Speaking on the House Floor in support of a new Select Committee on China, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) today blasted US politicians and corporations who have long enabled the brutal dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through trade and engagement without serious human rights protections. The following are excerpts of Smith’s remarks:   

            “For over three decades post Tiananmen Square Massacre, Congress was deeply divided, not between Republican and Democrat, but among the majority here and in the Senate who favored unfettered engagement and trade without serious human rights conditionality.

            Indeed, President Clinton delinked human rights and trade on May 26, 1994. I went up there and gave a press conference saying how serious that was to give up on human rights and allow profits to trump human rights.

            We’ve seen the brutal nature of the Communist regime especially under Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party’s ultimate desire to see hegemony.

            Over the years I’ve chaired 76 congressional hearings on China and authored several pieces of legislation including the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and was the Republican sponsor of Jim McGovern’s Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. We now have to make sure those laws are being faithfully implemented.

            Twenty years ago, when China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), most members of Congress and certainly in the business community and foreign policy establishment bought into what James Mann rightfully called ‘the China Fantasy’ – in other words, if you just trade more with a dictatorship, somehow they’ll matriculate into a democracy.

            That fantasy has been shown to have been demonstrably naïve, at best.

            The CCP has become more powerful because of the trade and dual-use high tech items that have accrued over there that are now being used by their military and their police.

            I would note parenthetically I chaired two hearings on why China should not be invited into the WTO—and no one listened.

            The record is clear, as predicted, we have become more like them, and thankfully that is changing, but many in our corporate establishment – we saw with the Olympics – were standing right by Beijing and the CCP and Xi Jinping and wouldn’t utter a word, including Coca-Cola and others, about the terrible killing of the Uyghurs and the use of forced labor camps.

            We have stood by as the Chinese embassy and the Ministry of State Security officials have harassed people of Chinese heritage and nationality living lawfully in the United States.  We have not done all we can do for the people of Hong Kong, Tibet and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

            But today, thankfully, we are turning a page, and I want to applaud our Speaker for pushing hard for this Select Committee and hopefully it will make a difference.”

###