Excerpts: Lawmaker Decries Trade Ties With Belligerent Beijing
(Rep. Rohrabacher speech on U.S.-China relations)Beijing's rulers are hostile to the United States, while U.S. trade policies do nothing but strengthen that regime, according to Representative Dana Rohrabacher (Republican of California).
In an April 24 speech to the House of Representatives, Rohrabacher said "the regime in China is more powerful, more belligerent to the United States and more repressive than ever before."
"The mainland of China is controlled by a rigid, Stalinistic Communist party," Rohrabacher said, that is "committing genocide in Tibet."
"China is not a free society under anyone's definition. More importantly, it is not a society that is evolving toward freedom," he said.
Rohrabacher, who led the floor debate in the House against granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status in the 106th Congress, blamed the situation on "some very sincere people" who believed that free trade "would bring positive change to China, and that engagement would civilize the Communist regime."
The United States, Rohrabacher said, has been "arming and equipping our worst potential enemy and financing our own destruction."
Rohrabacher made the point that while the Beijing regime might be the enemy of the United States, the people of China were America's allies.
He said the Chinese people were not "synonymous with the Chinese Government or with Beijing or with the Communist Party in China. The people of China are as freedom-loving and as pro-American as any people of the world."
Rohrabacher called the Chinese people America's "greatest allies," and said they "want freedom and honest government."
They do not want, he added, "a corrupt dictatorship over them."
Rohrabacher backed the Bush administration's recent decision concerning the sale of defensive weapons to Taiwan, but said he wished that the more modern Aegis-equipped destroyers had been included in the package.
"President Bush's decision in the wake of this incident at Hainan Island to sell an arms package to Taiwan including destroyers, submarines and an antiaircraft upgrade was good," he said. Following are excerpts of Representative Rohrabacher's April 24 speech from the Congressional Record:
(begin excerpts)
WAKE UP, AMERICA: ENGAGEMENT WITH CHINA HAS FAILED
House of Representatives
April 24, 2001Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, one month ago, the Communist regime that controls the mainland of China attacked an American surveillance aircraft while it was in international waters. After being knocked out of the sky, 24 American military personnel, the crew of the surveillance craft, were held hostage for nearly 2 weeks. The Communist Chinese blamed us and would not return the crew until the United States was humiliated before the world.
Wake up, America. What is going on here? Large financial interests in our country whose only goal is exploiting the cheap, near-slave labor of China have been leading our country down the path to catastrophe. How much more proof do we need that the so-called engagement theory is a total failure? Our massive investment in China, pushed and promoted by American billionaires and multinational corporations, has created not a more peaceful, democratic China, but an aggressive nuclear-armed bully that now threatens the world with its hostile acts and proliferation. Do the Communist Chinese have to murder American personnel or attack the United States or our allies with their missiles before those who blithesomely pontificate about the civilizing benefits of building the Chinese economy will admit that China for a decade has been going in the opposite direction than predicted by the so-called "free traders."
We have made a monstrous mistake, and if we do not face reality and change our fundamental policies, instead of peace, there will be conflict. Instead of democratic reform, we will see a further retrenchment of a regime that is run by gangsters and thugs, the world's worst human rights abusers.
Let us go back to basics. The mainland of China is controlled by a rigid, Stalinistic Communist party. The regime is committing genocide in Tibet. It is holding as a captive the designated successor of the Dalai Lama, who is the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. By the way, this person, the designated new leader, is a little boy. They are holding hostage a little boy in order to terrorize the Tibetan people. The regime is now, at this moment, arresting thousands of members of the Falun Gong, which is nothing more threatening than a meditation and yoga society. Christians of all denominations are being brutalized unless they register with the state and attend controlled churches. Just in the last few days, there has been a round-up of Catholics who were practicing their faith outside of state control. Now they are in a Chinese prison.
There are no opposition parties in China. There is no free press in China. China is not a free society under anyone's definition. More importantly, it is not a society that is evolving toward freedom. . . .
