Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Speaker, I want to start this debate with a simple truth that we cannot afford to forget: Truly free trade cannot involve slave labor.
Today, the Chinese Community Party is using the forced labor of the Uyghurs and other minorities to help bankroll its cultural genocide against those very same groups. The repression taking place right now in Xinjiang is breathtaking in its scope and in its brutality.
It involves the detention of 1 to 3 million people in concentration camps, Madam Speaker. It involves surveillance and attempted brainwashing on a massive scale. It involves breaking up families and taking children from their parents. It involves forced sterilization and, Madam Speaker, forced abortions.
This should be a terrifying warning to the world, to China's neighbors, and to the American people that the Chinese Communist Party is fundamentally focused on expanding its power, its control, and its authoritarian style of government. It views things that it does not control, like religion, cultural identity, and the yearning of all people for freedom, as threats that must be destroyed.
Because we have drawn the CCP into our most essential supply chains, it can hold our national security hostage while it uses U.S. consumers to subsidize its atrocities.
As many as one in five cotton garments globally could be tainted with Uyghur slave labor. In July, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized a 13-ton shipment of human hair--Madam Speaker, human hair--that originated in Xinjiang's forced labor system. We haven't heard about human hair since the Nazis and the concentration camps of the war that my father fought in, World War II.
It is brazen, and it is sickening. We must refuse to be complicit, financially or otherwise, in the CCP's crimes against the Muslim Uyghur.
For that reason, I support this bill before us today.
I must also point out the abuses in this province are not only one small part of the grave and growing threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses to the interests, the values, and the security of the United States. That threat is global and has military, economic, public health, and philosophical aspects.
I know that many on the other side of the aisle share my concerns. I, unfortunately, regret that, during this Congress, the majority has not given the CCP threat even one-tenth of the time they have put into their partisan efforts to bring down this President.
We were told that the China Task Force was going to be bipartisan, Madam Speaker, and at the last minute, the majority pulled out. For the past 4 months, I have served as chairman of the China Task Force. This task force, again, was supposed to be bipartisan because I believe this is not a Republican or Democrat issue.
Confronting the generational threat that the CCP poses should be a bipartisan issue. It is an American issue against the greatest national security threat to the United States of America.
I believe this failure of perspective needs to change. In our work on the China Task Force, we have met with 125 people from both sides of the aisle to gain better insight into our relationship and our foreign policy, as we speak here from the Foreign Affairs Committee, how we need to treat the Chinese Communist Party from a foreign policy standpoint.
This, again, is an American issue, not Republican or Democrat. This report coming out October 1 will include 400 recommendations, including 100 pieces of legislation that have bipartisan support like the bill before us today.
So, Madam Speaker, I strongly urge my colleagues to support this legislation. Then, once we get past this election, Madam Speaker, let us come together on both sides and analyze objectively our foreign policy with the Chinese Communist Party and address the bipartisan bills that will be recommended by the task force to address the Chinese Communist Party's malign activities throughout the world.
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I commend the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), the chairman, for his steadfast support for human rights across the world. The gentleman and the next speaker have been on this issue, really, as visionary leaders, I would say, the two strongest in the House of Representatives representing both sides of the aisle, and I thank him for that.
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, I thank my good friend, Mr. McCaul, the ranking member, for his leadership, for his very, very strong and passionate statement today. I thank my good friend and colleague, Mr. McGovern, the chairman of both the China Commission, as well as the Lantos Commission--and I serve as cochair with him on the Lantos Commission and as ranking member on the China Commission. And I am very pleased to be the principal Republican cosponsor of this bill. I see Mr. Suozzi over there, who has been a great leader as well. We have been teaming up for years on this issue, and I thank him for his leadership as well. And Eliot Engel, our chairman, for his work on this as well.
Madam Speaker, at a 2018 Congressional hearing I cochaired, Mihrigul Tursun recounted her ordeal of torture, sexual abuse, and detention in one of China's mass internment camps in Xinjiang. She broke down weeping, telling us that she pleaded with God to end her life. Her Chinese jailers restrained her to a table, actually increased the electrical currents coursing through her body, and mocked her belief in God. She was tortured simply for being an ethnic Uyghur and a Muslim in China.
Madam Speaker, there are millions of stories like this waiting to be told. Nightmarish accounts of President Xi Jinping's genocide. And make no mistake about it, this is Xi Jinping's genocide. I point out to my colleagues that this includes the mass internment of millions. An estimated 1.8 million victims in concentration camps, children ripped from the warm embrace of their families, to be indoctrinated in Communist ideology and forced to renounce their religion, their culture, and their language.
