Condemning the Chinese Communist Party for the Wuhan Lab "leak" causing the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr. Speaker, nearly 50 years ago, during the Cold War, Soviet Russia was the enemy of the people and the biggest threat to the free world.

Fast forward to 2023, and it appears that history is repeating itself once again as the threat of nuclear annihilation comes full circle as two opposing ideological blocs dominate the world.

General Secretary Xi Jinping has imitated Soviet Russia's playbook ever since he came to power more than 20

years ago. The Chinese Communist Party has built a cabal of global partners through predatory and oppressive investments in foreign countries, political strong-arming, stealing American technology, and strengthening ties with anti-American tyrannical leaders.

This plan is taken straight from the Soviet's playbook. Only this time, China is infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was.

The United States must recognize and take immediate action against China's push for influence in the developing world. The Soviet Union used military might and territory conquest to forge strategic alliances and expand its influence past the Iron Curtain. However, China mainly uses economic sway and exploits our globalized economic system to expand.

Over the past two decades, China has emerged as the critical trading partner for many regions and developing countries across the globe, and it is not by coincidence. China is intentionally targeting less- developed countries to popularize its authoritarian model and undermine developing democracies worldwide.

China's strategic approach is rendered explicitly in Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, aka the BRI, a lending gambit that grants China's allies, over 140 nations, billions of dollars under the pretense of economic integration and interconnected development.

China has bought up so much copper, pork, and soy, and constructed so many roads, trains, power grids, and bridges, that it has surpassed the U.S. as South America's largest trade partner, and it is now Brazil's, Chile's, and Peru's single largest trading partner.

Compared to the U.S. and the EU, Latin America's bilateral trade in goods with China grew dramatically from $14.6 billion in 2001 to $315 billion in 2020. That is a 21.5-fold increase since Beijing joined the World Trade Organization.

These insidious tactics have made China an undeniable economic superpower through unbounded dishonesty and underhanded manipulation.

In 2019, China, an active trade partner of the U.S., allowed the yuan to fall below the 7-to-1 yuan to U.S. dollar peg it had maintained since 2015. This action set off a day of intense selling in global markets. In the U.S., the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.9 percent, its worst daily decline all year.

By devaluing its currency, China could effectively undercut competitors in the marketplace by offering lower prices on its exports and, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, gain an unfair competitive advantage in international trade.

Intellectual property theft, corporate espionage, forced technology transfer, widespread product dumping, and currency manipulation are just a few of the economic warfare tactics used by the Chinese Communist Party.

This brings me to my point. One of China's most recent efforts to destabilize the United States involves forging an unofficial alliance with Russia to maintain Vladimir Putin's power at all costs. China is also the top trader with Russia and Ukraine.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, China had already surpassed Germany and the U.S. as Russia's most significant commercial partner and the largest consumer of its oil and gas. China has provided a financial lifeline to Russia over the past year by buying goods that the West won't and helping Russia continue to access financial markets despite harsh Western sanctions.

China not only accounted for the highest year-over-year rise in export volume to Russia of any country in 2022, but it was also the largest exporter to Russia overall.

Moving on, it is no secret that Putin and Xi are determined to end the U.S. and create what Xi called a new model of major country relations.

Sure enough, they have had great success in forming the BRICS bloc and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose citizens comprise two- thirds of the world's population.

China has been expanding its military production capabilities and is now the world's fourth largest arms exporter. There has been a drastic 80 percent increase in Chinese military sales to regions across the globe throughout the last decade. A growing number of United States defense officials are expressing concerns about China's swift military modernization.

At this rate, the United States cannot keep up with their prices and turnaround, especially in regions like the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Between 2017 and 2020, Chinese arms exports to sub-Saharan Africa outpaced the United States by a ratio of nearly 3-to-1.

China has spread its malevolent influence this far simply because China is determined to bolster our enemies and supplement them with whatever they need to undermine democracy and our sovereignty.

China has allied with other iron-fisted regimes that are presently in the crosshairs of U.S. sanctions, including some of the world's most monstrous dictators, such as Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and Russia's Vladimir Putin.

China has shipped more than $12 million in drones to Russia since it invaded Ukraine, indicating quiet collaboration between the two.

Recently, Chinese state-affiliated entities sold metals and centrifuges to corporations affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics to aid in constructing Iran's first hypersonic missile, which amplifies Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Despite debt-trapping Venezuela, China has remained their steadfast ally, negotiating payment grace periods and concealing trades.

China has even gone so far as to support a veto of the 2019 U.S.- backed resolution in the United Nations calling for free and fair presidential elections. The Maduro regime has become reliant on China for disinformation campaigns and social control programs, including an ID card that serves as a scorecard of loyal Venezuelan citizens to the regime.

