[Congressional Bills 117th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[H. Res. 500 Introduced in House (IH)]
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117th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. RES. 500
Condemning the Chinese Communist Party for 100 years of gross
violations of human rights and standing with the Chinese people in
their struggle for liberty.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
June 25, 2021
Mr. Gallagher (for himself, Mr. Gallego, Mr. McCaul, Mr. Gottheimer,
Ms. Stefanik, Mr. Golden, and Mr. Fitzpatrick) submitted the following
resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs
_______________________________________________________________________
RESOLUTION
Condemning the Chinese Communist Party for 100 years of gross
violations of human rights and standing with the Chinese people in
their struggle for liberty.
Whereas, in 1930, during the Futian incident, cadres who had opposed Mao
Zedong's purges stemming from the Anti-Bolshevik League incident were
detained and executed;
Whereas, from 1942 to 1945, during the Yan'an Rectification Movement, thousands
of cadres were detained, tortured, and in some cases executed as Mao
Zedong centralized control over the Chinese Communist Party;
Whereas, during the siege of Changchun in 1948, during the Chinese civil war, a
People's Liberation Army military blockade of the Manchurian city of
Changchun cut off access of food and supplies leading to the starvation
and death of more than 100,000 civilians;
Whereas, in the late 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party oversaw a massive land
reform movement campaign, in which landlords and others deemed to be of
the ``bourgeoisie'' were beaten and murdered, with Mao Zedong himself
claiming that as many as 2 to 3 million citizens were killed;
Whereas, in 1949, the People's Liberation Army forcefully incorporated the
western region of Xinjiang and coerced the local government with aid and
support from the Soviet Union;
Whereas, in 1951, the People's Liberation Army annexed Tibet and in 1959, put
down an uprising, killing thousands and forcing the Dalai Lama and
Tibetan government into exile;
Whereas, during the Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns in 1951 and 1952, the
Chinese Communist Party launched movements aimed to target loyalists to
the Republic of China Government and those deemed as being members of
the ``capitalist'' class, resulting in over 100,000 deaths from both
execution and forced suicide;
Whereas, from 1950 to 1953, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries saw
the Chinese Communist Party launch a political operation to arrest and
detain those deemed loyal to the Republic of China Government, with
official estimates putting the number of deaths by execution or forced
labor at over 700,000;
Whereas, from 1955 to 1957, the Sufan campaign led to hundreds of thousands of
noncommunist intellectuals being persecuted during a Mao-directed
purging of ``counterrevolutionaries'';
Whereas, from 1957 to 1958, the Anti-Rightist campaign led to the indiscriminate
detention of millions of intellectuals and ``capitalists'' who were
forced into hard labor, resulting in countless deaths;
Whereas, during the 1958 Xunhua incident in Qinghai, forces of the People's
Liberation Army massacred as many as 400 civilians following a protest
against the decision of local officials to impose strict rules for
socialist transformation and the detention of local religious figures;
Whereas, from 1958 to 1962, Mao Zedong's ``Great Leap Forward'' resulted in one
of the worst man-made catastrophes of all time, in which Mao's
collectivization of agriculture resulted in a catastrophic famine that
led to the death by starvation of as many as 20 to 40 million citizens;
Whereas, since 1958, the implementation of the Hukou Registration Regulation has
categorized both urban and rural populations, strictly mandating where
citizens and their families can work, travel, and attend schooling, with
a particular impact on the rural population in terms of deep wealth and
social disadvantage;
Whereas, from 1966 to 1976, Mao Zedong's cultural revolution saw the arbitrary
arrest, torture, and execution of millions of citizens, with estimates
ranging from 1 to 35 million;
Whereas, in August 1966, more commonly known as Red August, more than 1,700
citizens across Beijing, primarily consisting of school teachers and
principals, were killed by radical Red Guard paramilitary forces in a
campaign that was launched following a meeting between Mao Zedong and
Red Guard leaders, who then acted to enforce his policy of destroying
the ``Four Olds'';
Whereas, in the summer of 1975, the Shadian incident saw a crackdown on the Hui
ethnic minority population of Yunnan Province, wherein members of the
Hui community demonstrated for religious freedoms and attempted to
forcefully reopen mosques that had been shuttered by the local
government, and 10,000 troops of the People's Liberation Army were
summoned to crush the movement, killing an estimated 1,600 civilians
including 300 children;
Whereas, from 1979 to 2015, the Chinese Government's ``One Child Policy''
inhibited millions of families from having more than one child, and to
which local governments were granted the ability to require the use of
forced abortions and sterilization in addition to immense penalties and
fines for violators;
Whereas, in the spring of 1989, following the death of pro-reform former General
Secretary Hu Yaobang of the Chinese Communist Party, nationwide student
protests demanding greater freedoms were met with a violent crackdown,
culminating on June 4th as forces of the People's Liberation Army
butchered students and protestors in what is now known as the Tiananmen
Square Massacre;
Whereas, since 1999, the Chinese Communist Party has enacted a widespread