Rape and sexual abuse of women being held in internment camps, forced abortion and involuntary sterilization to prevent the birth of Uyghur children, a direct violation of Article II(d) of the U.N. Genocide Convention, which states, in part, that genocide includes imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group. Forced labor on a massive scale that allows Chinese companies to profit, and profit big time, from modern-day slavery.
Chinese authorities initially denied the existence of mass internment camps and tried to portray them as vocational training. The Chinese Communist Party employed the big lie, censorship and economic coercion to stifle any discussion of their crimes. However, documents obtained by the New York Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists have exposed beyond any reasonable doubt the brutality behind Beijing's plans to radically and coercively transform the culture and religion of ethnic Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims in China.
The leaked papers showed detailed plans--this is back years ago now-- of looking to intern between 1 and 3 million Uyghurs in these concentration camps and imposing Orwellian indoctrination efforts for those ``whose thinking has been infected.'' In other words, if you are a Muslim, your thinking is infected.
At the same time, Beijing instituted plans to erase the influence of Islam in all of western China--bulldozing mosques and shrines, severely restricting religious practice, and forcing detainees in the camps to renounce their faith.
The leaked documents also show that Xi Jinping himself directed the crackdown, saying 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.''
In 2017, February, the documents show he told thousands of police officers and troops standing at attention in the vast square in Urumqi to prepare for a ``smashing, obliterating offensive.'' Secret teams even went out--because some of the cops didn't want to do this--and they expunged them from their ranks.
Madam Speaker, we know that goods produced with forced labor find their way into U.S. markets. An estimated 22 percent of U.S. cotton goods come from the region, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency has prohibited companies from importing some textiles, electronics, and hair products. As my good friend from Texas pointed out about the hair, the last time we talked about the buying and selling of hair was with the Nazi concentration camps. It is happening today in Xinjiang.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has matched strong rhetoric condemning abuses and actions to protect U.S. national security and punish Chinese authorities and corporations complicit in these human rights abuses.
Since last October, the Commerce Department has placed over 40 Chinese companies and government entities on its Entity List, restricting exports because of their complicity in human rights abuses and enabling high-tech surveillance.
In July, the Treasury Department issued Global Magnitsky sanctions against six senior Chinese officials; however, we want more. There are other people that are complicit. They need to be on the list.
Treasury has also sanctioned the Xinjiang Production Construction Corps, a paramilitary that reports directly to the CCP. This summer, U.S. Customs and Border Protection banned eight other Chinese companies from importing textiles, hair, and electronic parts from Xinjiang. We welcome these steps, but more needs to be done.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act prohibits imports from Xinjiang to the U.S. by creating a ``rebuttable presumption.'' And that is the core of this bill, that all goods produced in the region are made with forced labor unless U.S. Customs and Border Protection certifies by clear and convincing evidence that goods were not produced with forced labor. So the rebuttable presumption is the key to this legislation.
It also carries other provisions, important ones, but, again, that is the most important one.
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman.
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, the legislation also authorizes targeted sanctions on any person responsible for labor tracking; protects U.S. investors and consumers by requiring financial disclosure from U.S. traded businesses about their engagement with Chinese companies and other entities engaged in serious human rights abuses; directs the Secretary of State to determine whether forced labor or other crimes against Uyghurs constitute crimes against humanity or genocide. I think it couldn't be clear. Read the Genocide Convention. One item after the other articulated in that convention is being met, sadly, by Xi Jinping's horrible genocide against his own people.
Madam Speaker, I urge support for the bill. It is a bipartisan bill-- 67 cosponsors in all. Republicans and Democrats joined saying, ``we want this stopped.''
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Yoho), the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific.
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, let me thank Speaker Pelosi. She actually came to our committee markup of this bill. It is very rare for a Speaker of the House to show up to a committee markup, and yet this issue is so important to her that she honored us with her presence in that markup. This is where we come together in the Congress, and I want to thank you for your support, Madam Speaker.
And I thank Mr. Smith, who has been dealing for decades with this.
I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jacobs).
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jacobs).
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Mr. McCAUL. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Madam Speaker, in recent years, the world has stood by idly as the Chinese Communist Party rounded up more than a million--probably a lot more than that--ethnic minorities into concentration camps where they are tortured, brainwashed, and forced into labor. This is all part of a deliberate program by the CCP to wipe out their ethnic identity, their religion, their culture, anything that might compete with the Communist Party for their loyalties and affection.
We have a moral duty today to speak out against these horrifying crimes against humanity and against the Uyghurs and, as the Speaker mentioned, against the Tibetans and Christians as well, who are persecuted in the Chinese Communist regime.
But we have an even greater duty to avoid funding this genocide by paying for slave labor in Xinjiang. There can no longer be business as usual with China.
Madam Speaker, the world is watching. I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes.''
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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