China is One of the Largest Threats in the 21st Century

Floor Speech

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Mr. YOHO. Mr. Speaker, I would like to continue on the rise of China and why it is important.

I think we have heard some great ideas today and some great dialogue, but this is something the American people need to pay attention to. This is something that our legislators need to pay attention to. This is something that we hear over and over again.

I have had the pleasure of being in Congress for 7 years, chairing the Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation Subcommittee in the last Congress, and I am the lead Republican in this Congress. The information we hear over and over again doesn't get better. In fact, what we find out is a more aggressive China that has raised all pretenses of the past, and I will talk about that.

Before I go into this too much, I want to start with this: China has an amazing history that spans thousands of years. Its culture has stayed, for the most part, intact until the 19th century.

At one point, China and most of Eurasia was under the control of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian Empire for over 100 years before the Khan dynasty lost to the prevailing emperors in the 19th century. I bring this up to counter China's nine dashed historical lines that they are making claim in the South China Sea and now their claim that they are now making near Arctic territory.

Later on in this dialogue, I want to talk about that because China predicates everything by saying: ``Well, we historically have sailed in the South China Sea; therefore, it is ours.'' Now China is saying they are near the Arctic, so being near that, they want to claim that as theirs when international law says it is not so.

In fact, the Philippines took China to court over the South China Seas, and I will have some maps here that we will discuss later.

China went from a major economic power in the 18th century to a nation addicted to opium and taken over by European colonial powers and Japanese imperialism. During the 19th century, China's ruling class allowed their country to be taken over by European colonial powers while over 90 percent of their male population became addicted to opium.

And I want to highlight that because we are going to talk about the fentanyl and the opium that are coming into this country and what country they are coming from.

The cultural heritage and social fabric of China decayed, and China entered into a peasant state isolated from the world, for the most part, during the next 70 years. This truly was a century of shame.

The PLA, the People's Liberation Army, emerged in the twenties, in fact, in 1927. They will have a 100-year anniversary highlighting that in 2027.

Mao Zedong was a favored member of the PLA. He later became the Chairman of the Communist Party of China. He promised communism would be the savior of China, but, unfortunately, for the 70 to 80 million people who died under Mao's policy, for them, it was a disaster.

Mao did set a 100-year plan, though, for China to regain their stature lost. Maoism became a belief for many, which seems bizarre, knowing that history records millions of people's deaths were credited to his policies.

Then, a foreign policy by President Nixon and then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger invited China into the modern 20th century. Many today look back and realize that this was a massive misstep in foreign policy. The hope was that China would become a responsible partner in the modern world, but, unfortunately, China thrived at the expense of the United States and many other nations with heavily lopsided, one-way favored trade deals that favored China but nobody else. In the process, China became very strong and very wealthy.

Maoism gave way to the era of Deng Xiaoping, who realized at the time China could not compete with the U.S. or Japan in intellectual capacity or in manufacturing, but he had the foresight to corner the market in rare earth minerals. Deng Xiaoping's saying was: Bide your time and hide your strength. Today, China has virtually cornered the rare earth market that Deng Xiaoping spoke of in the 1980s.

In fact, the F-35s today, our highest tech fighters, the highest tech in the world, have been copied by China via intellectual theft. And the rare earth metals, the weight of an F-35 is approximately 10 percent. This is approximately 4,000 pounds.

Now, get this. Ninety percent of these metals come directly from China. The other 10 percent come from countries that get these metals from China. So Deng Xiaoping fulfilled a promise he made.

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Mr. YOHO. You are leading into where I was going.

In 1990, President Clinton recommended China's entry into the WTO on a developing nation status. Yet today, they are the second largest economy in the world--second to the U.S.--and they are still a developing nation status. Yet they have a blue-water navy.

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Mr. YOHO. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman coming out.

I see this as a series of Special Orders on China, because the American people need to know this. When they go to a shelf and buy something that is cheap, and they look at that and it says, ``made in China,'' they are feeding this trade imbalance. So they are partly responsible for that.

As the gentleman well pointed out, if I fast forward to Xi Jinping, to the current era right now, the estimate is that there is a $300- plus-billion--I heard it was $400 billion--trade imbalance, I can't blame China for that. I blame our leaders since President Nixon.

For the last 40 or 50 years, somebody has dropped the ball or taken their eye off the ball. If you allow a trade imbalance of $400-billion- plus, and then add to that the theft of intellectual properties that we have heard up to $600 billion--I am sure you saw the DHS as they brought in products made by our manufacturers that went to China that are now coming from China, and it looks identical, yet, it is made by China. So it is robbing that profit and the jobs from American manufacturers that should go here, and it has to stop.

I commend the Trump administration for standing up to that. I think the gentleman brought this out.

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Mr. YOHO. The reckoning is here.

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Mr. YOHO. Mr. Speaker, it is, and I hope the gentleman participates in these. Because that day of reckoning is here, and if we don't do it today, it is only going to get worse. So this is something that we have to come together as Americans. It is not President Trump out there. It is not some of the businesses that are bold enough to stand with him.

We, the American people, need to stand behind him, and I think the gentleman brought this up that this is not a fight with the Chinese people. It is the system that is running unfair trade balances.

Mr. Speaker, what I would like to bring up, going back to my notes here is, we are in the era of Xi Jinping. I don't think our disagreement is with the Chinese people, but it is with the policies of Xi Jinping and the Chinese or the Communist Party of China.

The 2017 Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in October of 2017. During that time, Xi Jinping kind of came out and was very bold in his statements. He said: The era of China has arrived. No longer will they be made to swallow their interests around the world. It is time for China to take the world's stage.

The gentleman brought this up. There is plenty of room on the world's stage if you want to be fair and balanced, and you want to play like everybody else, but you have to honor international law. You have to honor the rule of law, honoring contracts, honoring the beliefs that we have to be a respected trading partner.

