[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 199 (Thursday, December 12, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7000-S7002]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 China

  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, this past Sunday, hundreds of 
thousands of protesters filled the streets of Hong Kong to remind 
Beijing that totalitarianism will no longer go unchallenged.
  I was reading a New York Times article about this protest when I came 
across a particularly striking quote. When asked why she had taken to 
the streets, a 24-year-old biology researcher named Alice said:

       We want Hong Kong to continue being Hong Kong. We don't 
     want to become like China.

  Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the 
Record this article on the Hong Kong human rights protest, that 
appeared in the December 9 edition of the New York Times and that 
depicts a beautiful picture of what people will do for the cause of 
freedom.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Dec. 7, 2019]

      Hong Kong Protest, Largest in Weeks, Stretches Several Miles

                 (By Javier C. Hernandez and Elaine Yu)

       Hong Kong.--Hundreds of thousands of protesters, basking in 
     a recent election victory by Hong Kong's pro-democracy camp, 
     poured onto the city's streets on Sunday in one of the 
     largest marches in weeks to pressure the government to meet 
     demands for greater civil liberties.
       The huge turnout was a reminder to China's leader, Xi 
     Jinping, that the monthslong campaign against his 
     authoritarian policies still had broad support in Hong Kong 
     despite a weakening economy and increasingly violent clashes 
     between protesters and the police.
       Tensions in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous territory, had 
     eased somewhat in recent days, after pro-democracy advocates 
     won a stunning victory in local elections two weeks ago, 
     giving new hope to the movement.
       On Sunday, demonstrators returned in force, packing city 
     streets to denounce Mr. Xi's government, rail against police 
     brutality and reiterate demands for greater civil liberties, 
     including universal suffrage. They beat drums, sang protest 
     anthems and chanted, ``Fight for freedom.'' Though the march 
     was largely peaceful, some demonstrators vandalized shops and 
     restaurants and lit a fire outside the high court.

[[Page S7001]]