The people who ordered that attack (Tiananmen) are still holding the reins of power in China today and, like all other criminals who get away with scurrilous deeds, they have become emboldened and arrogant.
The belligerence and hostility of Beijing is even more open. Underscoring the insanity of it all, the Communist Chinese have been using their huge trade surplus with the United States to upgrade their military and expand its warfighting capabilities.
Communist China's arsenal of jets, its ballistic missiles, its naval forces have all been modernized and reinforced. In the last 2 years, they have purchased destroyers from the former Soviet Union. These destroyers are armed with Sunburn missiles. These were systems that were designed during the Cold War by the Russians to destroy American aircraft carriers.
Yes, the Communist Chinese are arming themselves to sink American aircraft carriers, to kill thousands upon thousands of American sailors. Make no mistake about it, China's military might now threatens America and world peace. If there is a crisis in that part of the world again, which there will be, we can predict that some day, unlike the last crisis when American aircraft carriers were able to become a peaceful element to bring moderation of judgment among the players who were in conflict, instead, American aircraft carriers will find themselves vulnerable, and an American President will have to face the choice of risking the lives of all of those sailors on those aircraft carriers. . . .
In effect, the Communist Chinese have been using the tens of billions of dollars of trade surplus with the United States each year to build their military power and military might so some day the Communist Chinese might be able to kill millions of our people, or at least to threaten us to do that in order to back us down into defeat without ever coming to a fight.
We have essentially been arming and equipping our worst potential enemy and financing our own destruction. How could we let such a crime against the security of our country happen? Well, it was argued by some very sincere people that free trade would bring positive change to China, and that engagement would civilize the Communist regime.
Even as evidence stacked upon more evidence indicated that China was not liberalizing, that just the opposite was happening, the barkers for open markets kept singing their song: "Most-favored-nation status, just give us this and things will get better." It was nonsense then and it is nonsense today. But after all that has happened, one would think that the shame factor would silence these eternal optimists. . . .
Those advocating most-favored-nation status, or as it is called now, normal trade relations, have always based their case on the boon to our country represented by the sale of American goods to "the world's largest market." That is their argument. Here on this floor over and over and over again we heard people say, "We have to have these normal trade relations because we have to sell our products, the products made by the American people, to the world's largest market."
That is a great pitch. The only problem is, it is not true. The sale of U.S.-produced vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, autos, you name the commercial item, are almost a non-factor in the trade relationship between our countries. They are a minuscule amount of what is considered the trade analysis of these two countries.
During these many years that we have given China most-favored-nation status or normal trade relations, the power elite there never lowered China's tariffs, and in fact increased the tariffs in some areas, and erected barriers to prevent the sale of all but a few U.S.-made products. . . .
By the way, just to let Members know, the people of Taiwan, numbering 22 million people, buy more from us annually than the 1.2 Chinese on the mainland. The Taiwanese, with 22 million people, buy more consumer products from us than do 1.2 billion Chinese in the mainland. . . .
Adding insult to injury, our working people, some of them, whose jobs are being threatened by imports, our working people are being taxed in order to provide taxpayer-subsidized loans and loan guarantees for those corporate leaders wishing to close down their operations in the United States and set up on the mainland of China. . . .
Companies that were permitted to sell their product to the Chinese in these last 10 years, and there have been a few, companies like Boeing who have attempted to sell airplanes to China, have found themselves in a very bad predicament. As part of the deal enabling them to sell planes now to Communist China, they have had to set up manufacturing facilities in China to build the parts, or at least some of the parts for the airplane.
Thus, over a period of time, what the Chinese have managed to do is to have the United States just build factories and pay for them. Or, as part of an agreement to sell the airplane, we have set up an aerospace industry in China that will compete with our own aerospace industry.
I come from California. I come from a district in which aerospace is a mighty important part of our economy. I just want to thank all the people who have permitted this policy, this blackmail of American companies, to go on under the name, under the guise of free trade. It is going to sell out our own national interest 10 years down the road when these people will have a modern aerospace industry building weapons and being able to undercut our own people. . . .
