[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 85 (Thursday, June 25, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H5394-H5397]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
STANDING UP FOR FREEDOM
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Scarborough) is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. SCARBOROUGH. Mr. Speaker, earlier today the Speaker talked about
the historic moment that we had 50 years ago in this country when the
Berlin airlift took place. He said a couple things that I wrote down
here.
He talked about the importance for America to continue to, quote,
reject Communist oppression across the globe. And secondly, he talked
about the importance of standing up for freedom.
I think that is very important, and I think it is critical today, 50
years later, that we do that, that we look and see what America is
doing, to see if they are continuing to defend freedom across the globe
the way that those that came before us did 50 years ago and the way
that our Founding Fathers thought we should do.
Unfortunately, today I am concerned, as are a lot of other
Republicans and Democrats, about what this administration is doing
halfway across the globe in Communist China. The gentlewoman from
California (Ms. Pelosi) who has worked on human rights issues with
myself and others said this today:
There is no improvement in human rights there. The
President can say that China has improved its human rights
record because it exiled forcibly two dissidents. But we
don't call that progress.
Earlier this week the Washington Post, on Tuesday June 23rd, had this
to say about human rights in China:
Li Hai, 44 years old, a former teacher at the Chinese
Medical College, is now serving a 9 year prison sentence in
Beijing's prison. His crime, assembling a list of people who
were jalied for taking part in pro-democracy demonstrations
in Tiananmen Square in 1989. From the Beijing area alone, he
documented more than 700. Of those, 158, mostly workers
rather than students, received sentences of more than 9 years
and are presumed to still be held for protesting for
democracy in Tiananmen Square back in 1989.
Many were sentenced to a life in prison, from a 22 year old
to a 76 year old. Li Hai himself was convicted for prying
into and gathering state secrets.
Now, in China, in Tiananmen Square, in the land where the President
goes to talk about China's great progress on human rights, what the
Communist government calls prying into and gathering state secrets is
one individual, one citizen trying to find out who the Communist
Chinese drug off to prison after they shot down and killed hundreds and
maybe even thousands of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
The Washington Post goes on to say,
We thought of Mr. Li as we read President Clinton's
explanation in Newsweek yesterday of, Why I am going to
Beijing. Mr. Clinton wrote of the real progress that China
has made in human rights during the past year. That progress,
according to the President, consists of the release of
several prominent dissidents. How meager these
accomplishments in human rights really are becomes clear when
you stack them up against the administration's own decidedly
modest goals going back to 1996, when it had already
downgraded the priority of human rights.
The Washington Post concludes,
Tomorrow Mr. Clinton will leave for China. He is the first
President to visit since the Tiananmen Square massacre in
1989. His aides promise that he will speak out on human
rights there and that there is a chance that he will meet
with the mother of a student killed in Tiananmen Square. The
first could be valuable if his remarks are broadcast on
Chinese television. The second, an important symbol,
especially because many relatives of Tiananmen victims
continue to be persecuted and harassed. But Mr. Clinton's
comments should above all be honest. For the sake of Li Hai,
the 158 documented and the many that still cannot be found,
Mr. Clinton should not trumpet real progress in human rights
where no human rights record of progress exists.
Going back to 1992, it is very interesting to follow what the
President has said on human rights in China. I remember back during the
campaign of 1992, when the President talked about the need to stand up
to the butchers of Beijing, that is a position that I actually
applauded because I was surprised that those of us in Congress and the
administration did not do more following the brutal massacre in 1989.
The President made that vow, but soon after he got elected, he forgot
about that vow, just like he forgot about the promise to link human
rights with trade. And he forgot to do that very quickly. And the
result, as reported by A. M. Rosenthal in the New York Times, was
disastrous.
Religious freedoms and political speech continue to be crushed in
China. Protestants and Catholics are thrown in jail. In fact, thrown
into jail up to 2 years for simply having a bible at home and leading a
bible study.
{time} 1900
Over 400,000 are jailed right now. The New York Times and A. M.
Rosenthal has reported that Christians and Buddhists continue to be
savagely beaten, tortured in front of their families, and even killed
for simply worshiping God as they choose.
This past week, I went to a Tibet freedom rally on the west lawn. We
heard Tibetans talk about what has happened in their culture and how
the Tibetan culture continues to be crushed. Yet, in America, we ignore
some stark numbers.
