[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 105 (Thursday, June 15, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H2953-H2955]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
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COUNTERING CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY THREATS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from New York (Mr.
Santos) for 30 minutes.
Mr. SANTOS. Mr. Speaker, nearly 50 years ago, during the Cold War,
Soviet Russia was the enemy of the people and the biggest threat to the
free world.
Fast forward to 2023, and it appears that history is repeating itself
once again as the threat of nuclear annihilation comes full circle as
two opposing ideological blocs dominate the world.
General Secretary Xi Jinping has imitated Soviet Russia's playbook
ever since he came to power more than 20
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years ago. The Chinese Communist Party has built a cabal of global
partners through predatory and oppressive investments in foreign
countries, political strong-arming, stealing American technology, and
strengthening ties with anti-American tyrannical leaders.
This plan is taken straight from the Soviet's playbook. Only this
time, China is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was.
The United States must recognize and take immediate action against
China's push for influence in the developing world. The Soviet Union
used military might and territory conquest to forge strategic alliances
and expand its influence past the Iron Curtain. However, China mainly
uses economic sway and exploits our globalized economic system to
expand.
Over the past two decades, China has emerged as the critical trading
partner for many regions and developing countries across the globe, and
it is not by coincidence. China is intentionally targeting less-
developed countries to popularize its authoritarian model and undermine
developing democracies worldwide.
China's strategic approach is rendered explicitly in Xi Jinping's
Belt and Road Initiative, aka the BRI, a lending gambit that grants
China's allies, over 140 nations, billions of dollars under the
pretense of economic integration and interconnected development.
China has bought up so much copper, pork, and soy, and constructed so
many roads, trains, power grids, and bridges, that it has surpassed the
U.S. as South America's largest trade partner, and it is now Brazil's,
Chile's, and Peru's single largest trading partner.
Compared to the U.S. and the EU, Latin America's bilateral trade in
goods with China grew dramatically from $14.6 billion in 2001 to $315
billion in 2020. That is a 21.5-fold increase since Beijing joined the
World Trade Organization.
These insidious tactics have made China an undeniable economic
superpower through unbounded dishonesty and underhanded manipulation.
In 2019, China, an active trade partner of the U.S., allowed the yuan
to fall below the 7-to-1 yuan to U.S. dollar peg it had maintained
since 2015. This action set off a day of intense selling in global
markets. In the U.S., the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.9
percent, its worst daily decline all year.
By devaluing its currency, China could effectively undercut
competitors in the marketplace by offering lower prices on its exports
and, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, gain an unfair
competitive advantage in international trade.
Intellectual property theft, corporate espionage, forced technology
transfer, widespread product dumping, and currency manipulation are
just a few of the economic warfare tactics used by the Chinese
Communist Party.
This brings me to my point. One of China's most recent efforts to
destabilize the United States involves forging an unofficial alliance
with Russia to maintain Vladimir Putin's power at all costs. China is
also the top trader with Russia and Ukraine.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, China had already surpassed Germany
and the U.S. as Russia's most significant commercial partner and the
largest consumer of its oil and gas. China has provided a financial
lifeline to Russia over the past year by buying goods that the West
won't and helping Russia continue to access financial markets despite
harsh Western sanctions.
China not only accounted for the highest year-over-year rise in
export volume to Russia of any country in 2022, but it was also the
largest exporter to Russia overall.
Moving on, it is no secret that Putin and Xi are determined to end
the U.S. and create what Xi called a new model of major country
relations.
Sure enough, they have had great success in forming the BRICS bloc
and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose citizens comprise two-
thirds of the world's population.
China has been expanding its military production capabilities and is
now the world's fourth largest arms exporter. There has been a drastic
80 percent increase in Chinese military sales to regions across the
globe throughout the last decade. A growing number of United States
defense officials are expressing concerns about China's swift military
modernization.
At this rate, the United States cannot keep up with their prices and
turnaround, especially in regions like the Middle East, South Asia, and
Africa. Between 2017 and 2020, Chinese arms exports to sub-Saharan
Africa outpaced the United States by a ratio of nearly 3-to-1.
China has spread its malevolent influence this far simply because
China is determined to bolster our enemies and supplement them with
whatever they need to undermine democracy and our sovereignty.
China has allied with other iron-fisted regimes that are presently in
the crosshairs of U.S. sanctions, including some of the world's most
monstrous dictators, such as Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and Russia's
Vladimir Putin.
China has shipped more than $12 million in drones to Russia since it
invaded Ukraine, indicating quiet collaboration between the two.
Recently, Chinese state-affiliated entities sold metals and
centrifuges to corporations affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Defense
and Armed Forces Logistics to aid in constructing Iran's first
hypersonic missile, which amplifies Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Despite debt-trapping Venezuela, China has remained their steadfast
ally, negotiating payment grace periods and concealing trades.
China has even gone so far as to support a veto of the 2019 U.S.-
backed resolution in the United Nations calling for free and fair
presidential elections. The Maduro regime has become reliant on China
for disinformation campaigns and social control programs, including an
ID card that serves as a scorecard of loyal Venezuelan citizens to the
regime.
