[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 112 (Wednesday, June 17, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3055-S3057]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
China
Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I am here on the floor this evening to
talk about China and to talk about how we can have a better
relationship with China, one that is fair and equitable.
I am going to talk specifically about some of the investigations and
reports that we have worked on here in the U.S. Congress over the past
couple of years. I am going to be talking about four specific reports
that came out of what is called the Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations. I chair that subcommittee. It is under the Committee on
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and it is a committee that
takes these investigations seriously. We do a fair, objective, thorough
job. All of our investigations are bipartisan. I am going to talk a
little about why these investigations that we have done have led me to
the conclusion that we need to do much more here in this country to be
able to respond to China and to be able to have the kind of fair and
equitable relationship that we should all desire.
A lot of China's critics talk about the fact that China needs to do
things differently, and I don't disagree with most of that, but the
reality is there is much we can do right here in this country to create
a situation in which we do not have the issues that I will talk about
tonight--some of the unfair activities that have occurred here in this
country. Frankly, I think we have been naive and not properly prepared.
I will also talk about some legislation that we are proposing tomorrow
morning, which will focus on how to make America more effective at
pushing back against a specific threat to our research and our
intellectual property.
Our goal is not to have China as an enemy. Our goal is to actually
have China as a strategic partner, wherein there is a fair and
equitable and sustainable relationship, but it is going to require some
changes. Again, I am going to focus tonight on some changes we need to
make right here, changes that are within our control.
Our investigations have been thorough--in fact, driven--and our
reports have been objective, bipartisan, and eye-opening, and I
encourage you to go on the PSI website--psi.gov--and check it out.
Our first report was in February of 2019. It detailed a lack of
transparency and reciprocity, among other concerns, with the Confucius
Institutes that China operates here in this country. These Confucius
Institutes are at our colleges and universities. Some people are aware
of that, but some may not be aware that they are also at our elementary
schools, middle schools, and high schools. Our reports show how these
Confucius Institutes have been a tool to stifle academic freedom where
they are located, toeing the Chinese Communist Party line on sensitive
issues like Tibet or Taiwan or the Uighurs or Tiananmen Square.
By the way, when I talk about China tonight, I hope people realize I
am not talking about the Chinese people. I am talking about the Chinese
Government; therefore, I am talking about the Chinese Communist Party.
With regard to the Confucius Institutes, for example, which are spread
around this country, ultimately, they report to a branch of the Chinese
Government that is involved with spreading positive propaganda about
China. Ultimately, it is controlled by whom? The Chinese Communist
Party.
So I hope the comments I make tonight will not be viewed as comments
that are regarding the Chinese people as much as a small group in
China, the Chinese Communist Party, that, with regard to the Confucius
Institutes and other approaches it has taken to the United States, have
led to these issues.
By the way, it is thanks to our report and to the broader scrutiny
that followed that we learned about the lack of academic freedom and
about the fact that history is being taught a certain way at the
Confucius Institutes. By the way, it also pointed out that the Chinese
language is taught. It is a good thing to have this intercultural
dialogue and the opportunity to learn more about China, but there needs
to be, again, an understanding and a history of China that is fair and
honest, which does include discussions of what happened in Tiananmen
Square or what is happening today with regard to the Uighurs--a
minority group in China that is being oppressed.
In the year that followed our scrutiny--so, really, in the last year
and a few months--23 of the, roughly, 100 Confucius Institutes on
college campuses in America have closed, and others have made some
positive changes as to how they operate. So I believe our report made a
significant difference in terms of how we relate to the Confucius
Institutes.
I said earlier that one of my concerns about the Confucius Institutes
was the lack of reciprocity. When our State Department has attempted to
set up something comparable on Chinese university campuses, it has been
unable to do so. In fact, whereas the Confucius Institute employees and
members of the Chinese Government are able to come on our college
campuses, we are told that U.S. Government officials and, for that
matter, private citizens cannot go on Chinese campuses without having a
minder, somebody to be there to monitor what they are doing. Sometimes
they are not permitted to go at all, which goes to the lack of
reciprocity.
Yet my goal, really, is to, again, talk about what we can do here. I
would urge those tonight who are watching and who are connected with a
college or a university that still has a Confucius Institute--or a high
school or a middle school or an elementary school--to check it out.
Check out our report in which we have many instances when the American
students who are learning there are not getting the full story. That
may not be true in the case of all Confucius Institutes, but I would
recommend that you do the research yourself.