We ignore the number 50. That is about how long the Communist Chinese
have occupied Tibet. We ignore the number 1.2 million. That is the
number of Tibetans that have been killed since the Chinese occupation.
We continue to ignore the number 130,000. That is how many Tibetans
today have been forced into exile. The number 250,000 is important
because that is the number of Chinese troops occupying Tibet.
And 60 million is a frightening number when you want to really gauge
what type of regime the President is dealing with today in Tiananmen
Square. To give all Americans a little historical perspective, 60
million is the number of Chinese that have been killed by their own
government since 1949, 60 million. The number is so high that it
boggles the imagination.
Let us put it into this perspective: Adolph Hitler was accused of
killing 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Hitler killed 6 million Jews,
and has been termed as one of the most evil men of, not only this
century, but in the history of western civilization, the history of the
world. Yet, we have a regime that has murdered 10 times that amount of
people, murdered 60 million.
But that is a number that continues to fall on deaf ears in the
United States. Why is that? I think it has something to do with another
number, and that number is 9,000. And 9,000 is a very interesting
number, you see, because that number is a number that mesmerizes
politicians in Washington,
[[Page H5395]]
D.C. and in State capitals across this country. Nine thousand is a
number that mesmerizes the wizards of Wall Street. Nine thousand is a
number that mesmerizes those that work on Madison Avenue.
Yes, 9,000 is the number that the Dow Jones continues to float
around. It is about money. We are obsessed with finance. Let me tell
you, there is nothing wrong with a strong Wall Street. There is nothing
wrong with a Dow Jones over 9,000.
I have been termed as a right wing fanatic, too conservative on
fiscal issues. I believe in cutting taxes. I believe in abolishing the
capital gains tax. I believe in abolishing the inheritance tax. I
believe in cutting government spending radically. I believe in the free
enterprise system.
Socialism and Marxism as political theories lie on the dust bin of
history. They are dead. Capitalism won. Pure unadulterated capitalism
prevailed over the socialism and the communism of the Soviet Union.
I like profit. I think profit is good for America. But we have to
balance that with a few of the values that this country is supposed to
be about. But everybody is so busy chasing profits across the globe to
get the Dow Jones even higher that sometimes finance takes a front seat
to freedom. Finance seems to take a front seat to American self-
interest.
There is one defense contractor who is reported in the Wall Street
Journal last year who actually was so rabidly pursuing a deal with
China to sell airplanes to China that they sent their engineers over to
China to talk to the engineers that worked on Chinese jet fighters,
because they wanted to help the Chinese.
To prove that they were good partners, and to prove that they
deserved to get this deal, they wanted to help the Chinese engineers
learn how to make their jet fighters more competitive with our jet
fighters. All in pursuit of a deal.
We have the CEO of another defense industry who wants to build more
airplanes, that has supported me in the past, who continues to defend
the actions of the Communist Chinese, despite the fact that all
credible reports coming out of there continually show that oppression
continues to reign.
His quote last year was that there is more democracy and freedom in
China than there is in America, because, after all, more Chinese vote.
That is frightening logic. But it shows how desperate companies are to
go over there, make bigger profits, help their stocks go up higher.
If that affects the national security of the United States of
America, or if that affects freedom, this esoteric concept that Thomas
Jefferson once talked about, so be it.
We have the PAC community, BIPAC, the business PAC openly critical of
Republican and Democratic Members that continue to fight against
extending MFN, Most Favored Trade Nations Status to the Chinese. They
claim that it shows that we are antibusiness.
When I got elected here in 1994, I had never been involved in
politics before. I decided it was time to get up off the couch and do
something. But it seemed to me, before I got up here, that Members of
Congress and administrations did not have to choose between freedom and
finance, that we could somehow walk sort of that middle road. But it is
not that way anymore. The President tells us. The BIPACs of the world
tell us that it is all or nothing.
You either completely engage with China, give them whatever they want
on their terms, or else you are a dangerous knuckle dragging
isolationist that just does not understand the economic and political
realities at the end of the 20th Century. That argument is patently
false.
There was an editorial in the New York Times, an op ed last week that
said as much. It is written by Robert Kagan and William Kristol. The
headline said ``Stop Playing by China's Rules.'' Their editorial said
the following: ``In defending his China policy, President Clinton says
America faces historic choice: engage China as his Administration has
done or isolate it. But that is a false choice.''
