[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 151 (Tuesday, September 19, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4568-S4569]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 China

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, in the past 2 months, the Chinese 
Government has reminded the world just how an authoritarian communist 
state operates.
  In July, President Xi announced he had replaced the PRC's Foreign 
Minister after the official hadn't been seen in public in a month. 
Then, the senior official responsible for the PLA strategic missile 
force, who hadn't been seen for even longer, was replaced. And then the 
Chinese Defense Minister went missing for weeks before Beijing 
announced he had been fired and detained for investigation. The purge 
of senior leaders, growing economic volatility, bellicose foreign 
policy--these are concerning developments in a country with a 
reputation for repression at home and belligerence abroad.
  China's neighbors and global powers alike are increasingly skeptical 
of official economic and budget numbers from a dictatorship that 
suppresses free speech, mocks the rule of law, and simply disappears 
its senior leaders--and rightly so.
  One thing has long been certain: The PRC is arming itself at an 
alarming rate. Recent estimates suggest China spends close to $700 
billion per year on defense. That is concerning for a number of 
reasons. First, a much larger percentage of China's defense budget than 
ours goes to modernization and capabilities. Further, since Chinese 
geostrategic ambitions--for now at least--are focused primarily on 
challenging the status quo in its immediate region, the PRC doesn't 
face the resource constraints that the United

[[Page S4569]]

States does due to our global interests and power projection 
requirements.
  Beijing's decades-long modernization campaign has paid dividends for 
the PRC. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal detailed the 
significant progress China has made in testing and fielding hypersonic 
weapons and how such efforts have outpaced those of our own country. 
America also lags in shipbuilding. The infrastructure constraints that 
keep us from building more ships, testing more hypersonic vehicles, and 
training more pilots are well known. But the cold truth is that China, 
which has a shipbuilding capacity more than 200 times that of the 
United States, is set to reach 400 ships in 2 years, while the U.S. 
Navy is aiming for 350 ships--listen to this--by 2045.
  This is precisely why Senate Republicans, led by Senator Shelby and 
Senator Wicker, pushed for an amendment to the 2021 Bipartisan 
Infrastructure Framework to create a Defense Infrastructure Fund and 
expand our capacity for testing, training, and production. 
Unfortunately, the Democratic leader did not allow this amendment to 
receive a vote.
  For what it is worth, I appreciate the Pentagon's recent efforts to 
catch up. For example, the Deputy Secretary of Defense recently 
announced an initiative to dramatically accelerate production of 
autonomous systems to help level the playing field with the PLA. Her 
remarks were titled ``The Urgency to Innovate.'' But closing the gap 
with China and outcompeting our biggest strategic adversary will 
require more than innovation theater or speeches about revolutions in 
military affairs. Real progress will require real investments in long-
range strike capabilities, real expansion of our defense production 
capacity, and real defense technology cooperation with our closest 
allies that increasingly share our concerns about the PLA.
  The conflict in Ukraine has finally motivated efforts in America, 
Europe, and Asia to invest in our defense industrial bases, but if we 
truly take competition with the PRC seriously, there is a lot more that 
needs to be done. AUKUS, our technology-sharing partnership with 
Australia and the United Kingdom, is a step in the right direction. In 
fact, it will hopefully serve as a model for expanding defense 
cooperation with other allies. But these efforts cannot come at the 
expense of properly funding America's own requirements for crucial 
systems like attack submarines.
  The Department's interest in autonomous systems, hypersonic weapons, 
and long-range fire is welcome, but the Pentagon needs to move at the 
speed of relevance to field these capabilities as soon as possible, and 
the Biden administration needs to stop sending Congress defense budget 
requests that cut funding after inflation and start prioritizing 
serious investments in the weapons that we actually need.