[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 47 (Wednesday, March 11, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H1650-H1653]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            CHINA AWARENESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Scanlon). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2019, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Yoho) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. YOHO. Madam Speaker, what I would like to do for the next few 
minutes is talk about an awareness campaign, and that is to make people 
aware of China and what China is doing.
  We all know about China, a big country, wealthy country, a country 
that has come out of poverty and has become an industrial powerhouse. 
They have become a world power. Yet a lot of people don't understand 
what China really is doing.
  When one really studies the history of China and sees where they are 
going, it is pretty remarkable that many of our countries around the 
world and our companies around the world do business with China.
  The Communist Party took over in 1949, and that is when Mao Zedong 
came to power. He laid out a vision that I think any world leader would 
be proud of. He laid out a 100-year plan. In fact, they call it the 
100-year marathon.
  We have seen a remarkable advancement of China, but, unfortunately, 
it was at the expense of many along the roadways.

  We look at what they have done; and their goal, if you listen to what 
Xi Jinping has said when he came to power, was he wanted to remove any 
Western influence from China.
  This was not too long after Tiananmen Square, where people in China 
were promoting liberties and democracies, and then the Tiananmen Square 
massacre happened where thousands of people were run over by tanks in 
the streets as the world watched. Yet China has taken that history and 
swept it under the rug and pretends it didn't happen. But we know. We 
have seen the videos.
  Since that time, Xi Jinping has come out with a very strong 
statement. In fact, in 2017, in the Sixteenth Chinese Communist Party 
Congress, he made a statement, and it is a warning, and it should be a 
wake-up call for all people who are buying products from China.
  In that statement, he said: The era of China has arrived. No longer 
will China be made to swallow their interests around the world. It is 
time for China to take the world center stage.
  As we looked into that--and we have talked to people from Hong Kong 
and from China--their intent is very real, it is very true, and it is 
very out front. They are not trying to hide anything. Their goal is to 
be a world dominant power, or the world dominant power.
  What we are seeing today in the world is a tectonic shift in world 
powers that we haven't seen since World War II. China has made very 
clear what their intent is.
  Then they have marched on a campaign since 1949. Deng Xiaoping, in 
the eighties, said that it could not compete with American or Japanese 
technology and manufacturing, but what they could do is they could 
corner the market on rare earth metals.
  As China came into the modern world, America and other countries 
helped China in technology, science, research, in advancement of 
weaponry, thinking that China would come along and become more Western 
democracy in their thinking. That is the furthest from the truth.
  As China moved on, Deng Xiaoping's vision came to realization. They 
talked about cornering the market on rare earth metals. Well, today, 
they control virtually 100 percent of the rare earth metals that are 
needed in our electronics, in our cell phones, in our missile guidance 
systems and our satellites.
  China has gone on to corner the market in the APIs in our 
pharmaceuticals. The APIs are the active pharmaceutical ingredients. 
They control approximately 85 to 90 percent of that. They control the 
majority of the minerals and vitamins that go into our livestock feed.

[[Page H1651]]

  So their intent is very clear, yet they hide behind policies that 
favor China.
  In the WTO, when they became a member of that in the nineties, they 
entered with a developing nation status. Today, they are the second 
largest economy in the world. They are building five aircraft carriers. 
They have got a space program. They have expanded around the world 
through their One Belt, One Road initiative. Yet, today, in the WTO, 
they claim developing nation status.
  It is time that we let everybody know these things and wake up the 
American people and our manufacturers. China has risen, yet it has been 
at the expense of other nations. It is been through coercion, 
intimidation, not honoring contracts, and not honoring laws that are 
world norms.
  A good example of that is what is going on in the South China Sea. 
They have reclaimed landmasses, and they went ahead and built 
facilities on these to the point where they have military 
installations, runway strips, military barracks, offensive and 
defensive weapons on there, military radar systems. Xi Jinping, when he 
was here visiting President Obama in 2015, said they have no intention 
of militarizing those structures; yet, today, they are militarized.
  China has encroached on the ASEAN nations in the East China Sea, in 
the South China Sea, and they have gone into the exclusive economic 
zones in those areas, not honoring the world norms or the laws of the 
sea. In fact, the Philippines took them to court.
  At the court arbitration, China lost the case. They said they had no 
claims to the nine-dash lines that China claims that the Philippines 
challenged them on. The Philippines won, yet China ignored that ruling 
and kept doing the dredging of the landmasses, destroying thousands of 
acres of coral reefs and laying claim to that area.
  China has used their heavy hands with our corporations when somebody 
does something unfavorable to what China wants. An example is the 
Marriott Hotel employee who had mentioned something favorable about 
Taiwan. That person got fired.
  We have seen that over and over again with different industries. Just 
recently, the manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted in favor of the 
protestors in Hong Kong to stay strong for liberties and freedoms, and 
we all know what China did. The NBA backed down to placate China. We 
have seen this with corporation after corporation. We have seen Nike do 
this. We have seen other corporations do this.
  I think today, in the modern world today and what we are going 
through with the coronavirus--another gift from China--is the supply 
chain that they control of so many products that the world is dependent 
on, and I think this is a wake-up call that we need to remove 
manufacturing from China. We can't do it as a government, but our 
manufacturers can.
  We have drafted a policy. It is called ``Manufacture the ABC 
Method,'' and that is manufacturing anywhere but China.
  When we make a product in China, China benefits from it. China 
introduces their Chinese Communist Party members within their 
corporation. Many times, our corporations have to give up their 
intellectual property. So China benefits from this by the theft of that 
property plus the production of that property. They counterfeit so many 
of our manufacturers' products, and our manufacturers go out of 
business.
  We have met with many manufacturers that went over there initially 
for cheaper labor. Within 5 years, China has copied that product. That 
product is competing against the original manufacturer. It is being 
sold cheaper, and it is of an inferior quality, so it ruins the 
reputation of the manufacturer and they wind up going out of business. 
Then China just keeps producing. We see it over and over again, that 
they keep doing that.

