[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 94 (Monday, June 24, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H6699-H6706]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MOST-FAVORED-NATION STATUS WITH CHINA, AND INTRODUCING LEGISLATION TO
PROTECT AMERICAN PATENTS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Funderburk). Under the Speaker's
announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr.
Rohrabacher) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the
majority leader.
Tribute to the Late Honorable Bill Emerson
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I join my colleagues in remembering the
gentleman from Missouri, Bill Emerson, a decent, hardworking man who
made great contributions not only to this body, not only to our
country, but to the cause of a humane and decent world. We will
remember him. He made major contributions to this legislative body.
Mr. Speaker, today I will be discussing something that goes to the
heart and soul of a moral society, a decision that we will soon make
about most-favored-nation status with China. Then, after a brief
discussion on most-favored-nation status with China, in which the
gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Wolf] will participate, I will give a
longer presentation on a bill that will be introduced shortly on the
floor of the House dealing with the American patent system and major
changes that are being made in our patent system.
First, Mr. Speaker, let me say that as we move forward to the day
when Congress will be considering most-favored-nation status for China,
we must recall that this happens every year. Every year we are told
that we must grant most-favored-nation status for the Communist Chinese
because it will help them evolve.
The justification for not treating the Communist dictatorship like
any other democratic nation, for example, like
[[Page H6700]]
Canada, the evidence for not doing this is overwhelming. Unfortunately,
it is not strong enough to overwhelm the dreams of prophets, the
glimmer in the eyes of American capitalists and international corporate
elites. Up until now they have been able to win the day by claiming
that our economic interaction with this brutal, genocidal dictatorship
on the mainland of China will help it evolve into a freer, less
repressive society. But by now it should be clear to everyone that
China is not becoming a freer, less repressive society.
We keep granting most-favored-nation status, we keep having more
international and economic interaction. Yet the Red Chinese regime, the
last major Communist regime in the world, is becoming more belligerent,
more repressive, and more contrary. It is becoming more contrary to the
economic and moral interests of our people to continue this trading
relationship that we have developed that is, as I say, the same as a
trading relationship we would have with Canada or a democratic country.
The gentleman from Texas, Dick Armey, said something that I have
heard him say many times, and there really is some truth in it. I like
to steal phrases from the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Armey], which he
knows. Plagiarism in this case is a form of flattery. Mr. Armey said
insanity is doing more of the same but expecting to get different
results.
Mr. Speaker, if we use this as our guide to our relations to most-
favored-nation status relations with China, our policy is insane,
because we continue to have the same policy of granting favorable
economic status, as favorable as any other country in the world, but
yet the situation continues to get worse. Economically, just
economically, if we just judge it on that basis alone, they are the
most protectionist regime of any that we are trading with.
Yes, Mr. Speaker, they are permitted to flood our markets with their
goods, putting millions upon millions of U.S. citizens out of work,
while they protect their own domestic markets with huge tariffs,
tariffs that can be 40 percent and 50 percent tariffs.
What does that do? That means that in traditional economic terms, and
those of us who do believe in free trade, and I happen to believe in
free trade between free people, but when we take the equation the way
the Chinese are having trade, they fought flood our market, and when
economics would mandate, then those people laid off in our country
would go to work for those factories that are now producing goods to
sell in China, and what do we find out? We cannot sell our goods in
China because they will not let our people go over and sell the washing
machines and appliances because they have a protective tariff. They are
protecting their own domestic industry.
If America wants to invest in creating new factories over there so
that our laid-off workers or unemployed citizens continue to be laid
off and continue to be unemployed, that is okay with them. In other
words, the Red Chinese are manupulating the system, and we have
permitted them to do so, knowingly permitted them to do so, and that
puts millions of our own people out of work, and benefits them to the
tune of tens of billions of dollars of hard currency every year.
There are a few companies here that benefit from the trading
relationship. Do not get me wrong. Aerospace, which is a very big
industry in my own area, in my own congressional district, does
benefit. So do those who are selling raw materials and food. It is just
that everybody else except those in aerospace or those selling raw
materials and food, not everybody else but large numbers of people in
our society, are actually being hurt dramatically and losing jobs. I
happen to believe there are more jobs being lost in our economic
relationship with China than there are being created.
Who is losing? Regular working people. Who are really the main people
who gain? A lot o people in the international financial community and
the corporate elite. Basically, the Chinese continue economically in
this relationship to basically serve themselves, but our government is
not protecting the interests of our people while they potect the
interests of theirs.
The Chinese blatantly steal American technology, and over and over
again what do we do? We accept their word. They sign a little piece of
paper with a bunch of scribbling on it, and then we accept their word,
OK, we will not bring down sanctions on you this year because you have
signed this piece of paper. Then we act surprised again as it becomes
close to the time to debate most-favored-nation status to find that
there has been a wholesale violation of all the agreements they have
made.
We have had negotiating in the interests of the American people by
people who are not committed to the welfare and best interests of the
American people. Instead, we have had people who seem to be interested
in a global concept of trade and commerce, and China has to be part of
this. With that excuse we find Americans being thrown out of work, and
our standard of living is slowly but surely edging down. At the same
time, they steal our technology, they steal our intellectual property
rights and use it against us.
Of course, what are they doing with these tens of billions of dollars
in hard currency that we permit them to make every year? That is a
conscious decision that we are making, to permit them to make every
year? That is a conscious decision that we are making, to permit the
rules of the game to be that they are going to have all of these extra
tens of billions of dollars. What are they doing? They are building up
a powerful military that is currently being used to threaten their
neighbors. And someday, if the United States gets in the way, those
weapons will kill American citizens, America's defenders. What will
they be killed with? With technology they have stolen from us, and
billions of dollars of hard currency that we have permitted them to
make as profit in an unfair trading relationship between our two
countires.