       ``We want Hong Kong to continue being Hong Kong,'' said 
     Alice Wong, 24, a biology researcher who stood among 
     protesters gathered at Victoria Park. ``We don't want to 
     become like China.''
       As many as 800,000 people attended the march, according to 
     Civil Human Rights Front, an advocacy group that organized 
     the gathering.
       The mood at the march was relaxed, with people taking 
     selfies against a backdrop of the vast crowds. Children, some 
     dressed in black, marched with their parents, holding hands 
     as they shouted, ``Stand with Hong Kong!''
       A sea of protesters, spread across several miles, filled 
     major thoroughfares as they moved between towering 
     skyscrapers. In some areas, there were so many people that 
     the crowds moved at a snail's pace and spilled into adjacent 
     alleys. Some small businesses encouraged the turnout by 
     promising giveaways if more than one million people joined 
     the march.
       The protesters said they intended to remain peaceful on 
     Sunday, but some vowed to use more aggressive tactics if the 
     police cracked down. In the evening, the police readied 
     canisters of tear gas as they stood opposite crowds of 
     protesters who had barricaded a street downtown in a briefly 
     tense moment.
       The large turnout could further embolden the movement's 
     confrontational front-line protesters, who said they planned 
     to disrupt the city's roads and public transportation system 
     on Monday. The call for further action seemed to resonate 
     among some protesters on Sunday.
       ``If the government still refuses to acknowledge our 
     demands after today, we should and will escalate our 
     protests,'' said Tamara Wong, 33, an office worker who wore a 
     black mask as she stood among the crowd gathered at Victoria 
     Park.
       The protesters have demanded amnesty for activists who were 
     arrested and accused of rioting, as well as an independent 
     investigation of police conduct during the demonstrations.
       Despite the show of strength on Sunday, it is unlikely that 
     the protesters will win further concessions from Beijing, 
     which has worked to portray demonstrators as rioters 
     colluding with foreign governments to topple the governing 
     Communist Party.
       Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science at 
     Hong Kong Baptist University, said that even though Sunday's 
     march showed the protest movement remained strong and 
     unified, Beijing was unlikely to listen to its demands.
       ``Hong Kong is condemned to live in a permanent political 
     crisis as long as China is ruled by the Communist Party,'' 
     Professor Cabestan said.
       Mr. Xi, who has cultivated an image as a hard-line leader, 
     has demanded ``unswerving efforts to stop and punish violent 
     activities'' in Hong Kong. He has publicly endorsed the 
     city's beleaguered leader, Carrie Lam, and her efforts to 
     bring an end to the unrest.
       Chinese officials have suggested that the United States is 
     responsible for helping fuel unrest in Hong Kong, pointing to 
     statements by American officials in support of the protests. 
     Last month, President Trump signed tough legislation that 
     authorizes sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials 
     responsible for rights abuses in Hong Kong. The move was 
     welcomed by many protesters but also seen as exacerbating 
     tensions between the two countries.
       In a possible sign of increased scrutiny of American 
     citizens working in Hong Kong, two leaders of the American 
     Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong said on Saturday that they 
     had been denied entry to Macau, a semiautonomous Chinese 
     city. Mr. Xi is expected to visit Macau this month to mark 
     the 20th anniversary of the former Portuguese colony's return 
     to China.
       Tara Joseph and Robert Grieves, the president and the 
     chairman of the American business group, said they had 
     planned to attend an annual ball put on by the chamber's 
     Macau branch.
       ``We hope that this is just an overreaction to current 
     events and that international business can constructively 
     forge ahead,'' Ms. Joseph said.
       The protests, which began in June in opposition to a bill 
     that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China, have 
     hurt the tourism and retail sectors, pushing the city's 
     economy into recession.
       In recent weeks, the violence has escalated, with 
     protesters intensifying their efforts to vandalize businesses 
     they associate with hostility to the movement. The police 
     shot an antigovernment protester last month, inflaming 
     tensions. Then, in some of the worst violence, universities 
     became battlefields, with black-clad students hurling 
     gasoline bombs, throwing bricks and aiming arrows at the riot 
     police, who shot rubber bullets and fired tear gas in return.
       Many demonstrators acknowledge that a compromise with the 
     government is unlikely, despite recent victories. Mrs. Lam, 
     the city's leader, who is under pressure from Beijing to 
     restore order without weakening the government's position, 
     has brushed aside their demands and has warned that the 
     mayhem could ``take Hong Kong to the road of ruin.''
       Government officials have cast the demonstrations as 
     primarily centered on economic issues, arguing that vast 
     inequality in Hong Kong has exacerbated anger among the 
     city's youth. They rolled out emergency measures recently to 
     counter the effects of the turmoil on the economy, including 
     providing electricity subsidies to businesses and expanding 
     job training for young people.
       The authorities have justified their efforts to crack down 
     on the movement by saying that protesters are endangering 
     public safety. On Sunday, the police said they had found a 9-
     millimeter semiautomatic pistol, five magazines, 105 bullets 
     and two ballistic vests, as well as fireworks, among other 
     items, during a series of early morning raids.
       Senior Superintendent Steve Li of the Hong Kong Police said 
     early in the day that officers had received information that 
     the firearm and fireworks would have been used on Sunday to 
     create chaos.
       The police have in recent months banned many protests and 
     rallies in Hong Kong, citing safety concerns. But the 
     government granted a rare approval for the march on Sunday, 
     which was held to mark the United Nations' Human Rights Day.
       Demonstrators said they believed that the turnout sent a 
     strong message: The protest movement would not back down.
       ``If the government thinks that we will give up,'' said 
     Adam Wong, 23, a university student who was waving a black 
     flag, ``today's turnout will prove them delusional.''

