[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

[[Page S3057]]

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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