Then, in March of 2019, after the Confucius Institute report, our
report into the Equifax data breach here in America showed how China
had targeted private U.S. companies and stolen the information of
millions of Americans. In the Equifax data breach of 2017, which we
studied and which is one of the largest in history, the personal
information of 147 million Americans was stolen by IP addresses that
originated in China. So we should just be aware of that, and we should
take precautions and protections and encryptions and security measures
here to avoid it. Again, this is about our doing more here in this
country to be prepared for the reality of the 21st century.
Then, in November of last year, we released another eye-opening
report, this one detailing the rampant theft of U.S. taxpayer-funded
research and intellectual property by China by way of its so-called
talent recruitment programs--meaning, China systematically finds
promising researchers who are doing work on research that China is
interested in, and China recruits them. These programs have not been
subtle. The Thousand Talents Plan is the most understood of these
programs, although there are a couple hundred others. Yet we showed, in
studying the Thousand Talents Plan, how this problem has been ongoing
for two decades in this country. Through this program, much of what
China has taken from our labs and then taken to China has gone directly
toward fueling the rise of the Chinese economy and the Chinese
military.
Again, this is about China, but it is really about us. How have we
let this happen?
Specifically, we found that the Chinese Government has targeted this
promising, U.S.-based research and its researchers. Often, this
research is funded by U.S. taxpayers. As taxpayers, we spend $115
million a year on research to places like the National Institutes of
Health or to the National Science Foundation or to the Department of
Energy for basic science research. It has been a good investment
because, through some of these investments, we have discovered cures to
particular kinds of cancer and technologies that have helped our
military,
[[Page S3056]]
but it is not good if the U.S. taxpayer is paying for this research and
then China is taking it.
China has not just taken some of this research funded by U.S.
taxpayers but has paid these grant recipients to take their research
over to the Chinese universities in China--again, universities that are
affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. This is not about the
people of China. This is about the Chinese Communist Party, and it has
been very clever. It wants to make sure that China is a stronger
competitor against us, so it literally takes the research from the
United States to a lab in China where it tries to replicate the
research and provide the money to these researchers.
Just last week, we released a fourth PSI report that showed that this
problem of China's not playing by the rules extends to the
telecommunications space as well. Let me explain that situation. Then I
will go back to the Thousand Talents Program.
You may remember that, in May of last year, the FCC prohibited a
company called China Mobile and its U.S. subsidiary from providing
telecom services from the United States on the grounds that doing so
would jeopardize our national security--the first time such a ruling
had been issued. The fact that this was only the first time that a
foreign telecommunications company had been denied approval to operate
in the U.S. on national security grounds prompted us to investigate
other Chinese state-owned carriers that were already authorized to
operate in the United States. We asked an important question: Why was
China Mobile USA any different than these other three Chinese
companies?
We discovered in our report, which again we issued just a month ago,
that it wasn't different. We conducted a yearlong investigation into
the government processes for reviewing, approving, and monitoring
Chinese state-owned telecommunications firms operating here in the
United States, and we found, once again, over the years, the Federal
Government had been lax when it comes to securing our
telecommunications networks against risks posed by Chinese state-owned
carriers. Again, it is what we can do here in this country that we
haven't done.
In fact, three Chinese state-owned carriers have been operating in
the U.S. for nearly 20 years, but it has only been in recent years that
the FCC, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland
Security have focused on the potential risks these firms bring when
they operate in the United States. What we didn't know 20 years ago, we
do know today, and we should use that information to protect ourselves.
We now know that the Chinese Government views telecommunications as a
strategic industry and has expended significant resources to create and
promote new business opportunities for its state-owned carriers. We
also learned in our investigation and said in our report that Chinese
state-owned telecommunications carriers are ``subject to exploitation,
influence, and control by the Chinese government'' and can be used in
the Chinese government's cyber and economic espionage efforts aimed at
the United States.
This isn't a surprise. We have seen this time and time again that the
Chinese Government targets the United States through cyber and economic
espionage activities and enlists its state-owned entities in these
efforts. The Chinese telecommunications firms have been part of our
U.S. telecommunications industry as a result, and, of course, that is
critical to our everyday life. Its services from cellular networks to
broadband internet connections help break down barriers between people,
nations, and continents. That is good. It has helped our economy and
the economies of many other countries grow immensely. We all benefit
when telecommunications are global.
It makes sense then that the Federal Government has tasked the FCC
with ensuring that foreign telecommunications can establish a foothold
in the United States, but only if it is done in a fair and safe manner.
