[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 9]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 12674-12676]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




      HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES MUST `INTERFERE' IN U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 30, 2013

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, this week the U.S. and China will hold its 
annual human rights dialogue--a dialogue that began after the brutal 
Tiananmen Square crackdown 24 years ago.
  Nearly a quarter of a century later the Chinese government remains 
frightened by the spirit that animated that protest. A June 23 
Washington Post article reported that, ``In the 2\1/2\ decades since 
the protests' violent end, China's government has largely scrubbed 
Tiananmen from history.''
  Try as they might the Chinese government's ``Orwellian'' efforts to 
erase this unpleasant event from its history books are incomplete. 
There are those still living with the scars of that day--both emotional 
and physical. In 1991, Congressman Chris Smith and I traveled to China. 
We visited Beijing Prison Number One, which at the time housed 
approximately 40 Tiananmen Square protesters. While our request to 
visit the demonstrators was denied, we left with a pair of socks, made 
by the prisoners, for export to the West.
  The abuses of Tiananmen are not simply the stuff of history. The 
State Department's most recent human rights report found that, 
``Repression and coercion, particularly against organizations and 
individuals involved in rights advocacy and public interest issues, 
were routine. Individuals and groups seen as politically sensitive by 
authorities continued to face tight restrictions on their freedom to 
assemble, practice religion, and travel. Efforts to silence and 
intimidate political activists and public interest lawyers continued to 
increase. Authorities resorted to extralegal measures such as enforced 
disappearance, `soft detention,' and strict house arrest, including 
house arrest of family members, to prevent the public voicing of 
independent opinions.''
  In the face of these and other abuses, it is striking that the human 
rights dialogue with the Chinese government rarely produces real 
results or changes. The content of these discussions is cloaked in 
secrecy, even with other policy makers, including Congress, and the 
broader human rights community. We are assured that behind closed doors 
the administration gave an impassioned defense of basic freedoms and 
human dignity. We are told that, privately, specific cases were raised. 
This approach has, time and again, failed to produce meaningful 
results. The imprisoned Catholic bishop, the detained blogger and the 
beleaguered human rights lawyer deserve far more than this 
administration has given them.
  Human Rights Watch summed it up this way in a press release issued 
before last year's human rights dialogue: ``Many of the United States' 
and other governments' past human rights dialogues with China have been 
largely a rhetorical shell, lacking in accountability, transparency, 
and clear benchmarks for progress. The Chinese government often points 
to these dialogues as a human rights `deliverable,' an end in itself, 
or insists that human rights issues can only be discussed in the 
context of a dialogue. None of the governments that pursue these 
dialogues with the Chinese government have established benchmarks to 
ensure meaningful progress.''
  Will the same hold true this week? Will we find simply another 
rhetorical shell and no discernible progress on the part of one of the 
world's worse human rights abusers?
  If history is to be our guide, I fear the answer is yes.
  Early in her tenure as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, during a 
visit to Asia, famously said that U.S. concern with human rights issues 
in China ``can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global 
climate change crisis, and the security crisis.'' Her statement 
garnered shock and dismay from human rights activists at home, and I 
would venture, abroad--the very people who historically have looked to 
America to champion their cause, rather than relegate it to the 
backburner. Further, it effectively showed this administration's hand 
to everyone, including Beijing. Any mention of human rights was just 
that--an obligatory mention. Human rights were an interference to be 
managed, a pesky deterrent to bilateral collaboration on more pressing 
issues.
  This notion has been born out in reality. Only when events literally 
force a response from the U.S. government do human rights garner the 
attention they rightly deserve.
  In April 2012, Chinese activist and legal advocate Chen Guangcheng 
sought refuge in the U.S. embassy. All of a sudden human rights were 
sure to ``interfere'' with the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which 
was bringing secretaries Clinton and Geithner to Beijing for high level 
talks the following week.
  Several months earlier, in February 2012 I was one of several Members 
of Congress--including Rep. Chris Smith, who for years championed 
Chen's case--who wrote a letter to President Obama on the eve of 
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping's visit to the U.S. We encouraged 
President Obama to follow the time-tested model of President Ronald 
Reagan during the height of the Cold War, when Reagan spoke out on 
behalf of specific dissidents by name, linking human rights and 
religious freedom to every other facet of U.S.-Soviet relations rather 
than sidelining the very principles that make this country unique. Chen 
Guangcheng was among the cases we featured and pressed him to raise.
  But it was only with Chen's heroic escape from house arrest that he 
guaranteed that he was a diplomatic priority.
  Too often, it seems that this administration's posture vis-a-vis 
human rights is one of caution to the point of silence.
  Silence in the face of China's abysmal human rights record is 
indefensible.
  The government is an equal opportunity oppressor of people of faith--
Catholic bishops, Protestant house church leaders, Tibetan monks and 
nuns, Uyghur Muslims and Falun Gong practitioners to name a few. 
Harassments, intimidation and imprisonment are the order of the day.
  According to the Congressional Executive Commission on China, at 
least 40 Roman Catholic bishops remain imprisoned or detained, or were 
forcibly disappeared including the elderly Bishop Su Zhimin, whose 
current whereabouts are unknown and who had been under strict 
surveillance since the 1970s.
  Protestant house church pastors are routinely intimidated, imprisoned 
and tortured. Writing in Christianity Today on February 27, 2013, 
ChinaAid's Bob Fu declared, ``. . . the number of incidents of 
`persecution' increased in 2012 from the previous years, including a 
number of arrests, sentencing to labor camps, short term detentions, 
rape and torture in police custody, destruction and confiscation of 
property, beatings, fines, the loss of jobs or business licenses, and 
police intimidation.''
  Over the last two years, a growing number of peace-loving Tibetan 
Buddhist monks and nuns have set themselves aflame in desperation at 
the abuses suffered by their people. Human Rights Watch reports that, 
``The Chinese government, under the rationale of a campaign to improve 
rural living standards, has sent more than 20,000 officials and 
communist party cadres to Tibetan villages to undertake intrusive 
surveillance of people, carry out widespread political re-education, 
and establish partisan security units . . .''
  Uyghur Muslims are unable to freely associate and have been subject 
to forced confessions and persecution. I repeatedly requested, to no 
avail, that Secretary Clinton meet with Uyghur human rights activist 
Rebiya Kadeer who has long been at the forefront of this issue having 
suffered in prison for five years, including two years of solitary 
confinement, before she was exiled to the U.S. in 2005. In addition to 
being a leading human rights activist she is a mother. Her own children 
have been harassed and wrongly imprisoned as a direct result of her 
advocacy efforts.
  The annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious 
Freedom (USCIRF) found that, ``poor religious freedom conditions in 
China have deteriorated significantly, particularly for Tibetan 
Buddhists and Uighur

