Mr. Speaker, today I would like to address my colleagues about the greatest threat over the horizon, ``Made in China.'' Mr. Speaker, while focused on the deadly threat posed to our immediate safety by the forces of radical Islam, many…
Mr. Speaker, today I would like to address my colleagues about the greatest threat over the horizon, ``Made in China.''
Mr. Speaker, while focused on the deadly threat posed to our immediate safety by the forces of radical Islam, many Americans seem oblivious to the storm clouds just over the horizon.
I come to the floor with a grave warning to the American people. We face a threat to our national security with complexity and global scope such as we have never experienced in this Nation's history. This threat is pervasive. It challenges our economic, political, and financial structure, as well as the security of our homeland.
I have come to the floor to plead: We can no longer look at the dynamic shift in power that is taking place and console ourselves with wishful thinking. We must quit fooling ourselves that there are offsetting elements at play, that the glass can be viewed as half full or half empty. It is clear that a powerful adversary is unabashedly out to grab that glass and drain it, consume it at the expense of the American people, and leave Americans of the future in thirst of the prosperity and security which we now take for granted.
And it is not only our children's future at stake. What we do as a people, as was the case of Americans before us, will determine which diametrically opposed system of governance--freedom or tyranny--will shape the world and human events for generations to come.
Today, radical Islam can be, must be, and will be thwarted. Yes, it is a threat that is now upon us. Radical Islamists, however, are not only butchering Christians and Jews, but a multitude of Muslims as well. And yes, forces of modernity within the Muslim world who are themselves threatened with extermination will help us defeat this evil plague of radical Islam.
Today, if we remain vigilant and if we remain engaged, we can be confident of this outcome. Yet, as I say, a greater threat is just over the horizon. I am referring to China, a dragon of immense power and insatiable appetite. This challenge will far outshadow the current battle with radical Islam.
China is already engaged, already manipulating, already doing damage, already making serious moves to catapult itself into a position of preeminent power on the Earth. To them, that would simply be moving the center of the Earth back to China where it once was and rightfully should be, from their ethnocentric perception.
Right off, let me assert my intention is not to be a China basher. Surprise, surprise, because I am not a China basher.
China is not the regime that controls that territory, but the people who reside there. They are a people with a magnificent history and culture. Today, over 1 billion Chinese men, women, and children survive in abject poverty. They are in servitude to a small clique, a small, heavy-handed clique, a cadre. Yes. You might say a band of cronies which represents only about 2 percent of the Chinese population. That clique is kept in power by the brutality of their hacks and thugs and the deployment of technology which all too often can be traced back to Western benefactors. With modern Western-developed technologies, they have created a high-tech police state that mirrors the imagination of George Orwell in his prescient novel, ``1984.''
The Chinese regime that holds power in Beijing is a hostile force to the freedom of its own people and a threat to us. The hardworking, long-suffering, yet dignified and proud people of China, they are our allies in waiting. Our sympathy and loyalty should focus on them, the Chinese people. Their
greatest hope is our greatest hope, that they will some day demand and win their own freedom and thus shift China into the family of free nations and free people. This should not only be their goal, but our goal as well.
But for now, the aggressively authoritarian and murderous regime in Beijing holds power with an iron fist at home and makes alliances with gangsters and tyrants the world around. The growing power of China is obvious in the confidence and bullishness of its antidemocratic regime, in its leverage as a formidable economic competitor, and its expanding military force.
All of this has been steadily assisted by our own government and by the elite captains of America's finance industry.
These American tycoons still plot, scheme, and invest to make a quick buck by exploiting a massive cheap labor pool and a mega market in China.
It is the same dream of a century and a half ago, when ambitious Western businessmen dreamed of ``lighting the lamps of China'' and making a fortune doing it. Only now, the fortune is being made by America's elite, but it is not benefiting our country. It is being done at the expense of the American people.
The Chinese regime as of late has been masterful at manipulating the greed and avarice of Western businessmen, even as China itself continues to undermine international financial markets and hammers many of those Western corporations which have already set up there in China.
Beijing maintains a massive pool of near-slave labor to even attract more foreign capital and manufacturing know-how. This is at the same time that they undervalue their own currency to secure the dominance of their exports, even as they enforce the restrictions they have placed entry into their market.
