[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 54 (Friday, March 20, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1869-S1870]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              CORONAVIRUS

  Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, it has been so interesting talking to 
our Tennesseans as they have faced these issues we have with 
coronavirus and what is happening, our response to it, and how we are 
going to fight it. And yes, we are going to win this war, and we are 
going to defeat this, but we have to look at it as our health, food, 
and financial assistance.
  Last night, a couple of my Tennesseans and I were discussing this--
what their thoughts and their questions to me were about the 
relationship we have with China and how can we trust that we know what 
China knew, that we know when they knew it, and their lack of 
transparency around what happened with COVID-19.
  As we have gotten a couple of months past the start of this, these 
questions are unanswered. As I was telling our Tennesseans on the phone 
last night, even as this virus that came out of Wuhan, China--they had 
it in December. It has now touched six continents, and we know people 
are dealing with containment. They are dealing with mitigation. They 
are dealing with going through the process of getting the anti-virals, 
getting the vaccines that are necessary to deal with COVID-19.
  The questions that people have around this are compounded by the 
growing realization of how China has chosen not to be honest and not to 
be transparent in their dealings with the rest of the world. The way 
Beijing handled its initial response to the coronavirus was nothing 
new. In fact, deflection and lies meant to protect the Communist Party 
is part of their standard operating procedure. They have defied norms 
governing the protection of human rights. They embrace innovation by 
incursion, defy property rights, and steal intellectual property as a 
matter of course.
  We have U.S. companies that have suffered for decades from what China 
has done to steal their intellectual property, to infringe on their 
intellectual property. They defy the sovereignty of other nations and 
territories, and they defy what should be their role as a leader in the 
global economy. Certainly, they want to be a market economy or so they 
say, but look at their behavior. It is this act of defiance that makes 
them incredibly dangerous.
  I have to tell you, this has been something that has been going on 
for quite a while, but we only need to go back a decade to place a flag 
marking our awareness of what has become a very familiar story. Over 
the decades, as China started to manufacture and started to pull U.S. 
manufacturers there and then started to mistreat their intellectual 
property rights, people became aware of what was going on. It was right 
at 10 years ago, when I was a Member in the House, that we were doing 
much of the same work that we are doing right now in the U.S. Senate; 
we were preparing a defense authorization bill. Even then we realized 
the threat that China and Chinese state-owned companies posed to our 
national security. We drafted amendments to that year's NDAA, blocking 
the purchase of Huawei-supplied equipment. Indeed, we are still hearing 
about the need to block the purchase of Huawei equipment not only for 
us but for our allies.
  That action was 10 years ago, but China's influence has continued to 
grow. What we have done is pretty much our part in the Senate to expose 
those bad actions, even as the rest of the world has allowed Beijing to 
co-opt the trappings of capitalism to perpetuate totalitarianism.
  Last year, we saw the people of Hong Kong rise up on behalf of 
democracy and self-determination. Indeed, to this day, that fight goes 
on even though the threats and fears of COVID-19 have caused those 
protesters to have to protest in a different way.
  I cosponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and 
sponsored legislation prohibiting the commercial export of covered 
munition items to the Hong Kong police force. But the world moves on, 
even as that standoff in Hong Kong continues.
  The Senate was forced to pen a resolution asking the International 
Olympic Committee to rebid the 2022 Winter Games to a country that 
respects human rights. That was really quite a bold move. It leaves me 
to wonder, why was China given this honor in the first place? I have to 
tell you, nobody seems to really know the answer to that question. The 
aggression they display toward Taiwan and Tibet and the outright 
repression of the Uighurs--this is something that has gone unchecked 
many times due to fear of economic retaliation.

  I have addressed this body several times on the subject of Huawei and 
China's leveraging of the impending 5G rollout to create national 
security vulnerabilities in our network. Their efforts to undermine our 
sovereignty are not limited to high-tech espionage. Indeed, their goal 
is to place their equipment everywhere. That is why it is so incredibly 
affordable to so many countries and so many of our allies. In placing 
this equipment, they are seeking to establish their own high-tech cyber 
spy network. We know what they are up to.
  This month, I introduced a bill to temper the influence of China-
backed Confucius Institutes on American college campuses. We all have 
read the stories lately of how they have infiltrated some of our 
institutions of higher learning and how they have co-opted some of the 
staff or professors.
  This is something that needs our attention. It is followed on the 
heels of the Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act--another 
effort to prevent Beijing from increasing its hold on the minds of our 
younger generations. Time and again, we have called Chinese tech 
companies like Tik Tok onto the carpet for their censorship, their data 
collection, and their privacy practices--or lack of privacy, we should 
say. Yet content from their popular apps still dominates social media 
headlines. China's hold on the global economy has never been more 
apparent.
  Now there are reports that Beijing used the media and keyword 
censorship to suppress information about the coronavirus. Yet Beijing 
remains defiant, attacking President Trump in tweets and accusing 
everyday Americans of racism for daring to suggest that COVID-19 
originated in Wuhan, China. They are, as many younger people like to 
say, gaslighting us, and it is madness.
  It brings us to ask, when will enough be enough? We must not let our 
present concerns about the response to coronavirus deter us from 
thinking long term. This pandemic will change

[[Page S1870]]

our relationship with China in every single way. It is inevitable. 
Starting now, we must take advantage of this knowledge. As we think 
about an exit strategy from the coronavirus crisis, we have to think 
about this. As we think about a way forward to bring manufacturing back 
to the United States, we need to remember this.

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