Again, what we have learned is that the FCC and other Federal agencies
have been slow to respond to the national security threats these
telecom companies can pose in terms of cyber security and economic
espionage.
As we detail in our report, the FCC, which lacks the national
security and law enforcement expertise required to assess these risks,
has turned to other executive branch agencies to assess them,
specifically the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland
Security, and the Department of Defense, a group commonly known as the
Team Telecom.
Team Telecom was an informal arrangement and has lacked formal
authority to operate, making it overall an ineffective solution to
assessing these risks. The informality has resulted in protracted
review periods and a process FCC Commissioners have described as broken
and an inextricable black hole that provided ``no clarity for the
future.''
For example, Team Telecom's review of China Mobile USA's application
lasted for 7 years. This points to a troubling trend we have found in
all of these reports--how, frankly, our government and our institutions
over a space of time, the last couple of decades, have permitted China
to take advantage of lax U.S. oversight, be it on our college campuses,
our research labs, or in cyberspace.
At our PSI hearing on the Thousand Talents report, the FBI witness
before us acknowledged as much saying:
With our present day knowledge of the threat from Chinese
talent plans, we wish we had taken more rapid and
comprehensive action in the past. And the time to make up for
that is now.
That is our own Federal Bureau of Investigation. Again: ``We wish we
had taken more rapid and comprehensive action in the past.'' They don't
say that often, but it is true, and I commend them for saying it at the
hearing and for starting to make up for it now because they have made a
number of arrests just in the past few months with regard to the
Talents program.
It is my hope that PSI's work has opened the eyes of our government
to these systemic problems, and I think that is the case, as what we
have seen in the Trump administration is they have taken a firmer
stance towards the Chinese Government in every one of the four areas I
talked about.
As PSI was nearing the end of its telecom investigation, for example,
the responsible Federal agencies announced that they would review
whether these Chinese state-owned carriers that we were studying should
continue to operate in the U.S., given the national security threats.
The Trump administration also recently issued an Executive order to
establish Team Telecom as a formal committee, which is a good idea, as
well as addressing many of the issues the subcommittee report
identified in Team Telecom's processes.
Again, these are good steps, and I am pleased to say that they were
prompted by the thorough and, again, objective, nonpartisan inquiry
that we made through PSI. These four investigations combined show us
that China, frankly--and, again, the Chinese Government and the Chinese
Communist Party, not the people of China--is not going to play by the
rules unless we require it. Until we start to clean up our own house
and take a firmer stance on foreign influence here in this country, we
are not going to see much improvement. Rather than pointing the finger
at China, we ought to be looking at our own government and our own
institutions and doing a better job here.
Along those lines, I found it interesting that, just last week, 54
NIH-funded researchers nationwide have resigned or have been fired
because they had been found to be hiding their ties to foreign research
institutions as part of an NIH investigation into this problem. Again,
after our PSI investigation talking about how the Thousand Talents
program and other programs work, there are now 54 people just last week
who have been fired or have resigned.
Of the cases NIH has studied, 70 percent of the researchers failed to
disclose foreign grant funding, while more than half failed to disclose
participation in a foreign talent program like Thousand Talents. By the
way, the FBI just recently warned universities across the country that
China may be attempting to steal our research on the coronavirus--
therapies, antiviral therapies, vaccines, other research. This problem
is ongoing.
I think, in a fair and straightforward manner, we have got to insist
that
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there be a level playing field. We have got to insist that there be
fairness and accountability, again, in an objective manner and a
straightforward manner.
At the same time, our law enforcement officials and other Federal
entities that are working to hold China accountable are limited in the
actions they can take. That is part of cleaning up our own house. We
need to make some changes around here, including in our laws, which has
to come through this body.
In the case of the Thousand Talents plan, we have seen first-ever
arrests related to Thousand Talents recently. They followed our
investigation, our report, and our hearings. We even saw it in my home
State of Ohio. All of the arrests in connection with the Thousand
Talents plan, by the way, had been related to peripheral financial
crimes, like wire fraud and tax evasion--not the core issue of a
conflict of commitment, the taking of American taxpayer-paid research.
Why? Because amazingly, it is not currently a crime to fail to
disclose foreign funding of the same research on Federal grant
applications. In other words, if you are doing research and paid by the
taxpayer of the United States in your research and also being paid by
China to do the same research and to have the research go to China, you
don't have to disclose that under law.
These arrests that have been made haven't been about that core issue.