One last economic issue. Why do people want to have most-favored-
nation status? Why do big businesses want to have most-favored-nation
status? They could still officially sell their products over in China
and other countries that do not have most-favored-nation status. The
real reason behind this, the underlying reason, if you have most-
favored-nation status with China, companies can get, how about it,
government guarantees of their investments in this dictatorship. You
can have the Export-Import Bank and OPIC and the World Bank and all of
these financial institutions, which actually get their money from good
old U.S. tazpayers, those taxpayers end up subsidizing, let us say
guaranteeing, the loan for somebody who is going to do business in
China.
I will give Members one big example. This is mind-boggling. There is
a $30 billion public works program that they want to build in China to
provide electricity, called the Three Gorges Dam project. We have
people in here who said we have to support the Three Gorges Dam project
because that means jobs in the United States. The Chinese want us, the
Western bankers and American taxpayers, to guarantee these loans to
provide the $30 billion to build this big dam project.
What are they going to do with their own $30 billion? The Chinese
want to use their own $30 billion to build weapons so that someday, if
the United States ever gets in their way, they can take care of our
military. They want to spend their money on weapons to destroy people
and to bully their neighbors, but they want us to provide the loans and
the guarantees for those loans so they can build their great public
works project. And what are we getting in return? Caterpillar is going
to be able to sell their bulldozers, rather than having Japanese
bulldozers down there.
Let me just say this, Mr. Speaker. For those people who think that is
a good way to create jobs, would it not be better for us to spend $30
billion and rebuild our own infrastructure and use those bulldozers,
those caterpillars, here across the United States to rebuild our
drainage systems and our sewer systems that are going kaput, the
bridges that are about to fall down? That makes a lot more sense than
spending $30 billion to bolster a Communist regime in hopes that they
may evolve into more liberal, wonderful, beautiful people, just like
the elite that runs our country.
No, we should be thinking about the interests of the American people.
That should be the basis of our negotiations. One of our problems is we
have been sending the likes of Peewee Herman
[[Page H6701]]
over to do our negotiations when we should be using Arnold
Schwarzenegger.
One last area in terms of most-favored-nation status. That is the
following. It is not just an economic decision. It is not just a
strategic decision for the United States in terms of the military. It
is also a moral decision that goes to the heart of the United States of
America: What do we stand for?
Next week we will recess in order to celebrate the Fourth of July,
when our Founding Fathers proclaimed that every individual has certain
rights and those rights are granted by God. The Declaration of
Independence was not just a declaration that we were no longer going to
be under British tyranny, and it was not just a declaration that we
would have democracy here. It was a declaration of the rights of the
individual, and that no government has legitimate rights unless they
receive them from the consent of the governed. It was a proclamation
saying America will be a different kind of land, a different kind of
country, and we would be a shining beacon of hope to the world and to
the oppressed. Wherever they are, they can see there will be hope as
long as the United States stands true to its principles.
In this case, that is what we will be discussing, most-favored-nation
status, right after we celebrate the Fourth of July. But the human
rights violations and the tyranny on mainland China would tell us our
Founding Fathers would roll over in their grave if they thought that we
would have the same type of relations with this type of vicious
dictatorship as we do with other democracies in the world.
The gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Wolf], who has been stalwart in the
battle for human rights, has cataloged many of the abuses that the
people of China have had to endure. I yield to the gentleman from
Virginia so he can share with us some of the things that are going in
China today.
Mr. WOLF. I will, and I appreciate the gentleman taking out this
special order, Mr. Speaker. I think he is absolutely right. This is,
whether we like it or not, a fundamental moral issue, perhaps the
overriding one internationally that this Congress will have to address.
As the gentleman said with regard to human rights, as we vote on this
issue, we should think of several things: There are more slave labor
camps in China today than there were in the Soviet Union, and we all
remember Solzhenitzen's book, Gulag Archipelago. I was in one of those
camps, Perm Camp 35, with the gentleman from New Jersey, Chris Smith.
They are very grim places. And yet Members should know, the world and
the body should know, that there are more slave labor camps in China
than there were in the Soviet Union during the heyday of the Soviet
Union.
Second, there are more individuals in those gulags, slave labor
camps, logi camps, than there were in the Soviet Union. Also, they make
goods, they make supplies, they make socks; they make different items
like that for export to the United States, in competition with American
workers. As the gentleman from California [Mr. Rohrabacher] has said
many times, we lose more jobs than we gain.
The gentleman from New Jersey and I were in Beijing Prison No. 1,
where we saw a number of Tiananmen Square demonstrators working on
socks and plastic jelly shoes for export to the United States. They had
little golfer insignias on the side of the socks. What the gentleman
from California said is true. This is driving American jobs, and it is
also, I think, fundamentally a major moral issue: Do we want to
purchase the goods made with slave labor out of a gulag camp so we can
get a better buy? I think the American people are saying no.
Second, I think there is major fundamental religious persecution
going on in China, perhaps more than any other place in the world.
{time} 1515
Everyone should know, no one should say I did not know, that is why I
voted for MFN. Today, there are Catholic priests and Catholic bishops
in jail for worshipping and practicing their religious faith. Some have
been in jail for years, not 6 months, not 9 months, but for years.
There are also evangelicals who are in jail.
Almost every week Protestant house churches are raided and many times
the people are picked up, arrested and sent into the logais and the
slave labor camps and the gulags or in prison. so we have numerous,
both Catholic priests, Catholic bishops, and Protestant pastors
arrested and sent to jail.
We also know, and the gentleman I think mentioned it and knows as
well as anyone, Tibet has been plundered by the Communists in China.
They have abused and imprisoned and tortured Buddhist monks. They have
also done horrendous, horrible things to Buddhist nuns. They have
plundered Tibet, so we know what they have done. They are also now in
the process of persecuting those of the Moslem faith in certain
provinces in China.
So they have gone after the Catholic priests and bishops, they have
gone after the Protestant pastors, they have gone after the Buddhist
nuns and priests, and now they are going after the Moslems. So from a
religious persecution issue, this country is number one in persecuting
people.
Third, we know that they sell body parts. When they kill people in
their prisons, they line them up, and we have this on film if any
Member wants to see it, they line them up, they invite crowds to come
in to watch, they put pistols at the back of their heads, and they
shoot them, they fall to the ground.