This is not just symptomatic of a nation with gusto to get ahead. They are destroying the economic potential of their future competitors. So much more sophisticated than Mao, the Chinese oligarchs of today look and speak Western. They mean to eclipse our country and, yes, extinguish our ideals of democracy and individual freedom, even as the West stumbles in its retreat before this aggressive and autocratic global force.
Wake up, America. We are not only losing jobs to an ever more powerful China, but we are in the process of losing our security, our prosperity, and, yes, our freedom. We are losing more than jobs. We are losing our future. Wake up, America.
If eventually the United States and our great democratic experiment is defeated through the avarice and shortsightedness of grasping corporations and their bought-and-paid-for political hacks, who will be able to light the lamps of freedom, not only in China, but around the world?
There is no shortage of power-mongers who would cast the world into darkness and deprivation and fear. As evil expands America is, as it has always been, the only hope for a better world, the only hope for the world's oppressed, the only hope for stability and peace.
Six decades ago, Japanese militarists understood the role of America. That is why they attacked us at Pearl Harbor, so they could push us out of the picture and they could then dominate the Asia Pacific region with a greater sphere of co-prosperity and, of course, a brutally enforced stability.
The Chinese strategists now see us in the same light as the Japanese planners did before World War II. The Japanese, however, only intended to dominate a large chunk of the Pacific region. Today, China's rulers seek domination not just of the Asian Pacific region, but of the world. They are positioning themselves to do just that.
And what has been America's counterstrategy? Apparently, to establish economic ties that will build China's economy, thinking that with prosperity will come a new hospitable and benevolent attitude among the Chinese hierarchy.
So our country club class of American businessmen have built China into an economic giant and, yes, a global power. And, of course, these captains of American industry have made big bucks for themselves, personally, as part of this effort in building China.
America's corporate elite has not seemed to notice the obvious downside for their fellow Americans in sending jobs, capital, and technology to China. Maybe the brutal consequences on the rest of the American family of free people was obscured by the worst kind of wishful thinking. Elite think tanks, coffers filled by corporate giants, I might add these intellectual think tanks, intellectually claimed and have claimed that if you hug a dragon, it won't eat you. Well, the subsidized academics assured us, if we treat it nicely, it will become a warm and peaceful dragon. Well, look again. It has been decades of coddling, and it is still a dragon. It is bigger and stronger and still hungry.
The frightening result of our folly and betrayal of American working people is becoming evident. In the month of February 2010 alone, the trade deficit with China was a staggering $16.5 billion. In 1984, just 25 years ago, the U.S. had a trade surplus with China. Our annual trade imbalance with China is now $227 billion and rising. Our lamp is going out.
China holds the largest amount of American bonds than any nation and holds the highest percentage of our debt, and has repeatedly threatened to quietly dump those bonds and devastate our national economy if we don't comply with its wishes.
What is their goal?
First, of course, it is to maintain their unfair trade advantage built on near-slave labor, environmental desolation, devalued currency, and a heavily restricted access to their market, while enjoying access to our market and a continual flow of U.S. investment and technology and know-how into their country. Yet, now if we move to correct the imbalance by seeking equality and fairness in our trade policies, there will be a heavy price for us to pay. So we just let a bad situation continue to slide, even as our economy, our power, and our influence slide into an abyss.
The dragon may not be a Marxist red dragon, but it is still a dragon, dangerous as hell, and will not be deterred by appeasement or cowardice. Economic vulnerability is only half of the story.
On a parallel track, financed by their profits from this one-way free trade imbalance that they have enjoyed, China is engaged in an unprecedented military build-up. Communist China's military forces, which include nuclear, cyber, and space-based and conventional and terrorist components are on the rise, as our defenses are wearing thin and exhausted. In the past, we have always been able to rely on our technological superiority, ``in the past'' being the operative words in the sentence I just used. Yes, in the past we could rely on our technological superiority.
Today, new China laws demand that Western companies, who are now operating in China and wish to, give up technological secrets that can be used for economic and military advantage. Our greatest asset to the future is being given away in exchange for a piece of China's market today.
When we had the leverage, our financial and business elites were only looking to short-term profits and benefits for themselves, not for their country. This short-term approach ended up much shorter than expected. The other side now has the leverage, and they are making the best of it. Surprise, surprise. The Chinese elite is a murderous dragon. And, yes, they are still a dragon, and they still intend to eat our lunch. Tomorrow they will eat us.