Close to $68 billion in loans has been given to Venezuela by China
since 2007, plus around 490 agreements have been signed in diverse
areas of investment. The exact nature of these investments is still yet
to be made public, but essentially everything comes down to extracting
Venezuela's rich mineral supply.
In addition, some of these quiet deals encompass state-affiliated
entities that have sold over $615 million worth of weapons to Venezuela
in the past 8 years.
This is the perfect example of the kind of mischief destabilization
the CCP is known for--preying on other countries via unsustainable and
corrupt lending while ignoring global labor and environmental standards
for their own economic gain.
Even with their own country, the CCP will only continue to enhance
their economic development. Forced labor has become common practice and
part of the CCP's plan for Xinjiang's economic development, which
includes making it a hub of textile and apparel manufacturing.
In fact, tens of thousands of Uyghurs detained in concentration camps
for religious persecution were sent to factories throughout China
linked to 83 global brands. To cover up a mass genocide and enslavement
of the Uyghur people, Chinese officials called the policy ``poverty
alleviation.''
More than a million Uyghurs are locked up in camps in their homeland
or blindfolded and transported to prison by truckloads. Brutal crimes
against Uyghur women, including forced sterilization and abortion, have
been carried out to diminish the Uyghur population. Children are taken
away from their parents and under pressure to deny their Uyghur
ancestry.
China's deep pockets have left its partners notably silent.
Prioritizing their economic ties and strategic relationships with
China, many other foreign governments continue to ignore human rights
abuses.
Taking another page out of Soviet Russia's book, propaganda,
censorship, and disinformation are pillars of the CCP's grand strategy
toward world domination. Their goal is to make the state and its
objectives appear favorable to the world while simultaneously
manipulating markets, lying, cheating, and stealing to fuel its
ceaseless attacks on democracy.
The COVID pandemic was the perfect example of what kind of propaganda
the China Communist Party is known for. Millions of Americans died of
the coronavirus. The epidemic was first reported in Wuhan, a city in
central China. However, instead of alerting the
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global community in the early stages of the outbreak, the CCP sought to
cover up the severity of the coronavirus outbreak but also to carry out
a great propaganda campaign downplaying the severity of COVID-19,
attempting to shift responsibility and hide the origins of the virus.
I would hope the Biden administration and Congress would be willing
to step up to the plate and finally take a different approach toward
prevention and protecting the American people from the CCP's
unrelenting attempts to infringe on our national security. I hope that
as leaders of the free world we will take proactive steps to counter
the CCP's threat toward democracy and efforts to infiltrate our
sovereignty.
This is why I have introduced several bills that would hold China
accountable and protect our Nation's innovation, ideas, and way of
life.
Instead, we have senior officials of the DOJ colluding with the CCP
to have Chinese political asylees exiled from the United States to be
tortured and killed by CCP agents.
We have a President who promises to buy American but vetoes
legislation that has reinstated tariffs on solar panels from Chinese
companies in Southeast Asia. We have an administration actively
allowing the CCP to dodge responsibility for COVID.
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Drug traffickers are smuggling fentanyl produced by China into the
United States through our unsecured borders killing millions of
Americans while benefiting China from a weakening America due to the
fentanyl epidemic.
There are ways we can legislate to make a safer, more secure, and
better America for the next generation. Here are 10 measures I have
introduced to counter the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party:
H. Con. Res. 51 is a concurrent resolution that makes it the opinion
of Congress that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest threat to
freedom and the free world.
H.R. 4001 is a bill which includes a provision to prohibit the United
States from selling weaponry to the People's Republic of China and the
Chinese Communist Party.
H. Con. Res. 52 is a concurrent resolution condemning Cuba and the
Chinese Communist Party for discussing and implementing an agreement to
build a Chinese Communist Party spy base on the island of Cuba, 90
miles from the United States' coast.
H.R. 4000 is a bill to authorize the United States to bring civil
actions against the Government of the People's Republic of China for
harm suffered by the state as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
H.R. 3757 is a bill to prohibit the availability of Federal funds to
institutions of higher education that fund the Confucius Institute.
H.R. 3664 is a bill to prohibit the availability of Federal funds to
the World Health Organization pending the conduct of an investigation
relating to the influence over such organization by the Chinese
Communist Party and for other purposes.
H.R. 3598 is a bill to direct the Secretary of State to conduct a
comprehensive study assessing the Chinese Communist Party's role in the
distribution of fentanyl in the United States.
H.R. 3597 is a bill to direct the President to impose sanctions on
the People's Republic of China.
H. Con. Res. 48 is a bill condemning the Chinese Communist Party for
the Wuhan Lab leak causing the deadly COVID-19 epidemic.
H. Res. 421 is a resolution expressing the sense of the House of
Representatives that the Chinese Communist Party should be held
accountable for present-day efforts of knowingly and intentionally
manipulating their currency.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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