[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 218 (Monday, December 21, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7904-S7908]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 CHINA

  Mr. SULLIVAN. Madam President, despite what you might be reading in 
the press, there are a lot of recent, important, bipartisan 
achievements happening right here in the Senate. We are going to vote 
soon on another major COVID relief bill, which is really important. 
That will be our fourth major COVID relief bill this year--much needed, 
of course, for the health of Americans and for our economy. I think 
that when the history of this very challenging year is written, that is 
what is going to be remembered--four major, bipartisan, important 
pieces of legislation, not the rancor in the Senate, which has been 
part of our history, part of the Republic since the founding of the 
Republic.
  A number of other major bipartisan accomplishments have also occurred 
just in the past few months--the National Defense Authorization Act, 
which passed with over 80 Senators; the Great American Outdoors Act, 
probably the biggest conservation act in over 50 years; and the Save 
Our Seas 2.0, a bill I was proud to author, the most comprehensive 
ocean cleanup legislation ever to come out of the Congress. This is 
just to name a few.
  Let me name another important bipartisan accomplishment that is 
starting to occur in the Congress, and that is dealing with China, the 
important issue of China and China policy. I know people might be 
saying: Wait, are you crazy? China? There is bipartisan agreement on 
what is happening with regard to this relationship, the United States 
and China?
  The answer is, yes, we have made significant progress on this issue, 
too, and it is important. I want to explain that a little bit because I 
think it is a topic that we need to be focusing on more and more in the 
U.S. Senate.
  Like the Presiding Officer, I am honored to be completing my first 
term as a U.S. Senator and honored, like the Presiding Officer, to have 
been reelected to continue my service.
  Six years ago when I started my time here in the U.S. Senate, I 
started a series of speeches that focused on the U.S.-China 
relationship and the importance of it. We all have been focused post-9/
11 certainly on al-Qaida, ISIS, the big issue of violent extremist 
organizations, which has been the appropriate focus. But as I started 
my career here 6 years ago, I started to give a series of speeches 
where I said the biggest challenge that we face long term from a 
geostrategic standpoint for the United States for decades to come is 
going to be our relationship with the rising power of China.
  What I was saying 4 years ago, 5 years ago in this body is that 
nobody is talking about it. It is really important, and we are not 
focused on it. You can't say that anymore. Now everybody is talking 
about China. There has been an American awakening about China. And that 
is good. That is important. That is progress. And it has been 
bipartisan.
  I want to thank President Trump and his team because I think they 
deserve a lot of the credit.
  They laid out their national security strategy, their national 
defense strategy. These are very well-written strategies that, in 
essence, said that in the United States of America, post 9/11, it was 
appropriate to focus on al-Qaida, ISIS, violent extremist 
organizations, getting weapons of mass destruction. That was clearly 
the main focus of our national security.
  But what their strategies have been saying is that, yes, we need to 
continue to focus on that, but now we need to prioritize the great 
power competition

[[Page S7905]]