As the op ed goes on to say, nobody is arguing that we isolate China.
China is going to be one of the great powers in the 21st Century. We
will share the world stage with the Chinese people until everyone that
is living today has passed away and died. That is the political
reality. That is the demographic reality.
The 21st Century will not be the American century alone. It will be
the American and Asian century. A power shift is happening, and we will
be sharing the world stage, and we understand that.
But the question is, do we join into this partnership by China's
rules, or do we try to meet in the middle ground with them? What Kagan
and Kristol conclude is the following: ``Mr. Clinton seems determined
to cast his critics as backward-looking isolationists spoiling for a
new cold war. In fact, the Clinton Administration's current policy
invites Chinese adventurism abroad and repression at home. At the end
of this bloody century, we all should have learned that appeasement,
even when disguised as engagement, doesn't work.''
How many people have read the history, or how many Americans still
alive remember what happened in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain went to
Munich, and he was so desperate to avoid war, so desperate to avoid any
conflict with Adolph Hitler that he engaged in what was later termed an
appeasement policy, a policy that Winston Churchill and his
conservative allies aggressively fought against.
But Chamberlain was dead-set against fighting Hitler because Hitler
was too powerful. Britain was not ready for that type of a war. So he
came back, after appeasing Hitler, talking about how he had found
``peace for our time.''
Of course Adolph Hitler, like the Chinese today, did not see
appeasement as a show of strength, but rather a show of weakness. Soon
after that, peace in our time ended with Hitler going into Austria,
going into Poland and beginning the bloody, bloody Second World War.
We cannot capitulate. If we continue to capitulate, BIPAC, Wall
Street, and the other business leaders that are accusing us of
isolation may make a short-term profit but, in the end, will pay the
ultimate price.
What do the Chinese leaders think of us for this appeasement policy
we have been engaging? Let me read to you from yesterday's Investor's
Business Daily, a quote from a U.S. official who was negotiating with
the Chinese.
It goes like this: ``In March 1996, China started lobbying missiles
within 100 miles of Taiwan as a signal on the eve of the island's first
democratic elections. The Clinton administration said nothing publicly
at the time, even though the Chinese insulted U.S. officials when they
privately promised a military reaction if Taiwan was attacked.''
This is what the Chinese said after that threat, ``No, you won't.
We've watched you in Somalia. We have watched you in Haiti. We have
watched you in Bosnia and you don't have the will,'' a Chinese officer
told U.S. negotiators. China has nuclear weapons, and ``you are not
going to threaten us again, because, in the end, you care a lot more
about Los Angeles than Taipei,'' a U.S. official recalled the Chinese
officer saying.
So they understand that we are a paper tiger. They understand that
they can even threaten nuclear annihilation on Los Angeles, California
and not face the consequences. Yet, silence is deafening from Wall
Street. Silence is deafening from many in the PAC community. The
silence is deafening from the halls of Congress and the administration.
Why? The Dow is over 9,000. China is, after all, the next great
export market. In the end, let us face it, the economy is strong in
part because the prices on consumer goods are low.
Why are they low? Because China provides us with what Americans would
call slave labor. Their workers only make $30 a month. So they can make
the items that we buy and wear very cheaply. This is an arrangement we
do not want to fool around with.
I guess it was brought home to me just how bad the situation is in
China yesterday when I heard a speech by Bill Greider in the Capitol
talking about a plant that he visited over in China. They talked about
how they, the workers made $30 to $60 a month if they were productive.
If they were not productive, he found out that they actually took
money out
[[Page H5396]]
of this envelope at the end of the month if they were not doing as good
a job. Greider said that sounds kind of inhumane, does it not? Only $60
a month, and they still dock their pay.
The foreman said, ``Well, it is better than what happened a couple of
years ago.'' Greider said, ``Well, what is that?'' He said, ``Well, we
lined them up on the wall and shot them,'' and told the story of how
seven workers were not simply as productive as they should have been
and were taken outside and shot.
Wall Street, a lot of the business community, a lot of the lobbyists
will tell you that does not exist. Yet, just about every credible
journalist, whether it is the New York Times or the Washington Post,
will tell you they have seen it with their own eyes, that it does
exist.