We look at these private Chinese companies that were partners with our American firms, we look at them, and what do we find out? They are not private companies at all. Many of them are subsidiaries of the People's Liberation Army. That is right, the Communist Chinese army owns these companies. These are nothing more than military people in civilian clothing. Their profits end up paying for weapons targeting America, and we are paying them to build the companies that make those profits. . . .
Yet, even with all this staring Congress in the face, we have continued to give Most Favored Nations status to China and even now vote to make them part of the World Trade Organization. Why? One explanation, well just bad theory. Expanding trade, of course, they believe will make things better. But expanding trade did not make things better. . . .
China will corrupt the WTO, the World Trade Organization, just as it has corrupted the election processes in the United States of America. You can see it now 20 years from now, maybe 10 years from now, the panels of the WTO, you know, made up of countries from all over the world, Latin America, Africa, Middle East. There are members of those panels making these decisions, they will not have ever been elected by anybody, much less the people of the United States of America, yet we will be expected to follow their dictates. Communist China, they will pay those people off in a heartbeat. Why not? They did it to our people.
Remember the campaign contributions given to Vice President Gore at the Buddhist Temple? Remember the money delivered to the Clinton's by Johnny Chung? Where did that money come from? We are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where did it come from? It originated with Chinese military officers. These military officers were wearing civilian clothes. They were top officers in that part of the People's Liberation Army that produces missiles. That is where the money came from, all this while our most deadly missile technology was being transferred to Communist China. One wonders why the Communist Chinese leaders are arrogant and think that American leaders are cowards and corrupt when we let this happen.
Our country has, in short, had a disastrously counterproductive policy. We have, over the last 10 years, built our worst potential enemy from a weak, introverted power into a powerful economic military force, a force that is looking to dominate all of Asia. When I say worst potential enemy, that is not just my assessment. That is what the Communist Chinese leaders themselves believe and are planning for. . . .
In many ways, we are repeating history. In the 1920s, Japanese militarists wiped out Japan's fledgling democratic movement. That it did. In doing so, it set a course for Japan. Japan then was a racist power which believed it, too, had a right to dominate Asia. Japanese militarists also knew that only the United States of America stood in their way. This is deja vu all over again as Yogi Berra once said.
The Communist Chinese, too, are militarists who seek to dominate Asia. They think they are racially superior to everyone. They are unlike their Japanese predecessors, however, willing to go slow, and they have been going slow. But make no mistake about it, they intend to dominate Asia, all of it. And even know, their maps claim Siberia, Mongolia and huge chunks of the South China Sea. . . .
The American people and our allies are not being told that that is what the stakes were. This is a long-term effort on the part of the Communist Chinese to dominate the South China Sea and expand their power so they could call it maybe the Communist China Sea rather than the South China Sea. It behooves us to face these facts. That is what it was all about. That is why they wanted an apology and that is why they should not have gotten an apology.
I applaud this administration for wording its letter in a way that was not and could not in any way be interpreted as a recognition of the Chinese sovereignty over that airspace. . . .
The regime in China is more powerful, more belligerent to the United States and more repressive than ever before. President Bush's decision in the wake of this incident at Hainan Island to sell an arms package to Taiwan including destroyers, submarines and an antiaircraft upgrade was good. At least it shows more moxie than what the last administration did.
I would have preferred to see the Aegis system be provided to our Taiwanese friends. But at least we have gone forward with a respectable arms deal that will help Taiwan defend itself and thus deter military action in that area.
But after the Hainan Island incident, the very least we should be doing is canceling all U.S. military exchanges with Communist China. . . .
The American people should be put on alert that they are in danger if they travel to the mainland of China. And we should quit using our tax dollars through the Export-Import Bank, the IMF and the World Bank to subsidize big business when they want to build a factory in China or in any other dictatorship.