They have been about other things like tax evasion or wire fraud, kind
of like they went after the gangsters in the old days on tax evasion
because they couldn't get them on a RICO statute.
We need to change the laws so that we can give our law enforcement
community the tools they need to be able to do the job that all of us
expect is being done. It is incumbent upon Congress to work in a
bipartisan manner to pass those laws and to put a stop to this
behavior.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue, and it isn't. It is about
defending the interests of the United States, and that is something we
should all agree on. The good news is we are starting to do just that.
Tomorrow, we plan to introduce bipartisan legislation called the
Safeguarding American Innovation Act based on recommendations from our
Thousand Talents report from late last year to protect U.S. taxpayer-
funded research.
First and foremost, our bill is going to help the Department of
Justice go after Thousand Talents participants by holding them
accountable for failing to disclose their foreign ties on Federal grant
applications. Again, it is a tool that they desperately need. Our bill
goes directly to the root of the problem. It makes it punishable by law
to knowingly fail to disclose foreign funding on Federal grant
applications
This isn't about more arrests. We should all agree that transparency
and honesty on grant applications are critical to the integrity of U.S.
research and the U.S. research enterprise. These provisions will help
promote those principles as well.
Our bill also makes other important changes from our report. It
requires the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, to streamline and
coordinate grant making between the Federal agencies so there is more
continuity and accountability in coordination when it comes to tracking
the billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded grant money that is being
distributed. This kind of transparency is long overdue.
We have worked closely with the National Science Foundation, with the
National Institutes of Health, with the Department of Energy, and
others on this legislation, and they agree this is very important. Our
legislation also allows the State Department to deny visas to foreign
researchers who they know are seeking to steal research and
intellectual property by exploiting exemptions in our current export
control laws.
This may surprise you, but the State Department can't do that now.
Career Foreign Service Officers and employees at the State Department
have asked us to please provide them this authority. They testified
before our hearing, asking us to help them to be able to do what they
know needs to be done.
Our bill also requires research institutions and universities to
provide the State Department basic information about sensitive
technologies that a foreign researcher would have access to. Providing
this information as part of the visa process should help streamline the
process for the State Department and for the research institutions.
This allows for college campuses to rely on the State Department to
do some of the vetting for these applicants and to help keep bad actors
off the campus. This is why many research institutions and universities
will be endorsing our legislation tomorrow because we have worked with
them on this issue and others, including new transparency standards for
universities.
They are now going to be required to report any foreign gift of
$50,000 or more, which is a lower level from the current threshold of
$250,000, but it is also going to empower the Department of Education
to work with these universities and research institutions to ensure
that this can be complied with in a way that doesn't create undue
redtape and expenditures. It also allows DOE to fine universities that
repeatedly fail to disclose these gifts.
I believe this legislation can be a model going forward as to how we
use the lessons we have learned from these, again, objective and
straightforward PSI reports to get to the root causes of these cases.
We have gotten widespread support across my home State of Ohio, from
research leaders, hospitals, colleges and universities, and other
stakeholders who want to see us continue to have an open and
transparent research system and have the United States be the center in
the globe for innovation and research, but to ensure that can continue
to happen, they want to be sure we are holding China accountable.
We are now at work on this legislation to codify into law some of the
steps taken by the Trump administration in response to our new
telecommunications PSI report as well. This legislation we will
introduce tomorrow will be led by myself and Senator Tom Carper, my
colleague from the other side of the aisle from Delaware, who was also
my partner on this report with regard to the Thousand Talents program
and the hearing.
We also have five other Democrats who will be joining us tomorrow,
all of whom have an interest and understanding of this complicated
issue. We will also have about an equal number of Republicans joining
us, probably six to eight Republicans. So, again, this is going to be a
bipartisan effort--I would say even a nonpartisan effort--to ensure
that, in a smart, sensible, practical way, we can respond to the threat
that we are facing, in this case, from China taking our intellectual
property, our innovations, our ideas, and taking them to China and
using them in China, sometimes against the United States.
In addition to the four examples we discussed tonight, the
subcommittee will continue its work to shine a light on other examples
where China and other countries aren't living by the rules, so we can
ensure that, with regard to China and in regard to other foreign
governments, we can create a more durable and a more equitable and a
more sustainable relationship between our countries.
Again, we don't want to be enemies with China, but what we do want is
to have a relationship with mutual respect. When we have the right to
ask them that they treat us with the same respect that we treat them,
at the end of the day, that is what is going to be best for the Chinese
people, best for the American people, and best for all of us moving
forward.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
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