{time} 1915
A.M. Rosenthal better than anybody else over the past few years has
documented human rights abuses.
I had a lobbyist for an organization that I respect tell me with a
straight face that there is no religious persecution in China, that
there is no religious persecution in Tibet. That is a big lie.
There is a song out that is called ``Novocain for the Soul.'' I think
that is what 9,000 points on the Dow Jones Industrial has done. It has
numbed us. It has numbed the soul of Americans to the grave injustices
that are occurring across the globe. Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe we
should not worry about it. Maybe America in the 21st century is not
what America was in the 18th century. Maybe freedom, liberty and the
things that Thomas Jefferson talked about and James Madison talked
about does not matter. Maybe they are not relevant. But I tend to
believe they are. I believe in such quaint notions as what Russell Kirk
said. Kirk said, ``No matter the volume of its steel production, a
nation which has disavowed principle is vanquished.''
And Winston Churchill in the 1950s, talking about a similar shift in
his country and in his party, a similar shift where old concepts of the
Constitution and freedom were transplanted with commerce and simply
commerce, had this to say:
The old conservative party, with its religious convictions,
and constitutional principles, will disappear and a new party
will rise, perhaps like the Republican Party in the United
States, rigid, materialist and secular, whose opinions will
turn on tariffs and who will cause the lobbies to be crowded
with the touts of the protected industries.
I hope that does not happen to our Republican Party. I hope we will
have the courage to stand up and be counted where others sit down and
simply shut up and are silenced because the lure of new prosperous
markets are too inviting. But the question is up in the air right now
on how we are going to respond. I must say we have not been responding
as well over the past few years as I would have liked. I think what we
not only in the Republican Party but like-minded people in the
Democratic Party must fight for are the first principles that our
Founding Fathers based this Constitution and this constitutional
republic upon, concepts like freedom, concepts written in the
Declaration of Independence when Jefferson helped pen that incredible
phrase that ``we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
rights, among those life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.''
There is not a lot of ambiguity there. The belief was all men, not
people in America, but all are endowed with certain unalienable rights.
From where? According to the Declaration of Independence, from God. It
is non-negotiable. It does not matter whether the Dow Jones is over
9,000 or under 900. It does not matter if China is the next great
export market or not. That we in America believe that all are created
equal. And whether we are fighting for civil rights in Birmingham or
Beijing, it is non-negotiable. Regrettably we have negotiated away too
many of those freedoms and too many of those rights for a higher Dow
Industrial and a lower price on consumer goods. Jefferson's idea that
America was the last great hope for a dying world seems quaint 222
years later. And Ronald Reagan's belief that America was to be a city
shining brightly on the hill for all the world to see seems to be a
belief that has been dimmed. In fact, right now there is an exhibit
that almost seems quaint. Mr. Speaker, it is in the Library of Congress
and it is called ``Religion and the Founding of the American
Republic.'' It is right behind us, across the street, where the Library
of Congress pulled together all the papers of our Founding Fathers when
talking on the issue of religion. This is a summary of the exhibit,
what the Library of Congress wrote in the chapter ``America as
Religious Refuge, the 17th Century.'' It talks about how ``many of the
North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of
America were settled by men and women who in the face of European
persecution refused to compromise passionately held religious
convictions. The great majority left Europe to worship God in the way
that they believed to be correct.''
To worship in the way that they believed to be correct. Is that a
notion that can be negotiated away in Tiananmen Square? Is that a
notion that depends on how well the Dow Jones is doing? Is that a
quaint notion that depends on whether we are talking about the next
great export market? I do not think so. Again, that is a notion that is
non-negotiable. For those on Wall Street, for those lobbyists on K
Street, for those apologists on Main Street that want to turn a blind
eye to oppression in China, I say facts are stubborn things. Facts are
stubborn things.
We cannot turn our eyes away from the world's ills, to the growing
evidence of how China has aided in nuclear proliferation, how they gave
nuclear secrets to Pakistan, to Libya and now possibly even to Iran.
The results obviously are dangerous. Pakistan just exploded publicly
several nuclear devices that now endangers all the world as a new
nuclear arms race is escalating in Asia. The technology transfers that
we heard about a month or two back, where the DOD themselves said,
quote, America's national security has been jeopardized, has been
compromised, because this administration gave technology to the Chinese
that helped make their nuclear missiles more accurate towards America.
