[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.
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``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.