[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 10] [House] [Pages 13843-13870] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]DISAPPROVAL OF NORMAL TRADE RELATIONS TREATMENT TO PRODUCTS OF PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the unanimous consent agreement of July 17, I call up the joint resolution (H.J. Res. 50) disapproving the extension of the waiver authority contained in section 402(c) of the Trade Act of 1974 with respect to the People's Republic of China, and ask for its immediate consideration. The Clerk read the title of the joint resolution. The text of H.J. Res. 50 is as follows: H.J. Res. 50 Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Congress does not approve the extension of the authority contained in section 402(c) of the Trade Act of 1974 recommended by the President to the Congress on June 1, 2001, with respect to the People's Republic of China. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gillmor). Pursuant to the order of the House of Tuesday, July 17, 2001, the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas) and a Member in support of the joint resolution each will control 1 hour. Is there a Member in support of the joint resolution? Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, I am in support of the resolution. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from California (Mr. Stark) will control 1 hour. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas). Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to yield one-half of the time, 30 minutes, to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin), the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Trade of the Committee on Ways and Means, and that he be permitted to yield time as he sees fit. The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from California? There was no objection. Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to yield half of my time to the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), who supports the resolution. The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from California? There was no objection. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas). Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I rise in strong opposition to House Joint Resolution 50, which would cut off normal trade relations with China. This resolution, I believe, is terribly short-sighted toward Chinese reform and hard-fought gains of American consumers, workers and exporters, given how China is so close to accepting the comprehensive trade disciplines of the World Trade Organization membership. {time} 1615 Just last July, this body voted 273 to 197 to extend normal permanent trade relations to China upon its accession to the WTO. The reason this measure is in front of us today is that, after negotiations between Ambassador Zoellick and the Republic of China, we have come to an agreement on a bilateral agreement which is a precursor to the admission of China. Unfortunately, the date sequences leave us with an open period of time in which this annual renewal is necessary. In order to support the United States government's decision based upon the bilateral negotiated treaty with China, I urge all Members to oppose H.J. Res. 50. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.J. Res. 50, which would cut-off normal trade relations with China. This resolution is terribly short-sighted toward Chinese reforms and the hard-fought gains of American consumers, workers, and exporters, given how close China is to accepting the comprehensive trade disciplines of WTO membership. Last July, this body voted 273 to 197 to extend permanent normal trade relations with China upon its accession to the WTO. I expect China to officially assume the full responsibilities of WTO membership by year end. Defeat of H.J. 50 is necessary to support Ambassador's Zoellick's decision to take the extra time to ensure that China's concessions to the Untied States are as clear and as expansive as possible. Despite its history, despite having been pushed and pulled between colonialism and nationalism, ravaged by simultaneous imperial invasion and civil war, and finally driven to near ruin by Mao and his Cultural Revolution, China is finally prepared to join the world of trading nations by accepting the fair trade rules of the WTO. This is progress that must be supported. While the world and the Chinese people still face overwhelming problems with the behavior of the Chinese government, it is imperative to understand that China is changing. These last ten years represent the most stable and industrious decade China has known in the last 150 years. WTO Membership and normal trade relations with the United States is the best tool we have to support the changes we see in China. Thanks to the Chinese government's structural economic reforms, more than 40 percent of China's current industrial output now comes from private firms. Urban incomes in China have more than doubled. For millions of Chinese, increased prosperity and well-being has been manifest in the form of improved diets and purchases of consumer goods. Everyday, more and more ordinary Chinese citizens are able to start their own businesses and begin the process of building an entirely new way of life for themselves. We are witnessing Chinese society renew itself, absorbing new ideas and a world of information and knowledge. As well, the Beijing Government is taking steps to integrate capitalists into China's domestic political system. Revoking NTR at this time would undermine the success of the capitalist and social reforms taking place in China. Let us not turn our backs on the gains our negotiators have made with China for America's farmers, businesses, and consumers. Instead, let us all give capitalism a true chance in China. I urge a ``no'' vote on H.J. Res. 50. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, many might view this debate as an exercise in futility as China has already received permanent normal trade relations status. But I see it as an opportunity to recall some of the false arguments made on behalf of granting permanent normal trade relations to the People's Republic of China and to reflect back on the progress China has made in becoming a global trade partner worthy of normal trade relations status. Last year when we debated the relations with China, we heard all kind of horrific scenarios from the industries that support this about the threats of what would happen to the American economy if we did not grant permanent [[Page 13844]] trade relations to China. For instance, in May, 2000, Motorola ran a full-page ad in Roll Call and had a picture of the Motorola flip phone, like so many of us carry, and it said, ``If we do not sell products to China, someone else will.'' They contended in their ad that, of course, these phones were made by Motorola. They falsely said that this would mean China's markets would not be open to U.S. exports. Well, less than a year after the enactment, Motorola shut down its only U.S. manufacturing plant and moved the manufacturing jobs to China. There are many, many anecdotes to that. We just sold out too cheap. The argument, if we do not sell products to China, China will sell them to us, that is the argument that Motorola should have used. They made promises with respect to weapons which they have not kept. They have made promises with respect to human rights which they have not kept. And we, like a bunch of chumps, have bought into that argument and allowed China to run roughshod over human rights, over American dignity, over American jobs. Mr. Speaker, I would urge my colleagues to support this resolution, to end this charade that these people are doing anything that would help America or that they voluntarily will increase human rights on their part. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the remainder of my time be controlled by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Crane). The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gillmor). Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from California? There was no objection. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition. I do not really look upon this as an exercise in futility. It is an exercise that would have some true irony if this resolution were to pass because, as we know, China has now essentially finished its negotiations with all of the countries, save one perhaps, and with the WTO except for a few outstanding issues. Its accession is now essentially completed. If this resolution were to pass, we would withdraw NTR for a few months and then it would go into effect upon the formal accession of China. So, in that sense, any passage of this would be not only be radical but probably counterproductive. In that sense, maybe it is futile. I think we should look upon this discussion as an opportunity to assess where matters are since we voted for PNTR. In a word, I would say that it is a mixture of changing and staying the same. There has been continuing change in China. It has continued to move away from a state-dominated economy towards a free-market economy. That has been true in industrial sectors, and now more and more it is gaining a foothold elsewhere, both geographically and in other sectors. Also, it has been true in the smaller enterprises as well as the larger. We have also seen a rapid expansion of the Internet. We also have seen the beginnings of cracks in their legal system that has been so dominated by the state. For the first time, we are seeing some successful suits by workers and individuals to redress grievances. It is said soon China will be acceding to the WTO, and that I think everybody would agree is likely to accelerate change. Indeed, one of the issues is how China is going to handle these changes. But in many other respects China has stayed the same. Anyone who thinks increased trade is a panacea that will bring about all kinds of changes in the near future, I think those people are wrong. I think we have seen in the last year continued trampling on the human rights in China, Falun Gong, the repression of Tibet and other ethnic minorities and the grievous detention of scholars and American citizens. We have also witnessed some security issues, including the downing of our airplane. These are troubling issues, and they continue to be. So I think the events of the last year fortify the approach that was taken last year, and that is to combine engagement with China that I think is truly unavoidable in view of its size, its importance, and also the need to pressure China, indeed at times to confront, to engage and to pressure. Last year, the legislation had some provisions relating to engagement. They also did so in terms of pressure. We set up a congressional executive commission. I think that now all of the members have been named. There will be one change in the Senate. I think that within the next weeks, if not few days, that important commission will become operational. It will work on issues of human rights, including worker rights, be an active force to pressure China to move in the right direction. It did not like our creation of that commission, and I think that commission will fulfill its obligations. We asked in that legislation that there be an annual review of China's performance within the WTO. Many were skeptical that could be achieved, but it has been through the negotiations by USTR. We also inserted an anti-surge provision in the legislation that was the strongest inserted into legislation in American history, and that is there as a pressure point. So, in a word, I think that we need to continue the path that we have set, one of active engagement, but also of vigorous alertness and pressure. So, therefore, I oppose this resolution, not only because we would be withdrawing NTR only for it to go back into operation in a few months but because I think on balance the appropriate course is one of continuing engagement and also of vigorous pressure. Mr. Speaker, I think this is the best path to follow, not an easy one, but the one that is most likely to be productive on all sides of the equation. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I have introduced House Joint Resolution 50 with my colleague from Ohio (Mr. Brown) to disapprove the extension of the President's waiver on the Jackson-Vanik provision in the Trade Act of 1974. My reason for this resolution is to protect our country's national security, as well as to call attention to the gross violations of human rights that now are taking place on the mainland of China. Since we held this debate last year, and despite previous Presidential waivers, the Communist Chinese have used their $80 billion that they have in annual trade surplus with the United States to modernize their military and boost their nuclear forces which target American cities. In other words, they are using the $80 billion trade surplus that we are permitting. We are approving the rules of engagement in terms of our economic relationship. They use that $80 billion to buy technology to kill Americans. That is absurd, that we should continue in this type of relationship. Mr. Speaker, many people are going to suggest that this is in some way beneficial to the people of the United States. There is no doubt that the China trade is beneficial to a very few people in the United States, a few billionaires who are able to exploit the labor, the near slave labor in China and thus do not have to put up with unions or regulations in the United States of America. So, yes, it is beneficial for them, but it is not beneficial for the people of the United States of America. What is it then that propels this vote on normal trade relations? Why is it that we always have this vote, and those of us who are against normal trade relations with Communist China always lose. Well, it is because we have these people who have great wealth and power who are exercising their influence on this body and with the public to try to pressure to continue going down this road even though every road sign says, ``Turn back, not this way.'' Mr. Speaker, we will hear during this debate over and over again, mark my words, we will hear people say we have got to have normal trade relations with China in order to exploit the world's biggest market in order to sell American products. Let me repeat this two or three times. That is not what normal trade [[Page 13845]] relations is about. It is not what normal trade relations is about. Opening up markets and selling American products that are manufactured here is not what normal trade relations is about. What normal trade relations is about is, with the passing of this bill, those billionaires that I just mentioned are able to get tax subsidies, subsidies for their investment. They are able to close down manufacturing companies in the United States and open up factories in Communist China to use their slave labor with a subsidy from the American taxpayer, be it the Export-Import Bank or other subsidized international financial institutions. Mr. Speaker, that is what this vote is about. This vote is whether we should be subsidizing big business to close down American factories and give that subsidy to them to open up factories in Communist China. It is an insult to the people of the United States. We are taxing them to put them out of their own jobs. That is what this vote is about. It is about continuing the economic rules of engagement with Communist China which has led to their militarization and has led them to become so arrogant of the United States that the Chinese downed an American military aircraft and held American military personnel hostage for 11 days. Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to consider, what if those people had died on that airplane? Those 24 Americans, it was a miracle that they did not die, that that crash did not occur. Otherwise, what would we be doing today? I would suggest many people in this body would be making the same arguments, do not worry about Communist China, it is actually getting better. What do they have to do? They are murdering their own people. They are putting Christians in jail. They are putting Falun Gong meditators in jail. They have a higher level of oppression than they had before. They are bringing down American aircraft. What do we have to do? Mr. Speaker, we have to recognize that there are powerful forces at work in this country and they are profiting from what, from a tax subsidy from our taxpayers to give them the type of loan guarantees that they cannot get from private banks. {time} 1630 This has nothing to do with free trade. It has nothing to do with selling American products in China. It has everything to do with subsidizing and guaranteeing big businessmen who cannot get their loans guaranteed in the private sector because it is too risky to go and set up factories in China. That is what this vote is about. I would ask my colleagues to support our position and to reject the Jackson-Vanik waiver for trade with China. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time. Mr. CRANE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Keller). Mr. KELLER. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to House Joint Resolution 50, which attempts to disapprove normal trade relations with China. It is clearly in our country's best interest to open up China's market of more than 1.2 billion potential customers. Our markets are already open to China. We need normalized trade relations to further open up their markets to us. And we are moving in the right direction. Twelve years ago, the images we saw from China were of students standing in front of tanks. Now the images we see on our TV screens are of students standing in front of Internet cafes and McDonalds. There are several Wal-Mart stores that have recently opened up in China. U.S. exports to China have increased by $4 billion over the last 5 years, with a 24 percent increase last year alone as a result of normal trade relations. Some folks who want to put an end to our trading relationship with China point out that they have a less than satisfactory record on human rights. I agree. But I also agree with President Bush that maintaining normal trade relations with China is our best hope for improving their record in terms of human rights. I think President Bush did a great job in securing the safe return of 24 brave servicemen and women from China after the surveillance plane incident. Looking forward, we can make a positive impact by engaging in constructive dialogue with China, exporting more Bibles to China, opening up their minds about democracy through the Internet, and other things. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this resolution. Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means. Mr. CARDIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the resolution to disapprove MFN status for the People's Republic of China. I recognize this is largely a symbolic action. The die was cast last year when Congress approved PNTR for the People's Republic. I voted to support normal trade status as it was an essential step towards inclusion of China in the WTO and mainstream of international trade. As a part of the bilateral agreement between China and the United States, once China joins the WTO we will have achieved significant concessions from China in our trade arrangements. We will also have a permanent human rights monitoring of China. But to date, China has not become part of the WTO and standing on its own, using human rights as the test, particularly reviewing China's record during the past 12 months, China is not entitled to MFN status. I view this vote as a signal to the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party that their actions in numerous areas, but most particularly in the area of human rights, are unacceptable internationally. Mr. Speaker, let me just quote from the report of our own State Department on human rights practices in China: ``The government's poor human rights record worsened, and it continued to commit numerous serious abuses. ``The government's respect for religious freedom deteriorated markedly during the year, as the government conducted crackdowns against Christian groups, et cetera. ``Abuses included instances of extrajudicial killings, the use of torture, forced confessions. ``The government severely restricted freedom of assembly and continued to restrict freedom of association. ``Violence against women, including coercive family planning practices which sometimes includes forced abortion and forced sterilization.'' Mr. Speaker, the report goes on and on and on on the human rights violations of China. Jackson-Vanik speaks to our Nation that we believe that human rights are an important part of normal trade with our Nation. Based upon the record during the past 12 months, China does not deserve normal trade relations; and we should approve the resolution. Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) and ask unanimous consent that he be allowed to control the time. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gillmor). Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from California? There was no objection. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Tauscher). Mrs. TAUSCHER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, last year I was a strong supporter of granting PNTR status to China and the opportunity for them to join the WTO. Today I rise in strong opposition to the resolution of disapproval for normal trade relations with China. Has China improved over the last year and have they become the kind of nation that we would believe would be the perfect trade partner for us? Have they shared our values of democracy and human rights? Have they worked toward improving the environment? No, they have not. But at the same time, I believe that former Secretary of State Madeleine [[Page 13846]] Albright was correct when she said that engagement with China is not endorsement. And having an opportunity to work with a China that is opening its markets, that is one that is part of the World Trade Organization, that is opportunistically working to open its markets with us and is also able to be subject to the adjudication of the World Trade Organization is somebody that I think is necessarily part of the world market. We have an opportunity to know that in this connection, trade is not always about economic and political freedom, but it certainly will help us to get to a place where China can move toward improving its human rights, and that is a very important opportunity for the working families of my district in California. Mr. Speaker, normal trade relations with China is good for businesses and for working families. I urge my colleagues to oppose the resolution disapproving normal trade relations with China because exposing the Chinese people to economic and political freedom is the best way to encourage change in that country. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), a man who knows we should not be subsidizing American investment in China. Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time; and I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) for always keeping our eyes focused. It is funny what people see when they look at countries or events. When we look to China, we see a quick buck. That is what we look at. What did the students in Tiananmen Square see when they looked at America? They built a statue modeled after the Statue of Liberty. When you come into my office, the first thing you will see is the young man standing in front of the two tanks. He is dead. We debate faith-based initiatives today and what role religious organizations ought to have in our public life, and we jealously guard separation of church and state. What do they do in China? They will kill you if you step out of line. We debate passionately a woman's right to choose. There is no debate in this country about the government forcing somebody to have an abortion, but that is the norm in China. When you talk about normal relations, you better understand who you are talking about. Slave labor. We debate worker safety, environmental protections; and we have different views. But nobody in this House would allow one American to live like the Chinese people live under Communist tyranny. Time Magazine, not my favorite magazine, is banned in China. It is banned in China because they wrote something the Communist Chinese dictators did not like. Trade with China. You show me one agreement we have made with them, and I will tell you how they cheat. They are destroying the textile industry because they cheat. If during the Reagan years we had done with the former Soviet Union what we are doing with China, communism would still be alive and well because we would give the Communist dictators in the former Soviet Union the money to stay in business. The money going to China does not go to the people. It goes to their government. What is a normal relationship with China? The normal day-to-day operations in China should make most Americans feel ashamed that we are doing business with them. Mr. CRANE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Dreier). Mr. DREIER. I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, this is probably the last time that the United States Congress will engage in what has become known as the annual ritual of debating normal trade relations with China. No matter what side of this trade debate you are on, you cannot deny that China is rapidly emerging as a nation. They are already a regional power in Asia, and they have the capability to be a world player. This is not a value statement; it is clearly a fact. Another fact, and one that I have asserted many times over the years, is that market reform is a powerful force for positive change in China. As it develops economically, a massive class of better educated, wealthier Chinese people is emerging, people empowered not through politics and the ballot box but increasingly empowered through property rights and information technology. This is China's entrepreneurial class. We all recognize that the Chinese government does not share our values. The people who make up China's entrepreneurial class increasingly should share our values, but they often do not. The disturbing reality is that we appear to be losing the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. Now, there is no question that many Chinese leaders do not like America and the values that it embodies. But we need a national policy toward China that is able to penetrate through the haze of the Chinese information ministers and make it clear to the people of China that the people of the United States are their friends. The vast majority of the 1.3 billion people in China share the hopes and dreams that we hold. They want good jobs, strong families, and a peaceful future. The desire for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may have been penned by an American, but there is no reason to believe that the dream does not extend to people in China or anywhere else. That is why America has been a symbol for hope and human freedom for over 200 years. That is also why we must be committed to ensuring that the average Chinese family does not believe that America stands in the way of those basic goals. In short, we need to stand up to the Chinese government for freedom in ways that do not put us on the wrong side of the Chinese people. Mr. Speaker, the House is going to reject this resolution of disapproval because ending trade with China is bad for the American people and it is bad for the Chinese people. We may not need to go through this exercise again, but we should be thinking about how to build ties to the emerging Chinese entrepreneurial class. Winning the trade fight but losing the hearts and minds of those in China who should be America's friends may very well prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. For the people of the United States and the people of China, vote ``no'' on this resolution. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) who believes that this Congress should quit rewarding China for its human rights violations, for its political oppression, and for its persecution of religious figures. Ms. PELOSI. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time and for his leadership on this important issue. I just want to pick up where my colleague from California left off, and, that is, he said ending trade with China. Speaking that way is a grave disservice to this debate. Nobody here is talking about ending trade with China. What we are saying is that our trade with any country should promote our values, promote our economy through promoting our exports and make the people freer. Our trade relationship with China fails on all three points. I had hoped that this debate would not even be necessary. Last year when PNTR was passed, it was said it was necessary for us to do our part of the bargain so that China would come into the WTO and start complying with international trade rules. {time} 1645 Here we are again, 1 year later. Frankly, I think you should all be very embarrassed. You promised if we did that, they would be in. But, then again, you have been saying since 1989, when we first started this debate, that if we gave China most-favored-nation status, now had its name changed to protect the guilty, if we gave them PNTR, or NTR, or whatever you want to call it, that human rights, that the trade advantage would improve for us, and that [[Page 13847]] they would stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, three areas of concern. Well, bad news again. The news is bad on every score. When we first started this debate in 1989, the trade deficit with China was $2 billion a year. My, my, my, we thought that gave us leverage, $2 billion a year. The annual renewal, this policy that is in place that was going to improve our trade relationship, that deficit is projected to be $100 billion for this year. Not $2 billion a year, but $2 billion a week. On the basis of trade alone, this is a bad deal for the U.S. Intellectual property is supposed to be our competitive advantage. The International Intellectual Property Alliance reports that piracy rates in China continue to hover at the 90 percent level, an alarming increase in the production of pirate optical media products, including DVDs by licensed, as well as underground, CD plants. I will submit the full report in the record. Growing Internet piracy, growing production of higher-quality counterfeit products, and respective uses of unauthorized copies of software in government enterprises and ministries. The Bush administration report on agriculture is very bad. It says that the anticipated access for agricultural products has not been seen. So that was the big thing we held out last year. If you vote for this, our products will get into China. The access is just not there. On proliferation, China continues to proliferate weapons of mass destruction to rogue states, which we have now changed the name to ``countries of concern,'' and to unsafe guarded states like Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya, making the world a less safe place. On the question of human rights, we were told if we gave China most- favored-nation status, human rights would improve. The brutal occupation of Tibet continues. The human rights violations continue and are worsened. If you are a political dissident in China, you are either in jail or in exile. So I say to my colleagues, if we are standing here again next year, shame on us. I think we should finesse this issue. Next year we have to examine this policy closer. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Moran). Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose this resolution. Normal trade relations with China has been supported by every single President of the United States, Republican and Democratic alike, since 1980. By continuing normal trade relations with China, we are neither providing China special treatment, nor are we endorsing China's policies. The United States is the only major country that does not extend permanent normal trade relations with China. China is also the world's largest economy that is not subject to the World Trade Organization's trade liberalization requirements. The vast majority of Members voted to grant PNTR status to China last year. This action is critical to advancing China's accession to the WTO, which will bring the Chinese into a rules-based trading system. It would also enable U.S. consumers and businesses to gain access to the broadest range of goods and services from China at the lowest prices. Restricting trade will only force our consumers to pay higher prices. Continuing normal trade relations with China serves our best economic interests. Approximately 200,000 U.S. jobs are tied directly to U.S. exports to China. Without this relationship, we would be placing American firms at a severe competitive disadvantage. American companies are setting an example in China. They are offering good jobs, fair compensation, and strong worker protections. While I share the concerns expressed by many of our colleagues regarding human rights abuses in China, discontinuing normal trade relations will not improve human rights in China. Instead of isolating China, we should be exposing the Chinese people to Western ideas and the rule of law. Bringing China into the global free enterprise economy will shine a much-needed light on its government. Last week's decision by the International Olympic Committee to award China the bid for the 2008 games will put more pressure on the Chinese leadership to prove it is worthy of the designation and the international attention. Promoting normal trade and continued economic engagement over time will help open up China's economy and society. The way we engage the Chinese Government will help determine whether China assimilates into the community of nations or becomes more isolated and unpredictable. By revoking NTR with China, we would be standing alone on a trade policy that neither our allies nor trade competitors would follow. Our competitors would gain an advantage, consumers would pay higher retail prices, the Chinese people would suffer, and economic and political reform in China would be arrested. In short, we have much to lose and little to gain by failing to continue our current trading relationship with China. We should reject this resolution, and we should support continuing normal trade relations with China. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Traficant), who knows it is not right for U.S. taxpayers to subsidize businesses to close up here and set up shop on the mainland of China. Mr. TRAFICANT. Mr. Speaker, let us get to the point: China is a communist dictatorship. China has threatened Taiwan, and even Los Angeles. As we speak, China is shipping arms to Cuba. China has just signed an agreement with Russia. China held 24 Americans hostage, no matter how you want to state it. China stole our secrets. China just recently illegally bought U.S. microchips to make more missiles. China already, according to the Pentagon, has missiles aimed at American cities. Hey, China is on record, according to the Pentagon, as referring to Uncle Sam as imperialist and, quote-unquote, ``the enemy.'' Now, if that is not enough to spoil your stir-fry, China is taking $100 billion in trade surplus a year out of America. And we might laugh, but I believe that the Congress of the United States, with American taxpayer dollars, is funding World War III. World War III. A dragon does not negotiate with its prey; a dragon kills its prey. When are we going to wise up around here? China's record speaks for itself. My God, even the Pentagon bought the black berets from China. On the Mall, the symphony was performing on Independence Day, and vendors were passing out plastic Old Glories made in China. The last I heard, we were referred to around the world as Uncle Sam. So help me God, the way we are acting, the world is beginning to look at America as Uncle Sucker. I will have no part of this. There is an old saying: ``Better dead than red.'' This is a communist dictatorship. I want to give credit to former President Reagan, who crippled and dismantled communism, brought the Berlin Wall down, destroyed and destructed what he called that Evil Bear, the Soviet Union. And what we have done in the last 3 years, we not only reinvented communism, we are now starting to subsidize it. And, by God, we are funding, I believe, and I warn this Congress, a future World War III; and we had better be careful. With that I thank the gentleman for his time, and I support this resolution, and I think this resolution is more important than the consideration it is getting very flippantly from some economists in America. Mr. CRANE. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Kolbe). Mr. KOLBE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I do rise in opposition to the resolution that would revoke normal trade relations with China. I think very clearly doing this would be a destabilizing factor in our relationship. I am sure that is the intention of those who have this resolution today. I think it would steer China on a certain course towards isolationism and nationalism, and I would think that those [[Page 13848]] who support this resolution certainly do not independently intend that to happen, because that certainly is not in the interests of either country. That would be counterproductive, certainly to our own economic and to our foreign policy interests. There is nothing new in the debate really this year from what we had last year when we passed permanent normal trade relations. Nothing has changed since then. The reasons we supported PNTR last year are equally as valid as they were a year ago, and I say that despite the recent storms that we have had in U.S.-China relations. The recent downing of our aircraft and the holding of the plane and the crew for an inordinate length of time does not change the reasons that we need to have normal trade relations with that country. We must remember that if China is going to become a member of the World Trade Organization, it has to make dramatic policy changes. As a result, its economy is going to become more and more open, more and more capitalistic, in the future. Free market forces are growing and they are getting stronger in China. Economic liberty is on the rise, and that is exactly the course we want to help China navigate. If the U.S. revokes normal trade relations, it would be devastating to China's economic progress and hurt American consumers and workers in the process. I heard here earlier about how this is about the almighty dollar; and I say no, it is not about that. This is about making sure that China continues on a path towards opening its political and its economic system; and, yes, it does help American workers in the process. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members of the House to oppose this resolution and to defeat it. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis), who has fought human rights abuses in this country and wants to stop human rights abuses in China. Mr. LEWIS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend and colleague for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the resolution. We must stand up for human rights and democracy throughout the world; not only here at home, but around the world. Where is the freedom of speech? Where is the freedom of assembly? Where is the freedom to organize? Where is the freedom to protest? Where is the freedom to pray? It is not in China. China continues to violate the human rights of its citizens. They continue to arrest people for practicing their own religion. They arrested two elderly bishops and 22 other Catholics at Easter, and more than 200 Falun Gong members have died in custody since 1999. They continue to execute their own people, nearly 1,800 people in the last 3 months alone. They continue to imprison hundreds of people who participated in the pro-democracy protests of 1989. They continue to detain United States citizens without explanation. And we continue to reward China. What message are we sending to China? What message are we sending to the rest of the world? The people of China want to practice their own religion. They want to speak their mind. They want to live in a free and open and democratic society. If we stand for civil rights in America and other places in the world, we must stand for human rights in China and speak for those who are not free to speak for themselves. Today, with our vote, we have an opportunity to speak for the dignity of man and for the destiny of democracy. Now, I believe in trade, free and fair trade; but I do not believe in trade at any price, and the price to continue to grant normal trade relations with China is much too high. Mr. Speaker, I urge all of my colleagues to support this resolution and send a message to China. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott), a member of the Committee on Ways and Means. {time} 1700 Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose this resolution. I brought this glass of water out here because, when we look at it, it is not quite clear whether it is half full or it is half empty. This debate is really a half-full, half-empty debate. I went to China first in 1977 with the first legislative delegation that got into China after Mao died in 1976. There were about 25 of us State legislators who traveled all over China. The Chinese people at this point dressed in either gray, if they were in the government; or blue, if they were a peasant; or green, if they were in the army. You could look around the whole place and there was not anything but gray and blue and green. In 1982, I went back to China with a group from Seattle to establish a sister city relationship with Chungking. I was one of the five official delegates who did that. We went to the largest city in China, Chungking in the west. At that point, immediately one noticed two things. One was people's clothing had begun to change. People were allowed to have a little free expression here and there. The second thing that happened was that people were not afraid to come up and talk in English. When we had been there in 1977, people who had been trained in Bible schools and all sorts of places in the United States and spoke good English were afraid to speak to you in the street in English. In 1982, that had changed. They were talking about development of free trade zones in Tianjin and other places in China. I went back to China in 1992, and the changes were even more dramatic in terms of the change in people's dress, the change in people's behavior. They were having dancing classes, doing western ballroom dancing out in the street in front of the Shanghai hotels. Now, we say that is all superficial, but it is very indicative of the changes that are occurring in China. Now, if I were to tell my colleagues that there were labor leaders in one of the states of China that had formed a union and they worked on the docks and they did not like the way things were going so they called a strike, and the governor of the State, the State Attorney General, actually, were to put those labor leaders in house arrest for an entire year for having a strike, I am sure somebody would be out here jumping up and down and telling me all about these terrible human rights violations going on in China. The description I just gave my colleagues is going on in South Carolina today. A black longshore union down in South Carolina has three or four labor leaders under house arrest for a year while the Attorney General runs for governor and uses them as his bait. Now, the Bible says that before you talk about the mote in our brother's eye, look at the plank in your own eye. We are not clean on all of these issues of human rights, and giving everybody opportunity. The Chinese have changed dramatically since 1977 when I first went there. Have they a long way to go? Of course. I have been to India and seen the Dalai Lama, seen the people who have fled from Tibet who live in Katmandu. I have seen all of the aspects of this. Many of them live in Seattle. And those are not right situations. And none of us who think we ought to keep the pressure on the Chinese to change, none of us who are supportive, at least none that I know who are supportive of continuing a trade relationship with China, for 1 minute condone what is happening in Tibet or what is happening in a variety of slave situations in forced labor camps, none of that. But to walk away and say to one-fifth of the world's population, we have no interest in you, go your own way, do whatever you want; until you do it our way, we are not going to talk to you. We tried that. My Senator, Warren Magnuson, who was here for 44 years, said, the biggest mistake we ever made was in 1947 when Mao put his hand out to the United States and said he wanted to work with us, and we said, no, you are a Communist. We will not deal with a Communist. We closed the door on China from 1946 until a Republican President [[Page 13849]] showed up. I mean, I do not have many good things to say about Richard Nixon, but I will say he had the courage to go and reopen the door and say, closing the door does not work. We have lots of proof of that. And to go back to the pre-1972 era is simply not in either in our best interests or in the world's best interests. If the gentleman from Ohio is correct, that the Chinese are this great, fearful dragon, I think they are mythical animals, but, anyway, if they are really a fear to us, it is much better that we know them, that we are talking with them, that we are involved with them, and that we are using trade as a way to get them to adopt the rules of a civil world society, that is, the World Trade Organization. Everybody plays by the same rules. They have to make changes for that to work in the WTO. They cannot continue the way they have been, and they have not. They have been going gradually, not as fast as we would like, but the next time somebody tells us something has not changed in China in 10 years, remember, they have been there 6,000 years. They do not do things in a minute. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. This is a cup that, as we can all see, is empty, but I will submit to my colleague that there will be many people who will try to tell you that there is water in this cup. No. It is an empty cup. And no matter how much we would like it to be filled with water, it is not filled with water. No matter how much we would like to say that there has been human rights progress in China, there has been no human rights progress in China. In fact, the situation has retrogressed in the last few years. Japan was becoming highly westernized in the 1920s and 1930s. Berlin became a real party town compared to what it was when they were real poor and went through their economic hard times. Did this make Japan and Germany any less a threat to world peace? No. Today, China is, yes, advancing economically, but the money is being used by the militaristic elite to prepare for war and to attack the United States. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo). Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. It is historically accurate to say, I believe, that political freedom can influence economic vitality. I think that that is a provable point. I think it is much more difficult to try to prove the opposite, that, in fact, economic freedom can somehow force political freedom. It is a very difficult thing to do, just as my colleague has described. In the past, economic freedom, economic vitality did not lead ipso facto to political freedom, which is the case that is made over and over in defense of NTR. It will not necessarily work that way. The gentleman from California earlier, in opposition to this bill, suggested that we have to deal with the fact that China is an emerging nation. Wow. Pretty profound. It is, in fact, yes, it is an emerging nation. No one can deny that. No one does deny that. What kind of an emerging nation is China? It is a nation that in the last year has increased military capabilities to threaten Taiwan; exploded a neutron bomb a little over a year ago, that event went widely unpublicized; constructed 11 naval bases around the Spratley and Paracel Island group; convicted a U.S. scholar of spying for Taiwan; jailed or exiled every major dissident in China; closed or destroyed thousands of unregistered religious institutions; arrested 35 Christians for worshipping outside the official church and sentenced them indefinitely to forced labor camps; expanded the total number of slave labor camps to around 1,100; expanded the industry of harvesting and selling human organs. The government intensified crackdowns in the treatment of political dissidents in Tibet; suppressed any person or group perceived to threaten the government. Hundreds of Falun Gong have been imprisoned. Thousands of practitioners remained in detention or were sentenced to reeducation-through-labor camps or incarcerated in mental institutions. China has increased the number of extrajudicial killings; increased the use of torture, forced confessions, arbitrary arrest and detention, the mistreatment of prisoners, lengthy incommunicado detention, and the denial of due process. In May, the U.N. Committee Against Torture issued a report critical of continuing serious incidents of torture, especially involving national minorities; and, of course, last but not least, forced down an American plane and held 24 Americans hostage. This since we passed PNTR. This is the result. This is what we got for doing what we did. What can we expect, do my colleagues think? I quake to think what we can expect from a continued relationship of this nature. Trade. The issue of trade has come up so many times. The term trade we throw around here so lightly implies a two-way street. It implies an action we take, they take. We sell, they buy. No, it is not what is happening. Mr. Speaker, $100 billion later we explain to the rest of the world that this trade has not worked out to our advantage. And what makes us think that it ever will? I suggest only this: Please, when the gentleman earlier said that companies are setting an example in China, he is right, and here is the example they are setting. Those companies are putting profit above patriotism. Please do not encourage that kind of behavior. Vote for this resolution. Mr. CRANE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H. J. Res. 50, which would terminate Normal Trade Relations with China 60 days after enactment. This resolution jeopardizes the jobs and livelihoods of nearly 400,000 American workers and their families who depend upon trade with China. It also sells out millions more Chinese striving hard to reform a nation with an exceptionally complex and painful past, and for what? Let me suggest that there is a better way. Commercial engagement with China has been and continues to be the cornerstone of America's productive and maturing relationship with China. Since the historic 1979 U.S.-China Agreement on Trade, every American President has understood the importance of integrating China and its one-fifth share of humanity into the international system. Since the end of the destructive Maoist era, I believe that China has been experiencing nothing less than a ``great awakening.'' In ever- larger strides China has proceeded to open its doors to free enterprise and engage in international trade and commerce, now reaching $500 billion per year. On October 10 last year, President Clinton signed legislation that terminated the provision of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik statute that requires the annual consideration of China's Normal Trade Relations status, NTR. By a vote of 237 to 197, the House voiced its unwavering, bipartisan support for the reforms taking place in China and committed to extend Permanent Normal Trade Relations, PNTR, status to China when it becomes a member of the World Trade Organization. Under the accession agreement, our tariffs on Chinese imports will not change, while Chinese tariffs on our exports will be sharply reduced, giving us access to 1.2 billion customers. This agreement also requires China to undertake a wide range of market-opening reforms to key sectors of its economy still under state control, covering agriculture, industrial goods and services. On June 11, Ambassador Zoellick reached a breakthrough agreement with China on most of our remaining bilateral trade liberalization issues. In light of the progress made so far, it is very possible that China will become a WTO member by the end of this year. Therefore, it appears that Congress needs to reauthorize NTR status one last time for the span of just a few months. {time} 1715 In light of our historic PNTR vote last fall, we must keep moving forward toward our common goal of integrating China into the international system of rules and standards. After 15 years, we are almost there. [[Page 13850]] Mr. Speaker, relations with China this year have been anything but smooth. We are all angered and frustrated by the two steps forward, one step backward behavior of the Beijing government. The world expects much more from China. Yet, denying China NTR will not bring about political and religious freedom for the Chinese. In fact, it will have a quite opposite effect. A better way to America's long-term national security interests in China and the Asian region will be to help China begin this century on an economic reform path shaped and refined by the economic trade rules of the WTO, and I urge a no vote on House Joint Resolution 50. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent for the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Weller) to control the time on our side. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gillmor). Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Illinois? There was no objection. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to my friend, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell), who believes we should not reward a nation that uses slave labor to sell products to the United States. Mr. PASCRELL. Mr. Speaker, we need to expect more from ourselves first of all, not the Chinese government. I do not need the unions to tell me what to do on this issue, I do not need the churches, the synagogues, I do not need environmental groups, because this is what I carry with me, the Constitution of the United States, since I raised my hand. This is what this is all about, article 1, Section 8. It gives to the Congress of the United States the power to deal in trade. What we are doing, this is the last vote we are ever going to have on this issue. Think about that, Members, we are not going to be able to change anything. This is the last vote that we are going to have on trade with China. We, who have been voted by the public not the trade representatives of the United States, who did not stand for election, I stood for election, the Members stood for election, we stood for election, we have an obligation to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of the Constitution. To China, I say I thank them for returning a New Jersey citizen they detained for 5 months without cause. I thank them. The opponents of this resolution will call this unfortunate. For this noble act, not only do they deserve the Olympics in 2008, but please take a continuation of the most-favored-nation status. Has China done anything to warrant our continuation of most-favored- nation status? No. The Chinese government has abused its citizens, tortured its prisoners, held Americans hostage, and is doing its part to destroy the Earth's environment. We must not reward these heinous actions by giving them American jobs, exporting them one after the other. I plead with my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to take a small step, a temporary step, and revoke MFN that the Chinese want and do not deserve. Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Clement). Mr. CLEMENT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, I hear this debate; and some of it bothers me because I do not want to go back to the Cold War. I do not want to bring about new hostilities between the United States and China and other countries of the world. I do not think the United States should be the Big Brother of the world. I do not think that we have all the answers in the world, as well. I am for fair trade, I am for free trade, and I am in support of the normal trade relations with China. We know the importance of trade. Can Members imagine not trading with a country with a population of 1.3 billion people? They are on a land area approximately the same size as the United States. The only difference is, we have about 300 million people and they have 1 billion more people than we have. They have one- fifth of the world's population. Yet, we are saying because we do not necessarily like their human rights record, which I do not, and they do not have the same democratic principles as the United States, that we are not going to trade with them under normal trade relations? We do not need to raise the walls of isolation and separatism. I believe that the best approach to improving our relationship with the most populous country in the world is through diplomatic and economic channels. Revoking trade relations with China jeopardizes the U.S. economy. The expansion of markets abroad for U.S. goods and services is critical to sustaining our country's economic expansion. The United States has a lot of softness, do we not, in our economy today? We do not need to worsen it. It most certainly will hurt American workers, who will see their jobs disappear if exporting opportunities to China are lost. A policy of principled, purposeful engagement with China remains the best way to advance U.S. interests. Extending to China the same normal trade relations we have with virtually every country in the world will promote American prosperity and security and foster greater openness in China. We have serious differences with China, and I will continue to deal forthrightly with the Chinese on these differences. But revoking normal trade relations would rupture our relationship with the country of China. As we foster a better relationship with the Chinese based on trade and commerce and diplomacy, we can also work to establish increased freedoms and democracy for the 1.3 billion people that live there. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), a leader of the Human Rights Caucus, who has been a champion of human rights here in the Congress. Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the resolution and in opposition to PNTR. In some respects, listening to the debate in my office and reading about it, this reminds me of the time when Winston Churchill used to rise in the House of Commons to talk about the threat of Nazi Germany. They did not listen to Winston Churchill; and frankly, I do not think the country is listening today. This is an issue of values. Mary McCrory in The Washington Post said the other day in her column, ``We talk human rights, but we act like shopkeepers. We are listening to the cash register.'' We are listening to the sounds of the cash register, but we are not listening to the Catholic bishops, ten of them, that are in jail, and one because he gave holy communion to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), and he still has not gotten out. We are not listening to the sounds of agony of the Protestant pastors. Those who said they care about the church and the persecution, we listen to the sound of the cash registers. They get down here and talk about the Dalai Lama in Tibet. I have been there and I have seen the persecution of the Muslims, but we are listening to the cash registers. Harry Wu will tell us, when the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) and I went to Beijing Prison Number 1, where there were 40 Tiananmen Square demonstrators, and some are still there, but we listen to the sounds of the cash registers. For this side of the aisle, we name buildings after Ronald Reagan, but if we want to honor Ronald Reagan we should vote NTR down. Ronald Reagan not only did not give MFN to the Soviet Union; in 1986, he took away MFN for Romania. It was my bill, and the bill of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Hall). Ronald Reagan understood. He never gave it to them. He talked about values. The Soviet Union did not because we gave them MFN, the Soviet Union fell because Ronald Reagan stood up to them, the Pope stood up to them, the AFL-CIO and Lane Kirkland stood up to them, and not just grant them trade. We talk about freedom,we talk about human rights. But as Mary McCrory said, ``Frankly, this Congress and this [[Page 13851]] country,'' and quite frankly, the Bush administration, the Bush administration had better be careful it does not emulate the Clinton administration. Clinton talked about it but did nothing about it. This administration had better be careful. We talk about human rights, we act like shopkeepers. We are just listening to the cash registers, not to the bishops, not to the pastors, not to the Members of Congress, not to the people in the slave labor camps. There are more slave labor camps in China today than there were when Solzhenitsyn wrote the book Gulag Archipelago. Let us listen to them and not to the cash registers. Mr. Speaker, I think it is time we as a legislative body face reality about the People's Republic of China. We've annually debated trade relations with China. We've heard about human rights abuses, religious persecution, nuclear arms sales. And it has annually been the will of the Congress that we engage in trade with China with the expectation that human rights would improve and that China would get on the road to democracy. But the expectations have fallen far short. As we have increased trade, the human rights situation in China has grown worse. For the past two years, the Department of State's annual report on human rights in China has stated this clearly, saying: ``the Government's poor human rights record has deteriorated markedly'' and ``the Government's poor human rights record worsened, and it continued to commit numerous serious abuses.'' Giving China most favored nation status hasn't changed for the better the lives of thousands of men and women languishing in forced labor prison camps. Human rights violations in China are about people who are suffering. Human rights violations in China are about people of faith being thrown into a dismal prison cell because of their faith. When China violates its own citizens' human rights, people die, people suffer and families are torn apart. I recently read the graphic testimony of a Chinese doctor who participated in the removal of organs and skin from executed prisoners in China. Dr. Wang Guoqi was a skin and burn specialist employed at a People's Liberation Army hospital. He recently testified before the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Organizations, and Human Rights on the Government of China's involvement in the execution, extraction, and trafficking of prisoner's organs. Dr. Wang writes that his work ``required me to remove skin and corneas from the corpses of over one hundred executed prisoners, and, on a couple of occasions, victims of intentionally botched executions.'' What kind of government skins alive and sells the organs of its own citizens? The Government of China also persecutes and imprisons people because of their religious beliefs. The U.S. Department of State recently sent me a letter, on the status of religious freedom in China, which I enclose for the record. This letter states that the Government of China persecutes believers of many faiths, including Roman Catholics, Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and Protestant Christians. It is estimated that some ``ten Catholic Bishops, scores of Catholic priests and [Protestant] house church leaders, 100-300 Tibetan Buddhists, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Falun Gong adherents, and an unknown but possible significant number of Muslims are in various forms of detention in China for the expression of their religious or spiritual beliefs.'' What kind of government imprisons its nation's religious leaders? Compass Direct, a news service that monitors international religious freedom reports that ``Christian leaders in both the unofficial house churches and the registered `Three Self' churches in eastern China confirmed . . . that there is increased pressure against the church in China.'' When China violates its own citizens' human rights, people die, people suffer and families are torn apart. Today is the 159th day a mother and wife and permanent U.S. resident has spent in a Chinese jail. Dr. Gao Zhan is a researcher at American University here in Washington, D.C. She is my constituent. She studies women's issues. One hundred and fifty-nine days ago, Chinese authorities detained Gao Zhan and her husband and their 5-year-old son, Andrew. In the matter of an instant, this happy young family was torn apart by the regime in Beijing. A 5-year-old child was taken from his parents, a young couple was divided by prison walls and armed guards. Imagine how you would feel if the Government of China did this to your family. Imagine how you would feel if the Government of China put your 5-year-old son in prison. What kind of government imprisons mothers who are academic experts on women's issues? News reports indicate that the Government of China is due to deport American citizen Li Shaomin, whom the Chinese have imprisoned for several months and whom they recently convicted of espionage. While I am hopeful that Li Shaomin will be released, I also call on the Chinese Government to immediately release Gao Zhan, mother, scholar and devoted wife. I also call on the government of China to release the remaining American permanent residents and citizens it has arrested on trumped-up charges, including Wu Jianmin, Tan Guangguang, Teng Chunyan, Liu Yaping and others. Last year during the debate on PNTR, I expressed concern ``about the alliance that seems to be forming between China and Russia against the U.S.'' Now, this week, Russia and China have signed a treaty of ``Friendship and Cooperation'' that I enclose for the Record. Article 9 of this treaty outlines what China and Russia mean by agreeing to ``friendship'' and ``cooperation'': Article 9. If one party to the treaty believes that there is a threat of aggression menacing peace, wrecking peace, and involving its security interests and is aimed at one of the parties, the two parties will immediately make contact and hold consultations in order to eliminate the threat that has arisen. China is purchasing sophisticated weapons systems from Russia that could place in harm's way, the lives of U.S. service members and U.S. capabilities in Asia. Russia has sold China an ``estimated $1.5 billion worth of weapons contracts last year alone,'' according to a July 12 article from Jane's Defense Weekly. Jane's also reports that ``strategic cooperation between Beijing and Moscow has also extended beyond their bilateral relationship to include neighboring states . . . for co-operation on military and other issues.'' Jane's also reports that the PLA has increased its official defense budget by 18 percent this year and that ``the [Chinese] military enjoys additional funding from other classified government programmes, such as for foreign arms procurements and weapons research and development.'' China has exported weapons of mass destruction and missiles in violation of treaty commitments. The director of the CIA has said that China remains a ``key supplier'' of these weapons to Pakistan, Iran and North Korea. Other reports indicate China has passed on similar weapons and technology to Libya and Syria. If one of these countries is involved in a conflict, it is very possible that these weapons of mass destruction could be targeted against American troops. There have been numerous reports that the Chinese military views the U.S. as its primary threat. Evidence of this militaristic view toward the U.S. may be seen in China's unacceptable behavior in the downing of the U.S. surveillance aircraft and detainment of the crew. China's behavior in this incident and its subsequent piecemeal dismemberment of the aircraft by the Chinese is an affront to the U.S. and is further evidence that China views the U.S. as a threat. In light of the downing and detainment of the U.S. surveillance aircraft and crew, in light of the new Russian-Chinese treaty, in light of China's increased military budget, because of China's proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, because of China's viewing the U.S. as being their primary threat, why would Congress want to give China normal trade relations (NTR) and all the benefits that come with NTR? Giving China NTR will give away any leverage the U.S. has on these and other issues of concern. Successive Presidents and previous Congresses have acted to trade with the People's Republic of China expecting China's human rights record to improve and the growth of democracy. After nearly two decades in which China has received most favored nation status, it is clear religious freedom, human rights and democracy have been given lip service by the Chinese government. If the U.S. wants to help bring democracy to China, it cannot continue to give China a blank check in the form of normalized trade relations. As Lawrence F. Kaplan writes in a July 9 article from The New Republic, ``. . . to pretend we can democratize China by means of economics is, finally, a self-serving conceit. Democracy is a political choice, an act of will. Someone, not something must create it.'' I enclose it for the record. It is clear that many years of giving China NTR has not helped advance democracy in China. Arguably, giving China NTR has made the prospects for democracy in China worse and may actually be standing in the way of creating democracy in China. It is time to try something new in our China policy. If the U.S. wants to see the growth of [[Page 13852]] democracy and see China's human rights record to improve, the U.S. ought to review trade relations with China on an annual basis, until the Chinese government proves that it will treat its own people, its mothers, fathers, religious leaders and even common criminals with the dignity, compassion and respect that all human life deserves. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record an article and a letter relating to human rights and trade with China: Why Trade Won't Bring Democracy to China (By Lawrence F. Kaplan) On February 25, business professor and writer Li Shaomin left his home in Hong Kong to visit a friend in the mainland city of Shenzhen. His wife and nine-year-old daughter haven't heard from him since. That's because, for four months now, Li has been rotting in a Chinese prison, where he stands accused of spying for Taiwan. Never mind that Li is an American citizen. And never mind that the theme of his writings, published in subversive organs like the U.S.-China Business Council's China Business Review, is optimism about China's investment climate. Li, it turns out, proved too optimistic for his own good. In addition to rewarding foreign investors, he believed that China's economic growth would create, as he put it in a 1999 article, a ``rule-based governance system.'' But as Li has since discovered, China's leaders have other plans. Will American officials ever make the same discovery? Like Li, Washington's most influential commentators, politicians, and China hands claim we can rely on the market to transform China. According to this new orthodoxy, what counts is not China's political choices but rather its economic orientation, particularly its degree of integration into the global economy. The cliche has had a narcotic effect on President Bush, who, nearly every time he's asked about China, suggests that trade will accomplish the broader aims of American policy. Bush hasn't revived Bill Clinton's recklessly historical claim that the United States can build ``peace through trade, investment, and commerce.'' He has, however, latched onto another of his predecessor's high-minded rationales for selling Big Macs to Beijing--namely, that commerce will act, in Clinton's words, as ``a force for change in China, exposing China to our ideas and our ideals.'' In this telling, capitalism isn't merely a necessary precondition for democracy in China. It's a sufficient one. Or, as Bush puts it, ``Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.'' As Congress prepares to vote for the last time on renewing China's normal trading relations (Beijing's impending entry into the World Trade Organization will put an end to the annual ritual), you'll be hearing the argument a lot: To promote democracy, the United States needn't apply more political pressure to China. All we need to do is more business there. Alas, the historical record isn't quite so clear. Tolerant cultural traditions, British colonization, a strong civil society, international pressure, American military occupation and political influence--these are just a few of the explanations scholars credit as the source of freedom in various parts of the world. And even when economic conditions do hasten the arrival of democracy, it's not always obvious which ones. After all, if economic factors can be said to account for democracy's most dramatic advance--the implosion of the Soviet Union and its Communist satellites--surely the most important factor was economic collapse. And if not every democracy emerged through capitalism, it's also true that not every capitalist economy has produced a democratic government. One hundred years ago in Germany and Japan, 30 years ago in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, and today in places like Singapore and Malaysia, capitalist development has buttressed, rather than undermined, authoritarian regimes. And these models are beginning to look a lot more like contemporary China than the more optimistic cases cited by Beijing's American enthusiasts. In none of these cautionary examples did the free market do the three things businessmen say it always does: weaken the coercive power of the state, create a democratically minded middle class, or expose the populace to liberal ideals from abroad. It isn't doing them in China either. One of the most important ways capitalism should foster democracy is by diminishing the power of the state. Or, as Milton Friedman put it in Capitalism and Freedom. ``[t]he kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.'' In his own way, Bush makes the same point about China: ``I believe a whiff of freedom in the marketplace will cause there to be more demand for democracy.'' But the theory isn't working so well in the People's Republic, whose brand of capitalism isn't quite what Adam Smith had in mind. China's market system derives, instead, from a pathological model of economic development. Reeling from the economic devastation of the Mao era, Deng Xiaoping and his fellow party leaders in the late 1970s set China on a course toward ``market socialism.'' The idea was essentially the same one that guided the New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia 50 years before: a mix of economic liberalization and political repression, which would boost China's economy without weakening the Communist Party. And so, while leaving the party in control of China's political life, Deng junked many of the economy's command mechanisms--granting state-owned enterprises more autonomy, opening the country to limited investment, and replacing aging commissars with a semiprofessional bureaucracy. The recipe worked well: China has racked up astronomical growth rates ever since. And democracy seems as far away as ever. The reason isn't simply that government repression keeps economic freedom from yielding political freedom. It's that China's brand of economic reform contains ingredients that hinder--and were consciously devised to hinder--political reform. The most obvious is that, just as the state retains a monopoly on the levers of coercion, it also remains perched atop the commanding heights of China's economy. True, China has been gradually divesting itself of state-owned enterprises, and the process should quicken once China enters the World Trade Organization (WTO). But Beijing's leaders have said they will continue to support China's most competitive and critical industries. Taking a cue from authoritarian South Korea during the 1980's, China's leaders have proposed sponsoring industrial conglomerates in crucial sectors of the economy, transformed industrial ministries into ``general associations,'' merged failing state-owned firms with more successful ones, and established organizations to, as Chinese economist Xue Muqiao has put it, ``serve as a bridge between the state and the enterprises.'' But that's where any similarities with South Korea end. Unlike South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, which evolved from authoritarianism (and did so, significantly, as de facto protectorates of the United States), China even today has no effective system of property rights--a signature trait that distinguishes its Communist regime from traditional authoritarian ones. The absence of a private- property regime in China means that, at the end of the day, the state controls nearly the entire edifice on which China's ``free'' markets rest. It also means that China's brand of capitalism blurs, rather than clarifies, the distinction between the public and the private realms on which political liberty depends. Nor is that the only requisite for democracy that China's markets lack. As the imprisonment of Li Shaomin and thousands of other political prisoners attests, capitalism in the PRC still operates within the confines of an arbitrary legal order and a party-controlled court system. ``China is still a lawless environment,'' says University of Pennsylvania sinologist Arthur Waldron. ``Whether in terms of individual rights or the rights of entrepreneurs, interests are protected not by institutions but by special relationships with those in power.'' Before he was arrested, Li diagnosed this condition as ``relation-based capitalism.'' What he meant was that relations with government officials, not property rights or the rule of law, underpin the Chinese market. Because the political foundations of China's economy remain the exclusive property of the state, China's entrepreneurs operate with a few degrees of separation, but without true autonomy, from the government. Hence, capital, licenses, and contracts flow to those with connections to officials and to their friends and relatives, who, in turn, maintain close relations with, and remain beholden to, the regime. Their firms operate, in the words of Hong Kong-based China specialist David Sweig, ``[l]ike barnacles on ships, . . . draw[ing] their sustenance from their parastatal relationships with the ministries from which they were spun off.'' Helping to keep all these distortions in place are Deng's functionaries, who now constitute the world's largest bureaucracy and still control the everyday levers of the Chinese economy. Today, they function as the engines and administrators of a market increasingly driven by skimming off the top. The foreign-trade sector offers particularly easy pickings. In 1995, for instance, the World Bank found that while China's nominal tariff rate was 32 percent, only a 6 percent rate was officially collected. Presumably, much of the difference went into the pockets of Chinese officials. And even though WTO accession will reduce opportunities for rent-seeking from inflated trade tariffs, China's bureaucracy will be able to continue siphoning funds from distorted interest rates, the foreign exchange markets, and virtually any business transaction that requires its involvement--which is to say, nearly every business transaction. Nor is the problem merely the corrupting influence these bureaucrats wield over China's markets. The larger problem is that, whereas in the United States the private sector wields enormous influence over the political class, in China the reverse is true. For precisely this reason, Washington's celebrations of the democratic potential of the new Chinese ``middle class'' may be premature. ``Entrepreneurs, once condemned as [[Page 13853]] `counterrevolutionaries,' are now the instruments of reform. . . . [T]his middle class will eventually demand broad acceptance of democratic values,'' House Majority Whip Tom DeLay insisted last year. Reading from the same script, President Bush declares that trade with China will ``help an entrepreneurial class and a freedom-loving class grow and burgeon and become viable.'' Neither DeLay nor Bush, needless to say, invented the theory that middle classes have nothing to lose but their chains. In the first serious attempt to subject the ties between economic and political liberalization to empirical scrutiny, Seymour Martin Lipset published a study in 1959, Some Social Requisites of Democracy, which found that economic development led to, among other things, higher levels of income equality, education, and, most important, the emergence of a socially moderate middle class--all factors that promote democratization. More recent studies have found that rising incomes also tend to correlate with participation in voluntary organizations and other institutions of ``civil society,'' which further weakens the coercive power of the state. But middle classes aren't always socially moderate, and they don't always oppose the state. Under certain conditions, late modernizing economies breed middle classes that actively oppose political change. In each of these cases, a strong state, not the market, dictates the terms of economic modernization. And, in each case, an emerging entrepreneurial class too weak to govern on its own allies itself-- economically and, more importantly, politically--with a reactionary government and against threats to the established order. In his now-classic study Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, sociologist Barrington Moore famously revealed that, in these ``revolutions from above,'' capitalist transformations weakened rather than strengthened liberalism. In the case of nineteenth-century Japan, Moore writes that the aim of those in power was to ``preserve as much as possible of the advantages the ruling class had enjoyed under the ancient regime, cutting away just enough . . . to preserve the state, since they would otherwise lose everything.'' Japan's rulers could do this only with the aid of a commercial class, which eagerly complied, exchanging its political aspirations for profits. On this point, at least, Marx and Engels had things right. Describing the 1848 revolution in Germany, they traced its failure partly to the fact that, at the end of the day, entrepreneurs threw their support not behind the liberal insurrectionists but behind the state that was the source of their enrichment. Much the same process is unfolding in China, where economic and political power remain deeply entwined. In fact, China's case is even more worrisome than its historical antecedents. In Germany and Japan, after all, an entrepreneurial class predated the state's modernization efforts, enjoyed property rights, and as a result, possessed at least some autonomous identity, In China, which killed off its commercial class in the 1950s, the state had to create a new one. Thus China's emerging bourgeoisie consist over-whelmingly of state officials, their friends and business partners, and--to the extent they climbed the economic ladder independently-- entrepreneurs who rely on connections with the official bureaucracy for their livelihoods. ``It is improbable, to say the least,'' historian Maurice Meisner writes in The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry Into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, ``that a bourgeoisie whose economic fortunes are so dependent on the political fortunes of the Communist state is likely to mount a serious challenge to the authority of that state . . . the members of China's new bourgeoisie emerge more as agents of the state than as potential antagonists.'' A steady diet of chauvinistic nationalism hasn't helped. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, party leaders launched a ``patriotism'' campaign, a sentiment they defined as ``loving the state'' as well as the Communist Party. As the Shanghai-based scholar and party apologist Xiao Gongqin explains, ``[T]he overriding issue of China's modernization is how, under new historical circumstances, to find new resources of legitimacy so as to achieve social and moral integration in the process of social transition.'' To Xiao and others like him, the answer is nationalism. And, as anyone who turned on a television during the recent EP-3 episode may have noticed, it's working. Indeed, independent opinion polling conducted by the Public Opinion Research Institute of People's University (in association with Western researchers, who published their findings in 1997), indicate greater public support for China's Communist regime than similar surveys found a decade earlier. And, contrary to what development theory might suggest, the new nationalism appears to have infected the middle class--particularly university students and intellectuals--more acutely than it has China's workers and farmers. ``The [closeness of the] relationship between the party and intellectuals is as bad as in the Cultural Revolution,'' a former official in the party's propaganda arm noted in 1997. Even many of China's exiled dissidents have fallen under its spell. In addition to being independent of the regime and predisposed toward liberal values, China's commercial class is supposed to be busily erecting an independent civil society. But, just as China's Communist system restricts private property, it prohibits independent churches and labor unions, truly autonomous social organizations, and any other civic institutions that might plausibly compete with the state. Indeed, China's leaders seem to have read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and the rest of the civil-society canon--and decided to do exactly the reverse of what the literature recommends. ``Peasants will establish peasants' organizations as well, then China will become another Poland,'' senior party official Yao Yilin reportedly warned during the Tiananmen protests. To make sure this fear never comes true, China's leaders have dealt with any hint of an emerging civil society in one of two ways: repression or co- optation. Some forbidden organizaions--such as Falun Gong, the Roman Catholic Church, independent labor unions, and organizations associated with the 1989 democracy movement-- find their members routinely imprisoned and tortured. Others, such as the Association of Urban Unemployed, are merely monitored and harassed. And as for the officially sanctioned organizations that impress so many Western observers, they mostly constitute a Potemkin facade. ``[A]lmost every ostensibly independent organization--institutes, foundations, consultancies--is linked into the party-state network,'' says Columbia University sinologist Andrew Nathan. Hence, Beijing's Ministry of Civil Affairs monitors even sports clubs and business associations and requires all such groups to register with the government. The same kind of misreading often characterizes celebrations of rural China's ``village committees,'' whose democratic potential the engagement lobby routinely touts. Business Week discerns in them evidence ``of the grassroots democracy beginning to take hold in China.'' But that's not quite right. China's leaders restrict committee elections to the countryside and, even there, to the most local level. Nor, having been legally sanctioned 14 years ago, do they constitute a recent development. More important, China's leaders don't see the elections the way their American interpreters do. In proposing them, says Jude Howell, co- author of In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China, party elites argued that elected village leaders ``would find it easier to implement central government policy and in particular persuade villagers to deliver grain and taxes and abide by family planning policy. Village self-governance would thus foster social stability and order and facilitate the implementation of national policy. By recruiting newly elected popular and entrepreneurial village leaders, the Party could strengthen its roots at the grassroots level and bolster its legitimacy in the eyes of the rural residents.'' Which is exactly what it has done. In races for village committee chairs, the Ministry of Civil Affairs allows only two candidates to stand for office, and until recently many townships nominated only one. Local party secretaries and officials often push their favored choice, and most committee members are also members of the Communist Party, to which they remain accountable. Should a nonparty member be elected, he must accept the guidance of the Communist Party, which, in any case, immediately sets about recruiting him. As for those rare committee members who challenge local party officials, their success may be gleaned from the fate of elected committee members from a village in Shandong province who in 1999 accused a local party secretary of corruption. All were promptly arrested. Still, the very fact that China's leaders feel compelled to bolster their legitimacy in the countryside is telling. Last month Beijing took the unusual step of releasing a report ``Studies of Contradictions Within the People Under New Conditions,'' which detailed a catalogue of ``collective protests and group incidents.'' What the report makes clear is that Beijing's leaders think China's growing pool of overtaxed farmers and unemployed workers, more than its newly moneyed elites, could become a threat to the regime. Fortunately for the authorities, with no political opposition to channel labor unrest into a coherent movement, protests tend to be narrow in purpose and poorly coordinated. And the wheels of repression have already begun to grind, with Beijing launching a ``strike hard'' campaign to quell any trouble. In any case, what these formerly state-employed workers have been demonstrating for is not less communism, but more--a return to the salad days of central planning. Which brings us to the final tenet of the engagement lobby: that commerce exposes China to the ideals of its trading partners, particularly those of the United States. As House Majority Leader Dick Armey has put it, ``Freedom to trade is the great subversive and liberating force in human history.'' Or, as Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger burbled in 1997, ``The fellow travelers of the new global economy-- computers and modems, faxes and photocopiers, increased contacts and binding contracts--carry with them the seeds of change.'' But the Chinese disagree. To begin with, they don't import much. And economists predict that won't change dramatically once they've joined the [[Page 13854]] WTO, since China's leaders have committed themselves to the kind of export-oriented, mercantilist growth model that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan pursued in decades past. Last year, for instance, China exported $100 billion in goods and services to the United States and only imported $16 billion worth. Hence, for every six modems it sent to America, Sandy Berger sent back only one. To be sure, that one modem may carry with it seeds of change. Bush, for instance, says, ``If the Internet were to take hold in China, freedom's genie will be out of the bottle.'' Alas, through links to Chinese service providers, Beijing tightly controls all access to the Web. And Western investors in China's information networks have eagerly pitched in. One Chinese Internet portal, bankrolled by Intel and Goldman Sachs, greets users with a helpful reminder to avoid ``topics which damage the reputation of the state'' and warns that it will be ``obliged to report you to the Public Security Bureau'' if you don't. But Goldman Sachs needn't worry. If anything, China's recent experience lends credence to the pessimistic theories of an earlier era, which held that nations shape the uses of technology rather than the other ways around. Thus Beijing blocks access to damaging ``topics'' and to Western news sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and this magazine. It also monitors e-mail exchanges and has arrested Internet users who have tried to elude state restrictions. And, in ways that would make Joseph Goebbels blush, the government uses websites--and, of course, television, newspapers, and radio-- to dominate the circuits with its own propaganda. ``Much as many people might like to think the Internet is part of a bottom-up explosion of individualism in China, it is not,'' writes Peter Lovelock, a Hong Kong-based academic who studies the Internet's effect in the PRC. Instead, it provides ``an extraordinarily beneficial tool in the administration of China.'' And that tool was on vivid display during the EP-3 crisis, when China blocked access to Western news sources and censored chat rooms. American politicians describe foreign direct investment, too, as a potent agent of democratization. But, in this case, they're not even paraphrasing political science literature they haven't read because the literature makes no such claim. In fact, a 1983 study by the University of North Carolina's Kenneth Bollen found that levels of foreign trade concentration and penetration by multinational corporations have no significant effect on the correlation between economic development and democracy. In China's case, it's easy to understand why. Beijing requires foreign investors in many industries to cooperate in joint ventures with Chinese partners, most of whom enjoy close ties to the government. These firms remain insulated mainly in three coastal enclaves and in ``special economic zones'' set apart from the larger Chinese economy. Moreover, they export a majority of their goods--which is to say, they send most of their ``seeds of change'' abroad. At the same time, their capital largely substitutes for domestic capital (foreign-owned firms generate half of all Chinese exports), providing a much- needed blood transfusion for China's rulers, who use it to accumulate reserves of hard currency, meet social welfare obligations, and otherwise strengthen their rule. Nor is it clear that U.S. companies even want China to change. If anything, growing levels of U.S. investment have created an American interest in maintaining China's status quo. Hence, far from criticizing China's rulers, Western captains of industry routinely parade through Beijing singing the praises of the Communist regime (and often inveighing against its detractors), while they admonish America's leaders to take no action that might upset the exquisite sensibilities of China's politburo. Business first, democracy later. But ultimately the best measure of whether economic ties to the West have contributed to democratization may be gleaned from China's human rights record. Colin Powell insists, ``Trade with China is not only good economic policy; it is good human rights policy.'' Yet, rather than improve that record, the rapid expansion of China's trade ties to the outside world over the past decade has coincided with a worsening of political repression at home. Beijing launched its latest crackdown on dissent in 1999, and it continues to this day. The government has tortured, ``reeducated through labor,'' and otherwise persecuted thousands of people for crimes no greater than practicing breathing exercises, peacefully championing reforms, and exercising freedom of expression, association, or worship. It has arrested Chinese- American scholars like Li Shaomin on trumped-up charges, closed down newspapers, and intimidated and threatened dissidents. Nor is it true that linking trade and human rights will necessarily prove counterproductive. When Congress approved trade sanctions against Beijing in the aftermath of Tiananmen, China's leaders responded by releasing more than 800 political prisoners, lifting martial law in Beijing, entering into talks with the United States, and even debating among themselves the proper role of human rights. As soon as American pressure eased, so did China's reciprocal gestures. Turning a blind eye to Beijing's depredations may make economic sense. But to pretend we can democratize China by means of economics is, finally, a self-serving conceit. Democracy is a political choice, an act of will. Someone, not something, must create it. Often that someone is a single leader--a Mikhail Gorbachev, a King Juan Carlos, or a Vaclav Havel. But such a man won't be found in China's current leadership. Other times, the pressure for democracy comes from a political opposition--the African National Congress in South Africa, Solidarity in Poland, or the marchers in Tiananmen Square. But there are no more marchers in Tiananmen Square. Pressure for democratization, however, can also come from abroad. And usually it comes from the United States or from nowhere at all. During the 1980s America applied diplomatic and economic pressure to repressive regimes from Poland to South Africa; intervened to prevent military coups in the Philippines, Peru, El Salvador, Honduras, and Bolivia; and loudly enshrined human rights and democracy in official policy. The United States played a pivotal and direct role in democratizing even countries like South Korea and Taiwan, which many China-engagers now tout as evidence that the market alone creates political freedom. Appropriately enough, the decade closed with democracy activists erecting a facsimile of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square. The commercialist view of China, by contrast, rests on no historical foundation; it is a libertarian fantasy. ``The linkage between development and rights is too loose, the threshold too high, the time frame too long, and the results too uncertain to make economic engagement a substitute for direct policy intervention,'' writes Columbia's Nathan. Yet make it a substitute is precisely what the United States has done. And, far from creating democracy, this subordination of political principle has created the justified impression of American hypocrisy and, worse, given U.S. policymakers an excuse to do nothing. Maybe the claim that we can bring liberty to China by chasing its markets will prove valid in the long run. But exactly how long is the long run? A political scientist at Stanford University says it ends in 2015, when, he predicts, China will be transformed into a democracy. Others say China will democratize before that. Still others say it may take a half-century or more. The answer matters. After all, while capitalist Germany and Japan eventually became democracies, it wasn't capitalism that democratized them, and it certainly wasn't worth the wait. In China's case, too, no one really knows what might happen as we wait for politics to catch up with economics. With the exception, perhaps, of Li Shaomin, who tested the link between economic and political liberalization in China for himself. He's still in jail. ____ Department of State, Washington, DC, May 3, 2001. Hon. Frank Wolf, Co-Chairman, Human Rights Caucus, House of Representatives. Dear Mr. Wolf: This is in response to your request of Acting Assistant Secretary Michael Parmly for additional information during his testimony before the Human Rights Caucus on May 15 on the status of religious freedom in China. We appreciate your concern about the recent deterioration of religious freedoms in China and the large number of persons held in China for the peaceful expression of their religious or spiritual views. We regret the delay in responding to your request for information, but we wanted to provide as comprehensive a list of these individuals as possible. We currently estimate that roughly ten Catholic Bishops, scores of Catholic priests and house church leaders, 100-300 Tibetans Buddhists, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Falun Gong adherents, and an unknown but possibly significant number of Muslims are in various forms of detention in China for the expression of their religious or spiritual beliefs. The forms of detention range from de facto house arrest to imprisonment in maximum security prisons. As you know, we regularly raise cases of religious prisoners with Chinese officials both here and in China. Our information about such cases comes from sources as diverse as religious dissidents, human rights NGOs, interested Americans and, most importantly, regular reporting from our embassies and consulates. Unfortunately, the opaqueness of the Chinese criminal justice system and absence of any central system that provides basic information on who is incarcerated and why makes it exceedingly difficult to determine the exact number of religious prisoners currently being held in China. We have, however, attached lists of cases of particular concern that we have raised with Chinese authorities or have included in our human rights and religious freedom reports. We recognize the importance of compiling and maintaining a database of political and religious prisoners from additional sources such as Chinese newspapers and government notices and appreciate Congressional interest in providing us additional resources to fund such activities. At present, the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor is discussing with the International Republican [[Page 13855]] Institute a proposal which will be submitted through the National Endowment for Democracy. This proposal will be for a Human Rights and Democracy Fund grant specifically for the purpose of funding a U.S. NGO's efforts to develop and maintain a list of political and religious prisoners in China. Such a database will be extremely valuable to the human rights work done not only by this bureau but also by other government agencies, the Congress, and NGOs. We welcome your interest in and support of this effort and look forward to cooperative efforts to develop and fund a comprehensive record of religious prisoners in China. In the meantime, we hope the information in this letter and the attached lists are helpful to you. We would welcome any case information that you might have available that could improve the quality of this list. Sincerely, Michael E. Guest, Acting Assistant Secretary, Legislative Affairs. Enclosure. Illustrative List of Religious Prisoners in China Note: See comments in cover letter. The following illustrative list is compiled from various sources, including information provided to us by reputable non-governmental organizations and from the State Department's annual reports on human rights and on religious freedom. We cannot vouch for its overall accuracy or completeness. Muslims Xinjiang Abduhelil Abdumijit: Tortured to death in custody. Turhong Awout: Executed. Rebiya Kadeer: Serving 2nd year in prison. Zulikar Memet: Executed. Nurahmet Niyazi: Sentenced to death. Dulkan Rouz: Executed. Turhan Saidalamoud: Sentenced to death. Alim Younous: Executed. Krubanjiang Yusseyin: Sentenced to death. Protestants (misc.) Qin Baocai: Reeducation through labor sentence. Zhao Dexin: Serving 3rd year in prison. Liu Haitao: Tortured to death in custody. Miao Hailin: Serving 3rd year in prison. Han Shaorong: Serving 3rd year in prison. Mu Sheng: Reeducation through labor sentence. Li Wen: Serving 3rd year in prison. Yang Xian: Serving 3rd year in prison. Chen Zide: Serving 3rd year in prison. Evangelistic Fellowship Hao Huaiping: Serving reeducation sentence. Jing Quinggang: Serving reeducation sentence. Shen Yiping: Reeducation; status unknown. Cold Water Religion Liu Jiaguo: Executed in October 1999. FENGCHENG CHURCH GROUP Zheng Shuquian: Reeducation; status unknown David Zhang: Reeducation; status unknown CATHOLICS Bishops Bishop Han Dingxiang: Arrested in 1999, status unknown. Bishop Shi Engxiang: Arrested in October 1999. Bishop Zeng Jingmu: Rearrested on September 14, 2000. Bishop Liu: House arrest in Zhejiang. Bishop Jiang Mingyuang: Arrested in August 2000. Bishop Mattias Pei Shangde: Arrested in early April 2001. Bishop Xie Shiguang: Arrested in 1999; status unknown. Bishop Yang Shudao: Arrested Feb. 2001; status unknown. Bishop An Shuxin: Remains detained in Hebei. Bishop Li Side: House arrest. Bishop Zang Weizhu: Detained in Hebei. Bishop Lin Xili: Arrested Sept. 1999, status unknown. Bishop Su Zhimin: Whereabouts unknown. Priets Fr. Shao Amin: Arrested September 5, 1999. Fr. Wang Chengi: Serving reeducation sentence. Fr. Wang Chengzhi: Arrested September 13, 1999. Fr. Zhang Chunguang: Arrested May 2000. Fr. Lu Genjun: Serving 1st year of 3 year sentence. Fr. Xie Guolin: Serving 1st year of 1 year sentence. Fr. Li Jianbo: Arrested April 19, 2000. Fr. Wei Jingkun: Arrested August 15, 1998. Fr. Wang Qingyuan: Serving 1st year of 1 year sentence. Fr. Xiao Shixiang: Arrested June 1996, status unknown. Fr. Hu Tongxian: Serving 3rd year of 3 year sentence. Fr. Cui Xingang: Arrested March 1996 Fr. Guo Yibao: Arrested April 4, 1999. Fr. Feng Yunxiang: Arrested April 13, 2001. Fr. Ji Zengwei: Arrested March 2000. Fr. Wang Zhenhe: Arrested April 1999. Fr. Yin: Serving 1st of 3 year sentence. Fr. Kong Boucu: Arrested October 1999. Fr. Lin Rengui: Arrested Dec. 1997, status unknown. Fr. Pei Junchao: Arrested Jan. 1999, status unknown. Fr. Wang Chengi: Arrested Dec. 1996, status unknown. tibetan buddhists Lamas Gendum Choekyi Nyima: House Arrest. Pawo Rinpoche: House Arrest. Nuns Ngawang Choekyi: Serving 9th year of 13 year sentence. Ngawag Choezom: Serving 9th year of 11 year sentence. Chogdrub Drolma: Serving 6th year of 11 year sentence. Jamdrol: Serving 6th year of 7 year sentence. Namdrol Lhamo: Serving 9th year of 12 year sentence. Phuntsog Nyidrol: Serving 12th year of 17 year sentence. Yeshe Palmo: Serving 4th year of 6 year sentence. Ngawang Sangdrol: Serving 9th year of 21 year sentence. Jigme Yangchen: Serving 11th year of 12 year sentence. Monks Ngawang Gyaltsen: Serving 12th year of 17 year sentence. Ngawang Jamtsul: Serving 12th year of 15 years sentence. Jamphel Jangchub: Serving 12th year of 18 year sentence. Ngawang Kalsang: Serving 6th year of 8 year sentence. Thubten Kalsang: Sentence not reported. Lobsang Khetsun: Serving 5th year of 12 year sentence. Phuntsok Legmon: Sentenced to 3 years in prison. Namdrol: Sentenced to four years in prison. Yeshe Ngawang: Serving 12th year of 14 year sentence. Ngawang Oezer: Serving 12th year of 17 year sentence. Ngawang Phuljung: Serving 12th year of 19 year sentence. Lobsang Phuntsog: Serving 6th year of 12 year sentence. Sonam Phuntsok: Arrested in October 1999. Phuntsog Rigchog: Serving 7th year of 10 year sentence. Lobsang Sherab: Serving 5th year of 16 year sentence. Sonam Rinchen: Serving 15th year sentence. Ngawang Sungrab: Serving 9th year of 13 year sentence. Jampa Tenkyong: Serving 10th year of 15 year sentence. Ngawang Tensang: Serving 10th year of 15 year sentence. Lobsang Thubten: Serving 7th year of 15 year sentence. Agya Tsering: Arrested in October 1999. Trinley Tsondru: Serving 5th year of 8 year sentence. Tenpa Wangdrag: Serving 13 year of 14 year sentence. Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Biggert), a strong proponent of the opportunity for Illinois workers who believe in free trade. Mrs. BIGGERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Illinois, for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to vote against the resolution to revoke normal trade relations for China. Some of my colleagues have said that this body should signal our disapproval of Chinese policy by denying NTR. Mr. Speaker, I would caution those who seek to signal China by ending NTR to think for one moment today about the likely consequences, and first answer some very basic questions: Will Members' vote for NTR for China today actually change the behavior of China tomorrow? Will ending NTR free the political prisoners, end the military buildup, enhance respect for human rights, and stop the persecution of religious groups? Will denying NTR bolster the moderates, or will it strengthen the hand of hard-liners as they struggle to control the future course of Chinese policy? Most importantly, will revoking NTR teach the youth of China the values of democracy, the principles of capitalism, and the merits of a free and open society? Mr. Speaker, if I thought that ending NTR would achieve these goals in China, I, too, would cast my vote of disapproval today. But make no mistake, denying China NTR denies the U.S. the opportunity to influence China's workers, China's human rights policies, China's politics, and perhaps, most importantly, China's future. [[Page 13856]] Make no mistake, ending NTR for China will end our best hope of getting China to open its markets and live by the world's trade rules. It will effectively put an end to our trade with China. In short, revoking NTR for China will send much more than a signal. It will portend the end of U.S. trade with China and the end of our influence in China. I urge my colleagues to vote to retain our influence and our trade relations with China by voting against the resolution today. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3\1/2\ minutes to my friend, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior), who has fought against labor camps in China and fought for human rights for workers and people around the world. Mr. BONIOR. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding time to me. Mr. Speaker, those who favor granting China special trade privileges, some of them would have us believe that approving this MFN for China is going to lead to a freer society. They would have us believe that conditions in China have improved since the People's Republic was granted most-favored-nation status last year. In fact, the opposite is true. Let me just tell the Members a few stories. Bishop Shi Enxiang, a 79-year-old Catholic bishop jailed on good Friday for not practicing state-sanctioned religion and for refusing to reject the legitimacy of the Pope, 79 years of age. Of course, China will speak of its state-sanctioned Catholic Church. However, this is the same church that proclaimed 120 newly elected or canonized Chinese saints to be traitors and imperialist agents. Liu Zhang, a worker in the Chun Si Enterprise Handbag Factory, who was desperate for work. The factory promised him a good job, living quarters, and a temporary residence permit. However, Chun Si did not follow through on his promise. Liu Zhang made about $22 a month, $15 of which went back to the company for room and board. His factory held its 900 workers in virtual imprisonment, and regularly subjected them to physical abuse. {time} 1730 Gao Zhan and Li Shaomin, American scholars detained by China for allegedly spying for Taiwan. Gao Zhan, her husband, and her son were about to return to the United States after visiting her parents when she was arrested in the Beijing airport. Li Shaomin, who ironically believed that free trade would lead to a free China, was arrested when he left Hong Kong and entered China. Peng Shi and Cao Maobin, Chinese union organizers, arrested for staging protests and forming labor unions. Peng has been sentenced to life imprisonment for fighting for better lives for his family and coworkers. Cao was held in a mental hospital after daring to speak to foreign reporters about the formation of an independent labor union protesting the company's layoffs and refusing to pay 6 months of back pay. Now, if someone is for religious rights or political rights or economic rights, as a labor group or organizer they cannot function in China. They are going to end up in prison. These terrible stories of oppression have all happened in China within the last year. They have all happened since this House voted to extend permanent MFN to China. They are bitter lessons that we must remember. We cannot have free markets without free people. We in America have the privilege of living in the freest country in the world, but even here global trade is not the force that brought our steelworkers and our auto workers into the middle class. It was their organizing, it was their right to collective bargaining, it was their right to participate freely in the political life of this Nation that established safe working conditions and fair wages and labor rights. These folks demonstrated in America. They marched, they were beaten, they went to jail. Some of them died for these rights that we have that have set the standard in our country. People are doing the same thing in China each and every day and we are not on their side, we are on the sides of their oppressors. It was not global trade that brought protections for our air and water; it was people who fought and struggled in this country to elect leaders of their choosing to make a difference. We have to do our part to ensure that China respects human rights and democratic freedoms and environmental rights. We have to stand with the people who are standing up for these basic freedoms. I urge my colleagues to vote for this resolution and reject further MFN for China. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm). Mr. STENHOLM. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this legislation today, and I do so to answer the question that the gentleman from California raised a moment ago when he held up an empty glass. I concede it is almost empty, but the question is how do we fill it? And I submit to my colleagues that we do not fill it in exactly the same way that we have been trying to do with the little island off the tip of Florida in which we have now for 40 years refused to trade with Cuba in the belief that somehow, some way that will cause Fidel Castro to change his ways. It has failed. The only people it has hurt are the Cuban people and those in the United States that could have benefited from selling, other than those who have continued to sell. That is what it is all about. Now, normal trade relations with China is not going to solve all our farmers' problems. No, in fact, I think we have oversold a lot of trade issues. But I believe that the benefits of normal trade relations for U.S. agriculture will be significant, and I am in no small company in saying so. Nine Secretaries of agriculture have served since John F. Kennedy supported normal trade relations with China. China has 21 percent of the world's population, 7 percent of the world's arable land. There are those that argue that China does not need us. They say China exports more agricultural products than it imports. But this ignores the fact that significant agricultural imports enter China through Hong Kong. In fact, China and Hong Kong annually import about $6.9 billion more in agricultural products than they export. There will be those that stand up and say, there you go again, you are only talking about profit. Well, the question is, whom do we want to profit and whom do we think we are going to punish if we deny American jobs providing that which might be sold to China? We are not talking about Most Favored Nation; we are talking about normal trade relations. This is what sends a message to the people out there that somehow we are doing something special. I do not want to do anything special for those commie pinkos that do the bad things that the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) talked about their doing. I do not want to see these things continue. I want China to change. They are not doing good things. They are bad people, their leaders. Their people are good people. That is the significant question for us to answer today, How do we as a country begin to change those that do things that we do not like? And again I just point to that little island off the tip of Florida. We tried it by doing it my colleagues' way, those that suggest that somehow we can by not trading with China and allowing all our ``friends'' to trade with China that we will force them to do things. If it has not worked with a little island off the tip of Florida, how can it possibly work with a country of 1.2 billion Chinese people, most of whom like America, most of whom will like us better once they get to know us? And the only way they will get to know us is for us to treat them like the rest of the world treats them. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. Let me remind my colleagues we are not talking about an embargo against China. That is not what this vote is about. Normal trade relations is about one thing: Should we subsidize, the American taxpayer subsidize American businessmen who want to close up their factories here and set them up in China? [[Page 13857]] It is not about free trade or not about whether we can sell our goods in China. It is about whether or not big businessmen will get this subsidy. They cannot get guaranteed loans from the banks. It is too risky. So the taxpayers come in and guarantee the loans. That is what this is all about. It is not about selling American products; it is not about embargoes. It is about subsidies to big businesses to set up factories in China. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), the distinguished former chairman of the Committee on International Relations. Mr. GILMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I rise in strong support of the Rohrabacher-Brown resolution, H.J. Res. 50, disapproving the extension of the waiver authority that is contained in section 402(c) of the Trade Act of 1974 with respect to the People's Republic of China. I commend the sponsors for bringing this measure to the House floor at this time. Mr. Speaker, what will it take for us to wake up and understand that trade benefits for the People's Republic of China is not in our Nation's best interest? Human rights, religious tolerance, labor rights, even the right to die without having one's organs removed before one is dead are nonexistent in the People's Republic of China. The dictatorship in China threatens its neighbors, Democratic Taiwan, India, Japan, and the stability of the entire Pacific region with its threats and military buildup, funded almost exclusively by our enormous growing trade imbalance in China, $80 billion this year and growing even greater. This trade imbalance now surpasses our trade deficit with Japan. The Chinese totalitarian dictatorship has now embraced an alliance with Russia. China also supports the dictatorships in North Korea, Cuba and Burma. It has threatened democracy throughout the world by obstructing the United Nations' Human Rights Convention in Geneva. Its agents attempt to sell AK-47s and stinger missiles to Los Angeles street gangs here in our own Nation. Mr. Speaker, the time has come to recognize that China, the sleeping dragon, has awakened; and we need to respond appropriately. My colleagues, as we consider this proposal of denying free trade to China, let us bear in mind some of China's violations of basic international accords: its threats to Taiwan, its murder and its arrest of Christians, of Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners, the downing of our surveillance aircraft, and its occupation of Tibet. This is not peaceful behavior by that nation. I think it is time now for us to give an appropriate assessment of where China is. Mr. Speaker, the time has come to recognize that China's behavior does not support stability and we need to respond appropriately. And until it changes its behavior and until it stops threatening its neighbors and does not repress its citizens, we should not be supporting this repressive government and its growing military with normal trade benefits. Accordingly, I urge all my colleagues to support H.J. Res. 50 in opposition to the favorable trade status for China. Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Pence). Mr. PENCE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Illinois for yielding me this time. I rise today on behalf of Hoosier farmers, dedicated men and women who wake at sunrise and leave their sweat in the fields by sunset. In the year 2000 alone, American farmers benefited from U.S. agricultural exports to China totaling $1.9 billion; and China's ascension into the WTO, expected later this year, is projected to produce an additional $2 billion annually to our Nation's farmers. Mr. Speaker, at a time when most U.S. agricultural commodities are experiencing their lowest prices in decades, stable access to China's markets is critical. Mr. Speaker, according to our best traditions, we are to live as free men but not use our freedom as a coverup for evil. And unlike many in this Chamber, since arriving in Washington I have been a vociferous opponent of the human rights' abuses of the Chinese Government, and I will continue to be. In fact, I recently stood at this very podium and criticized China's incarceration of American troops, American academicians, and its securing of the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. But, Mr. Speaker, I believe our relationship with China is a complex one, and it can best be described as follows: America's relationship with China should be America with one hand extended in friendship and in trade and with the other hand resting comfortably on the holster of the arsenal of democracy. By empowering the President to offer this extension, we will continue to open Chinese society to foreign investment and expose Chinese citizens to private property, contract, and the rule of law, while we commit ourselves to the necessary rebuilding of the American military with special emphasis on the Asian Pacific Rim. I urge my colleagues not to mix trade and security today. I urge my colleagues to oppose H.J. Res. 50 and allow the President to extend NTR to China for one more year. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer). Mr. HOYER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I rise in support of this resolution. And because to some it may seem contradictory to my stand on behalf of permanent normal trading relations, I rise not so much to convince others to follow me as to explain why I take this position. In my view, the human rights performance in China is abominable, whether we are considering NTR or PNTR. However, I believe this provision of NTR is a one-way street. That is to say, I believe this is America giving to China, sanctioning, in effect, China's performance. I believed PNTR was a two-way street, in which we required China to accede to WTO, to agree to a commerce of law, to agree to an opening of markets; and, therefore, I supported it. Because like the previous speaker, I believe our relationship with China is a complex one. I believe China, perhaps, can be one of the most dangerous nations on the face of the earth or one of the most economically positive nations on the face of the earth. But this vote is about simply the United States giving a benefit to China. I think we ought not to do that. I think we ought to require, as I hope will happen in November, for them to take unto themselves certain responsibilities that manifest an intent to become an equal and performing partner in the family of nations. Therefore, I will vote for this resolution, but will continue to hope that China does in fact accede to the WTO and that we do pursue permanent normal trading relations with China, which I believe will have positive effects. I do not believe that simply annually pretending that China is not performing in a way with which we should not deal in a normal way is justified. I thank the gentleman for giving me this opportunity. {time} 1745 Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Pomeroy). Mr. POMEROY. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose this resolution of disapproval which would cause a tremendous break in an established trading relationship. I commend all who are participating in the debate and deeply respect the heartfelt concerns of the advocates for this resolution for the concerns that have been expressed so passionately and well this afternoon. All of us are terribly concerned about the issues that have been covered. The question is, how do we best effect change on these areas of concern? Is removal of the normal trade relations, reversing the course over the last many years, placing China, a nation of 1.2 billion, in a trade status only held by Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, is that the way to advance our concerns? We have a track record on the application of unilateral U.S. efforts to isolate major world powers. I believe the [[Page 13858]] most recent one was a Carter administration effort to place a grain embargo on the Soviet Union, expressing our outrage about their involvement in Afghanistan. The result is now very clear. We lost important agricultural opportunities. Our farmers paid a huge price. Other countries benefitted tremendously. We did not change Soviet Union behavior by that action one lick. I believe the same is absolutely before us. No matter how much we may want to, we cannot isolate this nation of 1.2 billion people. The record in China is mixed. Fairness in this debate requires us to reflect briefly on the fact that there is continued growth in their free market economy. The spread of private enterprise has moved from the coast. Growth of the Internet continues to slowly erode the stranglehold of information held by the state. Earlier this year, China ratified a United Nations agreement on economic and social rights. Progress is also evident in the agriculture area. We must reject this and move forward even while we continue to be very concerned about the conduct of China. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) who knows we should not be subsidizing with taxpayer dollars investments in Communist China. Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.J. Res. 50 to disapprove of the extension of MFN to the PRC. The point was well taken by the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). We are not talking about embargo. We are talking about most favored or permanent normal trading relationship with China. Unlike the grain embargo that was just mentioned by the gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Pomeroy), there we had Ronald Reagan and many presidents thereafter not allowing MFN to go forward for the Soviet Union because of their egregious human rights abuses and because of their gross mistreatments. Let me say briefly, Mr. Speaker, that, as we speak, two American citizens are being held hostage in China, Dr. Li Shaomin, who may get out and hopefully will get out but not after he had a kangaroo trial, and Mr. Wu Jianmin. Additional U.S. residents, including Dr. Gao Zhan, are being held. Recently we had a hearing in the Committee on International Relations and we heard from the relatives who were asking us, pleading with us to reach out to these American citizens. These are Americans being held hostage by a dictatorship while we are conferring normal trading relationship to a country that is anything but normal. Its dictatorship is grossly abnormal. Let us not kid ourselves. This is a big, fat payday for a brutal dictatorship. Eighty billion dollars is the balance in trade right now. That will grow potentially to $100 billion. The average person is not reaping that benefit and certainly the religious believer, be he or she a Buddhist or a Catholic or a Uighur or a Falun Gong or anyone else. The underground Protestant church, the Buddhists in Tibet are not reaping these benefits. They are suffering unbelievable torture as a direct result of the policy of this dictatorship. Look at the country reports on human rights practices. They make it very clear. Torture is absolutely pervasive, government-sponsored torture. If we are arrested in China for practicing our faith outside the bounds of the government, we get tortured. Mr. Speaker, I urge support for the Rohrabacher resolution. Human rights should matter. Let us send a clear message to the Beijing dictatorship. Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake). Mr. FLAKE. Mr. Speaker, I stand today in strong opposition to H.J. Res. 50. Free trade is not just sound economic policy. It is great foreign policy as well. Free trade shares far more than just goods and services. It shares sound ideas and institutional norms across boundaries. Countries that are open to trade and capital flows are far more often than not also open to such ideas as political freedom. We have heard today that China has a poor human rights record. That is not true. China has an atrocious human rights record. The question is, how do we best affect that for the better? Do we do it through trade? Do we do it through isolationism? Are we better to engage China or to isolate them? We have heard today that we cannot have free markets without free people. I submit we can rarely have a truly free people without free markets. We have got to engage. We have got to get China to accept institutional norms. The best way to do that is through engagement. The relevant question is, how do we change China for the better? I believe it is done through engagement, and I would urge defeat of the resolution. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) who believes we should not award China's human rights abuses with WTO membership and the Olympics. Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the Rohrabacher- Brown amendment as someone who loves liberty and believes in free trade among free people. Mr. Speaker, I wish to enter into the Record as part of this debate a wonderful article by Lawrence Kaplan in a recent edition of The New Republic where he talks about why trade will not bring democracy to China. He talks about the relationship between profit and freedom and looks at the long history of nation states, talks about foreign trade and the penetration of multinational corporations having no significant effect on the correlation between economic development and democracy. Capitalism does not bring democracy. 100 years ago in Germany and Japan, 30 years ago in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, and today in places like Singapore and Malaysia, capitalist development has buttressed rather than undermined authoritarian regimes. In none of these cautionary examples did the free market do the three things business people say it does: weaken the coercive power of the state, create a democratically minded middle class, or expose the populist to liberal ideas from abroad. It is not doing that in China either. In fact, capitalism in the People's Republic of China, a Communist state, still operates within the confines of an arbitrary legal order and a party-controlled system where the emerging bourgeoisie consist overwhelmingly of state officials, their friends and their business partners. And who is benefiting from all of this? The authoritarian, repressive regimes that are imprisoning Catholic bishops, that are not allowing U.S. citizens of Chinese heritage to go back into that country, and the very same people who took our surveillance aircraft and held our troops all those weeks and now are asking us to pay for the time that they held American citizens on their territory. Mr. Speaker, is something wrong with this picture? Vote in support of the Rohrabacher-Brown resolution. The May 1, 2001, report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom links the deterioration of rights to receipt of normal trade relations. ``China has concluded that trade trumps all.'' Torture of believers increased, the government confiscated and destroyed as many as 3,000 unregistered religious buildings, and has continued to interfere with the selection of religious leaders. Since passage, persecution and execution have increased. [From the New Republic, July 9 and 16, 2001] Why Trade Won't Bring Democracy to China.--Trade Barrier (By Lawrence F. Kaplan) On February 25, business professor and writer Li Shaomin left his home in Hong Kong to visit a friend in the mainland city of Shenzhen. His wife and nine-year-old daughter haven't heard from him since. That's because, for four months now, Li has been rotting in a Chinese prison, where he stands accused of spying for Taiwan. Never mind that Li is an American citizen. And never mind that the theme of his writings, published in subversive organs like the U.S.-China Business Council's China Business Review, is optimism about China's investment climate. [[Page 13859]] Li, it turns out, proved too optimistic for his own good. In addition to rewarding foreign investors, he believed that China's economic growth would create, as he put it in a 1999 article, a ``rule-based governance system.'' But, as Li has since discovered, China's leaders have other plans. Will American officials ever make the same discovery? Like Li, Washington's most influential commentators, politicians, and China hands claim we can rely on the market to transform China. According to this new orthodoxy, what counts is not China's political choices but rather its economic orientation, particularly its degree of integration into the global economy. The cliche has had a narcotic effect on President Bush, who, nearly every time he's asked about China, suggests that trade will accomplish the broader aims of American policy. Bush hasn't revived Bill Clinton's recklessly ahistorical claim that the United States can build ``peace through trade, investment, and commerce.'' He has, however, latched onto another of his predecessor's high-minded rationales for selling Big Macs to Beijing--namely, that commerce will act, in Clinton's words, as ``a force for change in China, exposing China to our ideas and our ideals.'' In this telling, capitalism isn't merely a necessary precondition for democracy in China. It's a sufficient one. Or, as Bush puts it, ``Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.'' As Congress prepares to vote for the last time on renewing China's normal trading relations (Beijing's impending entry into the World Trade Organization will put an end to the annual ritual), you'll be hearing the argument a lot: To promote democracy, the United States needn't apply more political pressure to China. All we need to do is more business there. Alas, the historical record isn't quite so clear. Tolerant cultural traditions, British colonization, a strong civil society, international pressure, American military occupation and political influence--these are just a few of the explanations scholars credit as the source of freedom in various parts of the world. And even when economic conditions do hasten the arrival of democracy, it's not always obvious which ones. After all, if economic factors can be said to account for democracy's most dramatic advance--the implosion of the Soviet Union and its Communist satellites--surely the most important factor was economic collapse. And if not every democracy emerged through capitalism, it's also true that not every capitalist economy has produced a democratic government. One hundred years ago in Germany and Japan, 30 years ago in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, and today in places like Singapore and Malaysis, capitalist development has buttressed, rather than undermined, authoritarian regimes. And these models are beginning to look a lot more like contemporary China than the more optimistic cases cited by Beijing's American enthusiasts. In none of these cautionary examples did the free market do the three things businessmen say it always does: weaken the coercive power of the state, create a democratically minded middle class, or expose the populace to liberal ideals from abroad. It isn't doing them in China either. One of the most important ways capitalism should foster democracy is by diminishing the power of the state. Or, as Milton Friedman put it in Capitalism and Freedom, ``[t]he kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.'' In his own way, Bush makes the same point about China: ``I believe a whiff of freedom in the marketplace will cause there to be more demand for democracy.'' But the theory isn't working so well in the People's Republic, whose brand of capitalism isn't quite what Adam Smith had in mind. China's market system derives, instead, from a pathological model of economic development. Reeling from the economic devastation of the Mao era, Deng Xiaoping and his fellow party leaders in the late 1970s set China on a course toward ``market socialism.'' The idea was essentially the same one that guided the New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia 50 years before: a mix of economic liberalization and political repression, which would boost China's economy without weakening the Communist Party. And so, while leaving the party in control of China's political life, Deng junked many of the economy's command mechanisms--granting state-owned enterprises more autonomy, opening the country to limited investment, and replacing aging commissars with a semiprofessional bureaucracy. The recipe worked well: China has racked up astronomical growth rates ever since. And democracy seems as far away as ever. The reason isn't simply that government repression keeps economic freedom from yielding political freedom. It's that China's brand of economic reform contains ingredients that hinder--and were consciously devised to hinder--political reform. The most obvious is that, just as the state retains a monopoly on the levers of coercion, it also remains perched atop the commanding heights of China's economy. True, China has been gradually divesting itself of state-owned enterprises, and the process should quicken once China enters the World Trade Organization (WTO). But Beijing's leaders have said they will continue to support China's most competitive and critical industries. Taking a cue from authoritarian South Korea during the 1980s, China's leaders have proposed sponsoring industrial conglomerates in crucial sectors of the economy, transformed industrial ministries into ``general associations,'' merged failing state-owned firms with more successful ones, and established organizations to, as Chinese economist Xue Muqiao has put it, ``serve as a bridge between the state and the enterprises.'' But that's where any similarities with South Korea end. Unlike South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, which evolved from authoritarianism (and did so, significantly, as de facto protectorates of the United States), China even today has no effective system of property rights--a signature trait that distinguishes its Communist regime from traditional authoritarian ones. The absence of a private- property regime in China means that, at the end of the day, the state controls nearly the entire edifice on which China's ``free'' markets rest. It also means that China's brand of capitalism blurs, rather than clarifies, the distinction between the public and the private realms on which political liberty depends. Nor is that the only requisite for democracy that China's markets lack. As the imprisonment of Li Shaomin and thousands of other political prisoners attests, capitalism in the PRC still operates within the confines of an arbitrary legal order and a party-controlled court system. ``China is still a lawless environment,'' says University of Pennsylvania sinologist Arthur Waldron. ``Whether in terms of individual rights or the rights of entrepreneurs, interests are protected not by institutions but by special relationships with those in power. Before he was arrested, Li diagnosed this condition as ``relation-based capitalism.'' What he meant was that relations with government officials, not property rights or the rule of law, underpin the Chinese market. Because the political foundations of China's economy remain the exclusive property of the state, China's entrepreneurs operate with a few degrees of separation, but without true autonomy, from the government. Hence, capital, licenses, and contracts flow to those with connections to officials and to their friends and relatives, who, in turn, maintain close relations with, and remain beholden to, the regime. Their firms operate, in the words of Hong Kong-based China specialist David Zweig, ``[l]ike barnacles on ships, . . . draw[ing] their sustenance from their parastatal relationships with the ministries from which they were spun off.'' Helping to keep all these distortions in place are Deng's functionaries, who now constitute the world's largest bureaucracy and still control the everyday levers of the Chinese economy. Today, they function as the engines and administrators of a market increasingly driven by skimming off the top. The foreign-trade sector offers particularly easy pickings. In 1995, for instance, the World Bank found that while China's nominal tariff rate was 32 percent, only a 6 percent rate was officially collected. Presumably, much of the difference went into the pockets of Chinese officials. And even though WTO accession will reduce opportunities for rent seeking from inflated trade tariffs, China's bureaucracy will be able to continue siphoning funds from distorted interest rates, the foreign exchange markets, and virtually any business transaction that requires its involvement--which is to say, nearly every business transaction. Nor is the problem merely the corrupting influence these bureaucrats wield over China's markets. The larger problem is that, whereas in the United States the private sector wields enormous influence over the political class, in China the reverse is true. For precisely this reason, Washington's celebrations of the democratic potential of the new Chinese ``middle class'' may be premature ``Entrepreneurs, once condemned as `counter revolutionaries,' are now the instruments of reform. . . . [T]his middle class will eventually demand broad acceptance of democratic values,'' House Majority Whip Tom DeLay insisted last year. Reading from the same script, President Bush declares that trade with China will ``help an entrepreneurial class and a freedom-loving class grow and burgeon and become viable,'' Neither DeLay nor Bush, needless to say, invented the theory that middle classes have nothing to lose but their chains. In the first serious attempt to subject the ties between economic and political liberalization to empirical scrutiny, Seymour Martin Lipset published a study in 1959, Some Social Requisites of Democracy, which found that economic development led to, among other things, higher levels of income equality, education and, most important, the emergence of a socially moderate middle class--all factors that promote democratization. More recent studies have found that rising incomes also tend to correlate with participation in voluntary organizations and other institutions of ``civil society,'' which further weakens the coercive power of the state. But middle classes aren't always socially moderate, and they don't always oppose the [[Page 13860]] state. Under certain conditions late modernizing economies breed middle classes that actively oppose political change. In each of these cases, a strong state, not the market, dictates the terms of economic modernization. And, in each case, an emerging entrepreneurial class too weak to govern on its own allies itself--economically and, more importantly, politically--with a reactionary government and against threats to the established order. In his now-classic study Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, sociologist Barrington Moore famously revealed that, in these ``revolutions from above,'' capitalist transformations weakened rather than strengthened liberalism. In the case of nineteenth-century Japan Moore writes that the aim of those in power was to ``preserve as much as possible of the advantages the rule class had enjoyed under the ancient regime, cutting away just enough . . . to preserve the state, since they would otherwise lose everything.'' Japan's rulers could do this only with the aid of a commercial class, which eagerly complied, exchanging its political aspirations for profits. On this point, at least Marx and Engels had things right. Describing the 1848 revolution in Germany, they traced its failure partly to the fact that, at the end of the day, entrepreneurs threw their support not behind the liberal insurrectionists but behind the state that was the source of their enrichment. Much the same process is unfolding in China, where economic and political power remain deeply entwined. In fact, China's case is even more worrisome than its historical antecedents. In Germany and Japan, after all, an entrepreneurial class predated the state's modernization efforts, enjoyed property rights, and, as a result, possessed at least some autonomous identity. In China, which killed off its commercial class in the 1950s, the state had to create a new one. Thus China's emerging bourgeoisie consists overwhelmingly of state officials, their friends and business partners, and--to the extent they climbed the economic ladder independently-- entrepreneurs who rely on connections with the official bureaucracy for their livelihoods. ``It is improbable, to say the least,'' historian Maurice Meisner writes in The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry Into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, ``that a bourgeoisie whose economic fortunes are so dependent on the political fortunes of the Communist state is likely to mount a serious challenge to the authority of the state . . . the members of China's new bourgeoisie emerge more as agents of the state than as potential antagonists.'' A steady diet of chauvinistic nationalism hasn't helped. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, party leaders launched a ``patriotism'' campaign, a sentiment they defined as ``loving the state'' as well as the Communist Party. As the Shanghai-based scholar and party apologist Xiao Gongqin explains, ``[T]he overriding issue of China's modernization is how, under new historical circumstances, to find new resources of legitimacy so as to achieve social and moral integration in the process of social transition.'' To Xiao and others like him, the answer is nationalism. And, as anyone who turned on a television during the recent EP-3 episode may have noticed, it's working. Indeed, independent opinion polling conducted by the Public Opinion Research Institute of People's University (in association with Western researchers, who published their findings in 1997), indicate greater public support for China's Communist regime than similar surveys found a decade earlier. And, contrary to what development theory might suggest, the new nationalism appears to have infected the middle class--particularly university students and intellectuals--more acutely than it has China's workers and farmers. ``The [closeness of the] relationship between the party and intellectuals is as bad as in the Cultural Revolution,'' a former official in the party's propaganda arm noted in 1997. Even many of China's exiled dissidents have fallen under its spell. In addition to being independent of the regime and predisposed toward liberal values, China's commercial class is supposed to be busily erecting an independent civil society. But, just as China's Communist system restricts private property, it prohibits independent churches and labor unions, truly autonomous social organizations, and any other civic institutions that might plausibly compete with the state. Indeed, China's leaders seem to have read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and the rest of the civil-society canon--and decided to do exactly the reverse of what the literature recommends. ``Peasants will establish peasants' organizations as well, then China will become another Poland,'' senior party official Yao Yilin reportedly warned during the Tiananmen protests. To make sure this fear never comes true, China's leaders have dealt with any hint of an emerging civil society in one of two ways: repression or co- optation. Some forbidden organizations--such as Falun Gong, the Roman Catholic church, independent labor unions, and organizations associated with the 1989 democracy movement-- find their members routinely imprisoned and tortured. Others, such as the Association of Urban Unemployed, are merely monitored and harassed. And as for the officially sanctioned organizations that impress so many Western observers, they mostly constitute a Potemkin facade. ``[A]lmost every ostensibly independent organization--institutes, foundations, consultancies--is linked into the party-state network,'' says Columbia University sinologist Andrew Nathan. Hence, Beijings Ministry of Civil Affairs monitors even sports clubs and business associations and requires all such groups to register with the government. The same kind of misreading often characterizes celebrations of rural China's ``village committees,'' whose democratic potential the engagement lobby routinely touts. Business Week discerns in them evidence ``of the grassroots democracy beginning to take hold in China.'' But that's not quite right. China's leaders restrict committee elections to the countryside and, even there, to the most local level. Nor, having been legally sanctioned 14 years ago, do they constitute a recent development. More important, China's leaders don't see the elections the way their American interpreters do. In proposing them, says Jude Howell, co- author of In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China, party elites argued that elected village leaders ``would find it easier to implement central government policy and in particular persuade villagers to deliver grain and taxes and abide by family planning policy. Village self-governance would thus foster social stability and order and facilitate the implementation of national policy. By recruiting newly elected popular and entrepreneurial village leaders, the Party could strengthen its roots at the grassroots level and bolster its legitimacy in the eyes of rural residents.'' Which is exactly what it has done. In races for village committee chairs, the Ministry of Civil Affairs allows only two candidates to stand for office, and until recently many townships nominated only one. Local party secretaries and officials often push their favored choice, and most committee members are also members of the Communist Party, to which they remain accountable. Should a nonparty member be elected, he must accept the guidance of the Communist Party, which, in any case, immediately sets about recruiting him. As for those rare committee members who challenge local party officials, their success may be gleaned from the fate of elected committee members from a village in Shandong province who in 1999 accused a local party secretary of corruption. All were promptly arrested. Still, the very fact that China's leaders feel compelled to bolster their legitimacy in the countryside is telling. Last month Beijing took the unusual step of releasing a report, ``Studies of Contradictions Within the People Under New Conditions'' which detailed a catalogue of ``collective protests and group incidents.'' What the report makes clear is that Beijing's leaders think China's growing pool of overtaxed farmers and unemployed workers, more than its newly moneyed elite could become a threat to the regime. Fortunately for the authorities, with no political opposition to channel labor unrest into a coherent movement, protests tend to be narrow in purpose and poorly coordinated. And the wheels of repression have already begun to grind, with Beijing launching ``strike hard'' campaign to quell any trouble. In any case, what these formerly state-employed workers have been demonstrating for is not less communism, but more--a return to the salad days of central planning. Which brings us to the final tenent of the engagement lobby: that commerce exposes China to the ideals of its trading partners, particularly those of the United States. As House Majority Leader Dick Armey has put it, ``Freedom to trade is the great subversive and liberating force in human history.'' Or, as Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger burbled in 1997, ``The fellow travelers of the new global economy--computers and modems, faxes and photocopiers, increased contacts and binding contacts--carry with them the seeds of change.'' But the Chinese disagree. To begin with, they don't import much. And economists predict that won't change dramatically once they've joined the WTO, since China's leaders have committed themselves to the kind of export-oriented, merchantilist growth model that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan pursued in decades past. Last year, for instance, China exported $100 billion in goods and services to the United States and only imported $16 billion worth. Hence, for every six modems it sent to America, Sandy Berger sent back only one. To be sure, that one modem may carry with it seeds of change. Bush, for instance, says, ``If the Internet were to take hold in China, freedom's genie will be out of the bottle.'' Alas, through links to Chinese service providers, Beijing tightly controls all access to the Web. and Western investors in China's information networks have eagerly pitched in. One Chinese Internet portal, bankrolled by Intel and Goldman Sachs, greets users with a helpful reminder to avoid ``topics which damage the reputation of the state'' and warns that it will be ``obliged to report you to the Public Security Bureau'' if you don't. But Goldman Sachs needn't worry. If anything, China's recent experience lends credence to the pessimistic theories of an earlier era, which held that nations shape the uses of technology rather than the other [[Page 13861]] way around. Thus Beijing blocks access to damaging ``topics'' and to Western news sources like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and this magazine. It also monitors e-mail exchanges and has arrested Internet users who have tried to elude state restrictions. And, in ways that would make Joseph Goebbels blush, the government uses websites--and, of course, television, newspapers, and radio--to dominate the circuits with its own propaganda. ``Much as many people might like to think the Internet is part of a bottom-up explosion of individualism in China, it is not,'' writes Peter Lovelock, a Hong Kong-based academic who studies the Internet's effect in the PRC. Instead, it provides ``an extraordinarily beneficial tool in the administration of China.'' And that tool was on vivid display during the EP-3 crisis, when China blocked access to Western news sources and censored chat rooms. American politicians describe foreign direct investment, too, as a potent agent of democratization. But, in this case, they're not even paraphrasing political science literature they haven't read, because the literature makes no such claim. In fact, a 1983 study by the University of North Carolina's Kenneth Bollen found that levels of foreign trade concentration and penetration by multinational corporations have no significant effect on the correlation between economic development and democracy. In China's case, it's easy to understand why. Beijing requires foreign investors in may industries to cooperate in joint ventures with Chinese partners, most of whom enjoy close ties to the government. These firms remain insulated mainly in three coastal enclaves and in ``special economic zones'' set apart from the larger Chinese economy. Moreover, they export a majority of their goods--which is to say, they send most of their ``seeds of change'' abroad. At the same time, their capital largely substitutes for domestic capital (foreign-owned firms generate half of all Chinese exports), providing a much- needed blood transfusion for China's rulers, who use it to accumulate reserves of hard currency, meet social welfare obligation, and otherwise strengthen their rule. Nor is it clear that U.S. companies even want China to change. If anything, growing levels of U.S. investment have created an American interest in maintaining China's status quo. Hence, far from criticizing China's rulers, Western captains of industry routinely parade through Beijing singing the praises of the Communist regime (and often inveighing against its detractors), while they admonish America's leaders to take no action that might upset the exquisite sensibilities of China's politburo Business first, democracy later. But ultimately the best measure of whether economic ties to the West have contributed to democratization may be gleaned from China's human rights record. Colin Powell insists, ``Trade with China is not only good economic policy; it is good human rights policy.'' Yet, rather than improve that record, the rapid expansion of China's trade ties to the outside world over the past decade has coincided with a worsening of political repression at home. Beijing launched its latest crackdown on dissent in 1999, and it continues to this day. The government has tortured, ``reeducated through labor,'' and otherwise persecuted thousands of people for times no greater than practicing breathing exercises, peacefully championing reforms, and exercising freedom of expression, association, or worship. It has arrested Chinese- American scholars like Li Shaominn on trumped-up charges, closed down newspapers, and intimidated and threatened dissidents. Nor is it true that linking trade and human rights will necessarily prove counterproductive. When Congress approved trade sanctions against Beijing in the aftermath of Tiananmen, China's leaders responded by releasing more than 800 political prisoner, lifting martial law in Beijing, entering into talks with the United States, and even debating among themselves the proper role of human rights. As soon as American pressure eased, so did China's reciprocal gestures. Turning a blind eye to Beijing's depredations may make economic sense. But to pretend we can democratize China by means of economics is, finally, a self-serving conceit. Democracy is a political choice, an act of will. Someone, not something, must create it. Often that someone is a single leader--a Mikhail Gorbachev, a King Juna Carlos, or a Vaclav Havel. But such a man won't be found in China's current leadership. Other times, the pressure for democracy comes from a political opposition--the African National Congress in South Africa, Solidarity in Poland, or the marchers in Tiananmen Square. But there are no more marchers in Tiananmen Square. Pressure for democratization, however, can also come from abroad. And usually it comes from the United States or from nowhere at all. During the 1980s America applied diplomatic and economic pressure to repressive regimes from Poland to South Africa; intervened to prevent military coups in the Philippines, Peru, El Salvador, Honduras, and Bolivia; and loudly enshrined human rights and democracy in official policy. The United States played a pivotal and direct role in democratizing even countries like South Korea and Taiwan, which many China-engagers now tout as evidence that the market alone creates political freedom. Appropriately enough, the decade closed with democracy activists erecting a facsimile of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square. The commercialist view of China, by contrast, rests on no historical foundation; it is a libertarian fantasy. ``The linkage between development and rights is too loose, the threshold too high, the time frame too long, and the results too uncertain to make economic engagement a substitute for direct policy intervention,'' writes Columbia's Nathan. Yet make it a substitute is precisely what the United States has done. And, far from creating democracy, this subordination of political principle has created the justified impression of American hypocrisy and, worse, given U.S. policymakers an excuse to do nothing. Maybe the claim that we can bring liberty to China by chasing its markets will prove valid in the long run. But exactly how long is the long run? A political scientist at Stanford University says it ends in 2015, when, he predicts, China will be transformed into a democracy. Others say China will democratize before that. Still others say it may take a half-century or more. The answer matters. After all, while capitalist Germany and Japan eventually became democracies, it wasn't capitalism that democratized them, and it certainly wasn't worth the wait. In China's case, too, no on really knows what might happen as we wait for politics to catch up with economies. With the exception, perhaps, of Li Shaomin, who tested the link between economic and political liberalization in China for himself. He's still in jail. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind). Mr. KIND. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the resolution. This debate is not about condoning slave labor in China, child labor, or religious or political persecution occurring in China. Mr. Speaker, I believe this debate is about empowering the Chinese people to make the improvements, make the positive changes that all of us in this Chamber would like to see made someday. I believe the best way to empower the Chinese people is with information: information from the outside world, information from us. And the best way we can accomplish this is through a policy of engagement, through trade, especially with greater telecommunications and Internet access within China. Just last year I had an opportunity to meet with five Chinese university students who wanted to talk with me since I serve on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I asked them, what is the most exciting thing occurring in Chinese universities? Almost all of them simultaneously said the Internet, because now we have access to outside information and ideas that we have never been exposed to before or were precluded from having. Mr. Speaker, I was sitting looking at this young crowd, thinking this is the next generation of leadership growing up in China, and if we want to see the positive, revolutionary changes occur in China that are long overdue, we need to empower them and the Chinese people. I believe the worst mistake we can make as a Congress in this new century is to pick a new cold war confrontation with the world's most populated nation after we have just concluded a very lengthy and costly cold war with the Soviet Union during most of the 20th century. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations did not collapse because of military defiance from the West. They collapsed because Gorbachev had the courage to institute perestroika and glasnost and open up their societies to the influence of the outside world, and the people realized that they were living under a failed system and policy. They stood in defiance of those governments, and the governments came down. The same potential holds true in China. Mr. Speaker, Cordell Hull, FDR's Secretary of State, was fond of saying, when goods and products cross borders, armies do not. I believe that is what is at stake here in our debate with NTR with China, getting them included in WTO as a member of the world trading community. I hope that we make that decision correctly for the sake of our children, for the sake of their children, and for the sake of a positive relationship with China and the United States as we embark together on this marvelous journey in the 21st century. [[Page 13862]] Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to myself. Mr. Speaker, I do not know what books my colleague has been reading from about history, but I read nowhere in history that if we treat the Nazis or the Japanese militarists as anything but dictatorships and threats where it turns out beneficial to the democratic countries of the world. I do not read where we in the past have ever benefited from trying to not recognize a real threat in the dictatorships around the world but instead try to gloss over those differences. I do not read where trade with dictatorships has led to peace. I do not read that. What I read is when there is free trade with dictatorships, they manipulate the trade in order to gain money for their own regimes; and our next speaker realizes we should not be using tax dollars to subsidize businessmen for closing factories in the United States and reopening them in China. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes). {time} 1800 Mr. HAYES. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to vote for this measure and oppose granting China normal trade relations. Normal trade relations for the People's Republic of China does not represent fair trade for our Nation's textile workers. For the tens of thousands of textile workers and the many communities that depend on these jobs in North Carolina's eighth district, this agreement continues down the road of trading away a vital industry to our State's economy. Since December of 1994, the textile and apparel industry has lost nearly 600,000 workers, 20 percent of which belonged to North Carolinians. A devastating effect on many communities throughout the district has resulted. Closed foreign markets which persist despite trade policies that open our markets, continuing large-scale customs fraud, transshipments, and currency devaluation have all led to this loss of jobs in a vital industry. The textile industry is not protectionist. It is not afraid of competition. In fact, it is a highly automated and technology-driven industry that simply wants to assure its place within the global economy through fairness and equal access. Until that happens, I urge my colleagues to oppose trade with China. Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I am happy to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Cunningham) not only a distinguished gentleman but one of America's greatest war heroes. Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, most of my life I have spent fighting against Communists and Socialists. You would think of anybody that did not want to support the Chinese, it would be Duke Cunningham. I am probably the only one in this room that has been shot at by the Chinese near the Vietnamese border. I cannot tell you what I told them over the radio or called them. And they were my enemy. They are an emerging threat today. When the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers), the chairman of the committee, asked me to go to Vietnam and raise the American flag over Ho Chi Minh City, I said, ``No, I can't do that. It's too hard.'' And then Pete Peterson, a friend of mine, the Ambassador to Vietnam, said, ``Duke, I need your help. I was a prisoner for 6\1/2\ years. I can do this. You can, too.'' So I went. And I met with the Prime Minister in Hanoi. I asked him, I said, Mr. Prime Minister, President Clinton is trying to work negotiations and trade with Hanoi to open up our two countries. Why are you dragging your feet? In perfect English, he looked at me and said, Congressman, I am a Communist. If we move too fast in trade, you see those people out there? And we were looking at a sea of thousand bicycles. He said, those people out there will have things, like property, like things of their own, like their own bicycles that they could own. He very frankly said, as a Communist, I will be out of business. I looked at him, and I said, Mr. Prime Minister, trade is good. I was the commanding officer of Adversary Squadron, and at Navy fighter weapons school my job was to teach Asian and Sino-Soviet threats to the world. Twenty years ago, they were a real threat. Today, China is a threat; but let us not close the door on our farmers, on the people that fought in Tiananmen Square, on the people that are fighting for human rights within China itself. My daughter dates Matthew Li. He is Chinese. I want to tell you, you look at our universities and the immigrants that we have into this country. They are the hardest working, the most freedom-seeking people in the world. And if we do not support this open trade with China, then we are going to lose that opportunity. China is not what it is or what it was 20 years ago. Are they going to be a democracy? Not in my lifetime. But do we want them to go backwards? Or do we want to slowly change that 10,000-year-old dog? It is hard to teach an old dog new tricks is the saying. I believe with all of my heart that if we close that door and that opportunity for us to reach out, at the same time I think it was wrong to give China missile secrets and then for China to then give it to North Korea and make us vulnerable to missile threats, but we can hold them at bay. Do not let the cobra in the baby crib but milk it for its venom. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) who understands that the facts show that Western investors prefer totalitarian countries more than democratic countries because Western investors like the docile workforce that China provides. Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, let me be very blunt. In my opinion, our current trade relations with China are an absolute disaster and are based on an unholy alliance between corporate America and the corrupt Communist leadership in China. As part of this trade agreement, corporate America gets the opportunity to invest tens of billions of dollars in China and to hire workers who are forced to slave away at wages as low as 20 cents an hour. And in the process, as corporate America invests in China, they are throwing out on the streets hundreds of thousands of American workers who used to make a living wage, who used to be able to join a union, who worked under some kinds of environmental protection. What an outrage, that corporate America has decided that it is better to pay Chinese workers starvation wages, have their government arrest those people if they form a union, and allow corporate America to destroy their environment. Mr. Speaker, today is a day to stand up for living wages in this country. Not only are we seeing a huge loss of manufacturing jobs because of our trade policy with China, what we are seeing is wages being forced down. How is an American worker supposed to make a living wage competing against somebody who makes 20 cents an hour? The result is that today, millions of American workers are working longer hours for lower wages than was the case 20 years ago. High school graduates in America no longer get manufacturing jobs at decent wages. They work at McDonald's for minimum wage. The reason for that is those manufacturing jobs are now in China. Let us stand today for American workers, for decent jobs, for decent wages, and let us support the Rohrabacher amendment. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gillmor). The Chair informs those who are controlling time that their introductions of their next speakers-- the time consumed in that--does come out of their time. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bentsen). Mr. BENTSEN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. There is not a Member of this House who agrees with all of the policies of the regime in China. I think there is not a Member in this House who would not like to see the Chinese government change their policies, whether it relates to their strategic relationship [[Page 13863]] with the United States, whether it relates to groups such as the Falun Gong, whether it relates to their labor policy. But at the same time I do not think any Member of this House can make a credible argument that the United States unilaterally erecting trade barriers with the Chinese would somehow cause the Chinese government to change those policies. A unilateral action of what is proposed in the gentleman's resolution would only come back to hurt the United States. Furthermore, I think Members need to understand, while we do have a trade deficit with China, it would be simplistic and incorrect to assume that there would be an exact substitution for the dollars of goods that we export to China going somewhere else versus what is imported here. In fact, I would submit to the body that if we were to erect barriers and eliminate trade with China as the gentleman's resolution would ultimately do, we in effect would lose export dollars in the United States at the expense of American workers. I think that would be a very grave mistake. I would think it would be an even worse mistake given the fact that we know that the United States economy is in a great slowdown right now, perhaps closing in on a recession but certainly very slow growth. The rest of the world economy is experiencing slow growth. And so this is exactly the wrong time that we would want to be cutting off trade and the selling of U.S. goods and services when in fact our manufacturing sector is in a recession. Mr. Speaker, I would hope that Members would realize that while from a rhetorical standpoint it may sound good, from a practical economic standpoint, the resolution would do nothing but bring harm to the United States. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds. Let me remind my colleagues, this has nothing to do with erecting economic barriers around China. It has nothing to do with an embargo. It has everything to do with removing a subsidy. That is the only effect of this vote that we are having right here today. The only effect of taking away normal trade relations from China is that big businessmen who want to set up a factory in China, maybe close one in the United States, are not going to get their loans guaranteed or their loan subsidized in order to set up that factory. It has nothing to do with stopping people from selling American products or erecting some sort of trade barriers. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter). Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, in 1941, about 6 months before Pearl Harbor, our former colleague Carl Andersen said that at some point in the near future we might be engaged in battle with a Japanese fleet. And if that occurred, we would be fighting a Navy whose ships were built with American steel and that were powered with American fuel. A few months after he made that statement, in fact, we were engaged at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, losing hundreds of ships and aircraft and thousands of lives to a Japanese fleet that was built with American steel and powered with American petroleum. Today, we are sending $80 billion more to China than they are sending to us. They are using those hard American trade dollars to build a military machine. A part of that military machine is the Sovremenny- class missile destroyers that they have now bought from the Soviet Union complete with Sunburn missiles that were designed for one thing and that is to kill American aircraft carriers. They are building coproduction plants for Su-27 aircraft, high performance fighters with the ability to take on American fighters very effectively. And with American trade dollars they are building a nuclear force, intercontinental ballistic missile force, aimed at American cities. Mr. Speaker, we are leaving a century in which 619,000 Americans died on the battlefield. It is a century in which a great Democrat President, FDR, joined early on with Winston Churchill to face down Hitler and save the world for democracy. And it is also a century in which a great Republican President, Ronald Reagan, faced down the Soviet Union, brought down the Berlin Wall, and disassembled the Soviet military machine. Let us not replace that Soviet military machine with another military superpower built with American trade dollars. Vote ``yes'' on Rohrabacher. Vote ``no'' on MFN for China. Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Pitts), a strong proponent of engagement with China. Mr. PITTS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this resolution that would revoke normal trade relations with China. It is a mistake to declare economic warfare on 1.3 billion people on the other side of the globe, on China, which in effect this resolution would do. We have NTR with about 190 nations. We do not with about four or five that we consider enemies. But instead of espousing the opinions of politicians and my own views, I was interested in finding out what are the views of those impacted by the human rights abuses in China? Those unregistered church leaders, pastors of unregistered house churches? I have some faxes here from some of them. This is what they say. Here is a Chinese pastor: ``It is good and right that America be firm and strong on the issue of human rights but trying to enforce human rights through using NTR status as a lever is a misguided policy.'' {time} 1815 Another one, a leader for over 20 years in a house church, he said, ``If China cannot enter WTO, that means closing the door on China and also on us Christians. It will have a direct impact on China if it joins WTO and keeps its doors open to the outside world.'' I could go on and on. But, Mr. Speaker, this disapproving the 1-year NTR extension will accomplish nothing except pouring salt into the wound of those in China who desire freedom. It will reinforce the agenda of the hard-line rulers in China. We should support NTR, not for the corrupt dictators in Beijing, but for the people of China and the people of the United States. Only by continuing to actively engage China can we help stem the nationalism, the anti-Westernism of the communist leaders, help the reformers and have the opportunity to influence China for good. We should not withdraw; we should not be isolationists. We should vote against this resolution. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gillmor). The Chair would inform the House of the order of closing. The order of closing will be as follows: the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher); the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin); the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown); and the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Weller). The time remaining is as follows: the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Weller), 8 minutes; the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown), 9\1/2\ minutes; the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher), 2\1/2\ minutes; and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Levin), 1 minute. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/4\ minutes to my friend, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio). Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, let us turn to a recent statement by President Bush on trade sanctions. Calling sanctions a ``moral statement,'' President Bush ordered stricter enforcement of the U.S. trade embargo and greater support for the country's dissidents. ``It is wrong to prop up a regime that routinely stifles all the freedoms that make us human,'' said President Bush. Unfortunately, of course, he was referring to that puny little nation of Cuba, and not to the giant economic military power, China. God forbid we should apply the same standards to someone as powerful as they are. You know, driven by big business, policymakers in this body and downtown at the White House for more than 100 years have been talking about dramatic policy changes in China. They are coming. If you stacked up all of the agreements on trade, arms control, and [[Page 13864]] human rights that have been negotiated and signed over the last 100 years by U.S. Presidents, you would have a new Great Wall, or more likely I guess you could call it an imaginary line, because the agreements are not worth the paper they are written on. Most recently, the 1992 MOU on prison labor: violated, torn up, thrown away. The 1994 bilateral on textiles: violated, torn up, thrown away. 1992 MOU on market access; 1996, 1998 intellectual property; 1999 grains and poultry: all ignored and violated. But the proponents, or should I call them the apologists, are constantly making new rationalizations, ``and this time it is really different,'' a little bit like maybe Lucy and the football; or perhaps we could say their arguments are as finely packaged as our Navy plane, which is coming back to us in pieces. It is about U.S. jobs, they say; it is about engagement; it is about the dissidents. Well, here is a headline the day after we granted China permanent MFN status last year. The Wall Street Journal ran a front- page story. It said: ``Debate focused on exports, but, for many companies, going local is the goal.'' The gentleman who preceded me talked about dissidents. I sat with a dissident who said, you know, occasionally we were treated better when the U.S. took certain action. Were those actions a doormat giving the Chinese everything they wanted? No. The few times we have gotten tough with China, the dissidents from prison were treated better. If we give them everything they want, like a spoiled child, we will get no change in their behavior. Please, please, this is our last chance. Vote to send a message to China. Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, as we listen to the impassioned debate on both sides of this issue, people we all respect have differing views. One group of people has been often overlooked in this debate, and that is the American worker. Trade with China means a lot to American workers. I think it is important to point out that 350,000 American families depend entirely on trade with China. In fact, exports to China are rising and will rise faster in a more open and free market with the Chinese. Last year, U.S. exports to China increased a record 24 percent to $16.3 billion, and China is now our 11th largest export market. Trade with China is important to farmers and our rural communities. In fact, the U.S. farm exports to China could grow by $2 billion annually, nearly tripling our current rate of exports to China. The point is, you are not pro-agriculture unless you are pro-free trade with China. I would also note that trade with China will also boost the technology sector, one of our weaker sectors today. We have seen the last 8 years a five-fold increase in exports to China from the technology community. The facts are, you are not pro-technology unless you are pro-free trade with China. America is the world's largest exporter, and China is now our largest consumer. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Kirk), a strong proponent of engagement with China. Mr. KIRK. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Illinois for yielding me time. Mr. Speaker, as a member of the Human Rights Caucus, I rise in support of trade with China. China is in the middle of a historic transformation. Half of all construction cranes in the world now operate in China. More cell phone users and Internet subscribers will live in China than in Europe. Opening China will help human rights. In the 1960s, 30 million people died in China of starvation, and it took the U.S. intelligence community over 20 years to even find out. Today, tens of thousands of Westerners travel throughout China each day. We know more about China than ever before, and we can fight for democratic change and more effective human rights better than ever before. Martin Lee, the democratic leader of Hong Kong's pro-democracy forces, supports trade with China. Taiwan supports trade with China. As the world is being remade in our image, I believe that free trade with China is the most effective way to support democratic change and human rights in China. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Indiana (Ms. Carson). Ms. CARSON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time to speak in favor of House Joint Resolution 50. Mr. Speaker, I was one of the 237 that voted for the most-favored- nation permanent relations with China last year, but since that time I have watched with interest the developments in China since we gave them the most-favored-nation status. I have watched them confiscate our airplane and destroy it. I have watched the continuation of human exploitation. Instead of trade, I have watched slave trade abound in China. And as important as that, I have noticed that China continues to dump steel in this country to the detriment of the American worker in this country. In the State of Indiana, the largest producer of steel has dropped substantially in terms of its steel production and steel exports with the loss of several thousand steel jobs in my State, along with Alabama, devastated by steel dumping, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington State, Detroit, Michigan, devastated by steel dumping. Thirty thousand steelworkers in Indiana had to accept shorter work weeks, lower-paying job assignments, or early retirement. The Commerce Department has reported that 11,000 American steelworkers have been laid off, and I was pleased to see President Bush had taken a look at this for the purpose of maybe imposing quotas. Mr. Speaker, I thank you for allowing me this opportunity to protest. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey). Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of revoking China's normal trade relations status. It has to be clear to all of us that granting China special trade status has not persuaded them to conform to standards of decency and fairness. Instead, their record of human rights abuses has worsened and trade imbalances have actually increased. Today, U.S. companies import 36 percent of all Chinese exports, but the presence of U.S. purchasing power has done nothing to improve Chinese workers' lives. What is most alarming is that many of the products the U.S. imports are made by young children, children who work more than 12 hours a day and more than 6 days a week. If the mere possibility of cheaper goods made by children, slaves and prisoners is worth all the human rights violations, the religious persecution, more forced abortions and sterilizations, then I do not think this country stands for what we know we believe in. Of course, we do not stand for that. It is long overdue for U.S. trade policy to address human rights, workers' rights, and the environment. Trade is not free, trade is not fair, when there is no freedom and no fairness for the citizens of the country involved. Yet, year after year, this Congress grants special trade status to China. This time, right now, tonight, let us have the courage to lever our economic strength and real reform and vote yes on this resolution. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). Ms. JACKSON-LEE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, as I have heard other Members, I rise today to give explanation to my protest vote today to deny China this normal trade relations, because I voted for PNTR. But already Lee Chow Min has been in China, a U.S. citizen, since February 25, 2001. His family and lawyers have not been able to access him. A young mother, wife and academic, Dr. Zhou Yongjun, whose husband and son are U.S. citizens, whose 5-year-old son was kept for 26 days away from her, [[Page 13865]] and she is now, if you will, incognito, with no lawyers and family able to see her. I believe China's leaders can do something about their human rights abuses. I believe the Chinese leadership can stand up to the words and say we accept the benefits and we accept the burdens. I am here today to vote in protest, because I demand that China become a citizen of the world, treat its citizens with respect, allow democracy and freedom; and I believe that if we say to China that we will take it no more, we will see a Chinese Government that understands that they can make a change. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Speaker, a year ago corporate CEOs flocked to the Hill to lobby for increased trade with China. They talked about access to 1.2 billion Chinese customers, but their real interest was in 1.2 billion Chinese workers. CEOs tell us that democracies will flourish with increased trade; but, as the last decade showed, democratic nations in the developing world, such as India, are losing out to totalitarian governments such as China, where people are not free and the workers do as they are told. In the post-Cold War decade, the developing democratic nations' share of developing country exports to the U.S. fell from 54 percent to 35 percent. {time} 1830 Decisions about Chinese economy are made by three groups: the Communist party, the People's Liberation Army, and western investors. Which of these three groups wants to empower workers? Does the Chinese Communist party want the Chinese people to enjoy increased human rights? I do not think so. Does the People's Liberation Army want to close the labor camps? I do not think so. Do western investors want Chinese workers to bargain collectively and be empowered? I do not think so. None of these groups, the Chinese Communist party, the People's Liberation Army, or western investors, none of these groups has any interest in changing the status quo in China. All three profit too much from the situation the way it is to want to see human rights improve in China, to want to see labor rights improve on China. Mr. Speaker, vote ``yes'' on the Rohrabacher-Brown resolution. Send a message to the Communist party in China. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time. Let me note as we close this debate that over and over again in this debate I have stated that the only practical effect and, let us say, the dominant effect of Normal Trade Relations with China is one thing, and that is that it ensures that a subsidy that we currently provide to American businessmen to close their factories in the United States and rebuild factories in China to exploit the slave labor there, that that is the only practical effect of Normal Trade Relations. If we deny Normal Trade Relations, no longer will these big businessmen be able to get a taxpayer, U.S. Taxpayer-guaranteed loan or subsidized loan in order to build a factory in Communist China so that they can exploit the slave labor there. When we are asked to consider the American worker, I hope we will consider that, because there may be 400,000 American workers, maybe, depending on the China trade, but that does not take into consideration the millions of American workers who have lost their jobs because we have subsidized big businessmen to go to China and invest there, rather than to try to invest in the United States of America. If my colleagues will note, no one on the other side has sought to try to disprove that point, and over and over again I made the point. I would challenge my opponents here tonight in their closing statement to say that that is not true. Well, they cannot say that, because they know that that is the practical effect of this vote. We were asked by the gentleman from Illinois, will the young people of China know anything more about democracy if we deny normal trade relations? My answer is, emphatically, yes. The young people of China will understand that this greatest democracy on earth is standing with them and their aspirations to have a free country and to live in freedom and democracy and have decent lives. They will learn that, the young people will learn that, rather than learn the lesson of today, that America is doing the bidding of a few billionaires who are in partnership, as the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) said, an unholy alliance with the dictators of China in order to exploit slave labor. Yes, we can teach them a lesson. This is not about free trade. It is not about whether people can trade with China. It is whether or not we are going to side with those billionaires and those dictators in China against the people of China. The people of China are our greatest ally. We must reach out to them, not to the rulers. When we talk about free trade with a dictatorship, we are talking about them controlling trade on the other side so they can make the billions of dollars and put it to use buying military equipment which will some day threaten American soldiers. Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to support my initiative to deny Normal Trade Relations with this Communist Chinese dictatorship. Mr. LEVIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remaining time. Most likely, this is not the last time we are going to be debating our relationship, including our trade relationship, with China. They were going to go into the WTO with or without U.S. support. So what we did last year was to decide we needed to both engage and pressure China. The assumption was that trade is the important part of engagement, but it is not a magic path. It will not automatically, even over time, bring about democracy. So, in part, we responded by setting up a commission. It will be in operation soon at an executive congressional level. It is charged with submitting to the Congress and the President an annual report with the committee of jurisdiction required to hold hearings, and it is assumed that they will, it says, with a view of reporting to the House appropriate legislation in furtherance of the commission's recommendations. This has been a useful debate. We need to keep the light and the heat on this issue, and we intend to do just that. Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Wu). Mr. WU. Mr. Speaker, I stand to ask my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this resolution and ``no'' to Most Favored Nations trading status for China. I am honored to stand here and be the last speaker; and I stand on the work of my colleagues, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos), and the gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher). I stand upon their work and their shoulders. I would like to ask my pro-life colleagues something. I am pro- choice, but whether one is pro-life or pro-choice, how can we give Most Favored Nation trading status to a nation that forces women to have abortions? That is not pro-life. That is not pro-choice. We just had a debate about religious freedom in this Chamber, and both sides of the issue professed to support religious freedom in the context of charitable choice. How can one support religious freedom and support Most Favored Nation trading status for a country that forces free churches to hide in attics and basements? Labor rights. If you are a student organizer in China, you get jail time. If you are a labor organizer in China, you get a bullet in the back of the head. If we support labor rights, how can we support Most Favored Nation trading status for China? Finally, to my so-called pro-business colleagues in this House, I was an international trade lawyer and an intellectual property attorney. What I see is a nation that sells us $100 billion worth of goods and we sell them $16 billion of goods. That is $84 billion worth of leverage that we are leaving on the [[Page 13866]] negotiating table. I would have committed legal malpractice if I had not used that leverage, and I will tell my colleagues this: If we approve this resolution today, his excellency, the ambassador of the People's Republic of China, will crawl across broken glass to the other Chamber to make sure that they do not vote the same way. Freedom does not automatically come from trade. It is an act of will. It is an act of human choice. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gillmor). The time of the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Wu) has expired. (By unanimous consent, Mr. Wu was allowed to proceed for 2 additional minutes.) Mr. WU. Mr. Speaker, to those who say freedom automatically follows trade, I offer the historic example of a century ago. In 1900, more of international GDP was international trade than today. More of international GDP was invested in foreign countries than today. And there were writers in 1890 and 1900 who said, war is impossible, because nations and business people surely will not bombard their own investments. They were wrong. They were wrong. Freedom does not automatically follow trade and business. Freedom is an act of human will. And to those who say that this is a futile debate, I say: tough, yes; futile, no. No more tougher than what our predecessors faced. I got across the street to the library of Congress the other day. I got in before it opened. Apparently, their security guards are a little bit more lax than those at the Department of Energy. And I found a letter from Mr. Jefferson written in 1826, 10 days before he died. He was invited to this city to celebrate the 4th of July, and this was his response: ``I should indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there, congratulations personally, with a small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword, and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice that we made.'' Mr. Speaker, freedom is a choice. We can make a choice today to send a strong signal and use the leverage that we have. Mr. Jefferson had a broader vision for freedom in this world. He continued in that letter, 10 days before his death, speaking of the 4th of July: ``May it be to the world what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst their chains.'' I ask my colleagues to vote for this resolution and against Most Favored Nation trading status for China. Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remaining time. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to H.J. Resolution 50, which would cut off Normal Trade Relations with China. I respect my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who oppose free trade with China, but I believe that this resolution is terribly shortsighted. When recognizing the reforms of the Chinese government and the hard-fought gains of America's consumers, workers and exporters, and given how close China is to accepting comprehensive trade disciplines of the World Trade Organization's membership, I would note that China is agreeing to live by the same rules that all leading trading nations live by. This past year, this last July, this House voted in a bipartisan vote, 237 to 197, to extend Normal Trade Relations to China upon their admission to the World Trade Organization, and we expect China to fully and officially assume responsibilities of WTO membership by the end of this year. Defeat of H.J. Res. 50 is necessary to support Special Trade Representative Zoellick's decision to take the extra time to ensure that China's concessions to the United States are as clear and expansive as possible. Despite its history and historic policies which many of us have disapproved of, as well as disagreed with, China has made it clear that they are fully prepared and finally prepared to join the world of trading nations by accepting the fair trade rules of the World Trade Organization. This is progress, and we must support this type of progress. While we see that the Chinese people still face overwhelming problems with the behavior of their government and their leaders, it is imperative to understand that China is changing. The last 10 years represent the most stable and industrious decade China has known in the last 150 years. WTO membership and Normal Trade Relations with the United States offers the best tool we have to support the changes we have witnessed over the last few years in China. With these changes, we have seen now that more than 40 percent of China's current industrial output comes from private firms, 40 percent of China's output now comes from free enterprise, and urban incomes in China have more than doubled. Engagement with China is working, the exchange of ideas and our values with China is working, and we must continue our engagement and free trade with China. The bottom line for American workers is it offers a tremendous amount of opportunity, opportunity for our farmers, opportunity for those who work in manufacturing, opportunity for our hard-hit technology sector. But I would note that America is not only the world's largest exporter but China is again the world's largest consumer. Over the next 5 years, China will have more than 230 million middle-income consumers with retail sales exceeding $900 billion, making China the world's largest market for consumer goods and services. {time} 1845 We are making a choice today, Mr. Speaker: Do we want our farmers, do we want our manufacturing workers, do we want our creative friends in the technology sector to have an opportunity to participate in the globe's largest market of 1.3 billion people? I believe we do. I believe a bipartisan majority supports continued engagement, as well as free trade with China. Revoking normal trade relations at this time would undermine the success of the free enterprise and social reforms taking place today in China. Let us not turn our backs on the gains our negotiators have gained with China, gains that benefit America's farmers, America's businesses, America's workers, and America's consumers. Instead, let us give capitalism a true chance in China. I urge a vote no on House Joint Resolution 50. Ms. DeGETTE. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to oppose H.J. Res. 50. I firmly believe that engagement is the only thing that will bring positive change in the Republic of China in the areas that I care so deeply about: human rights, labor and environmental sustainability. China is well on its way to joining the WTO, so the vote today is largely symbolic. I have consistently voted to support the annual extension of NTR status because of my belief that revoking it would worsen our relationship with China and negatively impact these issues. In addition, it could worsen the national security issues that have long plagued U.S.