[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 15]
[House]
[Page 20937]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



             USTR PREPARING TO GIVE CHINA MEMBERSHIP IN WTO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, as incredible as it sounds, the 
bureaucrats from the United States Trade Representative's Office are 
once again preparing to give their comrades in the People's Republic of 
China membership in the World Trade Organization. We saw the same thing 
happen last April when the Chinese autocrat Zhu Rongji was here in 
Washington.
  The USTR was feverishly working to further open our wallets to the 
world's largest nonmarket country; a nation that is ruled by corrupt 
tyrants with absolutely no respect for the rule of law or the basic 
human and political freedoms of its people; a nation that buys less of 
our goods than Belgium, one that steals our nuclear secrets, a country 
that proliferates weapons of mass destruction, and has the audacity to 
threaten the people of Taiwan for wanting the very same political 
freedom that lets us debate these issues in this chamber.

                              {time}  2015

  I have said it before, and I will say it again. Wei Jingshang, a man 
who spent nearly decades in Chinese prisons for having the nerve to 
fight for democracy, told me that it is American business executives 
and their political connections that serve as the vanguard of the 
communist revolution of the Chinese in the United States.
  As I speak, our Trade ambassador is being advised at the APEC summit 
in New Zealand by an individual who just 2 weeks ago was a lobbyist for 
Boeing, while his predecessor is now a lobbyist for a satellite 
manufacturer with extensive dealings in the People's Republic of China.
  Think about that the next time you read or hear about a textile 
worker in Georgia or an assembly line worker in Detroit or Cleveland 
who loses her job to a flood of Chinese goods, products that are made 
by workers that can be arrested, tortured, even executed for trying to 
organize a trade union. Think about their lives and the lives of their 
families and the well-being of their communities because the USTR is 
not going to hire these workers, Microsoft is not going to employ them 
as computer engineers, Wall Street is not going to take care of these 
laid off workers by allowing them to share the wealth either.
  And while we are left wondering how to help our workers and their 
families recover from the latest flood of prison labor imports or how 
we get the People's Liberation Army to back down from its threats 
against Taiwan, maybe we should take a closer look at how exactly our 
proposed World Trade Organization deal with China will affect American 
business and American workers.
  Just last week, the International Trade Commission released a report 
detailing the benefits a China WTO deal would have on our economy, a 
report based on the false promises that Zhu made during his Washington 
visit last April. False promises because time and time again the 
communist Chinese Government has not lived up in China to a single 
pledge to open its market to foreign competition.
  Every memorandum of understanding, every bilateral trade pact that 
our USTR, our Trade representative, has negotiated with the Chinese and 
touted as proof that China is changing has been completely ignored by 
the central planners in Beijing. Yet the American people, including 
those of us here in Congress, are not even allowed to read the Trade 
Commission report which was paid for by our tax dollars.
  These are not nuclear weapons codes. These are not blueprints for a 
new generation of microprocessors. These are not top secret materials. 
This is merely a government report on how a World Trade Organization 
deal for China will affect the U.S. economy.
  Yet the bureaucrats at USTR are deliberately withholding information 
from the American people and from this Congress. The only thing we have 
been able to read is a tiny summary that ominously warns that even 
under the best circumstances, meaning for the first time ever China 
actually lives up to its promises to reform, if in fact that would 
happen, even then, under the best circumstances, a WTO deal would 
barely increase our exports and would continue to swell the record 
setting trade deficits that we seem to find each month in dealing with 
China.
  Think about that because the ugly truth in this report which we are 
not allowed to read because it is damaging to the agenda of the 
Republican leadership in Congress, to the President and the 
administration, and to leaders in corporate America because it is 
damaging to them, it is admitting that the People's Republic of China 
into the WTO is the ultimate remedy for our burgeoning trade deficit 
with the world's worst abuser of human rights.
  Mr. Speaker, this is absurd. The American people should demand that 
the report be released and we should once and for all be allowed to 
finally democratize our trade policies. For too long our voters, the 
men and women who send us here, have been shut out of
this arena and they deserve to know exactly what our trade bureaucrats 
and their corporate allies have in store.
  Mr. Speaker, say no to WTO accession for the communist government and 
the People's Republic of China.

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