Close to $68 billion in loans has been given to Venezuela by China since 2007, plus around 490 agreements have been signed in diverse areas of investment. The exact nature of these investments is still yet to be made public, but essentially everything comes down to extracting Venezuela's rich mineral supply.

In addition, some of these quiet deals encompass state-affiliated entities that have sold over $615 million worth of weapons to Venezuela in the past 8 years.

This is the perfect example of the kind of mischief destabilization the CCP is known for--preying on other countries via unsustainable and corrupt lending while ignoring global labor and environmental standards for their own economic gain.

Even with their own country, the CCP will only continue to enhance their economic development. Forced labor has become common practice and part of the CCP's plan for Xinjiang's economic development, which includes making it a hub of textile and apparel manufacturing.

In fact, tens of thousands of Uyghurs detained in concentration camps for religious persecution were sent to factories throughout China linked to 83 global brands. To cover up a mass genocide and enslavement of the Uyghur people, Chinese officials called the policy ``poverty alleviation.''

More than a million Uyghurs are locked up in camps in their homeland or blindfolded and transported to prison by truckloads. Brutal crimes against Uyghur women, including forced sterilization and abortion, have been carried out to diminish the Uyghur population. Children are taken away from their parents and under pressure to deny their Uyghur ancestry.

China's deep pockets have left its partners notably silent. Prioritizing their economic ties and strategic relationships with China, many other foreign governments continue to ignore human rights abuses.

Taking another page out of Soviet Russia's book, propaganda, censorship, and disinformation are pillars of the CCP's grand strategy toward world domination. Their goal is to make the state and its objectives appear favorable to the world while simultaneously manipulating markets, lying, cheating, and stealing to fuel its ceaseless attacks on democracy.

The COVID pandemic was the perfect example of what kind of propaganda the China Communist Party is known for. Millions of Americans died of the coronavirus. The epidemic was first reported in Wuhan, a city in central China. However, instead of alerting the

global community in the early stages of the outbreak, the CCP sought to cover up the severity of the coronavirus outbreak but also to carry out a great propaganda campaign downplaying the severity of COVID-19, attempting to shift responsibility and hide the origins of the virus.

I would hope the Biden administration and Congress would be willing to step up to the plate and finally take a different approach toward prevention and protecting the American people from the CCP's unrelenting attempts to infringe on our national security. I hope that as leaders of the free world we will take proactive steps to counter the CCP's threat toward democracy and efforts to infiltrate our sovereignty.

This is why I have introduced several bills that would hold China accountable and protect our Nation's innovation, ideas, and way of life.

Instead, we have senior officials of the DOJ colluding with the CCP to have Chinese political asylees exiled from the United States to be tortured and killed by CCP agents.

We have a President who promises to buy American but vetoes legislation that has reinstated tariffs on solar panels from Chinese companies in Southeast Asia. We have an administration actively allowing the CCP to dodge responsibility for COVID.

Drug traffickers are smuggling fentanyl produced by China into the United States through our unsecured borders killing millions of Americans while benefiting China from a weakening America due to the fentanyl epidemic.

There are ways we can legislate to make a safer, more secure, and better America for the next generation. Here are 10 measures I have introduced to counter the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party:

H. Con. Res. 51 is a concurrent resolution that makes it the opinion of Congress that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest threat to freedom and the free world.

H.R. 4001 is a bill which includes a provision to prohibit the United States from selling weaponry to the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party.

H. Con. Res. 52 is a concurrent resolution condemning Cuba and the Chinese Communist Party for discussing and implementing an agreement to build a Chinese Communist Party spy base on the island of Cuba, 90 miles from the United States' coast.

H.R. 4000 is a bill to authorize the United States to bring civil actions against the Government of the People's Republic of China for harm suffered by the state as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

H.R. 3757 is a bill to prohibit the availability of Federal funds to institutions of higher education that fund the Confucius Institute.

H.R. 3664 is a bill to prohibit the availability of Federal funds to the World Health Organization pending the conduct of an investigation relating to the influence over such organization by the Chinese Communist Party and for other purposes.

H.R. 3598 is a bill to direct the Secretary of State to conduct a comprehensive study assessing the Chinese Communist Party's role in the distribution of fentanyl in the United States.

H.R. 3597 is a bill to direct the President to impose sanctions on the People's Republic of China.

H. Con. Res. 48 is a bill condemning the Chinese Communist Party for the Wuhan Lab leak causing the deadly COVID-19 epidemic.

H. Res. 421 is a resolution expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Chinese Communist Party should be held accountable for present-day efforts of knowingly and intentionally manipulating their currency.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.