[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 52 (Wednesday, April 21, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H2228-H2229]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      OUR TRADE POLICY WITH CHINA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, today Chinese Vice Premier Wu is in town

[[Page H2229]]

meeting with Commerce Secretary Evans and Trade Representative 
Zoellick. This would give the President a chance to right mistake 
number seven of his administration, which is trade. The United States 
last year ran over a $500 billion trade deficit. We have exported 
hundreds of thousands of manufacturing and now high-technology jobs 
outsourced under the Bush administration. And their response has been, 
from the President's chief economist Mr. Mankiw, this is a good thing, 
it is efficiency.
  It is not a good thing. It is not efficiency. Americans need jobs. We 
need an economy. We need an industrial base. That is wrong-headed 
thinking.
  So today they have got a chance in meeting with Vice Premier Wu to 
rectify the mistake of their trade policies. The mistake is at the 
insistence of President Bush, this Congress voted to give China, the 
Communist Government of China, permanent most favored nation or special 
trade status.
  We gave up the right to annually review their compliance with trade 
laws. Big mistake. But the President said, Do not worry, I have a plan. 
Yes, he is right. They are stealing our products and our intellectual 
property left and right. Yes, they have violated five agreements on 
stealing our intellectual property and our products over the last 5 
years or 7 years. But he had a plan. He was going to put them in the 
World Trade Organization because the President is big on rules-based 
trade.
  So the President got his way. China is now in the World Trade 
Organization, and guess what? Last year, according to statistics of the 
Chinese Government, let alone our own government which will not talk 
about these things, they counterfeited and stole between $20- and $24 
billion of U.S. products and intellectual property. Those are the 
numbers of the Communist Chinese Government about how much they are 
stealing.
  Has the President filed one, one single complaint in his rules-based 
trade organization, the WTO, against the theft of product, property by 
the Chinese Government? No, not a single one. Yet I have a company in 
my district, Videx. Their company not only had their property stolen by 
China, they were totally cloned. The Chinese put up a fake Website to 
attract people with a little waving American flag on it, saying they 
were an American company, made an inferior product, have stolen the 
Chinese market, and now are stealing the Asian market from this 
American company.
  I thought this is a no-brainer. The President likes rules-based 
trade. So I appealed to the Commerce Secretary and to the President. I 
said, help this company. They are not big enough to fight the 
Government of China. And the response was, no, we will not help that 
company because the big companies in the United States who are 
manufacturing in China do not care about the theft of property. In 
fact, they think it might hurt their interest in accessing cheap labor 
and avoiding environmental laws and outsourcing jobs to China. So the 
Bush administration will not lift a hand to help Videx. The only 
response we have gotten was Lou Dobbs and Moneyline, and after my 
company Videx was on Lou Dobbs and Moneyline, they got calls from all 
over America, from other small businesses who have been stolen blind by 
the Chinese Government. And the response of the Bush administration is 
to do nothing.
  They are having meetings today with Vice Premier Wu. She is going to 
give them the same empty assurances the Chinese have given us for the 
last decade: Oh, we will stop stealing $24 billion a year worth of our 
product, sure. Do my colleagues believe that? I do not believe that, 
and I cannot believe that the President or his administration believes 
that. So what they should do today is tell the Chinese they are in the 
WTO, they said they would follow the rules, they are not, and that we 
are informing them today if they do not shape up by next week, then we 
are going to the WTO with complaints on the theft of products from 
Videx and dozens of other small companies across America.
  This is an administration that supposedly cares about small business, 
yet when small business is being robbed blind by the Chinese, and big 
business says, hey, do not upset the Chinese apple cart, we are 
manufacturing really cheap over there, $1-a-day labor, now they might 
get upset with us, and they might charge us $1.25 a day for the labor 
over there, or they might even let them have a labor union or something 
else.
  Help America's small business. Help them to fight the Communist 
Chinese Government. Help stop stealing America blind. Help stop 
stealing our industrial and intellectual base, and help turn around the 
international trade deficit. That is a mistake the President can begin 
to undo today in these conversations with Vice Premier Wu.

                          ____________________