For decades, American capitalists have rushed to China with stars in their eyes and quick and easy profits on their minds, but it has been a deal with the devil, figuratively and literally. American corporations are not acting as Americans. They have been acting as greedy cowards, reflecting the worst of human aspirations, not the best.
We Americans pride ourselves at being committed to noble, higher ideals. We are not just a grasping horde seeking self-enrichment. We do believe in treating people decently, and we do believe in people's individual rights given to them by God. Well, we think of ourselves that way.
And then we hear that Google and other American companies have enabled the communist Chinese dictatorship to track down dissidents, who are
then jailed for daring to oppose tyranny and corruption or to worship God as they see fit.
Once compromised, companies like Google found themselves curtailing the free flow of information to millions of Chinese citizens, turning the Internet into a tool for repression rather than a facilitator for free expression, and, thus, a vehicle for the advancement of the human condition.
To Google's credit, uncomfortable with the role that it was being forced to play, Google decided not to go along with the heavy handed plan that the Chinese regime expected them to play and to implement.
At great risk to their company, Google's executives refused to go along and took a stand against repression. Yes, kudos to Google for that.
Conversely, shame on the rest of the high-tech entourage who collaborated and were even used to advance tyrannical corruption. Google was not backed up, for example, by Microsoft or Yahoo Internet providers. Now China is preferring to intensify draconian laws requiring telecommunications and Internet companies to inform on customers who discuss state secrets. That term, ``state secrets,'' can be defined as anything from negative economic statistics to information on environmental calamities or references to Tibet, Taiwan, the Falun Gong, Uyghurs or anything else that would anger the dragon. The Chinese regime obviously understands its control of technology is a way to control the future.
Yes, the future. Beijing's focus on space as well as electronic communications says it all. Remember, space-based assets--satellite systems--are a central component of global and national communication, with enormous implications to our own national security as well as our own prosperity. The power of commerce and political change will be determined by the control of these systems, and the freedom to use these systems will have an impact on the future of the country and the world.
What happens in space will determine what happens on the ground. With that in mind, the Obama administration's decision to go along with our domestic, high-tech corporate giants and again permit American satellites to be launched from Chinese rockets is a cataclysmic betrayal of America's security, and it undermines both the future of our aerospace industry and undermines freedom on this planet.
Fifteen years ago, during the Clinton years, a similar decision was made to permit U.S. satellites to be launched on Chinese rockets. We were assured by the Clinton administration that no technology would be transferred. I bought into that for a short time, then it became abundantly evident that this was a technological windfall for the Chinese regime, that President Clinton had not, as promised, secured that our technology would not be transferred. And when it became clear after the Clinton administration had made that commitment to us that there would be no transfer of technology, and when it became clear that this effort at cooperation was a colossal mistake and that technology was being transferred, no moves were made to limit the damage or shut it down.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Bernard Schwartz's contributions had some impact on President Clinton's reelection bid, meaning Bernie Schwartz was the CEO of Loral Corporation, a company heavily complicit in the illegal transfer of missile technology to China. He was also the biggest single contributor to President Bill Clinton's reelection campaign. Of course, he was not the only contributor to have a stake in this policy of sending missile technology to China. Other contributors to the Clinton campaign were traced and found to be leaders of the PLA, that's the People's Liberation Army missile program, which of course had a different name on their company and a different veneer, the veneer of a private sector and commercial company, but really it was a control company by the People's Liberation Army.
I was personally involved in uncovering the initial evidence that exposed this crime, a crime that made our country vulnerable to missiles that were built with technology that had been developed right here, but the missiles were now aimed at us by a hostile power. A full scale investigation ensued. Christopher Cox led a bipartisan task force which unanimously declared our security had been compromised. Before Congress could finally put the cork in the bottle, clearly invaluable rocket secrets were in the possession of this monstrously antidemocratic dragon regime. The world's worst human abuser now had America's utmost missile technology secrets.
