December 4, 2019 - Issue: Vol. 165, No. 193 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 1st Session
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CHINA'S 100-YEAR PLAN; Congressional Record Vol. 165, No. 193
(House of Representatives - December 04, 2019)
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[Pages H9251-H9254] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] CHINA'S 100-YEAR PLAN The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Yoho) for 30 minutes. Mr. YOHO. Madam Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to address the House on a very important topic. I am doing part three in a series of Special Orders on China. This includes the Chinese Communist Party complex, which is comprised of Xi Jinping, their emperor or ruler; the PLA, the People's Liberation Army; and the Chinese Communist Party and members of its politburo, their ruling class. China has an amazing history that spans thousands of years. Its culture has stayed, for the most part, intact until the 19th century. There have been multiple rulers and emperors recorded in the history books, and, at one point, China and most of Eurasia were under the control of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian Empire. China went from a major economic power in the 18th century to a nation addicted to opium and entered their century of shame. China is entering another century of shame, and it is too sad because China should be applauded for the success they have had, to go from where they were in the 1960s to where they are today; yet it was done at the expense of coercion, corruption, a squashing of human rights, and just not being nice neighbors in the world. The purpose of this Special Order is to bring awareness to Members of Congress and the American people and other Western-style democracies around the world to the true intent of China and what China is doing. Today, China has become the second largest economy in the world, and they will soon eclipse the United States of America. In order to understand where China is going, one needs to know where modern-day China started. Mao Zedong, in 1949, was a Communist Army fighter, and he became the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and set out a 100-year plan. He had a vision for China. Unfortunately, their vision was to be the ruler of the modern world. That 100 years is 2049. They are 70 years into that plan, and they have worked it very astutely; and, like I said, they should be applauded. Yet it was done at the expense of other countries. As we know today, in the 21st century, with an over $300 billion trade deficit with the United States of America, that China has gained a lot of their gains in technology, in science, and in economics by the theft of intellectual property. Just the other day, my son was trying to download a movie. It was a brand-new movie. It had all Chinese captions in it, and it was a pirated movie that is brand new. And China has already--people from China have already black-marketed it. What they have done is they have become so astute at the black market and stealing intellectual property that it has cost this country, alone, over $600 billion, annually. We have had workshops up here, through the Department of Homeland Security, where they show bearings from different companies that are American companies that have gone to China, where China has copied the product identically. It is not the same quality, but it looks identical. They copied the product name, the logo, the packaging, and they are selling it cheaper than the manufacturers can produce it here. So what they are doing is they are ruining an American manufacturer. They are selling their cheap products here that break down, and it ruins the reputation of that company, and they eventually go out. I can't tell you how many times I have had people come into our office, and I had the privilege of being the chairman of the Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation Subcommittee last Congress. We had businesses come from all over the world. A lot of them have gone to China, and they tell us: Our game plan in China is to go there and to plan on making our profits in 5 years and get out because, by then, the Chinese businesspeople and the Chinese Government have copied our products and we are competing against our own product. This is something that we have created an initiative in our office, and we hope it becomes a foreign policy, and it is Manufacture the ABC model. That is, Manufacture Anywhere But China. Because, again, China-- when you hear what I have to say here, China is taking that money to take over the world as far as militarily and economically. We are going through a major tectonic shift in world power we haven't seen since World War II. This is something that we have heard from our generals, we have heard from our business people, and it is happening right in front of us. And yet every time we buy something from China, it is benefiting the Chinese Communist Government. There is a real clear distinction that I want to make, or definition: There is not a separation between a Chinese business and the Communist Party; it is all one and the same. Members of the Chinese Communist Party have to be--by mandate, have to be--on their board of directors. When we have an American company that goes over there, they have to have members of the Chinese Communist Party embedded on their board. When we have an American company that goes over there, we have to give up--our companies give up about 51 percent of our companies so that the Chinese Government has the controlling interest. In addition, they have to give up intellectual property