Trucks and ambulances come and take them away. They take them to
hospitals and they take their kidneys out and their corneas out for
transplantation, for sale to people in the West, $35,000 per kidney. So
they have a major business of executing people, taking their corneas
out, taking their kidneys out for transplantation.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentleman, are any of
these people who are being shot, is there any evidence that they could
be just people who are advocating democracy?
Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I do not know. I do not know if they are or
not. We have pictures of them. It is hard to say why.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. But we do know that people have been executed in
China only for opposing the regime?
Mr. WOLF. Yes, we do know that.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. So we know that the Chinese dictatorship is willing
to execute someone simply for exercising what we consider to be our
rights as citizens and the rights of free people; we know that, and we
also know that they are engaged in a ghoulish enterprise of after
executing some prisoners, or executing prisoners in general, taking
from them their body parts and selling them on the world market?
Mr. WOLF. We know that for a fact, and we have pictures of it, taking
place as late as February of this year.
Last, before I get to the last one I would mention, we also know that
they were so barbaric that they were trying to sell AK-47's and
shoulder missiles to street gangs in L.A., near your area, which would
have been used to kill innocent people, and we also know that the
People's Liberation Army was behind this and the top leadership of
those companies are people who are connected to the leaders in Beijing.
I mean they were selling AK-47 weapons, assault weapons and also
shoulder missiles that could take a 747 aircraft down coming in at any
airport.
Last, let me cover something with regard to human rights. In the
1980's, and I know the gentleman was in the Reagan White House in those
days, writing speeches for President Reagan. In the 1980's, the
gentleman knows that no Member of Congress would have ever come to the
floor of the House, no person in the Reagan administration would have
ever gotten up and said that we should have granted MFN to the Soviet
Union when Sakharov was under house arrest in Gorky and Scharansky was
in perm camp 35. No member of the administration, no Member of Congress
on either side would have ever been in support of granting MFN for
Russia, and now we see the granting of it for China.
My closing comment is, I would like to read to you a statement by
Elena Bonner, who was the wife of Sakharov on the MFN status in China.
Her marriage to Sakharov changed Elena's life. She took early
retirement as a disabled war veteran to devote herself to Sakharov. She
was Sakharov's ambassador to the world at large. She represented him at
the 1975 Nobel Peace
[[Page H6702]]
ceremony in Oslo. She reported on her visits into Italy and America,
was exiled in January 1980. She served as a sole link with Moscow and
the West until 1984, when she too was barred from leaving Gorky. In
August of 1994 she was tried by a Gorky court, found guilty of anti-
Soviet agitation and sentenced to exile. So I will submit her entire
bio for the Record at this point.
Elena Bonner--Biography
Elena Bonner was born on February 15, 1923, in Merv,
Tadjikistan. She grew up in the restless, cosmopolitan
atmosphere of the Hotel Luxe on Gorky Street, which lodged
important foreign Communists working in Moscow. Her father,
Gevork Alikhanov, was a prominent Armenian Communist and a
secretary of the Comintern, the ``general staff of the world
revolution.'' Her mother, Ruth Bonner, was born in Siberia in
1900, joined the Communist Party in 1924, and was dedicated
to bringing culture to the masses. Elena's childhood
sweetheart, Vsevolod Bagritsky, lived only a couple of blocks
away. (He was killed at the front in 1942, shortly before his
twentieth birthday.)
Elena's life as a Moscow schoolgirl ended abruptly when her
father was arrested in May 1937. Ruth moved with her two
children to her mother's apartment in Leningrad but did not
escape her fate. She was arrested later that year and
sentenced to hard labor as the wife of a traitor.
Elena became a proficient survivor. She finished high
school in Leningrad, volunteered as a nurse when war broke
out, was wounded twice, and was honorably discharged in 1945
as a lieutenant and a disabled veteran. After two years of
intensive treatment, the loss of vision caused by her wartime
injury was brought under control, and she enrolled in the
First Leningrad Medical Institute. After graduation, she
worked as a pediatrician, a district doctor, and a free-lance
author and editor. She married Ivan Semyonov, a classmate
from the medical school, and, ignoring warnings that
childbearing could endanger her life, gave birth to a
daughter, Tatiana, in 1950, and a son, Alexei, in 1956.
(Elena and Ivan separated in 1965).
She succeeded in reestablishing contact with her mother as
the war was drawing to a close. It was only in 1954, however,
that Ruth was exonerated, granted a special pension, and
informed that her husband died in confinement sometime in
1939. (It took another 52 years for the truth to be
revealed--four years after Ruth passed away, Elena gained
access to the KGB files and learned that her father was
executed in 1938.) Ruth was also assigned an apartment on
Chkalov Street, comfortable by Soviet standards. This
apartment became Elena's home and in 1971 it was here that
Andrei Sakharov moved in.
Elena paid her respect to the memory of Vsevolod Bagritsky
by putting together a book of his diaries, letters, and
poems, which was published in 1964. She mingled with the
generation of writers and artists who has been inspired by
the post-Stalin thaw, but she also helped prisoners and their
families. Elena met Andrei Sakharov in October 1970 when both
were attending the trial of human rights activities in
Kaluga. They got to know each other better in December while
defending Jews sentenced to death for attempting an escape
from the USSR in a hijacked plane. By August 1971 friendship
turned into love, and in January 1972 they formally
registered their marriage. The unlikely match between a
reserved Russian physicist and a scrappy, streetwise
Armenian-Jewish physician endured.
Her marriage to Sakharov changed Elena's life. She took
early retirement as a disabled war veteran and devoted
herself to Sakharov, serving as his chief of staff and
secretary as well as cook and bottle washer. She also became
Sakharov's ambassador to the world at large. She
represented him at the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in
Oslo; reported on her visits to Italy, France, and
America; and after his January 1980 exile, served as his
sole link with Moscow and the West until May 1984, when
she too was barred from leaving Gorky. In August 1984, she
was tried by a Gorky court, found guilty of ``anti-soviet
agitation'' and sentenced to exile. By then she already
had a serious heart condition and was in urgent need of
surgery.
