[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 11982]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



            CHINA HAS YET TO EARN PREFERENTIAL TRADE STATUS

  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, 10 years ago this week China's 
Communist dictatorship sent its tanks and armored carriers crashing 
through the prodemocracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. 
Hundreds of innocent protesters were crushed to death, hundreds more 
were mowed down by machine guns, hundreds more were arrested and 
executed.
  The men and women who lost their lives in Beijing and the ones who 
remain jailed are the heirs to the legacy of our Founding Fathers. They 
quoted Thomas Jefferson, they built a monument fashioned after our 
Statue of Liberty, they look to the United States as a beacon of hope 
and of freedom. In the United States, the nation which the thousands of 
dead at Tiananmen hoped to emulate, is once again coddling the same 
dictators who had them murdered by renewing China's annual trade 
privileges. After all, the lure of one billion Chinese low-wage workers 
is the catalyst of our China policy.
  Think about it: no pesky unions, no minimum wage laws, no labor 
standards, no effective court system to scare away investors. The 
potential for profit, regardless of human rights for American 
corporations, is enormous. After all, Wall Street bankers could not 
care less if the shelves at the Lorain, Ohio, K-Mart are lined with 
goods manufactured by Chinese slave labor. The lawyers in Washington 
could not care less if Chinese workers are imprisoned for trying to 
form unions.
  Win Jingshang, a democracy activist who spent nearly two decades in a 
Chinese prison, told me that American corporate executives, not Chinese 
spies but American corporate executives, are the vanguard of the 
Chinese Communist Party revolution in the United States.
  It should bother us, all of us, that exactly 10 years after the 
slaughter of those demonstrators in Tiananmen Square that American 
CEO's actively roam the government corridors of the Chinese Communist 
Party dictatorship. It should bother all of us that after cavorting 
with the butchers of Beijing, these American CEOs streamed into Ronald 
Reagan National Airport to argue for continued favors, continued trade 
advantages for the world's worse abuser of human rights. It should 
bother all of us that the brutal nature of China's Communist regime is 
totally ignored by all too many in America's business community.
  The harsh reality is that the ongoing genocide in Tibet, continued 
arrest, and torture of democracy activists, proliferation of nuclear 
technology to North Korea, none of that matters very much to too many 
people in America's business community. To this I say, the most 
effective way to toughen our relationship with China is to deny it 
special trading privileges.
  Every year I and others in this body have prodded the administration 
and the Republican leadership to force China to improve its behavior 
before giving it preferential trade status. These benefits give China's 
Communist Party dictators billions and billions of dollars, last year 
it was 60 billion to be precise, and the commercial technology needed 
to modernize the People's Liberation Army. Yet each year the same GOP, 
the same Republican Members of Congress who are the loudest in their 
criticism of the Clinton administration and its China policy turn 
around because of corporate business influence in this body, turn 
around and give Beijing preferential trade status.
  Mr. Chairman, what we need to do before granting special trade status 
to the Communist Chinese is to condition their behavior on something 
other than what they say. I, for one, am weary of continued Chinese 
Communist promises that they will behave, they will play fair, they 
will stop human rights abuses, they will end child labor, they will 
stop forced abortions, they will begin to behave, they will stop 
selling nuclear technology to rogue nations, that they will begin to 
play by the rules.
  It was Mao, quoting Soviet leader Lenin, who liked to state promises 
are like pie crusts, they are made to be broken.
  Mr. Speaker, I ask the administration, I ask the President, I ask 
Republican leadership in this body, I ask the American business 
community, all of whom are far too strongly supportive of the World 
Trade Organization entry for China, I ask them to step back and let us 
see if China can behave for 1 year. We should demand to see if China 
can stop its human rights abuses, can stop its child labor and slave 
labor practices, can stop threatening Taiwan before receiving another 
dollar from U.S. business interests. We must not give China special 
trading privileges, Mr. Speaker, until we see proof that its Communist 
Party leaders are capable of abiding by world standards.

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