to have the right. It boggles my mind that an American [[Page H9252]] company will give up intellectual property. I ask them: Why are you willing to do this? They say: Well, they have got such a huge market. They have got 1.3 billion people. I just want to shake them by the shoulders and say: Don't you understand that they are taking your information, they are taking your intellectual property, and they are competing with it and using it against you? But, more importantly, don't focus on the 1.3 billion people in China. Look at the rest of the world, because there are 6.4 billion people outside of China. That is where your market is, and that is where I would encourage you to manufacture, anywhere but China, so that we are not empowering that nation. They have a philosophy that states there cannot be two suns in the sky at the same time, implying one must be removed. This has been repeated over and over again in the last 100 years. They are 70 years into their 100-year plan. Xi Jinping, their leader, has an initiative called Made in China 2025, where all things produced and consumed around the globe come from China, and they have done a great job. I wish we could applaud their success, but not when it comes at the expense of us or other countries around the world. To kind of lay out, again, where China is going, Xi Jinping stated in 2017 that the era of China has arrived. No longer will China be made to swallow its interests around the world. It is time for China to take the world's center stage. Again, it is a reference that there cannot be two major competing powers in the world at the same time. One has to be removed. And Xi Jinping says this very succinctly in 2017. So let's look at the facts. Let's look at what China has done to Tibet. You know, Tibet was a very peaceful culture. It still is for the people who are still around. But the Chinese Government, under Deng Xiaoping, infiltrated the Tibetan region with Han Chinese, which are the predominant Chinese sect or personality or sector of China, and they have overruled the Tibetan area and driven the Tibetans out. Not only that, they have addicted a lot of the Tibetan monks to heroin, and so they are repeating what happened in the heroin wars of China. In the South China Sea, China has encroached on sovereign nations around the area. They have got these fictitious nine-dash lines that they adhere to that are their historical sailing routes from ancient times. They claim all that area; since they sailed it in the past, it is theirs. It is a ridiculous notion. In fact, the Philippines sued them at the Court of Arbitration in The Hague. China lost the lawsuit, but they ignored the ruling, and so they took over islands. They have made islands. They have damaged the coral reefs in that area where they have made islands--or land masses, because I refuse to call them islands since that gives credibility--and then they have militarized them. When Xi Jinping was here in 2015 with President Obama, he lied to our President and the people around the world and said that he had no intention of militarizing those land masses that they dredged from the bottom of the ocean. Yet, today, they are militarized, and they have done this over and over again. Again, they are making deepwater ports in areas that are encroaching and getting closer to the United States mainland. And they are doing this, again, to reinforce their goal of being the sole superpower in the world. Why else would they be investing all this money in the five brand-new aircraft carriers that are going to be the state of the art? This is something we see over and over again. And they have encroached on the sovereignty of nations, of the ASEAN nations--the Philippines is part of that, Vietnam, Brunei--to the point where they are encroaching on their exclusive economic zones and forcing these countries to yield up their natural resources so that China can benefit from them. China has developed what we call the Belt Road Initiative, or the One Belt, One Road we hear a lot about. I have heard it referred to as the One Belt, One Road, and it goes one way; and it goes to enhance China, not the countries where they do economic development. We have seen so many examples around the world where China has taken development money to build infrastructure projects, where they give out bad loans. It kind of reminds me of the robber barons of the 1800s in this country, where they go in and give out these high-interest loans with bad terms. The country can't pay it back. They are a poorer country. And then China winds up taking over strategic land masses. Probably the best poster child example of that is what happened in Sri Lanka, where they went in there. They lent them money. Sri Lanka couldn't pay it back. China foreclosed on that loan, took over their deepwater seaports. And again, this is their strategy, to take over deepwater seaports so that they can control the shipping lanes. And then they took over 15,000 acres of land in addition to that for 99 years, to the point where the Sri Lankans have got to go back and renegotiate this deal. {time} 1530 We are seeing them do this in South America. We are seeing them do this in Africa, in Central America, and it is going all over the world. And, again, you have to go back to what the original intent is: To be the sole superpower in the world. China has pushed very strategically to corner the markets on rare Earth metals. Virtually today, the United States of America and other countries--I know for the United States of America, we get 90 percent of our rare Earth metals directly from China. The other 10 percent come from countries that get it from China. And we have seen