
        Thank you again so much for being here.
        The committee will be adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 12:05 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]

                                  ----------

                  Additional Material Submitted for the Record

             Responses of Mr. Xiao Qiang to Questions Submitted by
                            Senator Robert Menendez

                          accountability for tiananmen
        To this day the Chinese government refuses to let the survivors of
    the Tiananmen massacre and their families commemorate and honor their
    dead and continues to deny them justice in a concerted effort to wipe
    June 4 from memory.
        On May 20th, police ordered 82-year old Ding Zilin whose son Jiang
    Jielian was killed in the June 4 massacre to leave her home in Beijing
    and travel more than 1,100km to her hometown, a common tactic used
    against activists to silence them during politically sensitive periods.
        Ding Zilin is a founding member of Tiananmen Mothers, a group of
    families of victims who are seeking an investigation into the June 4th
    bloodshed. I ask Unanimous Consent to submit for the Record a letter
    from the Tiananmen Mothers to China's leaders calling for
    accountability and justice. Their own government may seek to silence
    them, but we can help them to have a voice.

     Suggested Reading for the 30th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Crackdown
                      Submitted by Senator Robert Menendez

        ``Mourning Our Families and Compatriots Killed in the June Fourth
    Massacre: A Letter to China's Leaders'' By the Tiananmen Mothers

        https://hrichina.org/en/press-work/press-release/mourning-our-
    families-and-compatriots-killed-june-fourth-massacre-letter

        Charter 8 December 17, 2017

        https://www.cecc.gov/resources/legal-provisions/charter-08-chinese-
    and-english-text

        ``I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement'' By Liu Xiaobo

        https://china.usc.edu/liu-xiaobo-i-have-no-enemies-my-final-
    statement-december-23-2009

        Question. How can we help ensure accountability and justice for the
    Tiananmen Mothers and others who lost family and friends thirty years
    ago?

        Answer. Maybe honoring Professor Ding Zilin in some more prominent
    level from the U.S. Congress.

        Question. What additional measures can we take to assure June 4
    will not be erased from history?

        Answer. Publicly raise this issue with China at least every
    anniversary.
                              digital surveillance
        Thirty years ago, the world was shocked when the Chinese Communist
    Party used tanks and the full force of the military to quash the pro-
    democracy movement. Today, they don't need to send in tanks. In
    Xinjiang they've amassed a massive surveillance state that looks like
    it came out of a George Orwell novel. Where people live in fear and
    under constant surveillance. Where technology allows the Chinese
    government to collect data and aggregate people if they are so-called
    ``threats'' to the Party, permitting the government to arbitrarily
    detain more than a million Uyghurs in concentration camps.

        Question. What do we know about the Chinese government's use of
    surveillance technology to suppress human rights in Xinjiang and
    elsewhere in China?

        Answer. Pervasive surveillance in Xinjian both complements and
    fuels the ongoing mass detentions in the region.
        This issue is widely reported by the media by now, such as:

        https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xinjiang-
    china-surveillance-prison.html

        https://logicmag.io/07-ghost-world/

        https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2019/05/02/china-how-
    mass-surveillance-works-xinjiang

        Question. What role have U.S. companies played in providing China
    with such technology?

        Answer. New Jersey-based Infinova has directly provided
    surveillance systems to Chinese authorities in Xinjiang and elsewhere;
    others may have done the same. In other cases, U.S. companies support
    Chinese surveillance firms by importing their products for sale.
        U.S. companies including Intel, Nvidia, Seagate, and Western
    Digital supply essential components to Chinese tech firms such as
    Hikvision and Dahua.

        https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/19/962492-orwell-china-
    socialcredit-surveillance/

        Research into underlying AI technologies is highly
    internationalized. Oxford University's Jeffrey Ding, for example,
    recently wrote that ``the seeds of China's AI development are rooted in
    Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) in Beijing [ . . . .] At the same time,
    MSRA has been essential for Microsoft.'' (The linked piece, describing
    five key points Ding gleaned from his first year of compiling his
    ChinAI email newsletter, is highly recommended.) Some news reports have
    criticized companies and institutions over research partnerships
    involving military-linked institutions in China, but the actual risk
    arising from these has been disputed by some experts, including Ding.
    The issue is further complicated by widespread potential for dual use
    of AI technologies.
        Any U.S. company operating in China could be forced to help surveil
    its users there under recent security legislation. Notable recent
    examples include Apple's transfer of local user data to servers
    operated in partnership with a government-owned Chinese partner, and
    Google's planned design for its apparently aborted ``Project
    Dragonfly'' Chinese search service, which would have logged search
    queries and tied them to users' verified identities. Twitter has also
    been the center of recent anxieties following a wave of account
    suspensions affecting Chinese users shortly before the recent Tiananmen
    anniversary on June 4. (The company has said that these were
    accidental.)
        Numerous recent reports have also highlighted American investments
    in Chinese surveillance firms.

        https://www.ft.com/content/36b4cb42-50f3-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626294

        https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/06/google-and-the-
    ethics-of-business-in-china

        https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/us-money-funding-
    facial-recognition-sensetime-megvii

        U.S. banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are also
    supporting Chinese tech companies more generally with large loans.
    Although the firms in question like Bytedance are not directly involved
    in abuses in Xinjiang, they, like any Chinese company in their
    position, would be required to cooperate with censorship and
    surveillance of users.