Why are we helping Vietnam and China? Why are we helping those dictatorships when nearby people, the people of the Philippines, whom I just mentioned, who are on the front line against this Communist aggression, who China is trying to flood drugs into their country. The Chinese army itself is involved in the drug trade going into the Philippines.
The Philippines are struggling to have a democracy. They have just had to remove a president who is being bribed. Bribed by whom? Bribed by organized crime figures from the mainland of China. When those people in the Philippines are struggling, why are we not trying to help them? Let us not encourage American businesses to go to Vietnam or to Communist China, when you have got people right close by who are struggling to have a democratic government and love the United States of America. The people of the Philippines are strong and they love their freedom and their liberty, but they feel like they have been abandoned by the United States. And when we help factories to be set up in China rather than sending work to the Philippines, and they do not even have the money to buy the weapons to defend themselves in the Philippines. That is why it is important for us to stand tall, so they know they can count on us. But they can only count on us if we do what is right and have the courage to stand up.
The same with China and India. India is not my favorite country in the world, but I will tell you this much, the Indians are struggling to have a free and democratic society. They have democratic institutions, and it is a struggle because they have so many varied people that live in India. But they are struggling to make their country better and to have a democratic system and to have rights and have a court system that functions, to have opposition newspapers. They do not have any of that in China. Yet instead of helping the Indian people, we are helping the Communist Chinese people? This is misplaced priorities at best.
Finally, in this atmosphere of turmoil and confrontation, let us never forget who are our greatest allies, and that is the Chinese people themselves. Let no mistake in the wording that I have used tonight indicate that I hold the Chinese people accountable or synonymous with the Chinese Government or with Beijing or with the Communist Party in China. The people of China are as freedom-loving and as pro-American as any people of the world.
The people of China are not separated from the rest of humanity. They too want freedom and honest government. They want to improve their lives. They do not want a corrupt dictatorship over them. And any struggle for peace and prosperity, any plan for our country to try to bring peace to the world and to bring a better life and to support the cause of freedom must include the people of China.
We do not want war. We want the people of China to be free. Then we could have free and open trade because it would be a free country and it would be free trade between free people instead of this travesty that we have today, which is a trade policy that strengthens the dictatorship.
When the young people of China rose up and gathered together at Tiananmen Square, they used our Statue of Liberty as a model for their own goddess of liberty. That was the statue that they held forth. That was their dream. They dreamed that her torch, the goddess of liberty, would enlighten all China and they dreamed of a China democratic, prosperous and free. Our shortsighted policy of subsidized one-way trade crushes that goddess of liberty every bit as much as those Red Army tanks did 12 years ago.
Let us reexamine our souls. Let us reexamine our policies. Let us reach out to the people of China and claim together that we are all people of this planet, as our forefathers said, we are the ones, we are the people who have been given by God the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is not just for Americans. That is for all the people of the world. And when we recognize that and reach out with honesty and not for a quick buck, not just to make a quick buck and then get out, but instead to reach over to those people and help them build their country, then we will have a future of peace and prosperity.
It will not happen if we sell out our own national security interests. It will not happen if we are only siding with the ruling elite in China. We want to share a world with the people of China. We are on their side.
Let me say this. That includes those soldiers in the People's Liberation Army. The people in the People's Liberation Army come from the population of China. They and those other forces at work in China should rise up and join with all the other people in the world, especially the American people, who believe in justice and truth; and we will wipe away those people at the negotiating table today that represent both sides of this negotiation, and we will sit face-to-face with all the people in the world who love justice and freedom and democracy, just as our forefathers thought was America's rightful role, and we will build a better world that way.
We will not do it through a World Trade Organization. We will do it by respecting our own rights and respecting the rights of every other country and every other people on this planet.
I hope that tonight the American people have heard these words. The course is not unalterable. This is a new administration. And in this new administration, I would hope that we reverse these horrible mistakes that have compromised our national security and undermined the cause of liberty and justice.
I look forward to working with this administration to doing what is right for our country and right for the cause of peace and freedom.
(end excerpts) (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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