[[Page 12675]]

Muslims. To stem the growth of independent Catholic and Protestant 
groups, the government has detained and arrested leaders, forcibly 
closed churches, and selected Catholic bishops without the approval of 
the Vatican. The Falun Gong and other groups deemed `evil cults' face 
long-term imprisonments, forced renunciations of faith, and torture in 
detention.''
  In November 2009 I wrote a series of high-ranking Obama 
Administration officials, including U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, 
urging that when they have the opportunity to travel to China, that 
they take time to attend a service at one of China's underground house 
churches.
  I noted that it is not uncommon for U.S. government officials to 
attend one of the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement 
churches but that officials rarely if ever visit any of China's house 
churches which constitute a significant segment of China's faith 
community and consistently face persecution and repression at the hands 
of their own government.
  I further noted that, perhaps counter-intuitively, many house 
churches welcome visits by high-profile government officials from the 
West. Not only do such visits give decision-makers a clearer sense of 
the repression that the church in China faces but in some cases it 
actually affords them protection from future harassment and lends 
credibility to the church themselves. Few administration officials 
bothered to respond to my letter and, to my knowledge, not a single one 
has attended a service since the request was made a year and a half 
ago. In several meetings I personally raised the issue with Mr. Kirk. 
He seemed to view the request as bothersome--a distraction from more 
important things.
  In its annual report, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International 
Religious Freedom (USCIRF) pointed to the administration's so-called 
``Asia Pivot,'' and observed that the ``security and economic pillars 
of the Asia Pivot remain more developed, and no new democracy, human 
rights, or humanitarian policy proposals have been offered.'' The 
commission further noted that human rights are not an integrated part 
of U.S.-China bilateral relations.
  The Chinese government maintains a brutal system of slave labor camps 
on the order of the Soviet gulags. Common criminals languish behind 
bars with Nobel laureates who dare to question the regime's authority.
  China has a thriving business of harvesting and selling for 
transplant kidneys, corneas and other human organs from executed 
prisoners, including political prisoners.
  Earlier this month, just weeks before the human rights dialogue, the 
New York Times reported that ``The police in Beijing have detained one 
of China's most prominent rights advocates, the latest in a series of 
arrests that critics said showed the Communist Party's determination to 
silence campaigners who have challenged the party to act on its vows to 
expose official corruption and respect rule of law.'' The advocate's 
name is Xu Zhiyong.
  The Times continued, ``supporters said that his case was likely to 
attract wider attention as a test of China's beleaguered `rights 
defense' movement, which he helped build. That loose network of 
lawyers, scholars and advocates has sought to use litigation, publicity 
and petitions to secure political and social rights.'' The Christian 
Science Monitor reported that, ``Xu is renowned for his public interest 
legal work on behalf of victims of official injustice, such as children 
sickened by melamine-tainted formula, and for the care he takes not to 
demand more than the Chinese Constitution provides for.''
  All of these examples are symptomatic of a broken system in China. A 
system infused with corruption and threatened by dissent.
  Despite explosive economic growth, China remains a ``closed society'' 
when it comes to information. The Chinese government recognizes that 
ideas have consequence and they go to great lengths to restrict Chinese 
citizens' access to information through the ``Great Firewall'' which 
censors so-called ``offensive'' speech.
  It is estimated that China employs between 30,000 and 50,000 special 
Internet police. These police were notably active in the aftermath of 
the ``Arab Spring'' as the government blocked Internet search requests 
for key words like ``Egypt'' and ``Jasmine.''
  As far back as 2008, Amnesty International rightly noted that ``In 
China the Internet has become a new frontier in the fight for human 
rights.''
  And yet the Obama Administration has paid mere lip-service to 
Internet freedom boasting in speeches of the priority it places on the 
issue when in fact nearly all of the money they've spent on Internet 