Unlike the last time around, thanks to the help of their American corporate benefactors, now the Chinese rockets are built further along than they were back in those days 15 years ago. Right now the Chinese have rockets, thanks to our help, that are much more competitive with our own systems. Before we stepped in to help, their rocket launchers more often than not turned into fiery failures. And even if successful, Chinese rockets of 15 years ago only carried one payload per launch. Now with our gift of technology--that I might add cost the American people, the American taxpayers, billions of dollars to develop--Chinese rockets are now reliable and capable of launching multiple payloads, be they satellites or warheads. It's called MIRVing, our gift to the Chinese. No wonder they have no respect for us. No wonder they are becoming aggressive. They think we're stupid. They think we're cowards, trying to buy peace with gifts to our enemies.
What else would we expect such tough guys who are in power in Beijing to think? Should they think, oh, how nice it is that the Americans are so willing to give us this power? We should be grateful, and we should be their friends because they are being so nice to us in giving us this technology that can be used for rockets and other high-tech weapons systems.
Well the town of Jiuquan is in the high desert of China's occupied regime of East Turkistan. Located there is China's main space launch center. That is where its Long March rockets and commercial space and nuclear-capable ballistic rockets take off from. At the entrance to this complex at this Chinese launch area is a billboard written half in English intended for the world to see. The statement of the Chinese warlords of this Uyghur province, I might add, says, ``Without haste. Without fear. We will conquer the world.''
And, yes, America's policies and the collaborations of our corporations are helping them do just that. Instead of facing the reality of the even more powerful and increasingly hungry dragon that is right in front of our face, interest groups and power players in our country keep raising the question about what's happening with China? Are we making China into our enemy?
Yes, so many Americans just love to blame ourselves every time such confrontation with tyranny occurs. During his recent trip to Asia, I half expected to hear that our President had actually bowed down to Chinese despots and apologized for the Opium Wars of 150 years ago. Now of course he didn't do that, but that is the attitude you can see reflected in people who are blaming us for any belligerency that's on the part of the Chinese, or any other enemy of the United States, I might add. This self-flagellation is of course much safer than blaming an increasingly strained relationship on the obvious badness and evil that is going on among the other guys. The obvious tyrants who murder their own people, the people who happen to be the world's worst human rights abuser. Now, maybe it's their fault, but if we blame them for it rather than blame ourselves for the current escalation of hostility that is now evident with the Chinese, we would have to deal with the threat. We have to deal with them. And that would be scary.
So instead, so many Americans end up blaming ourselves or apologizing for past errors that America may have committed or may not have committed. So the answer to our question, is the Chinese regime getting more belligerent, the answer is emphatically, yes, it is getting more belligerent. Is it our fault? No. The attitude of those who rule Beijing is the manifestation of an increasing lust for power and the hubris of the clique that controls the world's most populous country with an iron fist. That is what you would expect from such tyrants. That is why our policy should not be aimed at
building their strength military, economically, or any other way.
Of course, the essence of what's going on has not gone unnoticed by our friends and foes overseas. The perception of American weakness, even decline, eat away at the resolve of our friends and allies even as it contributes to Beijing's cockiness. And let's admit, we are considerably weaker than we ever thought we would be. We have been bled and drained by needlessly expensive small-scale wars around the world as well as a benevolence that has us bankrolling the United Nations and shoving foreign aid out our door even as we borrow money from China.
One example of this is seen in America's good-hearted participation in a global fund designed to provide the world's poorest countries support in the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other insidious diseases, which kill millions of people a year. Over the 8 years of the fund's history, the United States has willingly contributed $4.3 billion--that's more than 28 percent of all the contributions to this benevolent fund--and we should be proud that we are a generous people, even if we can't afford it. Whether we can continue to be so generous as our level of deficit spending threatens to collapse our economy, now that's another question.
But most significant, because of an anomaly in the funding formula, China has been one of the largest recipients of this fund. Over the last 8 years, China has been the recipient of almost $1 billion in grants. Conversely, over that same period China has only contributed $16 million to the fund. That's the fund we've given $4 billion to. I can't come up with one reason of why the American taxpayer should be underwriting the cost of China's public health system. The whole thing is a travesty.
Malaria, for example, is a minor problem in China, killing about 38 individuals a year. On the other hand, malaria is a massive problem in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing over 25,000 people last year. Yet in this international fund, China was awarded $149 million to combat malaria and only $122 million went to the Congo. That's $4 million for each case of a malaria death in China while the Congo received $5,000 per person that had died.
