[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
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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
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]