that is upon us with China as the pacing threat.
  As you know, most Senators--Democrats and Republicans--particularly 
the ones who focus on national security and foreign policy issues, 
particularly those on the Armed Services Committee--they agree with us. 
They agree with this reorientation. Again, this is important. This is 
progress, bipartisan progress, on what is really going to be one of the 
most--what is the most important bilateral relationship in the world.
  What we need to start doing--and I say ``we,'' this body, the 
Congress, the executive branch--is we need to start putting details and 
principles into a long-term strategy, a bipartisan strategy that will 
be enduring to address this challenge, to address the challenge that is 
the challenge for the next decade--the rise of China and how we, as the 
United States of America, need to deal with it. As I mentioned, I 
believe this is going to be the defining national security issue for 
our Nation for the next 50 to 100 years.
  What I want to do today is lay out a couple of key principles on what 
I see are some of the ways in which we can bring a bipartisan approach 
to addressing this challenge. Last year, I was honored to be invited by 
the heritage center--the Heritage Foundation--as part of their lead 
lecture series on the Asia-Pacific to talk about this issue. I gave 
remarks, an address that I called ``Winning the New Cold War with China 
and How America Should Respond.''
  Some of the principles that I laid out in that address from some of 
my experiences in the U.S. relationship with China over the last 
quarter century are what I would like to talk about. Those experiences 
for me have kind of run the gamut as a U.S. marine; as a National 
Security Council staffer and Assistant Secretary of State under the 
exceptional leader, Condoleezza Rice, when she was National Security 
Advisor and then Secretary of State; as the State of Alaska cabinet 
official in charge of energy and natural resources--which are so 
important to my State but also to Asian markets--and as a U.S. Senator.
  First things first: I believe, as I mentioned, there has been an 
awakening about the challenge posed by China. As I mentioned, 6 years 
ago in this body, not a lot of Senators were talking about it. Now 
everybody is, and that is important. I also think that there is a 
recognition--whatever you want to call the tensions that have arisen--
that the U.S. and China have entered into a much more strategic 
competition era--phase--with tensions that I have referred to as a 
``new Cold War'' with each other. This state of relations has only been 
exacerbated by the pandemic, which, of course, started in China and was 
covered up by the Chinese Communist Party.
  When I talk about this issue of a new Cold War with China, I want to 
be clear on one thing. This is not a challenge--or tensions--of our 
choosing. It is the result of a conscious decision by the Communist 
Party leadership of China to overturn key elements of the U.S.-led, 
rules-based international order, despite that order enabling China to 
emerge prosperous and strong from its so-called century of humiliation. 
This new Cold War is not an inevitable consequence of China's rise or 
our status as an established power. Rather, I believe, it stems from 
China's rejection of becoming a ``responsible stakeholder'' in the 
international system that the United States has led since the end of 
World War II--a system from which China probably, more than any other 
country in the world, has benefited from.
  But recognizing that we have this new tension, that we have a new 
Cold War with China, does not mean that the nature of the global 
challenge is identical to that posed by the Soviet Union or that our 
response should be the same. However, it does mean that the United 
States and our allies need to recognize this challenge, address it, 
counter it in ways that avoid major conflict but in ways that also 
avoid compromising our core values and interests and principles in 
liberty.
  Let me talk a little bit about what I call America's awakening.
  Since President Nixon initiated the opening of relationships with 
China, many hoped that the country's political and economic system 
would open as the country developed and joined this broader, Western-
led international system. Others believed that even if the Chinese 
Communist Party remained in control, its external behavior and 
relationship with the United States would not be affected. When the 
United States supported Chinese entry into the World Trade 
Organization, President Bill Clinton remarked that American workers and 
consumers would be the greatest beneficiaries--American workers. 
Ultimately, this has proven not to be true.
  Equally misguided was the hope that as China grew economically, it 
would liberalize politically. The expectation was that China would 
lower its trade barriers and follow WTO practices, respecting 
intellectual property rights, promoting basic safety standards for 
exports, curbing subsidies of its main industries, and not subjecting 
imports--our imports--to illegal, nontariff barriers. None of that has 
turned out to be true. China did not meet most of its commitments under 
the WTO and still hasn't. Rather, it has employed its new access to 
Western markets--American markets--to pursue large-scale theft of 
technology, exploiting the openness of the American economy without 
allowing American companies reciprocal access to its markets as it is 
required to do.