-China relations. Closing the door on China will not improve the lives of those who are suffering under an oppressive regime. It will not raise the standard of living in China. And it will not benefit our citizens by opening the market for American goods and services. In my state alone, there are already hundreds of companies that have begun exporting products to China. The potential for increased trade once China has lowered its tariffs is enormous in such areas as manufactured goods, technology and agriculture, just to name a few. A more open market will create significant new business opportunities for a broad cross section of Colorado businesses. Enhanced trade relations with China will economically benefit my district, my state and the nation as a whole. After much discussion and deliberation I decided to support PNTR because I strongly believe it will economically benefit the people of Colorado, and because I believe continued long-term engagement with China is the best way to promote democracy and protect human rights. An open door to the West provides the best hope for progressive change in China over the long term, both in terms of American business opportunities and human rights. It is possible to both reap the economic benefits and help promote democracy and free markets in China. Enhancing trade and diplomatic relations will accomplish these goals. [[Page 13867]] Mr. ROEMER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to H.J. Res. 50, disapproving Normal Trade Relations with China. We are considering a critically important piece of legislation that we must defeat; legislation that will affect the way our Nation and our world progress into the new millennium. However, I would like to outline three simple points that should show why supporting Normal Trade Relations for China is the right thing to do, both for the benefit of the United States and the people of China. Those three points are the economic benefits to American workers and business, the human rights benefits for the people of China, and the necessity to move forward into a more productive and challenging relationship with the government of China. First, and most important to our communities and constituents, is the way in which NTR for China will help Americans economically. Many people become understandably confused over the complexities of trade policy. However, the necessity of NTR can be easily explained. Although I am disappointed China has still not joined the WTO--as expected last year--it is anticipated that they will accede this coming autumn. However, as part of the terms of their accession to the WTO, China was required to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with the United States. We won those negotiations. Last year's agreement that was reached requires China to throw open its doors to American business and agriculture. They will reduce tariffs on American-made products from automobiles and aircraft landing systems to soybeans and pork products. They will dramatically reduce existing quotas on American made products. They will increase the access to their domestic economy by opening up distribution and marketing channels. All of these changes mean that American businesses will be able to sell more of their products to more Chinese people. At the same time, the United States gives up nothing to the Chinese--not one single thing. There is absolutely nothing in this agreement that would encourage an American company to move to China. In fact, the agreement actually gives American companies more incentive to stay in the United States. More exports to China means more jobs for Americans at better wages. Enacting NTR will change the status quo, and allow us to export American products, not American jobs. However, if this body fails to defeat this measure today, the United States will not be able to take advantage of that deal. The current status quo will remain, and American companies will find it increasingly difficult to sell their wares to a booming Chinese market. In fact, due to the fact that the European Union and other countries in Asia and around the world have similar agreements with China, American companies will actually be worse off than they are now! The other WTO members will be able to market their products to China more efficiently than we can, effectively shutting the United States out of the China market. The choice is simple: Economic stagnation and regression or commercial growth and prosperity. We need to respond to the new global economy, driven by a technological revolution, with a new fair trade policy. The choice is just as clear on the issue of human rights. It may be easy for people in Washington, D.C. to speculate what policies might be best for the Chinese people. However, when it comes to improving the human rights and political freedoms of people in China, I tend to place more weight on what the people in China, fighting those fights every day, think is best for themselves. The following human rights advocates strongly endorse this new policy: Martin Lee--chairman of the Democratic Party of Hong Kong which struggles daily to maintain the freedoms that are unique to that region; Xie Wanjun--chief director of the China Democracy Party, most of whose members are now in detention in China; Nie Minzhi--a member of the China Democracy party who is under house arrest as we stand in this chamber today; Zhou Yang--a veteran of the 1979 Democracy Wall movement; Boa Tong--a persecuted dissident and human rights activist; Dai Quig--an environmentalist and writer who served time in prison after Tiananmen Square; Zhou Litai--a pioneering Chinese labor lawyer who represents injured workers in legal battles against Chinese companies; Even the Dalai Lama himself, probably the most famous Chinese dissident in the world, supports the WTO accession. All of these people have been fighting for democracy and freedom in China on the ground, day-to-day. They all say the same thing: Support PNTR for China. They say this because they have seen how the annual renewal of NTR for China has become a bargaining chip for an oppressive government. They have seen firsthand how engagement with the United States had made China a more open society. They don't want to become isolated from the world. They want to join us in freedom and democracy. Working to ensure human rights in China is the right thing to do. However voting against NTR is not the way to do it. We need to listen to the brave people fighting the good fight on the ground in China, and we need to pass NTR. Very prominent Americans, such as the Rev. Billy Graham and President Jimmy Carter, agree with this approach. Finally, I want to stress the need for a change in our relationship with China. While we have come to see some improvement in China since the late 1970's, the Chinese government has still remained insular, resistant to change, and unwilling to allow sweeping reforms. The relationship between our two countries has warmed, but it has not completely thawed. Voting against NTR is telling China and the rest of the world that you like things the way they are today; that you prefer the status quo. As an elected representative to Congress however, I cannot in good conscience say that keeping the status quo with China is the best way for our country to proceed in this new millennium. Isolation and recrimination in the face of repression get us nowhere. One only has to look to China's neighbor, North Korea. We cut that country off from the world fifty years ago, and look what happened to them. North Korea is easily one of the most unstable, irrational, and hostile nations on this planet. Human rights and political freedoms are non-existent, and on top of it all, its people are slowly starving to death in a massive famine. Is that what we want China to become? Do we want to shut China off from the world? Will we refuse the challenge and engage the Chinese government? I say that pursuing a policy of thoughtless isolationism is not only economical suicide for the American worker, it is also callously dismissive of those brave souls in China who are trying to create change and fight for human rights. We must vote against this resolution today. We must actively work to make our world a better place for our children. We must reach out to the Chinese and attempt to lead them down the right path to embrace our values of democracy, open markets, and human rights. We must help them become a modern nation. The United State will probably be the main beneficiary of this evolution in China, but it will help the Chinese people some day join our fellowship of democratic nations with a respect for universal human rights. For these reasons, Mr. Speaker, will vote to defeat this disapproval resolution, H. J. Res. 50, and I strongly encourage my colleagues to support continued engagement and free and fair trade with China. Mr. GEPHARDT. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the annual request for Normal Trade Relations (NTR) status for China and support H.J. Res. 50 to reject this request. While I hope and believe we should continue to seek engagement with China and other nations around the world, I also think it's clear that on the key issues of trade, human rights and rule of law, the behavior of the Chinese regime has deteriorated in the past year. The Chinese leadership fails to respect or support the aspirations of its own people. Unfortunately, when it comes to trade and other relations, China is not yet a responsible partner in the international arena. Most worrisome is the ongoing record of human rights abuses detailed in the State Department's ``Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2000.'' The report states: ``China's poor human rights record worsened during the year, as the authorities intensified their harsh measures against underground Christian groups and Tibetan Buddhists, destroyed many houses of worship, and stepped up their campaign against the Falun Gong movement. China also sharply suppressed organized dissent.'' China's abuse of academic experts who simply want to study that nation's economic, political and cultural systems has been well documented in the past year. Both Chinese and American citizens have been swept up in the Chinese government's attack on academic freedom. Earlier this year, I wrote Chinese authorities to protest the detention of several Chinese-born U.S. citizens or permanent residents detained in China. Two of these individuals have been formally charged with espionage, though no information or evidence has been presented to justify these charges. Another was sentenced to a three year prison term for ``prying into and illegally providing state intelligence overseas,'' after she attempted to document the forcible detention of [[Page 13868]] Falun Gong members in mental institutions. Others remain in detention and under interrogation. I have strong reservations about the granting of the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing, in light of China's poor record on the individual rights and freedoms that this competition embodies. However, with this award, the Chinese government should know that its human rights abuses will be scrutinized because of the increased attention that China will receive during preparations for the 2008 Olympics. While this is likely to be the last vote on annual NTR for China, I am confident that the Congress will not abandon its role of monitoring Chinese abuses of human rights. The newly established Congressional- Executive Commission on China will assist the Congress in maintaining its traditional tough scrutiny of the Chinese government. China has a track record of suppressing the yearning of the Chinese people for democracy, and cracking down on those who would fight for their freedom, and a nation that does not respect the rule of law will not likely be interested in protecting intellectual property or other pillars of normal trade relations. I urge my colleagues to consider the reality of the situation in China as it is today, and to join me in affirming the bedrock values of our society. I urge my colleagues to turn back annual NTR until China becomes a responsible nation in a free and fair international trade regime. Ms. LEE. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this amendment to disapprove Normal Trade Relations with China. Last year Congress voted to grant Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China. After much consideration, I voted against that bill because I did not believe that the United States should enact a trade policy that rewards the use of child and prison forced labor; environmental degradation; and religious and political repression. I also opposed PNTR because of the enormous, $83 billion dollar trade deficit we have with China. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that PNTR will cost 872,000 American jobs in the next decade, 84,000 of them from my home state, California. That deficit is growing larger, while our own economy is slowing down, making jobs an even more precious commodity. We cannot make American jobs a casualty of our trade policy. And while the trade deficit increases, so does China's persecution of its own citizens. Our trade policy has done nothing to promote the protection of human rights. The Chinese government has trampled reproductive rights of women, imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners for carrying out their exercises, and arrested political dissidents for the simple expression of their beliefs. I support free and fair trade. An $83 billion dollar deficit that siphons off American jobs is not free and fair. A national industrial policy that is based on the forced labor of children and prisoners is not free and fair. Therefore, I urge you to support H.J. Res. 50. Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose H.J. Res. 50, the measure denying China Normal Trade Relations. Just last year, we approved historic legislation (HR 4444) providing for Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) for China conditional on China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Those talks have not concluded, so yet again, we are called on to vote on a measure denying Normal Trade Relations for China. I urge my colleagues to vote no. Now more than ever it is important that we engage China for domestic and foreign policy reasons. On the domestic side, access to China-our 4th largest trading partner is important to US workers and US companies, especially our high- technology industry. In 2000, the high-tech sector accounted for 29% of US merchandise exports and has accounted for 30% of GDP growth since 1995. This in turn has led to greater prosperity for American workers. In 2000 (according to AeA's Key Industry Statistics) the Average Wage in the High-Tech Industry was $83,103. An estimated 350,000-400,000 US jobs depend on our exports to China. The case for trade with China is clear on the domestic front. But the case on the foreign policy side is also compelling. Free markets cannot prosper in authoritarian regimes and authoritarian regimes cannot long survive the impact of freedom and free markets. Change in China will be incremental. Where American engagement with China will promote human rights, revoking NTR status for China would simply curtail American influence in this important area. At the beginning of a new millennium, we should not regress and isolate China, we should help engage China in the world community. It is my strong belief that helping to engage China in the world community will advance the cause of freedom. I urge my colleagues to join me in voting against H.J. Res. 50. Mr. FALEOMAVAEGA. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to House Joint Resolution 50, which would deny extension of normal trade relations (NTR) to the People's Republic of China. I urge our colleagues to vote against the measure. Mr. Speaker the decision before us is one of the most important actions taken by this Congress. The arguments for and against granting NTR to China are exceedingly broad and complex. The stakes, too, are tremendous, as it involves America's relationship with the world's largest nation, a nation composed of one-fifth of humanity. I commend my colleagues and deeply respect their commitment regardless of their position on the issue before us, for there are valid and compelling arguments to be made on both sides. For those who oppose NTR for China, I agree that China continues to be plagued with serious problems--from human rights abuses, to trade imbalances, to growing military and security concerns. However, none of these problems will be resolved by attempts to isolate and disengage from China by denial of NTR status. If anything, isolating China will only encourage it to turn inwards, making matters worse and likely resulting in increased violations of human rights, lessened respect for political and social progress for China's citizens, and heightened paranoia of other nations' intentions resulting in expanded Chinese military spending. It is important for the U.S. to remain engaged with China and granting NTR status that will assist China's entry into the World Trade Organization is one very major way to achieve that objective while gaining WTO protections for our trade interests. Additionally, China's membership in the WTO will further open up China to the international community and force its compliance with WTO multinational standards and rules of law. With WTO enforcement, this will ensure China and the U.S. trade on a level playing field, which should go a long way toward rectifying our present trade imbalance. Although the trade incentives for extending China NTR are obvious and apparent, Mr. Speaker, the most important consideration for me concerns what will best promote democratization and continued political, social and human rights progress in China. On that point, Mr. Speaker, I find most persuasive and enlightening the voices of those Chinese who have been persecuted and are among China's most ardent and vocal critics--individuals who would be expected to take a hard line stance against the Beijing government. Prominent Chinese democracy activists such as Bao Tong, Xie Wanjun, Ren Wanding, Dai Qing, Zhou Litai and Wang Dan have urged the United States to extend China normal trade relations as it would hasten China's entry into the WTO, forcing adherence to international standards of conduct and respect for the rule of law. Moreover, they urge that closer economic relations between the U.S. and China allows America to more effectively monitor human rights and push for political reforms in China. Joining their voices are other Chinese leaders who have opposed Beijing's communist control, including Hong Kong's Democratic Party Chairman Martin Lee and Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian. Both Lee and Chen have called for normalization of trade relations between the U.S. and China and WTO accession by China. Mr. Speaker, we should listen to the wisdom of these courageous Chinese, whose credentials are impeccable and who clearly have the interests of all of the Chinese people at heart. They know that it is absolutely crucial and vital for continued political, social and human rights progress in China that the U.S. maintain and expand its presence there through trade. The Chinese people plead for the U.S. to remain engaged and not turn away from China because our nation is the only one with the power, the conscience, and the fortitude to push for true reforms and democracy in China. Mr. Speaker, I urge our colleagues to heed the best interests of the Chinese people as well as the American people by normalizing trade relations between our nations and opposing the legislation before us. Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, I oppose H.J. Res. 50 and express my strong support for Normal Trade Relations for China. Unfortunately, due to family commitments in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, I will be unable to vote on the motion today. Last year Congress overwhelmingly made a difficult decision that we were following path of [[Page 13869]] engagement with the Chinese by voting to approve China's admission to the WTO and extending Permanent Normal Trade Relations. In so doing, the majority of Congress and the leaders of both political parties aligned themselves with the forces of change and reform in China. Because Chinese ascension to WTO has taken longer than we anticipated, we are back again with the need to do the last annual extension. We continue our roller-coaster relationship with China, although nothing has fundamentally changed. China continues to be ruled at the top by party and military leaders who are threatened by China's engagement with the United States and the broader world. Chinese leaders fear further penetration of the Chinese market by foreign economic powers, especially the United States. Tearing down economic barriers that would permit us to trade effectively would have a destabilizing effect on the repressive regime. Indeed, the distance that China has already traveled from the butchery and starvation of the Great Leap Forward and chaos of the Cultural Revolution today is almost unimaginable. Engagement will play to the positive forces of change, which are strengthening the new generation of entrepreneurial spirit, provincial and municipal leadership, and new business partnerships. A classic example happened earlier this year when an explosion occurred at a school based fireworks factory where children were being forced to assemble firecrackers as young as 3rd and 4th graders in this school. The official Chinese line was that a suicide bomber had entered a school and detonated an explosion. Within days, due to the magic of Chinese e-mail, the Chinese Premier was forced to acknowledge that it was an accident in the school-based factory. Through modern communications the reality was out instantly all across China and the truth triumphed. This is just one example of how reform is happening daily in hundreds of examples on a smaller scale that illustrate the point. It's not going to be quick or easy. But we can use the leverage of WTO membership to accelerate the progress and hasten the day when the Chinese people will enjoy the liberties that we too often take for granted. Failure to renew now would be a serious mistake. We have already embarked on a policy of engagement and established a policy on it. To reverse course now would have an extraordinarily destabilizing effect on our relationship, at a time when we are attempting to reduce tensions between the two countries. Economics would be the least of our worries. This would be a gratuitous and unfortunately escalation of pressures on our side, which would frustrate, if not infuriate the Chinese, confound our allies, and delight our business competitors. History suggests isolation will not have the impact desired by opponents of normal relations with China. It's particularly ironic that some are calling for disengagement with China at a time when we are now inching towards acknowledging our policy of attempting to isolate a much smaller country, Cuba, has been a failure. It's only harmed the Cuban people and prolonged the life of the Cuban dictatorship. Had we opened our borders, engaged in commerce and interaction, Castro would certainly be less powerful, and probably a thing of the past. China's behavior continues to be troubling and its record on human rights is atrocious; the potential is great that our frustrations with China may even escalate in the near term. Trading with China is not going to solve all our problems. We are still going to have to be aggressive in our negotiations, vigilant for human rights, the environment, and trade compliance. With China in the WTO we will have more tools and more allies in this struggle. Given the overwhelming positive effects of trade and engagement with China, I urge my colleagues to support continued NTR with China and vote no on the disapproval resolution. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Gillmor). Pursuant to the order of the House of Tuesday, July 17, 2001, the joint resolution is considered as having been read for amendment, and the previous question is ordered. The question is on the engrossment and third reading of the joint resolution. The joint resolution was ordered to be engrossed and read a third time, and was read the third time. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the passage of the joint resolution. The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that the ayes appeared to have it. Mr. WELLER. Mr. Speaker, I object to the vote on the ground that a quorum is not present and make the point of order that a quorum is not present. The SPEAKER pro tempore. Evidently a quorum is not present. The Sergeant at Arms will notify absent Members. The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--yeas 169, nays 259, not voting 6, as follows: [Roll No. 255] YEAS--169 Abercrombie Aderholt Akin Baca Baldacci Baldwin Barcia Barr Bartlett Barton Berkley Bilirakis Bonior Borski Brady (PA) Brown (FL) Brown (OH) Burr Burton Capito Capuano Cardin Carson (IN) Clay Clayton Coble Collins Condit Costello Cox Coyne Cubin Cummings Davis (IL) Davis, Jo Ann Deal DeFazio Delahunt Diaz-Balart Dingell Doyle Duncan Ehrlich Evans Everett Fattah Frank Gephardt Gillmor Gilman Goode Graham Green (TX) Gutierrez Hall (OH) Hansen Hart Hastings (FL) Hayes Hayworth Hefley Hilleary Hilliard Hinchey Hobson Hoeffel Holden Hostettler Hoyer Hunter Hyde Jackson (IL) Jackson-Lee (TX) Jenkins Jones (NC) Jones (OH) Kaptur Kennedy (RI) Kildee Kilpatrick King (NY) Kingston Kucinich Langevin Lantos LaTourette Lee Lewis (GA) Lipinski LoBiondo Markey Mascara McCollum McIntyre Menendez Millender-McDonald Miller, George Mink Mollohan Nadler Ney Norwood Obey Olver Owens Pallone Pascrell Pastor Payne Pelosi Peterson (MN) Phelps Pickering Pombo Quinn Radanovich Rahall Regula Reyes Riley Rivers Rogers (KY) Rohrabacher Ros-Lehtinen Ross Rothman Roybal-Allard Royce Rush Sabo Sanchez Sanders Sandlin Sawyer Scarborough Schaffer Schakowsky Scott Sensenbrenner Sherman Smith (NJ) Solis Souder Spratt Stark Stearns Strickland Stupak Tancredo Taylor (MS) Taylor (NC) Thompson (MS) Tierney Towns Traficant Udall (CO) Udall (NM) Velazquez Visclosky Wamp Waters Watson (CA) Weldon (FL) Wexler Wolf Woolsey Wu Wynn Young (AK) NAYS--259 Ackerman Allen Andrews Armey Bachus Baird Baker Ballenger Barrett Bass Becerra Bentsen Bereuter Berman Berry Biggert Bishop Blagojevich Blunt Boehlert Boehner Bonilla Bono Boswell Boucher Boyd Brady (TX) Brown (SC) Bryant Buyer Callahan Calvert Camp Cannon Cantor Capps Carson (OK) Castle Chabot Chambliss Clement Clyburn Combest Conyers Cooksey Cramer Crane Crenshaw Crowley Culberson Cunningham Davis (CA) Davis (FL) Davis, Tom DeGette DeLauro DeMint Deutsch Dicks Doggett Dooley Doolittle Dreier Dunn Edwards Ehlers Emerson English Eshoo Etheridge Farr Ferguson Filner Flake Fletcher Foley Forbes Ford Fossella Frelinghuysen Frost Gallegly Ganske Gekas Gibbons Gilchrest Gonzalez Goodlatte Gordon Goss Granger Graves Green (WI) Greenwood Grucci Gutknecht Hall (TX) Harman Hastert Hastings (WA) Herger Hill Hinojosa Hoekstra Holt Honda Hooley Horn Houghton Hulshof Hutchinson Inslee Isakson Israel Issa Istook Jefferson John Johnson (CT) Johnson (IL) Johnson, E. B. Johnson, Sam Kanjorski Keller Kelly Kennedy (MN) Kerns Kind (WI) Kirk Kleczka Knollenberg Kolbe LaFalce LaHood Lampson Largent Larsen (WA) Larson (CT) Latham Leach Levin Lewis (CA) Lewis (KY) Linder Lofgren Lowey Lucas (KY) Lucas (OK) Luther Maloney (CT) Maloney (NY) Manzullo Matheson Matsui McCarthy (MO) McCarthy (NY) McCrery McDermott McGovern McHugh McInnis McKeon McNulty Meehan Meek (FL) Meeks (NY) Mica Miller (FL) Miller, Gary Moore Moran (KS) Moran (VA) Morella Murtha Myrick Napolitano Neal Nethercutt Northup Nussle Oberstar Ortiz Osborne Ose Otter Oxley Paul Pence Peterson (PA) Petri Pitts Platts Pomeroy Portman Price (NC) Pryce (OH) Putnam Ramstad Rangel Rehberg Reynolds [[Page 13870]] Rodriguez Roemer Rogers (MI) Roukema Ryan (WI) Ryun (KS) Schiff Schrock Serrano Sessions Shadegg Shaw Shays Sherwood Shimkus Shows Shuster Simmons Simpson Skeen Skelton Slaughter Smith (MI) Smith (TX) Smith (WA) Snyder Stenholm Stump Sununu Sweeney Tanner Tauscher Tauzin Terry Thomas Thompson (CA) Thornberry Thune Thurman Tiahrt Tiberi Toomey Turner Upton Vitter Walden Walsh Watkins (OK) Watt (NC) Watts (OK) Waxman Weiner Weldon (PA) Weller Whitfield Wicker Wilson Young (FL) NOT VOTING--6 Blumenauer DeLay Engel McKinney Saxton Spence {time} 1909 Mrs. MEEK of Florida and Messrs. EHLERS, LaHOOD, LARGENT, WATT of North Carolina, SHOWS, and ENGLISH changed their vote from ``yea'' to ``nay.'' Ms. SANCHEZ, Messrs. NORWOOD, RADANOVICH, DINGELL, and Ms. WATERS changed their vote from ``nay'' to ``yea.'' So the joint resolution was not passed. The result of the vote was announced as above recorded. Stated for: Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, I hit the wrong key on the recorded vote No. 255 on passage for H.J. Res. 50. I voted ``no'' accidently and would like it to be changed to ``yea'' for the Record. ____________________