China use the rare Earth metals market demand that they have to coerce nations like Japan to allow them to go into Japanese territorial waters to fish, and Japan had no other choice. They have threatened to do that to the United States of America. This is something that is not acceptable for our national security. I sit on the agricultural committee, too, and what I found out is that China controls 100 percent of the vitamins and minerals that go into our livestock feed. This, again, is a national security interest. China today controls 85 to 90 percent of what we call the APIs, that is the active pharmaceutical ingredients that go into all of our medicines around the world. And the bad thing about that is that they have the controlling interest of the pharmaceutical ingredients, the active portion of that, which is bad enough, but what they do is they have changed the formulation of the original drugmaker and manufacturer by using different reagents and solvents, so it changes the active ingredients. So what we have found out is that the product is tainted, it is not as effective. And we found cases where there is a high risk of cancer from using these products. And, unfortunately, some of these products are anti-cancer drugs that are, in turn, causing cancer to the rate of one in 6,000. Again, this is something that we need to understand: Every time we buy a product and it comes from China, we are reinforcing this, and we are growing their economy stronger and their military stronger. We can look at their other economic threats that they have done. Back in 2013 and 2014 South Korea was changing presidents. South Korea was being taunted by North Korea, and they continually have been, about being attacked. And so they took one of our THAAD systems, which is a terminal high altitude area defense mechanism, and China retaliated, not against North Korea that was making all the threatening gestures, but they retaliated against South Korea. And the reason they do this is because South Korea is a western-style democracy, which would threaten China. So the way they retaliated against South Korea is they went after their largest department chain called Lotte Department Stores. They virtually shut them down in mainland China. They went after Hyundai. Hyundai sales dropped precipitously. They revoked tourism visas going to South Korea. So, instead of going after North Korea for these provocative gestures, [[Page H9253]] they go after South Korea for their own defense. And then the agreement we had after the Korean conflict was that we would provide them defensive mechanisms. And so, we see the same thing going on in Hong Kong today. The thing I have learned, and the thing that is very evident is, China cannot exist around a western-style democracy where freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of thought is expressed, because in China the highest power in the Chinese Communist Party is the party. And it is their doctrine. So you can't have people that are free thinking, and it is very self-evident when you see what is going on in Hong Kong today. We are approaching 7 months of protests in Hong Kong, where you have over 25 percent of the population protesting because what China did is through their chief executive officer, Carrie Lam--who is a puppet of Beijing--she introduced an extradition bill. And when Hong Kong was turned over from Great Britain back to China in 1997, there was a 50-year period of time where Hong Kong was supposed to be a self-ruled autonomous region with an independent judiciary system. Twenty-two years into it, Xi Jinping, the emperor of China, has said that as far as he is concerned that deal is null and void. And so they went ahead and put in this extradition bill, which breaks their judicial system, and it caused the protests. And we have seen this over and over again, the way China did this with the Tibetans. They did it in Tiananmen Square, where they had a mass massacre of people that were standing up for democracy and freedom back in the 1980s. And here we are, we are seeing it happen again, and China is not backing off on the suppression of human rights. We got visited by the students of Hong Kong that were in the protests. They came to our office. These are true freedom fighters in the modern 21st century. These students were standing up, and these were the ones that were burning the Chinese flag, and they were the ones waving the American flag because of what that represents around the world. And our American flag is bigger than a Presidency, it is bigger than a Republican party or a Democratic party. It is an ideal that people around the world look at as a model of what they want to accomplish. And it is great to know that this body passed the Hong Kong Democracy Act this week, and it is a strong signal to put sanctions on the people of China who have said to the people of Hong Kong that no form of punishment can be too strict or strong for the protestors, that they must be brought into line. And then we can look at the Xinjiang province where it is mostly a Chinese Muslim province. There is approximately 10 million Uighurs that live in that area. The Uighurs are Chinese Muslims. They come from different areas, Kyrgyzstan and all that region of western China. And they practice their Muslim faith. But China, again, can't be threatened by anything that is outside the Chinese Communist Party doctrine. And so what they have done is they have built modern day concentration camps where over a million, the estimates are one to two million, Uighurs are placed into these reeducation camps. And I have met with the students and the children of people that have been interned in these camps, and they were CPAs, their parents, they were doctors, they were pharmacists, they were lawyers, and they were professional people. But the Chinese Government says these people needed to be retrained so that they could have adequate jobs to provide for their families. I remember the words of Dwight Eisenhower when he went into Nazi Germany and he saw the concentration camps, and he said, ``Never again.'' And if we, as a civil society of free-thinking people around the world, are allowing this to happen, shame on us. And we are allowing this to happen, again, every time we buy a product that is made in China. The Uighurs that go to these reeducation camps, they are using them as slave labor. It is well documented. The other thing I found interesting in our Foreign Affairs Committee is we had a hearing on this, and they were telling us about the crematoriums they have. Now, crematoriums are obviously there to cremate people after they are dead. But my question is: Why is it in their advertisement, they are asking for armed people that are well at fighting to guard these crematoriums? If you are going to cremate dead people, why do you need armed guards at the crematoriums? Unless they are not dead? And, again, we have seen this happen in history. And this is going on today. And it is something that the American people need to wake up to. I know Members of this body are waking up to it. But it is people around the world that need to wake up to this and shun China until China changes their behavior. We can't make them do it, but we can change our habits and buy elsewhere and have people produce products everywhere else. We were proud to pass in the last Congress the BUILD Act, which develops the United States International Development Finance Corporation. This is something that we can offer to countries as a way to do development finance in other countries. We can partner up with countries that have a development finance corporation like Japan, the U.K., Australia, Great Britain, and we can do major infrastructure projects. The difference between us doing that and China is we are going to do it for the development and the betterment of that country, understanding that if we help them build an economic base through infrastructure, they will develop an economy, and through that economy we will develop more trade and so then that country benefits, not China. We have seen China go into Cambodia, bring in Chinese workers, Chinese material, build casinos. They build Chinese restaurants, Chinese hotels that are run, controlled, and worked by Chinese nationals, not the people of Cambodia. So there again, it is an example of how China comes in and does these projects for the benefit of China, not for the benefit of the local economy. I was down in South America, and I was talking to one of the Members of Congress down there whose brother happened to be a mayor of one of the small towns. The Chinese embassy had given that mayor two fire trucks. Now, the Congressman was going to have a meeting with the country of Taiwan, and the Chinese embassy found out about it. And they didn't call the Congressman in Chile, they called the mayor, his brother, and said, If your brother takes that meeting with Taiwan, you will not get any more favors from us. And this is just one of their ways of underhandedness and coercion that they do to force people to do what they want. In China today they have the largest collection of CCT cameras, which are the closed-circuit television cameras that monitor their citizens. So today in China they have what they call the good citizen score. They monitor people, and if you don't do something properly, like you jaywalk or you went through a red light or you threw something on the ground, it is scored. You don't know what your score is, but you will find out if you want to go to a restaurant, they may prevent you from going in there. If you want to travel, they will prevent you from traveling. But you won't find out until you show up. And this is a way to control their people because, again, the thing they fear most is free thought. In China what we do know is Xi Jinping came from a family that was an elite family. His father was one of the leaders of the Communist Party. But he wanted Xi Jinping to understand the rural life, so in his teenage years they sent him out to a rural area where he had to live in a cage and dwell in a cage in a village. He did that, so today he can relate to people that are out in the rural areas. When he became powerful and moved up in the political process, and this is around 2012, 2013, what he did is he started to eliminate anybody that was a potential threat to him. So they either did forced retirement, and in the five biggest cities in China today the people that were ruling, those mayors either had forced retirement or they disappeared, or they are in prison. He has replaced them with pretty much henchmen of his that will follow his orders. They are doing this in their own [[Page H9254]] country. They are doing this in Hong Kong. They are doing it in Tibet. And they are going to do it in other parts of the world. We have seen them doing this with the Uighurs in the Xinjiang province. My hope today is that people will hear this. And this message will get out to where when people buy a product, they have a choice. It might be a little bit cheaper, but every time you buy that product, you are buying a product that is feeding an economic engine and a military whose sole purpose is to be the dominant power in the world and to make us secondary or worse. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________
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