  Let me give one example of this that I have seen in my experience. In 
2003, over 17 years ago, I was in an Oval Office meeting as a National 
Security Council staffer with President George W. Bush, Condoleezza 
Rice, and the Vice Premier of China, Madam Wu Yi, at the time. The 
President, President Bush, strongly believed in the protection of 
intellectual property rights, and he raised this issue with Madam Wu Yi 
right there in the office--very aggressively, leaning over in his 
chair. Madam Wu Yi looked at the President of the United States and 
said: Mr. President, I am in charge of this. We are going to fix this. 
We are working on it. You have my commitment, Mr. President. That was 
in the Oval Office, 17 years ago.
  Where are we on intellectual property theft from China? It is worse 
today than when Madam Wu Yi made that commitment in the Oval Office. As 
a matter of fact, the U.S. Trade Representative Office estimates that 
Chinese theft of American intellectual property costs the U.S. economy 
an estimated $600 billion annually, not to mention the thousands of 
jobs lost. President Obama also tried to stem these blatantly unfair, 
nonreciprocal practices, but Beijing did not honor the common 
understanding reached by President Obama and Xi Jinping in 2015, 
curbing cyber hacking of government and corporate data for economic 
gain. Such theft continues unabated today.
  These episodes raise an even bigger problem between the United States 
and China. It is the problem that I call ``promise fatigue'' with 
China. Think about it. Broken promises extend well beyond the economic 
sphere, like intellectual property.
  Here is another example. Standing next to President Obama in the Rose 
Garden in 2015, President Xi Jinping promised the President of the 
United States not to militarize the South China Sea. The commitment was 
broken within months, when China took a very aggressive policy of 
militarizing many of the islands and built up islands in the South 
China Sea to the consternation of every single country in the region. 
After enduring this promise fatigue with the Chinese for decades, we, 
the Congress, the executive branch of the U.S. Government, are finally 
getting wise. Everybody thinks trade should be a win-win, but Chinese 
leaders appear to view it much more as a zero-sum game.
  Ironically, this promise fatigue and China's predatory, nonreciprocal 
trade practices have brought about--and did bring about--the new, much 
tougher, and, in my view, much needed approach from the Trump 
administration that we had prior to the pandemic.
  We have this situation where we are not trusting our relationship 
with China with promises that have been made but have not been kept 
across a whole host of spheres, where the tensions in the South China 
Sea are growing. But this current state of affairs was not preordained.
  In 2005, then Deputy Secretary of State and future World Bank 
President Robert Zoellick encouraged China in a very well-regarded 
speech to become a

[[Page S7906]]