        Question. What role does Congress have in prohibiting these U.S.
    companies from doing business with Chinese security services?

        Answer. The financial and technological stakes are high enough to
    make restraint or self-regulation by industry unreliable at best. Any
    controls imposed by the executive branch might be traded away to serve
    other ends, given the current administration's evident lack of concern
    for underlying rights issues. Congress therefore seems the most likely
    source of robust, durable restrictions.

        Question. Should we require the State Department to publish a list
    of problematic Chinese companies who are aiding in the government's
    crackdown on human rights?

        Answer. ``Aiding in the government's crackdown of human rights''
    might be too broad: any Chinese tech company could be forced to censor
    content or provide details of users' activity on their platforms, for
    example. Narrower criteria such as direct provision of surveillance
    hardware or software to authorities in Xinjiang might both be more
    practical and provide a basis for more focused, effective policy. As
    with the dual-use AI research problem noted above, the situation is
    complicated by the entanglement of political repression with legitimate
    law enforcement and urban management, which could make broader
    conditions for inclusion such as provision of surveillance systems to
    authorities across China impractical.
        In addition, the corporate landscape is fluid and opaque. With
    regard to Xinjiang, for example, facial recognition firm Megvii was
    reportedly not involved in the surveillance app examined by Human
    Rights Watch, despite the presence of its own code among that obtained
    by HRW. Sensetime sold off its share in a Xinjiang-based joint venture
    in April, but the move has been described as ``only symbolic'' and ``a
    fig leaf.'' It would be a considerable challenge to compile a list
    without false positives that would damage its credibility and loopholes
    that would undermine its effectiveness.

        Question. What additional steps can the U.S. government take to
    ensure that technology does not fall into the wrong hands or shape how
    China uses such forms of digital authoritarianism?

        Answer. One important step would be to lead by example. American
    surveillance technologies are widely used in dubious ways at home, and
    widely sold to dubious regimes abroad. Particularly in the current
    climate, this undermines the credibility of concerns about or measures
    against Chinese surveillance, both at home and abroad. In addition, the
    sale of U.S. surveillance technology to third countries increases its
    exposure to possible Chinese acquisition and reverse-engineering.
        Another crucial step will be provide FBI and other intelligence
    agencies more resources and high priority to gather intelligence on
    such harmful technology transfer, and more responsive to human rights
    organizations' credit reports on those issues.
                                 civil society
        It comes as no surprise that the Chinese government harasses
    activists and dissidents who wish to commemorate the June 4
    anniversary. The Chinese government also uses vague national security
    legislation to ensure that civil society doesn't work on sensitive
    topics such as human rights and democracy, closing the space for any
    work to be done inside the country.

        Question. How can we help promote and partner with civil society
    inside of China?

        Answer. The Chinese government has stepped up severely on cracking
    down civili society in China in the past 6 years. One thing the U.S.
    government can do is put some funding to support programs aiming at
    hundreds of thousands of Chinese students who are studying outside of
    China, especially in America.
                                   falun gong
        While we have rightfully been focused on the plight of the Uyghurs
    in recent months, the Falun Gong continue to experience systematic
    persecution at the hands of the Chinese government.

        Question. In your view, how should this administration be
    addressing the human rights violations perpetrated against the Falun
    Gong?

        Answer. The persecution on Falun Gong should be always included in
    the list of human rights violations, particularly on religious
    persecutions and being raised to Chinese government by US government in
    all appropriate occasions.

        Question. Should we be encouraging the administration to consider
    using Global Magnitsky sanctions against those individuals who are
    credibly alleged to be responsible for the persecution of the Falun
    Gong?

        Answer. Yes, definitely.
                                 great firewall
        For China to change for the better it is clear that it will be up
    to the Chinese people to better understand and challenge their
    government's human rights practices. For example, the Tibetan people
    have resisted peacefully to the Chinese government oppression for
    decades. Yet all information about China's repression of the Tibetans
    is censored by the Communist Party.

        Question. Do you think the Chinese people appreciate the increasing
    discrimination suffered by Tibetans?

        Answer. In general, not much. Chinese people are by large unaware
    of the increasing discrimination suffered by Tibetans. Not only lack of
    related information (they are all suppressed by Chinese censors) , but
    also on going propaganda about how Tibetans are ``enjoying'' their
    ``good life'' Brough by Han Chinese also enhanced this ignorance and
    prejudice about Tibetans among Chinese people. Fundamentally, this is
    due to the information censorship and lack of public debate on those
    issues. Chinese people are not aware.

        Question. How does the ``Great Firewall'' function to suppress the
    free-flow of information in China? What can be done to alter that
    situation?