  We see constant abuses of human rights that we have seen over and 
over again, and these have been reported in the news. So many times we 
stand up for human rights around the world, and if we really, truly 
believe that as a nation, we believe in those values of liberty and 
freedom, that all people are created equal, that they have the right to 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they have the right of due 
process, they have the right to a court of law, if we believe in those 
things, we have to look at our trade policies.
  Why are we trading with a country that blatantly ignores those?
  I think I want to just pivot to Hong Kong.
  I think everybody in the world agrees that Hong Kong is a province of 
China. In 1997, Great Britain and China came to an agreement that they 
would allow Hong Kong to go back to China over a 50-year process, and 
that was going to be from 1997 to 2047.
  Hong Kong had the ability and the guarantee that they would be a 
semiautonomous region, a portion of China, that they would have an 
independent judiciary system, they would have their own election 
process.
  Yet 22 years into that process, we see the heavy hand of Xi Jinping 
and the heavy hand of the Chinese Communist Party. 22 years into that 
agreement, Xi Jinping came out publicly and said, as far as he was 
concerned, that agreement is null and void.
  We saw the extradition bill that was brought up by their chief 
executive officer, Carrie Lam, and we know that she didn't bring that 
up by herself. That was at the direction of Beijing.
  What that law did is it was robbing liberty and freedom from the 
people of Hong Kong. And it is sad, because the people of Hong Kong 
have always known liberty and freedom in today's modern world. But, 
unfortunately, the people of China--Xi Jinping and the Chinese 
Communist Party--they, unfortunately, have never experienced liberty 
and freedom because they have lived under a communist, repressive 
regime that we have seen only grow stronger.
  We did a floor speech down here on Tiananmen Square on the 
anniversary last summer, and shortly after that, within weeks, there 
were the protests in Hong Kong about the extradition bill.

                              {time}  1815

  And when you have 2 million people coming out in the streets in a 
province of China that has less than 8 million people, you have got a 
quarter of your population, and it was young people, it was old people, 
it was educated people, it was business people, mothers, fathers, 
children, and they are all protesting against the heavy-hand of China, 
because what they saw was freedom and liberty being taken away from 
them.
  If that was an isolated case, that would be one thing, but what we 
have seen with China is the intimidation, the erasing of cultures, as 
they have done with the Tibetans, as they have tried to do with other 
ethnic minorities in their country, whether it is the Uighurs, the East 
Turkistan region, the Kyrgyz. And we see this over and over again, yet 
they make no apologies for it.
  China is One Belt One Road. Or the Belt and Road Initiative is often 
referred to as One Belt One Road, and it goes one way, and that goes to 
the Chinese Communist Party.
  They do predatory lending practices that put other countries in debt 
where they can't pay it back, and China winds up taking strategic 
ports. They have strategically done this around the world. They are in 
the Western Hemisphere and they are marching on.
  The purpose of this Special Order tonight is to get people to pay 
attention to what China is doing. Who are we going to do business with 
in the future?
  We have got a country that their goal is to take over the world. Xi 
Jinping says, and their philosophy is, you cannot have two suns in the 
sky at the same time, meaning one has to come down; and in their 
philosophy that would be us. Again, those are very confrontational 
points of view that they are pursuing, and they are pursuing them 
rapidly.
  We have seen the intimidation of corporations with them. We have seen 
the intimidation of China and their heavy-hand with other countries.
  The Czech Republic was going to have their Speaker of the House go to 
Taiwan to do some business there. China told them if they went there, 
the Czech Republic, their auto company, could no longer do business in 
China.
  We have seen them do this with Mercedes Benz. If they don't buy 
Chinese batteries, they can no longer market in China, even though the 
majority of the Mercedes Benz Corporation is controlled by a Chinese 
individual.