``responsible stakeholder'' in the international system, which had done 
so much to enable China's rise in prosperity. Zoellick's speech 
challenged China to change its behavior, to support and promote and, 
certainly, not undermine the U.S.-led economic order that had brought 
peace and prosperity to China and so many other countries in the Indo-
Pacific.
  For a time, it appeared that China's leadership was contemplating 
this American offer to be a responsible stakeholder in this global 
system--the one that we had set up after World War II. In my trips as 
an Assistant Secretary of State to China, I heard China's leadership in 
many meetings--including in meetings with Hu Jintao, the President, and 
other senior leaders--where they talked about being a responsible 
stakeholder, where this invitation on working through the system we had 
developed was clearly something they were contemplating. But over time, 
it has become increasingly clear that the Chinese Communist Party has 
rejected this concept, this idea to be a partner with us in bolstering 
the international order that has benefited China so significantly.
  In fact, the opposite has happened. China is now working to 
systemically build an illiberal sphere of influence that threatens to 
exclude America and erode our alliances in the region that have kept 
the peace in the region for decades. The challenge we face today is 
rooted in the attempt by the Communist Party of China to popularize its 
authoritarian model abroad to ensure China's rise as a great power 
under the Communist Party's leadership. President Xi made this clear at 
the 19th Party Congress, where he championed China's model as a new 
option for other countries and nations that want to speed up their 
development. We must always remember, the Chinese Communist Party's 
primary goal in domestic and foreign policy is to ensure the survival 
and preeminence of the party.
  The key driver of U.S.-China competition and tension today is China's 
ambition to project its authoritarian model abroad. China's development 
under a Leninist political model serves as an inspiration for many 
illiberal actors and aspiring autocrats around the world. It uses its 
economic influence as a means of exerting political pressure. 
Additionally, Chinese companies and state-owned and state-subsidized 
industries are not bound by the anti-corruption laws that American and 
Western companies must adhere to.
  Chinese indifference to establishing standards of transparency, which 
we have certainly seen now with the pandemic, and project 
implementation through its Belt and Road Initiative result in elite 
deals that concede corruption abroad, weaken prospects for long-term 
prosperity, and undermine the sovereignty of weaker nations.
  China is seeking to undermine democracy and human rights and the rule 
of law and international institutions--from pushing its norms for 
controlling cyber space to silencing critics of its human rights 
record, including critics in the United States, to pushing for the 
enforcement of the Belt and Road Initiative at the United Nations. 
China is using its growing voice on the global stage to legitimize an 
approach at home and abroad that undermines American interests.
  A recent Hoover Institution study argues that China is looking to 
gain influence in the United States to shape attitudes and, ultimately, 
American policy toward China. And although we have not experienced the 
same level of political interference as, say, some of our allies, like 
Australia, where politicians and donors linked to the Chinese Communist 
Party try to sway the country's policies on sensitive issues, China is 
clearly engaged in what the National Endowment for Democracy calls a 
significant, sharp-powered campaign to influence American policy here 
at home. This recent spy scandal with a Congressman from California is 
just a recent example of this.
  Fortunately, the Trump administration and Members of Congress on both 
sides of the aisle have awakened to the long-term challenge that China 
poses to America's national security and economic security interests. 
As I noted, the Trump administration's more realistic approach on 
China, laid out in its national security strategy and national defense 
strategy, offers a clear-eyed view of Chinese ambitions and our need to 
counter them. At a time when there is not enough bipartisan agreement--
although, I think there is more than, certainly, we get credit for--
there is broad, bipartisan focus and support within the U.S. Government 
and, I believe, in the U.S. Senate on the strategic challenges posed by 
China.
  So we have had an important American awakening and a good beginning 
with the recent U.S. national security and national defense strategies, 
and I believe it is strongly in America's interest for the incoming 
Biden-Harris administration to continue these strategies that have 
strong bipartisan support here. In fact, in my recent meeting with 
Secretary of Defense nominee GEN Lloyd Austin, I encouraged such an 
approach on national security issues, particularly as it related to 
China.
  Yet these strategic documents that we are talking about need more 
meat on the bones. What are more details and principles that we can add 
to the national security strategy of our Nation that can ensure 
bipartisan support for a longer term U.S.-China strategy? Let me 
recommend five core elements that, I think, should be key in moving 
forward with regard to our relationship with China.
  First, we need to demand reciprocity in all major spheres of the 
U.S.-China relationship. Second, we need to reinvigorate American 
competitiveness so we can outcompete and outinnovate China. Third, we 
need to continue to rebuild our military's strength and capability. 
Fourth, we need to deepen and expand our global network of alliances. 
Finally, we need to remember that employing our democratic values is a 
huge, critical, comparative advantage in countering China's global 
authoritarian influence around the world. So let me briefly touch on 
each of these.
  First, we need to demand reciprocity. The United States must insist 
that the relationship with China be defined by reciprocity and 
fairness. For too long, the United States has ignored the promise 
fatigue--that I have talked about--with China and accepted unfulfilled 
Chinese promises across so many spheres of the bilateral relationship. 
You have seen it. When you raise the issue of reciprocity with senior 
Chinese officials, whether that be in Beijing or with the Ambassador, 
and they finally acknowledge that, yes, the relationship isn't 
reciprocal, they say it is because ``China is still a developing 
country.''
  I would respectfully tell senior Chinese officials: Don't use that 
argument anymore. It is an insult to the intelligence of American 
officials. We need a reciprocal relationship because every American 
understands and agrees with this--that it is about fairness, basic 
fairness.
  I posed an important question of reciprocity to former Secretary of 
State Henry Kissinger at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing a 
couple of years ago, and he acknowledged that, to have an important, 
sustainable, great-power relationship between two of the most important 
countries in the world, reciprocity was critical. The citizens of our 
country need to feel that the relationship is fair and that a general 
policy of reciprocity is important and critical in that regard, but we 
all know it hasn't been that way.
  The Trump administration has made significant progress on pressing 
for more reciprocal relationships in our trading relationships, which 
is very important, but we all know that the reciprocal relationship 
doesn't exist. Chinese companies and government-backed investment funds 
can come to the United States and buy companies, but we would have no 
opportunity to do the same. Yet it needs to go much further than 
economics. Let me give you an example. We need reciprocity in the free 
exchange of ideas. American journalists are not allowed to travel 
freely in China, and if they are not, then, why should Chinese 
journalists be allowed to travel freely in the United States?
  Similarly--and this body is focused on this--there are over 100 
Confucius Institutes, established by the Chinese Communist Party, at 
American universities. When I was in Beijing a couple of years ago and 
met with senior Chinese officials, I mentioned this.
  I said: I was recently with the Ambassador, and he said that just to 
go on the campus of Beijing University you need to be accompanied by a 
Chinese

