[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 74 (Wednesday, May 4, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2302-S2303]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                            Russia and China

  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, Ukraine's struggle against Russia's 
invasion has reminded Americans that, sometimes, the world divides into 
good and evil and into heroes and villains. Not always. There are many 
fights that are not like that, and we just stupidly talk like it. 
Debates about marginal tax policy are not good versus evil or heroes 
versus villains; but, sometimes, fights are heroes versus villains.
  Heroes are men and women who love their country and who love their 
freedom and who want to pass along freedom to the next generation, but 
they are also people who believe in freedom more broadly. Heroes are 
people who believe that we were created in the image of God and that 
everyone has unalienable rights: the rights to life, liberty, speech, 
religion, assembly, protest. These are pre-governmental rights. 
Governments don't give us these rights; we are endowed with these 
rights by nature and nature's Creator. Heroes recognize this not only 
about themselves and their own countrymen and -women but about 
everybody. Zelenskyy is such a hero.
  The villains are tyrants. They are people who want to oppress others, 
who want to hold them down. They want to take freedom from their 
countrymen but also from their neighbors. They are people who seek 
power at the expense of the weak. Putin is such a villain.
  But there is another villain in this drama, a villain who isn't 
getting nearly enough attention, and he is Chairman Xi, the dictator in 
China. His Chinese Communist Party has enabled him to do all sorts of 
oppressive things against men and women in his country. We know what is 
happening in Xinjiang--there is actually a genocide happening against 
the Uighurs in our time--but Xi is doing more than just oppressing 
people at home.
  A hundred years from now, when the history of the Russian invasion of 
Ukraine is written, assuming that it isn't written as Chinese 
propaganda, I am confident that the public will have a much clearer 
understanding of the way that Xi and Putin have worked together and 
have worked together closely. We can't talk here about everything we 
know in the Intelligence Committee, but I am confident that, when the 
history is written, the American people and the people of the world 
will see Xi and Putin as having worked hand in hand, side by side.
  Americans should understand this today: Chairman Xi is not 
indifferent about Ukraine. He is on Putin's side, and he has supported 
Putin's unprovoked war.
  The situation in Ukraine reminds us of a pretty good rule for 21st 
century foreign policy, and it is this: The Chinese Communist Party is 
almost always on the wrong side of freedom and human dignity.
  The CCP and the United States are in the middle of a global conflict 
of visions. It is important for us in this Chamber not to say ``the 
United States and China'' as if we mean 330 million Americans and 1.4 
billion Chinese are locked in a battle; but the U.S. vision, the 
American idea, is in conflict with the vision of the Chinese Communist 
Party and the ways that they want to oppress not just their neighbors 
but their own citizens. The CCP and the U.S. are locked in a global 
conflict of visions, and that is true whether DC politicians want to 
admit it every day or not, and sometimes it seems convenient for folks 
not to admit it.
  It is the free peoples of the world--NATO allies, Ukrainians, and 
other freedom lovers--who are fighting against a handful of 
totalitarian regimes--chiefly, Putin's Russia and Xi's Chinese 
Communist Party. These are the folks who are terrorizing not just their 
own people but their neighbors. This contest is a contest between 
liberty and tyranny. Not every fight is, but this one is; and you had 
damned well better believe that the tyrants are working together 
strategically and intentionally to undermine freedom.
  So let's back up to February 4.
  The Winter Olympics had just begun, and Vladimir Putin was in China 
to visit Chairman Xi. Together, they released what they called a 
``joint statement'' announcing a new partnership with ``no limits.'' 
The Xi-Putin statement said there would be no limits in their 
partnership against the United States. They promised that they would 
work together to promote each other's economic and national security 
interests even as Putin was amassing forces on the border of Ukraine 
and preparing for his invasion. Xi was not unaware of what Putin was 
planning when he released and signed the ``no limits'' statement.
  Here is why this is strange: Historically, Russia and China have not 
been friends. For centuries, these two countries have clashed with one 
another. During the Cold War, not even shared communist ideology could 
unite China and Russia for very long. The CCP studied the collapse of 
the Soviet Union to learn how to keep a communist regime afloat, and 
they have been very adept at using new technologies not to advance 
human freedom but to squash human freedom. Now, though, the historic 
rivals have found something they have in common. Both Putin and Xi hate 
the United States and hate, most fundamentally, our ideas of the 
dignity of every individual having been created in the image of God.
  Let's do a little geography.
  Russia and China share nearly 3,000 miles of common border. Russia is 
a giant. It has 11 time zones. Think about that. If you look at your 
globe of the world and spin it all the way around, you will get 24 time 
zones. Russia spans 11 of them. Russia is about 11 percent of the area 
of land on Earth. There are 5 countries that have about 6 percent: 
China is one; the U.S. is one; Canada is one--and India. So Russia has 
11 percent, and 5 countries have about 6 percent. No other country has 
more than about 2 percent of the land mass of Earth.
  The Russian-Chinese border has historically been complicated because 
they haven't gotten along, but as he planned to launch his wicked 
invasion of Ukraine, Putin needed to move troops and materiel all the 
way from the border with China in the East back into Europe in the 
West. And he couldn't do that--he couldn't leave this giant border 
unguarded--unless Chairman Xi said: We don't have any problems right 
now. And that is exactly what happened. Xi agreed that he would be on 
the same page with Putin as Putin took all of his troops and all of his 
materiel back from this historically contested border to use against 
the free people of Ukraine.
  From the beginning of this crisis, Chairman Xi has been in lockstep 
with Putin. The New York Times writes in some impressive reporting that 
Xi even asked Putin to delay the invasion until after the Olympics 
ended, which Putin ultimately did.
  One of the biggest ways China has supported Russia through all of 
this is by amplifying Russian lies and propaganda about the war. 
Chinese Communist Party propagandists, such as Wang Yi, have done 
everything from blaming the United States and NATO for the war to 
playing up Russia's unrealistic security demands, to echoing lies about 
Ukrainian biolabs.
  Xi's henchmen and CCP-controlled state media have always been there 
to amplify Putin's falsehoods. Some of the stuff Putin is saying at 
home is laughably absurd even to the hosts of state TV, who are paid to 
read these scripts. Yet Xi has been willing to take all of it, 
translate it into Mandarin, and pump it into China to make sure the 
people in China don't have an accurate understanding of what is 
happening between Russia and Ukraine. The CCP's state media have been 
trying to tell the world repeated untrue stories about Russia, and they 
now cover up the atrocities and horrors that have been committed by 
Russian troops against Ukrainian civilians.
  The propagandizing is obviously despicable, but the diplomatic 
support the CCP is providing Russia is even more dangerous. Through the 
COVID pandemic, we saw how China tried to manipulate international 
organizations like the WHO to promote their own narrative and to bully 
other countries. During the invasion of Ukraine, they have done the 
same thing on behalf of Putin.