We penned an editorial that talked about Xi Jinping is leading--along with the Communist Party which is 90 million members--is leading China into a second century of shame, and it is because they are losing face. They are losing honor that the Chinese culture, over millennials, built up. They were respected. But they are getting ready to enter into the second century of shame, and I would like for Mr. Fortenberry to continue.

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Mr. YOHO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his time.

The gentleman brought up a good point about China. If you read about the Chinese Communist Party, the role of the individual is to serve the party. There is no higher entity in China other than Xi Jinping. Whereas in our government, we are so blessed in this country because we have a government that empowers their people. China suppresses their people, and that is why I want to talk about this.

This comes from a 2012 House Intelligence Committee report where they deemed Huawei and ZTE to be a U.S. national security threat. I have got the results of that right here. So we want to talk about that.

Huawei and ZTE, from 2012 until today, they have been a national security threat, but they have been able to do business in this country. This is something we need to bring to an end.

Other speakers brought up how universities were falling prey to China. We had our own university in Florida that Huawei came in and offered to set up a cybersecurity program, and they were going to fund it. And we said: No way. And so we got them to stop that.

If you just go to the headlines and you can hear how China is ramping up in intellectual property theft. They are paid to do this. This is something they want to go after, and they are doing it.

They rail against the United States on GMOs, yet, they go to Iowa and steal corn seeds so that they can grow GMO and be in competition with us.

The trade war with China and the problems with intellectual property rights, this is something that goes on every day. And as we buy cheap products made in China, this is benefiting them, not us. You can see the headlines here.

What I want to do is move on to Hong Kong with Xi Jinping. Back when Great Britain gave Hong Kong back to China in 1997, under the rulers of China at that time, there was a 50-year agreement that Hong Kong would be an autonomous, self-ruled nation. Twenty-two years into the program, China has put their heavy foot down. China has disrupted the autonomous rule of Hong Kong to the point where Xi Jinping had the nerve to say this on the world stage; as far as he was concerned, that agreement was null and void.

I want to bring that up because if we talk about if that agreement is null and void with Hong Kong, if we go back to the agreement of Taiwan under Nixon and Kissinger when they said that Taiwan is recognized as one country, two systems, and autonomous rule, if China and Xi Jinping can discount that agreement with Great Britain, does that give us the right to discount one country, two systems?

Is it time to recognize Taiwan as an independent country, a thriving democracy, our eleventh largest trading partner?

I want to bring up the South China Sea.

Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

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Mr. YOHO. Mr. Speaker, I will try to tighten this up.

Mr. Speaker, China, in the South China Sea, has started claiming property that is not theirs. It goes off to nine historical lines that come from antiquity, from 300 or 400 years ago. And they said: Well, we used to sail here, so this is our property.

So they started building these islands, and they went off the coast of the Philippines, and the Philippines took them to the Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and China lost the lawsuit. China ignored the ruling of The Hague, an international norm that we are all supposed to follow. They ignored it, and here you have the Spratly Islands that were little atolls sticking shallowly out of the water at low tide.

China has gone in there, and it is probably the biggest environmental insult to this world, where they have dredged up over 4,000 acres of land and they have built these land masses. I refuse to use the word ``island'' because that gives credibility to China.

What they have done is built--illegally, against the environment, against the ruling of international law--land masses in the East China Sea.

President Xi Jinping had the gumption to come here to the United States during President Obama's era in 2015, he went to the Rose Garden and claimed: We will never militarize these islands.

Yet, today, there are runways on there that can accommodate military planes. Our satellites show that there are military barracks, offensive and defensive weapons, and radar systems. I think it is pretty well militarized. They are doing that again and again and again. There are four islands they have done now.

Their goal is to go to the next chain of islands which is closer to our mainland. This is something the world has to stand up to. If not, they are going to keep continuing to march forward.

This is a photo of when they started, and this is more of the dredging. We don't have the one that shows them completed, but you can find it on the internet.

Now we are at the China of today. China has perfected 5G technology. China today has over 800 million CCTV cameras, closed-circuit television cameras, and they have put a system in place where they monitor their systems.

Today in China there are over 24 million citizens being monitored, and they get issued by the Communist Party a good citizen score. But, Mr. Speaker, you don't know what your score is. So when you show up to travel, if your score is not high enough, then you get denied travel. If you go to borrow money or use your banking system, you are denied your banking system. Your kids can't go to the colleges you want them to go to because you are denied because you are a bad citizen. They have extended this and offered this to Russia; they have extended this and offered it to Maduro in Venezuela; and Iran wants this technology.

What better way for a despotic or authoritarian or Communist regime to control their citizens than the CC technology?

China uses technology to suppress their citizens to fall in line so that they serve the Communist Party. Our government empowers our people to reach their full potential.

I will close with this last thing, Mr. Speaker. China has interned over 2 million Muslim Chinese ethnic people, the Uyghurs, in what they call reeducation camps.

I want to show you this poster here, Mr. Speaker. This is a reeducation camp. That means they just go there because they want to learn new skills. This is what China is doing with the Uyghurs, the Muslim population. Not only that but they have armed crematoriums that are in place in these camps.

I've got to ask you, Mr. Speaker, when you have got a place that looks look a prison, I don't believe it is there for education. We went through World War II and the Holocaust. This Nation and all other nations said: ``Never again.''

Mr. Speaker, it is happening right now in China. We need to pivot away from China buying stuff, and we need to encourage our manufacturers to go anywhere but China.

I don't want a conflict with China. Nobody does. But if we stand up collectively together and we encourage manufacturers to go, then we can get China's attention via their pocketbook and we can change the course of the history of this world.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your patience, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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