        Answer. ``Great Firewall'' is a computational algorithms and
    infrastructure which monitoring, filtering and blocking unwanted
    websites outside of China from Chinese internet users. It can be
    circumvented by anti-blocking technology--commonly knows as Proxy or
    VPN-like technology - and there are large number of Chinese users
    (potentially tens of millions) are willing to use such technology to
    circumvent the Great Firewall. Therefore, if US government increase
    amount of funding in annual Internet freedom bill, and year-marked some
    amount on China, it will guarantee effective institutional efforts to
    develop anti-blocking technology to keep up in this arms-race. The
    current funding and China portion is simply not adequate. This not to
    completely undermine the Great Firewall, of which Chinese government
    invested in billions of dollars to keep it up hand, but still can
    effectively mitigate its impact and serve millions, potentially tens of
    millions of Chinese users freer flow of information.
                                   __________

         Responses of Mr. Christopher Walker to Questions Submitted by
                            Senator Robert Menendez

                      accountability for tiananmen square

        Question. How can we help ensure accountability and justice for the
    Tiananmen Mothers and others who lost family and friends thirty years
    ago? What additional measures can we take to assure June 4 will not be
    erased from history?

        Answer. A crucial aspect of ensuring accountability and justice for
    the Tiananmen Mothers and others who lost family and friends 30 years
    ago is to make certain, first and foremost, that the Chinese
    authorities are not successful in their efforts to erase the massacre
    from collective memory. In this regard, the stakes are growing as
    Beijing improves its capabilities in modernizing censorship. As scholar
    Glenn Tiffert's work has shown, the CCP is actively working to censor
    the digitized archives of Chinese periodicals, books, documentary
    collections, and other historical sources. American universities, as
    well as universities in other free societies, have a vital role to play
    in cataloging and resisting this censorship to preserve the historical
    record of this period for Chinese and foreign scholars. More
    fundamentally, given the concerted effort of the Chinse authorities to
    suppress independent information it is important to promote the
    consistent flow of information about the Tiananmen massacre within, as
    well as outside of, China.
                              digital surveillance
        Thirty years ago, the world was shocked when the Chinese Communist
    Party used tanks and the full force of the military to quash the pro-
    democracy movement. Today, they don't need to send in tanks. In
    Xinjiang they've amassed a massive surveillance state that looks like
    it came out of a George Orwell novel. Where people live in fear and
    under constant surveillance. Where technology allows the Chinese
    government to collect data and aggregate people if they are so-called
    ``threats'' to the Party, permitting the government to arbitrarily
    detain more than a million Uyghurs in concentration camps.

        Question. What do we know about the Chinese government's use of
    surveillance technology to suppress human rights in Xinjiang and
    elsewhere in China?

        Answer. The CCP has created a massive, centralized surveillance
    system within the Uyghur region, using biometric data, a network of
    cameras, and facial recognition AI to monitor, intimidate, and suppress
    the Uyghur and other minority populations. Authorities in the region
    have access to detailed information about the people they oversee, from
    their blood type to their cell phone and electricity usage, information
    that police today can access in real time, or close to it. This
    information is then used to harass and often detain people for legal
    activities that the government may deem suspicious. Apart from enabling
    the imprisonment of millions of members of ethnic minorities in
    reeducation camps, this pervasive surveillance also creates an
    atmosphere of fear, where people assume that the authorities are
    constantly watching, in both private and public spaces, both online and
    offline. There is reason to believe that the tech-animated surveillance
    that the CCP has put into place in the Uyghur region is part of a
    wider, iterative process of high-tech surveillance development that has
    nationwide implications.

        Question. What role have U.S. companies played in providing China
    with such technology?

        Answer. [No response received]

        Question. What role does Congress have in prohibiting these U.S.
    companies from doing business with Chinese security services?

        Answer. [No response received]

        Question. Should we require the State Department to publish a list
    of problematic Chinese companies who are aiding in the government's
    crackdown of human rights?

        Answer. [No response received]

        Question. What additional steps can the U.S. government take to
    ensure that technology does not fall into the wrong hands or shape how
    China uses such forms of digital authoritarianism?

        Answer. [No response received]
                                 civil society
        It comes as no surprise that the Chinese government harasses
    activists and dissidents who wish to commemorate the June 4
    anniversary. The Chinese government also uses vague national security
    legislation to ensure that civil society doesn't work on sensitive
    topics such as human rights and democracy, closing the space for any
    work to be done inside the country.

        Question. How can we help promote and partner with civil society
    inside of China?

        Answer. As I noted in my written statement, at a fundamental level,
    any response to this global challenge to democracy presented by China's
    rise also needs to consider the essential importance of democratic
    development in China itself. In this regard, it is essential that the
    democracies continue to support people and organizations that can help
    enhance transparency, accountability, and human rights within China.
                                   falun gong
        While we have rightfully been focused on the plight of the Uyghurs
    in recent months, the Falun Gong continue to experience systematic
    persecution at the hands of the Chinese government.

        Question. In your view, how should this administration be
    addressing the human rights violations perpetrated against the Falun
    Gong?

        Answer. [No response received]

        Question. Should we be encouraging the administration to consider
    using Global Magnitsky sanctions against those individuals who are
    credibly alleged to be responsible for the persecution of the Falun
    Gong?

        Answer. [No response received]
                                   __________

              Material Submitted for the Record by Senator Markey:
                            tter to Secretary Pompeo

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