In 1981 Elena and Andrei went on a successful hungerstrike
to secure the right for their daughter-in-law to join her
husband, their son Alexei, in the United States. But it took
three hungerstrikes by Sakharov, totalling almost 200 days,
for Elena to gain permission to travel to US in December 1985
for open heart surgery. She returned to Gorky in June 1986
with six bypasses, to Andrei and to indefinite exile. But a
love story deserves a happy ending--on December 15, 1986, a
telephone was installed in their Gorky apartment. The next
day it rang for the first time, and Mikhail Gorbachev
personally asked the Sakharovs to return to Moscow. They
arrived at the Chkalov Street apartment on December 23, 1986.
The curtain was raised for the next act.
Since Andrei Sakharov's death in December 1989, Elena
Bonner has continued the campaign for democracy and human
rights in Russia. She joined the defenders of the Russian
parliament during the attempted coup of August 1991, and lent
her support to Yeltsin during the constitutional crisis of
1993. She writes frequently for the Russian and American
press. She has campaigned tirelessly in defense of self-
determination for the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh and
for all the peoples of the former Soviet Union.
Dr. Bonner has published a number of books in the United
States and in Russia.
Dr. Bonner has two children and five grandchildren, all of
whom live in the United States and whom she comes to visit
from Moscow.
But this is what Dr. Bonner said in a letter to me the other day. She
said:
June 17, 1996.
I believe it is dangerous to grant the most favored nation
status to China, while mass-scale violations of human rights
are taking place there, confirmed by many authoritative
international human rights organizations.
The United States possesses only one real mechanism for
protection of human rights in other countries--granting or
not granting such status. There should be no double standards
in this issue and there should be no double standards for
protection of human rights no matter in which part of the
world.
More than 20 years ago Andrei Sakharov has addressed the
U.S. Congress with appeal to introduce the Jackson-Vanik
amendment and by doing this to confirm commitment of your
country to the human rights cause. Today, I dare to warn
American legislators against hasty refusal from the Jackson-
Vanik amendment. By giving up this amendment, the U.S.
Congress, in my mind, is going to lose completely its
influence on human rights situations in any part of the world
and will practically admit that protection of human rights is
no longer a matter of priority and a long-term goal of the
Congress and the U.S. people.
Elena Bonner.
So I think Doctor Elena Bonner has said it and said it well. I will
tell the gentleman too, if he looks at the surveys, the American people
are overwhelmingly against granting MFN to China. So while it may be a
close issue in the Congress and certainly gone, lost in the
administration, the American people agree with the position of the
gentleman.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. When the American people see their Congressmen over
the Fourth of July holiday, it would be actually a good moment to
remind the Member of Congress that we should be standing up for what
our forefathers believed in, these principles of freedom and individual
rights, that this country was going to be better than just some
conglomeration of people seeking profit and seeking monetary reward,
that we do indeed stand for freedom.
Before the gentleman leaves, I would like to mention one last story
on this particular issue. I agree with him wholeheartedly when he says
that no one could ever have gotten away during the cold war with
suggesting we will make Russia better, this dictatorship in Russia
better, by granting most-favored-nation status and transferring all of
our technology to Russia. No one would have ever dreamed of that.
Instead, we were strong and we were tough and when Ronald Reagan came
in, his tough stand helped end the cold war and bring a greater
potential for freedom and peace in the world than anyone had ever
dreamed. Well, during that time period, there was a hero of freedom
named Natan Scharansky. He was a Jewish man, a dissident in Russia who
was a champion of liberty, and he was arrested and thrown into the
gulag, and when we say the gulag, we are talking about the harshest of
prison conditions that Americans cannot even imagine. There he was,
struggling to survive in the gulag and his Communist captors said, all
he needed to do is sign this document admitting that you were lying
about the repression in the Soviet Union and admitting that you are
some kind of a spy or something, and we will let you go, and he refused
to do it. All he had to do was sign a piece of paper.
Eventually, his fame spread throughout the world. Here was indeed a
man, a lone individual, a champion of freedom standing up against a
totalitarian power, and all he had to do to end his suffering was to
sign his signature.
Well, eventually we traded him for a Russian spy. We actually sent a
Russian spy across a bridge and he went back another way, and when
Natan Scharansky came to the United States, he made his way to
Washington and to the White House where he met with President Reagan.
As a speech writer for President Reagan, I will never forget that day
because when he left the Oval Office, he met with the press corps and
the reporters asked him, ``What did you tell President Reagan?'' And
Natan Scharansky, this heroic individual,
[[Page H6703]]
said, ``I told him not to tone down his speeches,'' not to tone down
his speeches. He said, they were the only things. He said, I described
for them in the gulag, and he was describing for these reporters how in
the gulag, somebody smuggled in little pieces of paper that had Ronald
Reagan's words of one of his speeches on it, and he said, as long as I
knew that the President of the United States believed in these
principles, there was hope, and it gave me the hope to struggle on.
Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, this is such an
important point. Congressman Chris Smith and I visited the gulag that
Natan Scharansky was in. The fact is we hollered out that we were
Congressmen from the United States and we met with 21 of the men. In
fact, we interviewed, on camera, an interview with Natan Scharansky's
cell mate and that night, late into the night in the Ural Mountains in
this gulag, the men said, and I had forgotten it, but you triggered it,
the men said precisely what you said.
We gave the men Bibles and we started to ask them questions. All of
the men said they knew of the statements that Ronald Reagan had made,
and I do not understand how they got it in there, and it gave them hope
and encouragement and by us speaking out, by Ronald Reagan speaking
out, they were bold and solid.
The gentleman said to Natan Scharansky, when Natan Scharansky was
exchanged, Natan Scharansky was to walk across the Glienicke Bridge in
Berlin and the Communists told Natan Scharansky to walk straight. What
Scharansky did is he walked zigzag. He walked this way on the bridge
and that way on the bridge and that way on the bridge and that way on
the bridge, and he denied the Communists for the very reason that you
said, because we gave Scharansky and we gave his cell mate and we gave
those people hope.