[[Page H1652]]

  We have seen the race for the 5G phone network with Huawei, with ZTE, 
in 2012, in this country. In this body here, in the House Intelligence 
Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, both ZTE and Huawei, 
in 2012, were deemed a national security risk. Yet, they keep going on 
and claim to be private enterprises. Yet, we know that the Chinese 
Communist Party and Government have invested heavily in those 
companies.
  And what they are doing is, they are using their technology that will 
be able to be invaded through the backdoor by the Chinese Communist 
Party to be able to spy on people. Today, China has the most CCT 
cameras, closed-circuit television cameras, to where today in modern 
China they are using these television cameras to grade their citizens. 
They have good citizen scores. If you don't do what the Chinese 
Communist Party tells you, you can't travel, you can't bank, you can't 
go to the restaurants.
  It is 1984, George Orwell's story is happening right now.
  And what they are doing is they are doing that to suppress people. 
They have offered that technology around the world. They are using it 
in Hong Kong. They have offered that to Maduro in Venezuela to control 
his people. The Iranian ayatollahs want to use that technology. 
Vladimir Putin wants to use it.
  And what we are finding is any authoritarian or despotic government 
wants that technology so that they can control their citizens. If you 
look in the Xinjiang region, which is East Turkistan. East Turkistan 
has been an Asian area of China for over 100 years. Yet, when the 
Communist Party came in they took it over, recently they renamed it 
Xinjiang, which means New Territory. And I bring that up because it is 
home to a Muslim population, the Uighurs, the Kyrgyzstans, the Kyrgyz, 
that are being suppressed by China.
  I think we have all heard of the concentration camps that are going 
up all over China. We have done hearings--I sit on the Foreign Affairs 
Committee, I chaired the Asia Pacific Subcommittee last year, the 
ranking member this year, and we have had hearing after hearing on the 
human rights suppression, just the terrible things that they are doing 
over there.
  When we looked into it, we have enough reports to feel this is true. 
What they are doing is, China has interned over a million Uighurs, and 
other ethnic groups, the Kyrgyz, the Turkistans, they have put them 
into these so-called re-education camps, but they are not re-education 
camps, they are concentration camps.
  They have armed crematoriums around the country associated with these 
camps. And my question when we were in the Foreign Affairs Committee 
doing this hearing: Why do you need an armed crematorium? You know, the 
people that are supposed to be there are supposed to have passed away.
  But we recently met with some people that--I found it very 
interesting. The people we met with were from East Turkistan. They had 
a Cossack person with them who had just won an award from Mike Pompeo 
and First Lady Melania Trump, for her courage, Women of Courage Award.
  And what we found as we were listening to the story is, this family, 
an educated family, the husband was a schoolteacher, the wife was a 
practicing medical doctor. I mean, they were model citizens.
  Well, the husband saw what was happening to his relatives, what was 
happening in the Xinjiang area, so he got passports, took himself and 
his kids out. The wife, the doctor, applied for a passport, China would 
not allow her to go. They felt she needed to go to the re-education 
camp. This is a lady that is a doctor that was practicing. China puts 
them in there, saying it was a threat to our country, she was a 
terrorist, they need to be re-educated.
  What China is trying to do is erase other cultures. We have just seen 
this over and over again. And so when we spoke to these people that 
were in our office this week, I asked them, I said: Do you have reports 
of abuses? And they went on and on about the abuses. How they strap 
people in chairs, they electrocute them, they torture them, pull out 
their fingernails. The women were being raped, people were being--I 
can't say murdered, because they said they would disappear and never be 
seen again.
  These are things--you know, it is not just hearsay. We have reports 
from all kinds of magazines, all kinds of researchers.
  Here is one from Radio Free Asia, ``China Secretly Transferring 
Uyghur Detainees from Xinjiang to Shaanxi, Gansu Province Prisons.'' 
And it goes on talking about ethic Uighurs held in political ``re-
education camps.'' I am going to put quotes around that because they 
are not re-education camps, they are concentration camps, because the 
Chinese Communist Party is the highest of the hierarchy, there can be 
nothing higher than that. And if you have a religion, and you have a 
deity above that, that puts the Chinese Communist Party and people like 
Xi Jinping in fear because they don't know how to control free thought. 
These people are being sent to prisons in those provinces.
  ``China to address an overflow in overcrowded camps, where up to 1.1 
million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities accused of harboring 
strong religious views and politically incorrect ideas have been held 
since April of 2017.'' This is something that has been going on not 
just 3 years, but longer than that, but it is coming to light.
  We have asked their ambassadors, have they had the Western Press in 
there, free and open presses? And they said: Oh, no, there is no need. 
These aren't going on. But we know they are going on. This is just one 
report.
  I have another one here, Madam Speaker, information concerning China 
killing prisoners to harvest organs. This is something we have heard 
over and over again. We have had hearings on this. This is a multi-
billion-dollar industry in China. It happens to anybody that doesn't 
agree with the Communist Party. They get picked up, they get 
imprisoned. Health checks are done. In fact, this person that was in 
our office is a medical doctor, she would do the health checks on these 
young Muslim men, and they would get a red check if they were healthy. 
And in the darkness of night, they would disappear, never to be seen 
again.
  The China Tribunal, which was a tribunal put together to look into 
this, has published its final judgment. ``The China Tribunal concluded 
`that forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout 
China on a significant scale, and the tribunal has had no evidence that 
the significant infrastructure associated with China's transplantation 
industry has been dismantled and absent a satisfactory explanation as 
to the source of readily available organs concludes that forced organ 
harvesting continues till today.' ''
  I don't know how a civilized world can tolerate such atrocities. And 
when I see the armed crematoriums or the Uighurs being taken from their 
homes, forced from their homes, forced into a concentration camp, and 
then being rented out or sold as chattel to manufacturers, and this is 
well-documented, I don't know how we can tolerate that or how we can 
look at our trade policies to do those kind of deals with a country 
that works like that.
  If they treat their own people that way, how do we expect they are 
going to treat any of us?
  We have talked about Tibet. We have talked about Xinjiang, East 
Turkistan, the purging of individuals, the social credit scores, the 
coercion and intimidations.
  I haven't touched on the theft of intellectual property. There is 
over $600 billion of intellectual property theft that goes on and 
erodes economies all over the world.
  I want to read an article here just briefly. ``China Compels Uighurs 
to Work in Shoe Factory That Supplies Nike.'' And I don't bring Nike's 
name out to put a ding on Nike. It says: ``The workers in standard-
issue blue jackets stitch and glue and press together about 8 million 
pairs of Nikes each year at the Qingdao Taekwang Shoes Company, a Nike 
supplier for more than 30 years and one of the American brand's largest 
factories.
  ``They churn out pair after pair of Shox, with their springy shock 
absorbers in the heels, and the signature Air Max, plus seven other 
lines of sport shoes.
  ``But hundreds of these workers did not choose to be here: They are 
ethnic Uighurs from China's western Xinjiang region''--which again 
means New Territory, they renamed from East