The Pentagon said national security was jeopardized.
Just today, there was testimony from a Pentagon aide who criticized
Chinese policies. This is by John Diamond with the Associated Press:
A veteran adviser with the Pentagon agency charged with
reviewing proposed exports testified today before a Senate
committee investigating whether the administration helped
China gain military capacity that should have been
restricted.
Speaking in a hoarse whisper, he told the Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee how senior defense officials
glossed over concerns in the lower ranks that U.S. businesses
were being allowed to sell China and other countries
technology with military applications. Senior defense
officials sometimes instructed subordinates to soften or
reverse their recommendations that certain technology not be
exported, he said.
That's happened on several occasions. Sometimes it happens
in your face and sometimes it happens when you're on vacation
and somebody tampers with your database under your name.
In 1996, Leitner said, he returned from a 3-week vacation to find
that his recommendation against the export of supercomputer technology
to Russia had been rewritten to a neutral position. Although approval
for the export eventually was denied, Russia later announced it had
obtained the U.S.-built computers without an export license. The case
now is under investigation.
We heard reports in this House in an investigating committee that
people that were charged with stopping military technology from being
transferred to China would make recommendations not to export that
technology to China and they would then be pressured to change their
recommendations. We find out now that the President asked the Secretary
of State to allow these technology transfers. The Secretary of State
said no, this damages America's national security in its relationship
with China. The President asked the CIA. They said no. The President
asked the National Security Council. They said no. In fact, they
continued shopping to try to find somebody that would approve this
technology transfer.
Finally they went to the right department. They asked the Department
of Commerce, who said, ``Sure, go ahead, it's great for business.''
Now,
[[Page H5397]]
the heck with the national security. It does not matter what our
Secretary of State says. But go ahead and send it to Commerce. And now
we find out this past week that the Commerce Department allowed
technology transfers without telling other agencies about what was
going on. Because, we see again, national security recently has taken a
back seat to finance, to quick profits, and it is dangerous,
extraordinarily dangerous.
The question is, with nuclear proliferation exploding across the
globe because of China and because of our lack of response to China,
with technology transfers that our own Pentagon has said compromises
national security continuing to move forward, with human rights
violations that are continuing in China as reported by the New York
Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time and just about every other
major news outlet, with these human rights abuses continuing, what can
be done when Wall Street, when official Washington, and when too many
other people across the country are simply not paying attention,
turning a blind eye to it or engaging in this conspiracy of silence.
What can be done to make a difference?
I am at times cynical, but I do believe that we can make a big
difference. I believe that we can fight the good fight, and I think
that if people will start speaking out on this floor and speaking out,
Republicans and Democrats alike, that we have a chance the next time
MFN is debated to talk about human rights and talk about technology
transfers, to talk about nuclear proliferation and maybe even make a
difference.
Bobby Kennedy back in 1966 went to Johannesburg and at the time he
was talking about ending apartheid. A lot of people thought that it was
a mission that could not be done, thought it was too difficult, thought
the walls of oppression would continue there. But Bobby Kennedy
continued the fight. Even though he was killed in 1968, 15 years later,
many of the things that he talked about in that speech in Johannesburg
came true.
In talking about ending apartheid, this is what Robert Kennedy said:
It is a revolutionary world that we live in. It is young
people who must take the lead. We have had thrust upon us a
greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has
ever lived.
``There is,'' said an Italian philosopher, ``nothing more
difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more
uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the
introduction of a new order of things.''
There is the belief there is nothing one man or one woman
can do against the enormous array of the world's ills,
against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet
many of the world's great movements, of thought and action,
have flowed from the work of a single man or woman.
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief
that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for
an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes
out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope,
and crossing each other from a million different centers of
energy and daring those ripples build a current which can
sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
{time} 1930
It is my prayer tonight, with the President halfway across the world
in Beijing, that those who respect and honor human rights in China,
those who respect and honor human rights in Europe, those who respect
and honor human rights in this country will start acting in ways that
will strike out against injustice and send forth ripples of hope and
that together, today, we can begin a movement that will help end the
human rights abuses in China and Tibet and across the world and help
America reconnect with its proud and noble past.
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