  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Madam President, Alice's statement is loaded with 
historical context and correctly implies that what we are seeing now is 
the culmination of a slow but sure violation of the laws and norms that 
once defined Hong Kong's semiautonomous relationship with mainland 
China. These protests erupted after what Beijing argued was a simple 
proposed change to existing extradition laws, but the people saw it for 
what it was--a thinly veiled threat to Hong Kong's relative autonomy. 
It wasn't a takeover. It was just that foot in the door, and China is 
nearly unparalleled in its ability to turn a foot in the door into a 
permanent existing condition.
  Sometimes their power plays are very obvious, and sometimes they are 
not. On my recent trip to Djibouti, I saw firsthand the influence of 
China's debt-trap diplomacy.
  Here is what debt-trap diplomacy is. It is a fancy way of saying that 
China has increased its influence around the world by offering to 
struggling nations that they are going to hold their debt in exchange 
for preferential treatment on trade or maybe a physical presence such 
as a port or other sweetheart deals.
  In Djibouti City, I saw this tactic run wild. Now China would say 
that what they have done is to help the Djiboutians create a ``smart 
city'' in the Horn of Africa, but in reality they have negotiated their 
way into creating a full-blown surveillance state.
  Cameras are everywhere--on every corner and every street, with 24/7 
footage--and guess where that footage lands. Beijing. They have even 
tried to point one of those cameras at our military base, right at the 
entrance to Camp Lemonnier.
  Debt-trap diplomacy is bold. It is obvious. If that is all you see of 
China, it is easy to assume that all of their tactics are that bold and 
obvious. As I said, they will go after you in obvious areas and also in 
areas that are not as obvious.
  Even domestically, China's surveillance state is notoriously the 
opposite of covert. Their domestic ``smart city'' program has outpaced 
that of every other country on the face of the Earth and the majority 
of their $70-plus billion budget for that project has been spent not on 
intelligent power grids or traffic management systems or on clean air 
or clean water, but it is being spent on surveilling their own 
citizens.
  The greatest danger China has created by engaging in brash and at 
times absurd surveillance and suppression is that it has created a 
false sense of security here in the West when we don't see the evidence 
of what they are doing. In the United States we are not particularly 
vulnerable to their debt trap, but we are vulnerable to less obvious 
attempts to get that foot in the door.
  In some form or another, most Americans have allowed Big Tech to take 
hold of a portion of their lives. Smartphones and cloud storage once 
were very novel, but now we assume that even simple transactions come 
predicated by an additional condition. Everything is free as long as 
the app or the service has access to--guess what--your data. They want 
to own your virtual you.
  Popular apps like TikTok, whose parent company is based in China, 
have left me with more questions than answers about the platform's 
business practices, privacy protections, and ideological loyalty to the 
Communist

[[Page S7002]]

Party. Consider that the U.S. Army has barred soldiers from using 
TikTok. Everybody needs to understand this. The U.S. Army has said: You 
cannot use TikTok. This very body has expressed our concerns on a 
bipartisan basis with the platform's censorship and data handling 
practices.
  It is no wonder that TikTok's chief executive officer canceled this 
week's scheduled meetings here in DC with Members of this body. The 
fact that millions of Americans, especially our American children, 
continue to offer their personal data to TikTok is beyond disturbing, 
but we will not be able to roll back the creeping surveillance state 
without setting our own standards for what is acceptable from both 
foreign and domestic companies.
  When I introduced the BROWSER Act earlier this year, I did so not 
only to give Big Tech solid guidelines regarding data privacy and 
content but to set a new standard for what consumers expect from Big 
Tech. Our problem here in this country is pretty much one of awareness 
and of understanding that the exact same philosophy drives China's 
surveillance programs and their less obvious but much more personal 
individual monitoring schemes--their surveillance state scheme.
  China's Communist Party is after more than just ad revenue and more 
complete data sets. Their goal, as those Hong Kong protesters put it, 
is to trick other countries in becoming more like China, which is not 
tilting toward freedom but tilting away from freedom.
  My goal with the BROWSER Act and with my focus on what has become the 
surveillance state is to do the exact opposite--to enable freedom, to 
encourage freedom, not only here but around the globe--and to make 
certain that consumers here decide how much of their data they want to 
be able to share. We must make certain that we continue to support the 
cause of freedom wherever human beings show up to protect the freedoms 
they have.
  I yield the floor.