[[Page S7907]]

official. So if there were real reciprocity in the relationship, if you 
can have Confucius Institutes at American universities, how about we 
get James Madison Institutes of freedom and liberty at Chinese 
universities?

  Of course, the Chinese wouldn't accept that.
  They said: Well, Senator, Confucius Institutes only teach culture and 
language, and a James Madison Institute of freedom and liberty and 
democracy in China would be teaching propaganda.
  That is what they said.
  This is just one of many examples wherein we must have a reciprocal 
relationship between the United States and China going forward.
  Second, we must reinvigorate American competitiveness. The United 
States is no stranger to global military and economic cooperation, as 
we have known throughout the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Our 
comparative advantages globally remain significant, but we can and 
should do more to bolster other areas at home. We should bolster STEM 
education, double down on basic research, and support Federal agencies 
like the National Science Foundation.
  We need to be able to outcompete and outinnovate China, and, 
importantly, better understand China, its culture, its language, its 
history, and its strategy with the new generations of Americans who are 
focused on these issues, just as Russian and Soviet studies were 
emphasized during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Many of our most 
significant challenges--our national debt, infrastructure projects that 
take years to permit, an education system that leaves too many 
Americans behind, a dysfunctional immigration system--are all self-
inflicted wounds.
  I believe that the real challenges posed by China, as they become 
more broadly apparent throughout our country, will start to spur the 
bipartisan motivation that will be needed to address these significant 
but solvable American challenges in order to make us stronger.
  Third, we must continue to rebuild our military. From 2010 to 2016, 
the Department of Defense's budget was slashed by 25 percent. Readiness 
plummeted, and at the same time, the Chinese undertook a massive 
building of its military and the modernization of its forces while it 
also made concrete moves to militarize the South China Sea. History 
shows, particularly with regard to America's authoritarian rival, that 
American military weakness encourages authoritarian provocations 
globally. We must make sure that, as we continue to engage China, a 
strong U.S. military provides a hedge against Beijing's contemplating 
risky and destabilizing military actions as its military strength and 
capabilities continue to grow. China has a long history of using its 
military to achieve strategic ends when countries are not ready, and we 
must be ready.
  As the Presiding Officer knows, I have mentioned that, gosh, almost 
25 years ago, I was a young marine infantry officer who was deployed as 
part of an amphibious task force to the Taiwan Strait, which included 
two carrier battle groups as part of the U.S. response to Chinese 
provocations on the eve of the Presidential elections in Taiwan. It was 
a long time ago, but it was certainly an example of the American 
commitment and resolve of one of our allies during a period of 
heightened tensions in the Taiwan Strait that we need to remember and 
be able to react to with a strong military.
  Fourth, we need to expand and deepen our alliances. The recalibration 
of our relationship with China should be done in partnership with our 
allies. The cultivation and nurturing of these relationships must be a 
foundational pillar of any American strategy as it deals with China.
  Our greatest strategic advantage in dealing with China is this: We 
are now a rich nation with longstanding historical ties that have been 
reinforced by decades of diplomatic, military, and economic cooperation 
based on shared values with our friends and allies in the region. By 
contrast, China is an ally-poor nation, with North Korea as its closest 
friend and ally. The unity of the West and our Asian allies is 
essential to maintaining high global standards and transparency, 
accountability, anti-corruption, a peaceful resolution of conflict, and 
the importance of international law, particularly in the global areas 
of sea, space, and cyber space.
  Finally, we must employ America's democratic values as a critical 
comparative advantage. We should never forget that our democratic 
values were critical in our successful victory over the Soviet Union 
during the last Cold War. In President Reagan's famous Westminster 