This issue needs to be addressed, but nobody of course has the guts to address it because China is getting about a billion dollars' worth of benefits, paying a pittance, while the United States pays $4 billion into this fund. What we've been doing in this case is borrowing from China to donate to a fund that gives back to China. Over the years, we then end up paying interest on the debt that's been incurred by this very transaction.
Now, this is the kind of ongoing indefensible transfer of wealth from our country to China that we have faced, and we've acquiesced with this. We've put up with it for years. It's got to stop. The burdens of drawn-out commitments that we've had all over the world and the irrational benevolence--you can read that ``giveaways''--makes our Nation poorer. We're talking about it's diminishing our ability here at home to meet our needs, the needs of our own people, and to watch out for our own security because wealth is being transferred out of our country by policies that we've gone along with. We are now vulnerable after all of this to an unrestricted political, economic, and military threat by a major power like China.
So China is encouraging those who would tie us down and drain our energy. This is part of their effort. They have been helping those people who have been trying to tie us down and to drain our energies and revenues and our resources. This is part of their effort to disable us by sapping our willpower, our resolve, and our resources. And as we become weaker, China's unquenchable thirst for natural resources such as oil, natural gas, and scarce minerals that are necessary for modern manufacturing, this has spurred China to become the ally, supplier, protected, and puppet master of rogue regimes on a global scale.
And the Chinese planetary offensive is evident in countries like North Korea, Burma, Cambodia, Iran, and across Africa, like Sudan and Zimbabwe. Not only are their people being repressed by regimes that are tyrannical but these are regimes that have allied themselves with Beijing, which is becoming the leading--it is already the world's worst human rights abuser and it is the creator of alliances with dictators throughout the world.
It's hard to miss that when China establishes an alliance with these countries what its intention is. We need to look no further than to show that China has an alliance and is providing arms with the anti- American blowhard in our hemisphere, the would-be caudillo of Latin American, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. So it's evident elsewhere. Wherever trouble and turmoil threaten U.S. interests, we can find that China has a hand in this.
Nuclear weapons and missiles technology were slipped to Iran by China via North Korea and Pakistan, and they have added a dangerous instability to the Middle East. In light of this, there should be no mystery as to why China in the United Nations and in other international forums has opposed stronger and enforceable sanctions against Iran and North Korea.
North Korea's sinking of a South Korean naval patrol ship not that long ago, there was a loss of 46 South Korean sailors, and it was publicly treated as a nonevent by Beijing, although it's right there in its backyard. In fact, North Korea's eccentric dictator, who probably could not be in power without Chinese support, was given an official heroes' welcome in China just days after it sunk a South Korean ship, which cost the lives of 46 South Korean sailors.
More recently, China has bullied Japan over the control and sovereignty of islands that are not even close to its shores. While it was doing the bullying of Japan, our great ally, the United States was warned by China to butt out and stay away from those islands. ``Aggressive'' and ``belligerent'' are words that come to mind when you're trying to analyze what's the nature of the Chinese regime in these situations.
And then there is, of course, Pakistan with its ``Islamic bomb.'' Never forget the Pakistanis are in a strategic partnership with China even while we give them billions of dollars to bolster Pakistan's terminally ill economy. The Chinese gave Pakistan critical nuclear weapons technology. This is insanity. We are borrowing more from China to give to Pakistan, which is an ally of China, even as Pakistan builds its Islamic bomb with the help of China and continues to help the Taliban, who are at this moment killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Wake up, America. We can't continue with this kind of insanity.
The opening by Iran of a new missile production plant in March of 2010 enabled Iran to quickly expand its supply of NASR anti-ship missiles. Yep, it was another China deal. Not long after that, a Hezbollah-Iranian cruise missile knocked out an Israeli ship. Aha. Yes, another gift from China. And what is the response of the Obama administration to all these transfers of lethal weapons of mass destruction by China to rogue nations? Well, there have been no penalties imposed, even on the state-owned Chinese companies that are conducting these weapons transfers. Even worse, Washington is again considering letting Chinese rockets launch U.S. satellites. I guess they need to upgrade their system so they can pass even more updated weapons on to their criminal buddies.