The gentleman is exactly right. If we had the same type of rhetoric
coming out of the White House, the language that Ronald Reagan used, we
would solve this problem. The Chinese would stop persecuting
Christians, stop persecuting priests and ministers and Buddhist monks,
and you are exactly right.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. The gentleman would probably be interested in
knowing that the day after Scharansky met with Ronald Reagan, I was in
the Israeli Embassy at a reception honoring Scharansky, and through the
crowed, he was the honored guest, he walked straight toward me and he
came up to me and he said, I understand that you write Ronald Reagan's
speeches and I said yes, that is true, and he said, I have often
wondered who you are.
Well, he knew that some people were behind Ronald Reagan and working
with him to try to make sure that we took these bold stands and beat
back the bureaucracy and the elitists in every country that would say,
oh, do not make moral stands, do not make a stand of morality and a
stand for freedom because it will rock the boat. But he knew, ever as a
prisoner in the gulag, that I was there and other people were there.
Today it is the same thing. Although they do not know us by name,
they know that there are American people everywhere throughout our
country who believe in the cause that George Washington talked about on
the 4th of July, believe in what Thomas Jefferson was talking about and
James Madison and our Founding Fathers when they started a country on a
Declaration of Independence and a declaration that talked about the
individual rights that are a gift of God to all people.
Mr. WOLF. Can the gentleman imagine the feeling that would roll
through China if they found out that the United States House of
Representatives, the people's body, voted to deny them MFN? Can you
imagine how the dissidents would feel? Can you imagine how the
prisoners in the gulags in China would feel?
The gentleman is exactly right. I hope that we defeat MFN when it
comes here. I know they are going to get MFN because President Clinton
is going to give it to them, but if we defeat it, the gentleman is
right, the message that we will send through China to the dissidents
will be the same message of the 1980s.
Do you remember the rally that was held on the lawn from the Capitol
down to the Washington Monument on that Sunday for those of the Jewish
faith who had been persecuted? Do you remember the hundreds of
thousands that came? If we could not that for those who are suffering
in China, can you imagine the difference that it would make?
Mr. ROHRABACHER. If we had made that stand a few years ago instead of
heeding those naysayers who said, do not let the moral stand, we are
going to evolve China away, rather than making a tough stand, we would
probably right now be voting to grant most-favored-nation status to a
new and more democratic China.
Mr. WOLF. And I would be voting for it and the gentleman would be
voting for it and we would be pushing trade.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. That is correct. I thank the gentleman very much,
and I appreciate his jointing me.
The second issue that I would like to discuss today is also an issue
that deals with trade, interestingly enough, and the well-being of the
American people and the relationship with others, because I believe
what is pushing our most-favored-nation status with China at the
expense of the American people is the same thing that is motivating us
to destroy the American patent system.
I would like to ask a question. What was one of the first things that
Bill Clinton did after becoming elected President? The answer is, he
appointed Bruce Lehman as Commissioner of the Patent and Trademark
Office.
{time} 1530
What was one of the first things that Bruce Lehman did when he became
head of that office? He hightailed it to Japan and met and reached an
agreement with--this is an agreement that almost nobody knows about
outside a few people in Congress--Mr. Wataru Asou, the commissioner of
the Japanese patent office. They had a meeting with Mr. Lehman.
That is right. These two unelected officials entered into an
agreement which, if it holds, could change the face of the American
economy as we know it. It could effectively remove America, and I
predict will effectively remove America, from our economic predominance
in the world.
What is the intent of this agreement that I am talking about? Who
knows about this hushed-up agreement between the head of the patent
office in Japan and the Patent Office in the United States?
The purpose of this agreement is to harmonize the American patent
system to the Japanese system. Their intent is to take the best patent
system in the world, that of the United States of America, the patent
system that has offered the strongest patent protection of any country
in the world, and in the name of global and Japanese harmonization of
law, convert it into a mirror image of a system in Japan that has
stifled innovation and creativity and kept the Japanese people under
the heel of their economic elite.
The Japanese system benefits large conglomerates. They crush any
creative attempts by individual inventors. The Japanese system, which
they are now trying--and, remember this, they want our law to be
exactly like the Japanese law, and they are moving to change it, to
superimpose that law on us--the Japanese system is so slow that it
takes many years to grant a patent at great expense of the applicant.
Turning abuse into injury, the Japanese publish every patent
application in 18 months. By the time the patent is issued, years
later, a phenomenon known as patent flooding has already occurred.
What is patent flooding? We are going to know all about that, because
we are changing our law to be exactly like their law. That is when
patents very similar to the original idea flood the patent office,
slowing the whole process and rendering the original application almost
valueless, unless of course it is a huge corporation or a fabulously
wealthy inventor who can defend himself. Even then it makes the process
much more expensive.
Where did the patent flooders get the information, in Japan to flood
the patent office? The information, by the way, was just in the
inventor's original patent application that had to be published after
18 months.
By the way, under our system traditionally when you file for a
patent, until you are granted that patent, it is
[[Page H6704]]
a secret. Nobody knows. Thus an inventor has the incentive to invent
things and to make an application for a patent and it is protected.
Americans have always been the innovators of the world because we
have had this system. Our patent system supports innovation. The
Japanese, however, have been copiers and their patent system supports
copying. The proof of this, and it is glaring, the United States has
175 of the world's Nobel laureates in science and technology. Japan has
just five.
Why would we want to change our system to make it more like their
system? Global harmonization is the answer. That is what we are being
told, although there are other excuses, but that is the main one, that
we need to globalize all the rules of the game so we can have a global
economy, and gutting the American patent system is the first step
towards globalizing us with the rest of the world.
Does it makes sense to everyone that we should just globalize our
economy, even if it means gutting rights that have been inbred into our
system for 200 years, that our Founding Fathers thought were
sacrosanct? First let us recognize that the strongest advocates of a
global market are not the advocates of free markets at home. Once the
authority to regulate a global market is empowered, it will be too
late.