campaign to eliminate the practice of the Falun Gong religious movement
both within China and around the globe, utilizing methods of suppression
including arbitrary detention, forced labor, physical torture,
nonconsensual organ harvesting, and in some instances even death;
Whereas, in 2008, Chinese police and military forces led a violent crackdown on
Tibetans who were protesting the Government's treatment and persecution
of the local population, resulting in an untold number of civilians
killed and the illegal detention of activists, many of whom reported
that they were tortured and forced to falsely declare that the exiled
Dalai Lama had paid them to orchestrate the protest;
Whereas, since 2008, the Chinese Communist Party has persecuted various
individuals linked to Charter 08, a manifesto calling for greater
transparency and freedoms for the people of China, and in which one of
the signatories, 2010 Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Liu Xiaobo, was
imprisoned by the Chinese Government and later died of liver cancer
after being denied foreign medical treatment;
Whereas, since 2013, the Chinese Government has cracked down on the practice of
Christianity, forcing churches to remove their steeples, and persecuting
practitioners and forcing house churches to shut their doors;
Whereas, in the summer of 2015, the ``709 Crackdown'' led to abductions,
arrests, and persecutions of over 200 prominent human rights activists
and civil rights lawyers across China, dealing a devastating blow to the
nation's rights-defense movement;
Whereas, since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has conducted ``Operation
Foxhunt'', a covert global campaign designed to silence dissent and
pressure foreign governments to extradite individuals under the guise of
anticorruption, in which the Director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, Christopher Wray, in July 2020, described the operation
as a ``sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals
whom he sees as threats'', and that families of these targets ``have
been threatened and coerced, and those back in China have even been
arrested for leverage.'';
Whereas, in the fall of 2015, 5 staff members of Hong Kong's Causeway Bay Books,
an outlet selling books covering the salacious lives and rumors of
elites of the Chinese Communist Party, were secretly abducted only later
resurfacing inside China and expressing coerced confessions to various
crimes, and of these individuals, Gui Minhai currently remains in
Chinese custody;
Whereas, since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party has committed grotesque human
rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang,
and estimates state that over one million Uyghurs have been refined to
``re-education'' camps and forced to give up traditional religious and
cultural practices;
Whereas, in July 2020, China's rubberstamp National People's Congress directly
implemented a draconian Hong Kong National Security Law that aims to
curb citizens of Hong Kong freedoms, and silence all forms of political
speech, opposition, and dissent, paving the way for arbitrary arrests
under ill-defined allegations of subversion, secession, and colluding
with foreign powers;
Whereas, in the fall of 2020, Chinese police forces arrested and suppressed
demonstrators in inner Mongolia following protests against the
Autonomous Region government's decision to replace the Mongolian
language as the medium of instruction in favor of standardized Mandarin,
viewed by many Mongolians as an attempt to erase the region's unique
history and culture in favor of forced assimilation with the majority
Han culture;
Whereas, in December 2020, lawyer-turned-journalist Zhang Zhan was sentenced to
4 years in prison for her independent reporting on the situation in and
the Government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the city of Wuhan;
Whereas Ms. Zhang's reporting countered the propagandist narrative set by state
media outlets and gave millions an inside look at what was truly
happening in Wuhan during the earliest stages of the pandemic;
Whereas, in January 2021, the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo determined
that the Chinese Government's human rights abuses in Xinjiang amounted
to crimes against humanity and genocide;
Whereas, in February 2021, Canada's House of Commons unanimously declared that
the Chinese Government's actions toward the Uyghur people in Xinjiang
was genocide;
Whereas, in March 2021, the United States, the European Union, the United
Kingdom, and Canada imposed sanctions on senior Chinese officials and
members of the security apparatus over human rights abuses directed
toward the Uyghur people in Xinjiang;
Whereas, in March 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Department of
State affirmed the judgment of the previous administration, declaring
that the Chinese Government's actions in Xinjiang against the Uyghur
people constituted crimes against humanity and genocide; and
Whereas, in April 2021, the United Kingdom's House of Commons voted to declare
that it is their belief that China's actions in Xinjiang amount to
genocide: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
(1) condemns the Chinese Communist Party for 100 years of
gross violations of human rights, including repression,
torture, mass imprisonment, and genocide;
(2) supports the inherent right of the Chinese people to
self-determination and free political expression independent of
one-party rule;
(3) calls on the Government of the United States and like-
minded allies and partners to support human rights in the
People's Republic of China, including through the use of
technology to support and enable free expression and
information; and
(4) looks forward to the day that the Chinese Communist
Party no longer exists.
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