speech before the British Parliament in 1982, in which he launched the 
National Endowment for Democracy, he argued that America would win the 
Cold War not through hard power alone but through the power of our 
ideals.
  As he reminded our audience and our close allies in Britain, ``Any 
system is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means of 
legitimizing its leaders.'' China's unelected leaders, like all 
authoritarians, ultimately fear their own people. Our leaders do not.
  It is fear that has driven China to develop an Orwellian social 
credit score to rank its people, while detaining as many as 1 million 
Chinese workers in concentration camps. Why else does the Chinese 
Communist Party invest so heavily in facial and gait recognition 
technology to monitor their own citizens? Why comprehensively censor 
the internet to preclude even the most glancing criticism of the 
Communist Party and its leaders? Why do China's internal security 
services employ more people than the People's Liberation Army, the 
world's largest military? The answer lies in fear, and the goal, above 
all else, to make sure the Communist Party remains in power.
  President Reagan saw the power and promise of our democratic ideals 
as a potent critical instrument to challenge America's global rival, 
then the Soviet Union, because the aspiration of freedom is universal 
and remains the core commonality that underpins the strongest 
partnerships of the United States with other nations. The belief that 
liberty, democracy, and free markets reflect and strengthen the size of 
our alliance system is something that is fundamental to the United 
States and our allies during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and now 
during our challenges with China. Helping countries protect their 
sovereignty so they can be responsive to their citizens and effective 
partners of our Nation is imperative at a time when Chinese influence 
risks pulling nations into a new ``Sinosphere'' hostile to American 
interests and our democratic ideals.
  Let me conclude by predicting that the new challenges I describe with 
China are going to be with us for decades. We must face this fact with 
confidence and strategic resolve and bipartisan work in the U.S. 
Senate.
  America has extraordinary advantages relative to China: our global 
network of alliances, our military power and economic leadership, our 
innovative society, our abundant energy supplies--we are now the No. 1 
producer of oil, natural gas, and renewables in the world--our world-
class universities, the world's most productive workforce, and a 
democratic value system that makes countries far more comfortable as 
American partners than subservient members of a new ``Middle Kingdom'' 
led by China.
  As a result of the long twilight struggle with the Soviet Union, we 
also know what works--maintaining peace through strength, promoting 
free markets and free people at home, and having the confidence in 
George Kennan's insight that the Chinese Communist Party, like the 
Soviet Communist Party, likely bears within it the seeds of its own 
decay.
  While democracies are resilient, adaptive, and self-renewing, there 
are many vulnerabilities embedded in China's perceived strengths.
  One-man rule creates acute political risks. Historical grievance can 
breed violent nationalism. State-directed economic growth can produce 
massive overcapacity and mountains of debt. The gradual snuffing out of 
freedom in places like Hong Kong creates spontaneous protests of tens 
of thousands and huge global backlashes across the world. China's 
budding military power and historical view of itself as a nation and 
culture superior to others is beginning to alarm neighboring states, 
inspiring them to step up security cooperation with our Nation. Nearly 
half of all wealthy Chinese want to emigrate--and these are the winners 
from China's four decades of heady economic growth.

[[Page S7908]]

  As we have in the past, Americans can prevail in this geopolitical 
and ideological contest, but doing so will require a new level of 
strategic initiative, organization, and confidence in who we are and 
what we stand for. This also means that we must redouble our efforts in 
making this strategic case to others around the world, particularly our 
allies, and we must continue to work on bipartisan solutions that have 
enduring support in this body for decades to come as it relates to our 
challenges with China.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Boozman). The Senator from Alaska

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