Protect America's Innovation and Economic Security From Ccp Act of 2024

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. CHU. As chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, I rise in strong opposition to the deceptively named Protect America's Innovation and Economic Security from CCP Act. It brings back the shameful China Initiative, which is the new McCarthyism.

Rather than protecting America's innovation, this bill would hurt it with a Trump-era China Initiative, a program that assumed that researchers and scholars in America should be investigated if they had a nexus with China, such as being born there or having relatives from there. They targeted them and arrested them, but here is what you need to know: Most of the cases overwhelmingly failed to prosecute actual cases of economic espionage or trade secret theft. Nearly all cases had no connection to national security or espionage but rather paperwork mistakes. Many cases were dropped or withdrawn without explanation.

For so many researchers and professors, the damage was already done. By racially profiling innocent Asian-American scientists because of their ethnicity, the China Initiative ruined their reputations, finances, and lives. They were traumatized, arrested in front of their families, fired, and went into deep debt.

McCarthyism had deadly effects in the 1950s, and so does the China Initiative, harming our country's competitive edge by casting a chilling effect on our academic community. Let me be clear. While we all want to stop American secrets from being stolen, investigations should be based on evidence of criminal activity, not race and ethnicity.

This bill brings back the shameful mistakes of the China Initiative. It would stoke anti-Asian xenophobia, and it would hurt American innovation by contributing to the reverse brain drain of talent from the U.S. to the PRC from which only the CCP itself stands to benefit.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source