We do not appreciate most of the important things in our lives until
we are on the verge of losing them. Americans will find that freedom in
the economic arena has everything to do with controlling one's own
destiny and determining one's own life. But the regulators of this
global market on a worldwide scale will have little or no regard for
the desires of ordinary Americans.
The global market will be regulated by a new set of managers. It will
be the arrogance of officialdom times 10. Huge multinational
corporations may be able to thrive in such an environment, but
individual citizens and small business will not. They will see what
they have considered their rights as an American evaporate.
There are those who believe that globalizing is good for America, and
we understand that participation in the world trading system is
essential for our economic well-being. I certainly believe in trade. As
I say, I believe in free trade between free people. But we cannot
sacrifice the rights of our people or especially destroy our innovative
process to achieve this goal.
What has been the factor that has given America the strength in the
economic marketplace to maintain a high standard of living for our
people even though many people overseas receive much less money in pay?
It has been our technological genius and our innovation. That is what
has permitted us to succeed and our people to prosper. What is being
proposed is the sacrifice of the rights of Americans, the sacrifice of
our future, of the standard of living of our people, all in the name of
globalism and harmonization.
Megabusiness, however, has a different approach. The cartels have no
loyalty to the American people, and that is us. We are talking about us
here. Those huge multinational conglomerates are profitmotivated and
that is it. They now have a dream that they can maximize profits
throughout the world and help trade flow through a global economy. The
first step, however, in achieving that is putting the American people
in their place. That means a lower standard of living, that means fewer
rights, that means the individual no longer has the protections that
the individual has had in the past. Phase one of this assault on
America is the assault on America's technological rights because that
is what has given us as Americans our leverage, our ability to ensure
our freedom and to build a high standard of living for our people. The
first step in this organized strategy to destroy our patent system was
snuck into the GATT implementation legislation we passed about a year
and a half ago. We accepted a fast-track system to pass the GATT
implementation legislation because we were promised that nothing would
be put into this legislation except that which was mandated by the GATT
agreement itself. However, dramatic changes in the patent term were
snuck into that legislation even though the position on patents in GATT
just simply suggested that the patent term should be no less than 20
years from date of filing, which means, if one reads that, that we need
not change America's current patent system. But they put the massive
change--that may seem hard to understand but it will have incredible
results--into the GATT implementation legislation. What did it do?
Basically it eliminated the 17-year guaranteed patent term.
A patent term, let me note, has been a right. A guaranteed number of
years as a patent term has been the right of Americans since 1790,
since the establishment of our Constitution. A patent office is
actually in our Constitution. The implementing legislation created an
uncertain patent term. We then took a guaranteed patent term and
exchanged it in that implementation legislation for an uncertain patent
term which dates 20 years from the date of application. That means, in
the new system, and, by the way, the new system is nothing more than
the Japanese system superimposed on us. It is much different than our
past system and it is hard to understand but under the new code, the
day the inventor files for a patent, 20 years later, his time is up. He
has no more rights, he or she has no more rights to ownership of that
patent. If it took 10 years for a patent to be issued in the past, the
inventor still had a guaranteed term of 17 years. Under the new system,
however, if it takes 10 years for a patent to issue, half of the
inventor's patent term has been eaten up, it is gone, he or she will
never get it back, and the clock continues to tick against the
inventor, not against the bureaucracy. Every second that ticks is
against the inventor. Anyone who has studied the process knows that it
is not unusual for a breakthrough technology, and these are the
innovations that changed the world, innovations like the airplane and
the microprocessor and many others. I will explain a couple of those in
a moment.
Polyurethane plastic, by the way, which has changed our life, it took
33 years for the inventor to receive his patent. It took 17 years for
the microprocessor and 21 years for the laser to receive their patent.
These patents will determine the flow of tens of billions, if not
hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of wealth. By making sure that
they now receive almost no protection, because the new system would
offer them almost no protection, it has changed the flow of wealth in
the world.
What does it mean when the clock is ticking against the inventor? It
means the bureaucracy and special interests have leverage on the
inventor, because he wants some reward for his creative invention.
During the negotiations which are part of the patent granting
process, the inventor, just like in Japan, will end up being ground
down because now he or she is vulnerable. If a patent can be delayed,
what does it mean? If they can delay the patent or shorten the time
when the patent is actually in effect because he now only has half of
his patent term because the rest has been eaten away, it means that
those royalties that were once going into the bank accounts of American
inventors, royalties from basically technologies that were created by
Americans, those royalties will now be in the bank accounts of huge
domestic and multinational corporations. These people will not be able
to control their technology. To claim stolen royalties or to reclaim
control over one's technology after these huge corporate and
multinational interests have taken the technology, the individual
American will have to pay lawyers and legal specialists to go to court.
Have you got that? That is the little inventor in the United States
versus Toshiba. Where do you think we are going to get on that? The
little guy gets ground down, just like the Japanese people have been
ground down over the years, now those same corporate interests will be
here in our country grinding down our people. The Wright Brothers will
be smashed by the Toshibas and the Sonys of the world and the aerospace
workers that should be producing the aerospace technologies of the
future may well not be American aerospace workers. Our people will be
impoverished.
This system, which our Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman wants
American law to emulate, has ill-served the Japanese people. Little, if
any, innovation is born in Japan and few, if any, inventions start
there. The Japanese, as I say, are rightfully known as copiers and
improvers, and that is fine,
[[Page H6705]]
they do a good job at that, but they are not innovators and inventors.
Their laws, which Bruce Lehman wants America to emulate, have permitted
powerful business conglomerates to run roughshod over their people.
Their people have been beaten down. Anyone who raises their head gets
beaten down over there. Now those same interests will have that same
kind of leverage over American inventors. After successfully beginning
this harmonization through the legislative maneuver which, as I said,
went through the GATT implementation legislation, basically they got
step No. 1, which is eliminating the guaranteed patent term for
American inventors.
