Urging China to Respect the Freedom of Assembly, Expression, and Religion and All Fundamental Human Rights and the Rule of Law

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, it has been 25 years since China's Government crushed the peaceful demonstrations we remember by the name ``Tiananmen Square.'' The resolution before us honors the extraordinary sacrifice endured by hundreds of thousands of peaceful Chinese democracy activists who rallied for almost 2 months in Beijing and in over 400 other cities in China in a heroic quest for liberty and human rights. It has been estimated that over a million people took part.

Tiananmen has also come to symbolize the brutal lengths China's Communist Party will go to remain in power. When the tanks rolled into the square on June 4, 1989, mothers lost sons, fathers lost daughters, and China lost an idealistic generation of future leaders.

You know, Mr. Speaker, some may prefer to look past or even trivialize the wanton slaughter by Chinese soldiers. The memory of the dead and those arrested, tortured, and exiled requires us to honor them, respect their noble aspirations for fundamental freedoms, and recommit ourselves to the strugUnknowngle for freedom and human rights in China.

Former President Jiang Zemin said in an interview that Tiananmen was ``no big deal.'' But it was a very big deal that has left an enduring mark on Chinese society and on U.S.-China relations.

The Government of China continues to go to astounding, even bizarre, lengths to censor and ban open discussion of Tiananmen. This resolution sends the right message: we will never forget Tiananmen, ever, especially so as long as the Chinese people cannot discuss it and its significance openly without harassment or arrest or torture.

Mr. Speaker, one of the most enduring symbols of the Tiananmen demonstrations was the unveiling of a facsimile of the Statue of Liberty on May 30, 1989. It was a moment that thrilled freedom advocates around the globe. There was this enduring symbol of freedom facing the portrait of Mao Zedong hanging in Tiananmen Square.

This moment was extraordinary because it showed that when the Chinese people are able to speak publicly and freely, they ask for greater freedoms, democracy, and justice. These are universal liberties that can be found in demonstrations for liberty worldwide. We see it in Cairo and Caracas, Turkey and Tunisia, Kabul and Kiev.

There was a moment when we all believed that Tiananmen Square demonstrations would be a triumph of freedom and democracy. Later in 1989, the Warsaw Pact nations started to crumble, and eventually the former Soviet Union fell as well, but the Communist leaders of China sought to cling to power through unbelievable brutality and force. They sent tanks and soldiers into Beijing to ``clear the square'' on the evening of June 3 into June 4. The beatings, the bayonetting, the torture and murder of students and the ubiquitous display of tanks turned the dream of freedom into a bloody nightmare.

Mr. Speaker, in 1991, I was able to visit Beijing prison number 1 on a trip with my great friend and colleague Frank Wolf. It was a bleak gulag, where some 40 Tiananmen Square demonstrators were being unjustly detained. We saw firsthand the price paid by brave and tenacious individuals for peacefully petitioning their government for freedom, and it was not pretty. They looked like walking skeletons of Auschwitz, and they worked grueling hours making products, some of which ended up in U.S. markets.

Mr. Speaker, for the past 25 years, the Tiananmen demonstrations have shaped the way the Chinese Government deals with dissent. Despite the country's stunning economic growth over the past two decades, Beijing's leaders remain terrified of their own people. China's ruling Communist Party would rather stifle, imprison, or even kill its own people than defer or embrace their demands for freedom and rights.

President Xi Jinping's tenure as President, which started with so much promise of new beginnings, has instead ramped up the repression. China today is in a race to the bottom with the likes of North Korea.

Last year was the worst year since the 1990s for arrests and imprisonment of dissidents. Over 230 people have been detained for their human rights advocacy, and those are the ones we know about. There are many, many more. In the past month leading up to the Tiananmen anniversary, Beijing has detained some two dozen activists for seeking to commemorate the anniversary, even criminalizing private gatherings and art installations.

China remains, as we all know, one of the worst offenders of human rights overall. It remains the torture capital of the world. Religious freedom abuses continue with absolute impunity, and ethnic minority groups face repression when they peacefully seek rights of culture and of language.

Hundreds of millions of women, Mr. Speaker, have been forced to abort their precious babies because of a draconian attempt to limit population growth in effect since 1979. China's one-child policy is a human rights disaster without precedent, and it is a demographic nightmare as well. Brothers and sisters in China, Mr. Speaker, are illegal, and the preference for having boys has led to a gender imbalance and a mass extermination of the girl child.

This is not only a massive gender-based crime, Mr. Speaker, but a security problem as well. Experts are coming to the conclusion that China's unprecedented gender imbalance will lead to more crime, social instability, worker shortages, and even possibly war. Of course it has had a horrific impact on sex trafficking.

Last year, China was rightfully demoted to a tier 3 country under the provisions of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act because of the missing girls and daughters, so those slavers are now buying and selling women as commodities because women don't exist relative to the number of males in the People's Republic of China all because of a cruel one child per couple policy.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, repression has not dimmed the desires of the Chinese people for freedom and reform. There is an inspiring drive in China to keep fighting for freedom under very difficult and dangerous lethal conditions. This drive is the most important asset in promoting human rights and democratization.

When democratic change does come to China, it will come from within, not because of outside pressure; although that pressure needs to be applied, and it needs to be applied judiciously and effectively. U.S. policy, in both the short and long term, must be, and seem to be, supportive of advocates of peaceful change. We can't abscond in our responsibility. Lists need to be tendered every time we meet with Chinese leaders, whether it be the White House or any Members of Congress, of political prisoners.

I believe that someday China will be free. Someday the people of China will be able to enjoy all of their God-given rights. As a nation of free Chinese men and women, we will honor them and they will be celebrated someday as heroes of Tiananmen Square and all of those who sacrificed so much and for so long for freedom.

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