circumvention has been as a result of congressionally-mandated funding 
targeting closed societies and the State Department has actually sought 
to redirect the funding toward less threatening research initiatives as 
opposed to actual hard-hitting circumvention which poses a real threat 
to authoritarian regimes.
  This is not surprising given that this administration seems less 
concerned with bringing about reform and change on the part of the 
Chinese government than it does with embracing the current leadership.
  On January 19, 2011, I spoke at a Capitol Hill press conference 
regarding the visit of then-Chinese president Hu Jintao to the U.S. in 
which I strongly criticized the administration for granting the Chinese 
president the distinction of an official state dinner--something which 
had not happened for 13 years--given that the regime had done nothing 
to deserve such an honor.
  We were joined at the press conference by the wife of Gao Zhisheng. 
Gao is one of the most respected human rights lawyers in China. He has 
defended activists and religious minorities and documented human rights 
abuses in China, including a number of high-profile human rights cases, 
involving Christians in Xinjiang and Falun Gong practitioners. He has 
been disbarred and subjected to forced disappearance, torture, illegal 
house arrest and detention as a result of his work. Currently he is 
imprisoned in Shaya County Prison in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous 
Region in northwest China, after being incarcerated in December 2011 
for allegedly violating the conditions of his suspended three-year 
sentence. Prior to this, his whereabouts had been unknown for almost 20 
months. He has been tortured repeatedly since 2006 and continues to be 
at high risk of further torture. Nearly eight months ago his older 
brother was able to visit him in prison. Prior to that it had been nine 
months since anyone had had confirmation he was even alive. He has not 
been seen or heard from since.
  I have ``adopted'' Gao as part of a recently launched initiative, the 
Defending Freedoms Project, led by the Tom Lantos Human Rights 
Commission which seeks to draw attention to the plight of persecuted 
prisoners of conscience and I am committed to pressing for his release 
and ultimately his freedom.
  Gao is but one of many high profile dissidents presently languishing 
in prison. In December 2009, the government sentenced human rights and 
democracy activist Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison due to his 
involvement in drafting Charter '08, a historic manifesto advocating 
for democracy and a greater respect for human rights in China. Liu's 
courage was recognized by the Norwegian Nobel Committee when they 
awarded him the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. However, the award ceremony was 
held with an empty chair as a solemn reminder that the 2010 Nobel 
Laureate remains behind bars.
  Many have predicted that the 21st century will be the Chinese 
century, but absent dramatic reform at the heart of the Chinese 
government, such Chinese ascendancy is deeply problematic and America 
must be clear-eyed about its implications.
  This administration has been anything but.
  Last year, Chinese dissident Yu Jie wrote an unsettling piece in the 
Washington Post where he stated, ``China is a far greater threat than 
the former Soviet Union ever was,'' and ``unfortunately, the West lacks 
visionary politicians, such as Ronald Reagan, to stand up to this 
threat.''
  While this administration and this president lack vision, the Chinese 
people do not.
  Before President Obama's recent meeting with Chinese President Xi 
Jinping, I joined a leading group of human rights organizations and 
activists in pressing him to raise the fate of a group of Chinese 
prisoners of conscience dubbed the ``China 16,'' and to call for their 
immediate and unconditional release. Each has suffered for courageously 
challenging ``the status quo at great cost and peril to themselves and 
their families.''
  As is characteristic, their names were never publicly uttered by the 
president. And we can only guess what happened privately.
  Are their names being raised this week in Kunming, China? Are they 
being quietly whispered in closed door meetings? Will a single person's 
life change for the better as a result of the human rights dialogue?
  Today, in China, there are men and women whose names we do not yet 
know but who stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Sharansky and 
Solzhenitsyn and other famed dissidents throughout history who have 
dared to question the tyranny which enslaved them.
  Does the Obama Administration stand with them?

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