But, now, we see step No. 2. Step No. 2 happens to be authored, it is
H.R. 3460, the Moorhead-Schroeder Patent Act which I call the Steal
American Technologies Act. What this legislation does is finish the job
of harmonizing our law like that of Japan's. In our country, the rights
of the individual are paramount and these patent laws were meant to
protect individual property rights. Basically, these individual
property rights would be respected by our Government just as other
property rights, of small farmers and businessmen and others who own
property in our country, and this system of private property for the
individual has worked well. We believe it is through individual
endeavor and personal responsibility that someone prospers and when
individuals as a whole population act in that way, the whole society
prospers. Lehman's approach treats individuals as secondary, sort of as
ants in a collective hole who, if they insist on rights for themselves,
will be crushed.
{time} 1545
Of course, those trying to challenge our system will never admit
this. The change is coming not as part of a major debate in our
democratic process, but I believe these changes are coming, they are
trying to sneak these changes through, hoping that none of us will
never understand the complexities of patent law. Well, when one can
force the advocates of these patent changes to engage, they claim their
goal is not destroying the American traditional patent system, but
instead they are going to solve a problem which they call, well, it is
called the submarine patent problem. What is that? They believe some
inventors, certainly a few self-serving inventors, may have been able
to elongate the process in which their patent application was being
considered; thus, if they put off the issuing date of their patent,
they will have a guaranteed 17 years of patent. That means that some
inventors will enjoy some royalty benefits in the outyears when, you
know, if they had not gamed the system, they would have been receiving
those royalties in the outyears. They would be receiving them in the
in-years and perhaps after a length of time, certain technologies are
more valuable.
Well, making things worse, according to the other side, let us say
someone games the system for 10 years. Some other companies may have
decided to use that technology, which they have discovered
independently, in some of their own products and then when the
submariner finally allows his patent to be issued, well, then those
other companies have to pay that submarine patenter a certain royalty.
Now, this is all very confusing. But the fact is we are talking about
less than 1 percent of all patents where people are actually able just
to prevent their patent, through gaming the process, from being issued
right away. And I agree, that is not something we should tolerate, but
it is not something that will in any way justify, basically, the
elimination of the guaranteed patent term and the obliteration of the
patent system in the United States and replacing it with a Japanese
system.
The vast majority of all patent applicants, more than 99 percent, are
doing everything in their power to get their patent issued. They are
not submariners. They beg, they plead, please issue my patent, because
that is when they know they can start earning their rewards. And if
they delay, what is going to happen? They know if they delay their
patent being issued, new technologies might come up and make their
patent worthless. But there are a few submarine patenters, and they are
a minuscule part of the system, and this problem can and will be dealt
with and should be dealt with by patent examiners and by using the
patent system as it is today, rather than eliminating the patent system
and eliminating the guaranteed rights of Americans.
My bill, in fact, includes a provision that we publish the
application of any inventor who uses a continuance to intentionally
delay the process. Over and over again in the year and a half that I
have pushed this issue, I have offered to put many changes into law
that will curb submarine patents as long as those changes did not
eliminate the guaranteed patent term. But the other side never would
come up with a suggestion except, oh, I am sorry, this is the problem,
so we have to eliminate the guaranteed patent term. I was willing to
compromise in any way just so long as you get those submarine
patenters. There are a few of them out there.
You know, sometimes when someone is unwilling to compromise and make
a change like that, you maybe get the feeling that perhaps his real
target was eliminating the guaranteed patent term and not correcting
some minor problem, the submarine patent. Well, interestingly enough,
there is a system in place in the Patent Office called the patent
application and monitoring system, the P-A-L-M, the PALM system, which
can and does print out the status of all pending applications in the
Patent Office monthly, and if a patent has an unusual term of waiting,
if an application is judged to be special by the Commissioner, he has
the right to publish the application at any time. And this is in
existing law. Thus it is already possible to solve the submarine
patent. It is already solved. But this is being used as an excuse to
destroy the guaranteed patent term in the United States of America.
Well, history will judge their motives, but those claiming to end the
submarine patent as their goal have refused every other method except
eliminating the guaranteed patent term.
By the way, this move to harmonize our laws with Japan happened long
before anyone had ever heard of the word ``submarine'' patent and this
whole idea of eliminating the guaranteed patent was part of that
harmonization process.
During the debate, Mr. Lehman has used the bogeyman of the submarine
patents, and when we have checked his figures, we have found that many
of the patents he claimed to be submarine patents, again, this is the
excuse they are using to destroy our patent system, when we checked out
the submarine patents, we found many of them had not been issued
because the Defense Department had said this is a security risk, we
have to keep these particular technologies secret.
You can imagine what secrets will be made available to America's
enemies if we just publish all of our patent applications after 18
months.
My bill, H.R. 359, would restore the guaranteed patent term of 17
years and facilitate the action against those who are trying to
manipulate the system and delay the issuance of their patent. I am
offering this as a substitute to H.R. 3460, a bill which, as I say, is
the next step in totally harmonizing our law with Japan. H.R. 3460,
which I call the Steal American Technologies Act, better than anything
else demonstrates what really is going on because it is understandable
and its goals are easy for regular working people to understant what is
happening.
One of the provisions was introduced last year under a bill entitled
the ``Patent Application Publication Act.'' This bill is now part of
H.R. 3460 and is titled ``Early Publication of Patent Applications.''
The title is self-explanatory. That provision in this bill--hold on to
your hats--mandates that after 18 months every American patent
application, just like in Japan, whether it has been issued or not,
will be published for the entire world to see. Every thief, every
brigand, every pirate, every multinational corporation, every Asian
copycat will be handed the details of every patent application. Our
newest and most creative ideas will be outlined for them, for the
thieves of the world, even before the patent has been issued to the
American citizen.
It is an invitation for every thief in the world to steal American
technology. Lines will form at the copy machines and the fax machines
to get this information out to America's worst enemies and our fiercest
competitors.
[[Page H6706]]
H.R. 3460 is entitled as I say, the ``Moorhead-Schroeder Patent
Act.'' The author of the bill suggests that we need not worry about an
abrupt early publication of patent applications if domestic or foreign
or multinational corporations steal the ideas; the patent applicants,
once he or she gets the patent issued, can sue the pirates. Like I say,
it is Toshiba versus John Q. American citizen. The price tag on this
simple infringement suit, by the way, is a quarter of a million
dollars, a quarter of a million dollars for just an uncomplicated suit.
Our citizens who will be up against Toshiba, Sony, and even the Chinese
People's Liberation Army, which is engaged in stealing our technology.
As this bill was being passed through subcommittee, I was in my
office with the president of a medium-sized solar energy corporation.
When I asked what would happen if this provision became law, he
clenched his fist and angrily predicted his Asian competitors would be
manufacturing his new technology before his patent was issued, and they
would use the profit from selling his new technology to defeat any
court challenge that they had and destroy his company. On top of that,
his overseas competitors would have a further advantage in the fact
that they would never have had to invest in research and development to
get the new technology they were benefiting from.
This is a nightmare that faces every small- and medium-sized company.
Anyone who cannot afford a stable of expensive lawyers is at the mercy
of the worst thieves of the world. The big guys have the contacts
overseas and the money to divert and deter such thievery, but it is
open season on the little guys, on the average Americans. Of course, we
will do everything we can to prevent this bill, but what is their goal?
They say we have to do everything, we have to go, we have to destroy
the American patent system, we have to make all of our technological
secrets known to the world in order to protect us from submarine
patents. Because a few people want to elongate the system on their
patent and they will get 5 or 10 years more protection here, a few
Americans, so we have to open up our system to this type of massive
theft. I would suggest that maybe we should think about the arguments
about the submarine patent argument.
What they are telling us, it is sort of like you are going in to your
doctor and saying, doctor, I got a hang nail here on this toe and it is
really hurting me. The doctor says, I really am opposed to hang nails.
Those hang nails are terrible and we are going to solve your problem.
We are going to cut your leg off, we are going to amputate your leg.
No, no, doctor, please. I just got this little hang nail down here.
He says, I bleed for you, and he goes into a big lecture on hang nails,
and at the end of it he says, well, we are going to cut your leg off.
Well, if your doctor is telling you that to cure a hang nail, that he
is going to amputate your leg, I think you better question your
doctor's motives or maybe your doctor's sanity if he is trying to do
that on you.
Another major provision in H.R. 3460, it is the abolition of the
Patent Office. That is right, H.R. 3460, the Steal American
Technologies Act, will abolish America's Patent Office. Now, it is in
our Constitution. Ben Franklin saw to that. Thomas Jefferson saw to
that. It has played a vital role in protecting our property rights ever
since then, yet now H.R. 3460 will separate the Patent Office from our
Government, limiting congressional oversight. That means those of us
who have been elected to represent the interest of the people will not
have the same oversight after the Moorhead-Schroeder Act passes. It
will remake the Patent Office into sort of a corporate-like private
corporation-government corporation, sort of like the post office.
Now, I am in favor of privatizing services when government does not
have to do that, but this is a core function of our Federal Government.
Protecting the rights of our people as we head into an era of
technology, that is even more important. But we need the government to
make sure of that. Who is there to determine and protect the
intellectual property rights of our people? That is their core function
all the way back since 1784.
Well, along with corporatizing and taking away our congressional
oversight, the civil service protection for our patent examiners will
be stripped from them. It is like stripping the judge's robes off of
him, and basically the patent examiners make judicial decisions that
will affect billions of dollars worth of ownership in our society. It
is the quasi-judicial decisions, and under this bill, they are not
going to have any more civil service protection. It opens up our system
to outside influences and to corruption that we have never had before.
Taking away the civil service protection is a travesty, and these
people who work at the Patent Office try their best, and even when they
are protected, it is a hard job.
If our Patent Office is corporatized, the head of the Patent Office,
Bruce Lehman, Mr. Harmonize Our Laws With Japan, can make the changes
he and his board of directors want with limited congressional scrutiny
and recourse. Thus, in the coming era of technology and creativity, we
basically will be decoupling the protection of patent rights from our
Government, cutting off this congressional oversight, and leaving it in
the hands of an autonomous board of unelected officials.
Mr. Speaker, who is going to be on that board? Whose special
interests will be represented on that board overseeing the decisions as
to who owns what technology in the future? Maybe they won't even be
people who have allegiance to the United States, who knows. But they
will be making the decisions, and we do not know who they are.
H.R. 3460, the Steal American Technologies Act, must be defeated. My
bill, H.R. 359, the Patent Rights Restoration Act, can be substituted
in its place when it comes to the floor of Congress for a vote. The
choice is our choice as the American people, as Members of Congress. It
is H.R. 3460, the Moorhead-Schroeder Patent Act or the Rohrabacher
substitute. One might ask why has a bill that is so obviously
detrimental to America's interests, why has it gone this far? First and
foremost, and this is a problem we talked about earlier, our big
businesses have bought off on the idea of a world economy, and if
harmonizing our patent rights is part of that deal with a global
economy and even if our foreign competitors renege later, we must
change our laws now as a sign of good faith to get everybody working
together. This mindset is a great threat to the well-being of the
American people.
Second, let me say these huge corporations have enormous influence on
Members of Congress. Your biggest corporation in your district comes to
see you, the president of that corporation, you listen to that head of
that corporation. But these corporate leaders are not representing the
interests of their own working people, much less the greater
constituency of the people of the United States. These corporate
leaders may have good hearts and may be well intended, but they are
wrong headed when it comes to globalization. Their loyalty should be in
the long term with the people of the United States. Instead, what we
find here are people who basically bought into an idea, we are going to
create a whole new world, and it is going to be a more perfect world
where commerce is flowing.
Watch out, Mr. and Mrs. America, when you run into somebody who is
going to change the whole world and make it so much better, even at the
expense of the American people and our rights. That is the threat we
face today, and right after the Fourth of July when this bill comes to
the floor, H.R. 3460, the Steal American Technologies Act, has to be
defeated and the Rohrabacher substitute should take its place.
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