[[Page S2303]]

  The Chinese foreign ministry has participated in the consistent 
spreading of lies about the war through and to other international 
organizations.
  At the U.N., Chinese diplomats have worked tirelessly to provide 
cover for Russian crimes and to enable Putin's invasion. They have 
spurned the pleas of Ukraine and other European countries to try to 
help restore the peace.
  And just a couple of weeks ago, China's vice minister met with the 
Russian Ambassador to announce the regimes will ``continue to 
strengthen strategic coordination with Russia.'' Statements like these 
have become characteristic of the twisted friendship that has developed 
between these two aggressor nations and what they call their ``no-
limits friendship.''
  China has also attempted to bail out Russia and to save their economy 
from the crippling sanctions that we and our allies have imposed since 
the beginning of this invasion. As soon as the sanctions were imposed, 
Chinese banks were looking for work-arounds so they could keep doing 
business with Russia, partly for their own interests but largely to 
help stabilize and subsidize Russia.
  Russian banks issued Chinese UnionPay cards, after Visa and 
Mastercard pulled out of the country, and ordered Chinese currency 
savings accounts. China was already in the currency manipulation 
business, but since February, they have been using their talents not 
just to prop up their own currency but also to keep the ruble from 
flaming out. And while other free countries have begun shunning 
Russia's energy sector, China's state-owned energy companies have 
continued to conduct what they call ``normal trading cooperation'' with 
Russia, looking for ways to expand and eat up more of the Russian 
supply.
  But China hasn't only been supporting Putin indirectly. Chairman Xi 
has also aided Putin's invasion of Ukraine directly. The Times of 
London reported at the beginning of April that China launched a massive 
cyber attack on Kyiv mere days before Putin invaded. Think about that. 
The Chinese Government was involved in a cyber attack against free 
Ukraine to help Russia.
  As the Russian army has struggled, Putin has asked Xi for direct 
military assistance, and Xi is reportedly deliberating about how he can 
do more, hoping the international community won't notice. We should 
notice. We should amplify what Xi is doing. He is aiding and abetting 
Russia's war crimes against civilians.
  Here is the fact: Putin and Xi are tied at the hip. China regularly 
claims that it stands for the principles of state sovereignty, 
territorial integrity, and noninterference in domestic affairs. Yet 
China has supported and provided diplomatic cover for Russia's illegal, 
immoral, and unprovoked war against Ukraine every step of the way. Now 
there is the chance that Team Zelenskyy could win, and so what has Xi 
done in response? He has decided to convene meetings to figure out how 
he can amp up support for Putin.
  We should be asking ourselves: Why is Chairman Xi so supportive of 
this invasion? Part of the reason is because Vladimir Putin is running 
a scout team offense for Chairman Xi's eventual planned invasion of 
Taiwan. Xi wants to learn everything he can about how democracies and 
free peoples will respond and how democracies defend themselves so that 
he can try to develop strategies to beat us and to beat our allies.
  Xi also wants Putin to win because he thinks this will demoralize 
Taiwan and the rest of the free world. He wants to be able to tell a 
story where the age of America, where the age of freedom is over. Xi 
wants to plunge the globe into a new dark age--an age of surveillance 
state totalitarianism. And step one at this moment is destroying the 
friends of Ukraine.
  We shouldn't deceive ourselves. What we are seeing in Ukraine is a 
contest between freedom and tyranny. It is not in our national interest 
to see the tyrants triumph. We need to show the world that the forces 
arrayed by Putin and Xi cannot defeat the bravery of men and women who 
want to live free and who believe in freedom.
  Zelenskyy and Ukraine's heroes have a chance to smash the new Russia-
China axis, but they need our support. Standing up to Putin and helping 
Ukraine is important for its own sake, but it is also important because 
this is the opening skirmish in a larger confrontation between tyranny 
and liberty, between Chinese communists and the American idea.
  Will the United States continue to lead the world toward peace and 
freedom, or will tyrant Xi and his CCP have the chance to impose their 
totalitarianism on weaker countries around the Pacific?
  Today in Ukraine, it is easy to see the line between good and evil, 
and that is why it is time for us to step up, to help Ukraine, but also 
to tell the world who Chairman Xi is, what he believes, what he has 
done on Putin's behalf, and why he is on Putin's side.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah.