March 20, 2020 - Issue: Vol. 166, No. 54 — Daily Edition116th Congress (2019 - 2020) - 2nd Session
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CORONAVIRUS; Congressional Record Vol. 166, No. 54
(Senate - March 20, 2020)
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[Pages S1869-S1870] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] CORONAVIRUS Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, it has been so interesting talking to our Tennesseans as they have faced these issues we have with coronavirus and what is happening, our response to it, and how we are going to fight it. And yes, we are going to win this war, and we are going to defeat this, but we have to look at it as our health, food, and financial assistance. Last night, a couple of my Tennesseans and I were discussing this-- what their thoughts and their questions to me were about the relationship we have with China and how can we trust that we know what China knew, that we know when they knew it, and their lack of transparency around what happened with COVID-19. As we have gotten a couple of months past the start of this, these questions are unanswered. As I was telling our Tennesseans on the phone last night, even as this virus that came out of Wuhan, China--they had it in December. It has now touched six continents, and we know people are dealing with containment. They are dealing with mitigation. They are dealing with going through the process of getting the anti-virals, getting the vaccines that are necessary to deal with COVID-19. The questions that people have around this are compounded by the growing realization of how China has chosen not to be honest and not to be transparent in their dealings with the rest of the world. The way Beijing handled its initial response to the coronavirus was nothing new. In fact, deflection and lies meant to protect the Communist Party is part of their standard operating procedure. They have defied norms governing the protection of human rights. They embrace innovation by incursion, defy property rights, and steal intellectual property as a matter of course. We have U.S. companies that have suffered for decades from what China has done to steal their intellectual property, to infringe on their intellectual property. They defy the sovereignty of other nations and territories, and they defy what should be their role as a leader in the global economy. Certainly, they want to be a market economy or so they say, but look at their behavior. It is this act of defiance that makes them incredibly dangerous. I have to tell you, this has been something that has been going on for quite a while, but we only need to go back a decade to place a flag marking our awareness of what has become a very familiar story. Over the decades, as China started to manufacture and started to pull U.S. manufacturers there and then started to mistreat their intellectual property rights, people became aware of what was going on. It was right at 10 years ago, when I was a Member in the House, that we were doing much of the same work that we are doing right now in the U.S. Senate; we were preparing a defense authorization bill. Even then we realized the threat that China and Chinese state-owned companies posed to our national security. We drafted amendments to that year's NDAA, blocking the purchase of Huawei-supplied equipment. Indeed, we are still hearing about the need to block the purchase of Huawei equipment not only for us but for our allies. That action was 10 years ago, but China's influence has continued to grow. What we have done is pretty much our part in the Senate to expose those bad actions, even as the rest of the world has allowed Beijing to co-opt the trappings of capitalism to perpetuate totalitarianism. Last year, we saw the people of Hong Kong rise up on behalf of democracy and self-determination. Indeed, to this day, that fight goes on even though the threats and fears of COVID-19 have caused those protesters to have to protest in a different way. I cosponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and sponsored legislation prohibiting the commercial export of covered munition items to the Hong Kong police force. But the world moves on, even as that standoff in Hong Kong continues. The Senate was forced to pen a resolution asking the International Olympic Committee to rebid the 2022 Winter Games to a country that respects human rights. That was really quite a bold move. It leaves me to wonder, why was China given this honor in the first place? I have to tell you, nobody seems to really know the answer to that question. The aggression they display toward Taiwan and Tibet and the outright repression of the Uighurs--this is something that has gone unchecked many times due to fear of economic retaliation. I have addressed this body several times on the subject of Huawei and China's leveraging of the impending 5G rollout to create national security vulnerabilities in our network. Their efforts to undermine our sovereignty are not limited to high-tech espionage. Indeed, their goal is to place their equipment everywhere. That is why it is so incredibly affordable to so many countries and so many of our allies. In placing this equipment, they are seeking to establish their own high-tech cyber spy network. We know what they are up to. This month, I introduced a bill to temper the influence of China- backed Confucius Institutes on American college campuses. We all have read the stories lately of how they have infiltrated some of our institutions of higher learning and how they have co-opted some of the staff or professors. This is something that needs our attention. It is followed on the heels of the Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act--another effort to prevent Beijing from increasing its hold on the minds of our younger generations. Time and again, we have called Chinese tech companies like Tik Tok onto the carpet for their censorship, their data collection, and their privacy practices--or lack of privacy, we should say. Yet content from their popular apps still dominates social media headlines. China's hold on the global economy has never been more apparent. Now there are reports that Beijing used the media and keyword censorship to suppress information about the coronavirus. Yet Beijing remains defiant, attacking President Trump in tweets and accusing everyday Americans of racism for daring to suggest that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China. They are, as many younger people like to say, gaslighting us, and it is madness. It brings us to ask, when will enough be enough? We must not let our present concerns about the response to coronavirus deter us from thinking long term. This pandemic will change [[Page S1870]] our relationship with China in every single way. It is inevitable. Starting now, we must take advantage of this knowledge. As we think about an exit strategy from the coronavirus crisis, we have to think about this. As we think about a way forward to bring manufacturing back to the United States, we need to remember this. ____________________
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