Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Speaker, the last several months have made it clear to the entire world that the Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP, has little regard for human life. When faced with a decision, they have chosen and will continue to choose to preserve their own power over helping their own people.
Rather than alert the world to the true dangers the coronavirus posed to the world, they instead lied and orchestrated the worst coverup in human history, exposing the Chinese people and the entire world to a virus that has killed over 350,000 people, including nearly 100,000 innocent Americans. Another 5.5 million have been infected worldwide, and those numbers only continue to climb.
This atrocity is far from the only example of the CCP prioritizing its power over human life and liberty. At this very moment, the CCP's rubber-stamp legislature is working to dismantle Hong Kong's freedoms. Under the guise of national security legislation, the CCP plans to expand its police state to Hong Kong and fundamentally change Hong Kongers' way of life, freedom, and autonomy.
The CCP is showing the world that they are willing to tear up the international commitments they made to preserve freedom in Hong Kong.
We can no longer stand idly by while the CCP consolidates its power at the expense of freedom around the world. The ultimate example of what the CCP is willing to do in the name of national security has been clear for some time, and that is the cultural genocide of the Uyghurs and other ethnic minority Muslim groups in western China.
Over the last several years, these ethnic minorities have been rounded up and forced into concentration camps where they are brainwashed with state propaganda and forced to do grueling work as part of their ``reform.''
They live under a complete Orwellian surveillance program, an apparatus tracking their every move. Some have been tortured and killed. Others have been disappeared from their families, never to be returned, with no explanation from the CCP.
That is why I stand today in strong support of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act.
The goal of the Chinese Government is to completely eradicate an entire culture simply because it doesn't fit within what the Chinese Communist Party deems ``Chinese.'' They want to remove the cultural, religious, and ethnic identity the Uyghurs have and indoctrinate them so that they love the Chinese Communist Party more than their family, their culture, or their religion. In total, 1 to 3 million Chinese citizens have been subjected to the state-sponsored cultural genocide.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called this the ``stain of the century,'' and he is absolutely right.
That is why we can't sit idly by and allow this to continue. As I have said before, our silence will be complicit, and our inaction will be our appeasement. But today we are acting, Madam Speaker, as a beacon of hope and freedom to the rest of the world, and the United States has a responsibility to take action.
Now is the time for all of us, Republican and Democrat, as Americans to stand together and show the CCP that their egregious human rights abuses will not go unchecked. We can do that by passing this bill today with strong bipartisan support to show the Chinese Communist Party and the entire world that their treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs is inexcusable and will not be allowed without serious consequences.
This legislation requires the President to submit a report that identifies Chinese Communist Party officials who have carried out these heinous crimes. These officials may then be sanctioned for their complicity.
This bill also requires a separate human rights report that highlights abuses specifically to Xinjiang, China.
Madam Speaker, I am hopeful that this is just one of many bipartisan actions that we can take as we push back on the world's most oppressive dictatorship.
We must acknowledge that the CCP is the greatest economic and national security threat of this generation. We must face this threat not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans.
As the chairman of the recently announced China Task Force in the House, I look forward to working with my colleagues to plan decisive action to push back on the CCP. We cannot allow the CCP to remain unchallenged on the world stage.
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith), the House sponsor of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act.
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, I want to thank my good friend for his very strong remarks today and his leadership, Brad Sherman as well, and, of course, Jim McGovern, as chairman, and I, as the ranking member of the China Commission, for the work that we have been doing to try to bring light to this terrible human rights tragedy, this genocide that is being committed against the Uyghur people.
Madam Speaker, Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping's ongoing genocide against the approximately 10 million Uyghurs living in Xinjiang in northwestern China demands action.
Today, more than a million Uyghurs are in concentration camps. Millions more are harassed, beaten, raped, and tortured.
S. 3744, which is nearly identical to legislation H.R. 649 that I and my good friend Mr. Suozzi and 136 bipartisan cosponsors introduced 17 months ago, requires the administration to categorize and report on the human rights abuses being committed by the Chinese Government and take specific steps to sanction China's officials for these abuses, including visa denial and asset blocking, the essence of the Magnitsky Act, which is the prohibition of all financial transactions by an abuser.