[[Page H1653]]

Turkistan--``sent here by local authorities in groups of 50 to toil far 
from home.
  ``After intense international criticism of the Communist Party's 
campaign to forcibly assimilate the mostly Muslim Uighur minority by 
detaining more than a million people in re-education camps, party 
officials said last year that most have `graduated' ''--graduated from 
a work camp.
  And, again, if you talk to these people--I have talked to 
pharmacists, I have talked to lawyers, I have talked to engineers, I 
have talked to doctors, they didn't need to be re-educated. What China 
wanted to do was intimidate them, and basically brainwash them from 
their habits of a religion, of practicing their religion, and become 
good model Chinese citizens that bow down to the Communist Party.
  ``But there is new evidence to show that the Chinese authorities are 
moving Uighurs into government-directed labor around the country as 
part of the central government's `Xinjiang Aid' initiative.
  ``For the party, this would help meet its poverty-alleviation 
goals''--and, again, this is a doctor. They are saying, we need to 
alleviate their poverty goals--``but also allow it to further control 
the Uighur population and break familial''--
  The Uighur workers, they are afraid or unable to interact--the Uighur 
workers at these facilities are afraid or unable to interact with 
anyone in this town where they went to north of Qingdao, beyond the 
most superficial of transactions at the stalls or in the local stores 
where they go. They won't talk to anybody.