Madam Speaker, at a 2018 congressional hearing, Mihrigul Tursun recounted her ordeal with torture, sexual abuse, and detention in one of Xi Jinping's concentration camps. She broke down weeping, telling us that she pleaded with God to end her life. Her Chinese jailers restrained her to a table, increased the electrical current coursing through her body, and mocked her belief in God.
She was tortured simply because she was an ethnic Uyghur and a Muslim living in China.
Madam Speaker, there are millions of stories like this waiting to be told about the crimes against humanity being committed by the Chinese Government against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims.
There are many people--we all know them; I have had them at my hearings in the past--women and men who have had their entire families back in this region, Xinjiang, arrested and put into concentration camps and harassed in other ways.
Chinese authorities initially denied the existence of the concentration camps and even tried to portray them as vocational training centers. What a euphemism. They employed lies, censorship, and economic coercion to stifle discussion of their crimes.
Where have we heard that before? Look at what is going on with COVID- 19 and the deceit and the lies that have come from Xi Jinping himself.
But documents obtained by The New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have, indeed, exposed the brutality behind Beijing's plans to radically and coercively transform the culture and religion of ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims.
The leaked documents showed detailed plans to intern between 1 and 3 million Uyghurs into concentration camps, where they are subjected to severe human rights abuse and Orwellian indoctrination efforts for those whose thinking ``has been infected''--that is to say, they are Muslims. To Xi Jinping, that is something that needs to be obliterated.
At the same time, Beijing instituted plans to erase the influence of Islam in western China, bulldozing mosques and shrines, severely throttling all religious practice, and forcing camp detainees to renounce their faith.
The leaked documents also show that Xi Jinping, himself, the so- called President--not elected by the people, of course--Xi Jinping, himself, directed the crackdown, saying that the Communist Party must put the ``organs of dictatorship'' to work and show ``absolutely no mercy'' in dealing with the Uyghurs and other Muslims.
In one speech, President Xi said: ``The weapons of the people's democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering.''
Continuing the quote, in February 2017, he told thousands of police officers and troops standing at attention in a vast square in Urumqi to prepare for a ``smashing, obliterating offensive,'' which is exactly what they have done.
According to documents obtained again by The New York Times, Communist Party officials who were reluctant to carry out Xi Jinping's draconian and horrific policies were themselves investigated and expunged. ``Secret teams of investigators have traveled across the region identifying those who were not doing enough. In 2017, the party opened more than 12,000 investigations into party members in Xinjiang.''
Madam Speaker, we cannot be silent.
Xi Jinping is smashing and obliterating an entire people. He is presiding over a genocide.
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I have no additional speakers, so I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I continue to reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Just today, the Secretary of State announced, under the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act that we passed last November which requires an annual certification of Hong Kong's autonomy, he just announced that he cannot certify the autonomous nature of Hong Kong.
This is a very significant day, Madam Speaker, because the Chinese Communist Party now has cracked down on the free and loving people of Hong Kong and their autonomous nature under one country, two systems, back when the U.K.-Sino pact was signed. The CCP, Chinese Communist Party, are in violation now of the Sino-U.K. pact.
Madam Speaker, this bill, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 is more proof that we can come together, as Republicans and Democrats, to address the generational threat by the Chinese Communist Party and champion American values.
Whether it be the Muslim population of the Uyghurs, whether it be the Tibetan population who have been persecuted, and the Dalai Lama, who is in exile, to the Christians who are persecuted in China by the Communist Party, this bill will help hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for their atrocities and will show the world, including the Uyghur Muslim American community, that the United States Congress will not tolerate these appalling human rights violations. We will always stand for human rights across the globe.
And the one thing I respect about our committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, is that we stand together when it comes to our foreign policy. As Chairman Engel often says, partisanship stops at the water's edge. And when it comes to human rights, we stand with our Founding Fathers and what they stood for in fighting oppression and tyranny and for democracy and freedom.
That is why, today, we stand with the Uyghur Muslim population in China. And for all those listening in China and, particularly, to those members of the Chinese Communist Party who are probably watching this broadcast on C-SPAN, we are watching you today. We will not back down. We will talk about this until it stops, and it will stop, hopefully, in our lifetime. It won't stop this Congress, but it must stop.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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