                              {time}  1830

  They won't talk to anybody. The people at these towns say: ``Everyone 
knows the Uighurs did not come here on their own free will. They were 
brought here,'' said one of the fruit sellers at her stall. ``The 
Uighurs had to come because they didn't have an option. The government 
sent them here,'' another vendor told the reporters. They were sent 
forcibly.
  The report that we read did not ask their names out of concern for 
their safety, so they could not discuss the issues.
  Like I said, we met with Mrs. Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh 
from East Turkistan that, today, is now called, as I said, Xinjiang. 
She is the one who shared this. She is a true freedom fighter.
  As we move on and we look at what China is doing, they have 
controlled so much of the supply chain.
  Then we see what happened with the coronavirus. The coronavirus came 
out. It started off in Hubei province in Wuhan. The epicenter was 
supposedly a fish market or a fresh market.
  With my science background, if you have an epicenter, you want to do 
your forensics and study it from an epidemiological standpoint. China 
didn't do that.
  We had a hearing where we had two epidemiologists there. They did not 
do the proper epidemiological studies, yet they destroyed any evidence 
that was there.
  Then the doctors that tried to report this wound up being put in 
prison, in jail. They came down with the virus, and then they died.
  China has done this over and over again.
  Then that virus spread around the world. This will be reported, I am 
sure, in history as the Chinese plague that they tried to hide and 
conceal like they did SARS and MERS.
  As we look at this as a nation and we make trade agreements and we 
work with these countries around the world, we should look at whom we 
are trading with.
  We have a standard that is known around the world. We have a rule of 
law honoring our contracts, and when we look to do business with 
people, we should do business with people we know, like, and trust, and 
I don't think those apply to China.
  When you see the heavy hand of what China is doing, I just think, as 
a nation, with our trade agreements and with our businesses going over 
there, we all need to relook at what we are doing. If they will treat 
Hong Kong that way with those students over there and then the threat 
of taking over Taiwan and their goal of taking over the world, I think 
that is something we all need to look at and say: Do you know what? We 
need to diversify.
  That is why we are kind of proud to talk about the manufacturing 
policy, the ABC method, anywhere but China. Go to Vietnam. Go to 
Indonesia. Go to anywhere but a country that wants to take us over.
  I want to close on two things here. One is we had the students of 
Hong Kong who led the protests. They came to our office and they 
brought me this plaque. It says: ``Democracy Now. Stand With Hong 
Kong.'' They brought this plaque up, and as I have been able to travel 
around the world and I have seen how other countries look at America 
and they look at the ideals and the principles of this country, that is 
what they want.
  It made me think that America is bigger than a Presidency. It is 
bigger than a Republican or a Democratic Party. It is those ideals, and 
it is those ideals that these students in Hong Kong who brought us this 
plaque are willing to take a chance and protest the Chinese Communist 
Party. They burned their flag and held up the American flag because 
that represents liberties and freedoms.
  Taiwan is a different subject. Taiwan has never been part of the 
People's Republic of China, the Communist Party, nor will they ever be. 
They have their own borders. They have their own military, their own 
economy, their Western democracy, yet China wants to claim them as 
their own.
  I think this is a wake-up call for China. If you have got a quarter 
of a population in a province who knows they are part of China, you 
can't do that to Taiwan because, when you look at the agreement we have 
with Taiwan, we have an agreement to make sure they have the equipment 
to protect themselves in a defensive manner.
  I want to end with what we started with. When we looked at the 
students from Hong Kong, it made me think. I think we have all seen 
pictures of grass. It is green, tender, new shoots. They are very 
tender. If we were to compare that with pavement, this is hard road. 
This is asphalt.
  If I were to ask you which one is tougher, which one is stronger, I 
think we would all say the asphalt is; right? But if we say this is 
freedom and liberty and this is repression from communism, which one is 
more powerful, liberties and freedoms will break through that force 
that is trying to suppress them.
  That is what is going on in the world, and that is why China will 
never succeed long-term in what they are doing. That is why the people 
of Xinjiang, the Uighurs, will win, because they have the strength of a 
blade of grass that can grow through the asphalt.
  I think I shared that the other day. These are the people who are 
standing up strong through that suppression. These are the people who 
have been there.
  My heart goes out to those people because I can look back at our 
country when it was formed. We were under the suppression of another 
power, and we decided that we weren't going to live there because we 
are not designed that way as people.
  Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to be here, and I want 
people to think when they go to buy something and it says ``Made in 
China,'' find a different source. Buy it somewhere else. Encourage your 
manufacturers, your Nikes, your basketball teams to go somewhere else. 
Don't go to a country that is doing virtually genocide today.
  If we look back to World War II when Eisenhower went to Auschwitz and 
the concentration camps and they saw the death and destruction and he 
said, ``Never again,'' we as a nation have a responsibility to move 
everything that we can so that the Chinese Communist Party has to 
change their way.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________