China's increasingly aggressive and threatening foreign policy are matched at home by severe repression. Millions of religious believers in China are facing increased not decreased oppression. The abuse is indiscriminate, whether they are Christians, Tibetans, Buddhists, Muslims. The most savage treatment, of course, is dealt out to the Falun Gong members. Falun Gong are just yoga and meditation practitioners. They've been tortured, thrown into prison camps, slave labor camps. They have been murdered and their organs have been cut out and sold by the Chinese health industry to the highest bidders, many of whom are Americans. This is the most ghoulish of all repressions. And it continues with devastating intensity.
Then again, maybe all this evil is due to the fact that we Americans are just so belligerent to the Chinese.
What?
Yes, some people want to blame us, so let's reach out to the dragon, not with a clenched fist but with an open hand, with a positive attitude and, most of all, with kindness, not hostility, and with lots of investment money as well, of course, and with lots of technology and secrets.
Give me a break. Wake up, America. This has got to stop.
This nonsense has led to some of America's military's top commanders to misguidedly welcome China's military leaders to visit our own defense centers and our own international defense forums with our Asian Pacific allies and to permit Chinese military personnel to observe our military exercises. One can only guess that the strategy behind this outreach and inclusion is the idea that it will somehow charm the Chinese into thinking of us as their friends, not as their rivals. Hug a dragon and it won't be a dragon.
Well, is it not evident that the very existence of our democracy is what intimidates and enrages the Chinese antidemocratic dictatorship as with all of these dictatorships in the past? It is certainly not a comparison of how many ships we have and airplanes we have as compared to theirs, which has brought on this animosity from Beijing. Beijing knows that the United States has no intention of attacking them. However, like the Japanese before World War II, they know that America is the only power with the courage and the ability to stand between them and their goal, which is one of total domination of a large segment of the world and a heavy-handed influence on the rest.
Perhaps the worst aspect of this looming security crisis is that China's aggressive military modernization has been made possible by its rising trade surplus with the United States. We have unintentionally financed their economy and have built their economy at the expense of jobs and manufacturing at home, and they are using the residual profits from their economic transactions with us to build weapons, very good weapons--better weapons than we may have available to us in the future. Their intent is to back us off and to destroy us as a dynamic force in the world.
In 1998, the People's Liberation Army's publishing company openly published a book that is publicly available, called ``Unrestricted Warfare.'' The strategist's guidelines in that book called for using economic destabilization, computer viruses, information deception, terrorism, and devastating modern military weapons, including biochemical and nuclear weapons.
Among those things highlighted in this Chinese strategy book were two individuals--Osama bin Laden and George Soros. Bin Laden was cited because terror and guerilla groups historically are thought to have bled empires to the point that they could be defeated by a rival power. Soros was lionized because he had mastered the art of manipulating the currencies of countries around the world, from England to Malaysia to Thailand, thus dramatically weakening those countries.
The People's Liberation authors in that book openly stated that, if individuals could accomplish such things, then China, as an emerging power with focused strategic weapons in cyber and deep space, could bring down and defeat a great power such as the United States.
The greatest threat to America's future generations may well be the high-tech strategic and exotic weapons China will possess as a result of advances made in recent years. China's strategic economic position should also be noted with alarm. Global competition over scarce natural resources is intensifying. Armed with advanced weapons and flush with money earned from its American trade imbalance, Beijing has been allying with, buying off and bribing the gangster regimes of the underdeveloped nations of the world, and these same regimes, of course, control the rich energy and finite mineral resources in their countries.
These are not the actions and maneuvers of a government that wants to be part of the world's trading system, that wants to be part of the Family of Nations. These are the actions and maneuvers of a tyrannical dictatorship that is striving to dominate the world in alliance with other dictatorships.
Do you think that such people might sink so low as to bribe the decisionmakers at the World Trade Organization or at the United Nations?
When you hear people say that we should solve these issues, that we must always go multilaterally and come at world peace via part of an international effort, just remember it takes American courage to stand up. If we try to go through the World Trade Organization or the United Nations, we are going to find out someday that the Chinese have bribed those people in the World Trade Organization and in the U.N. If they haven't done it already, they will do it in the future to protect their international acquisitions in Asia, Africa, and South America.
China's People's Liberation Army is certainly a threat, but the Navy that it is building is also a threat because China is building a lethal surface ship and submarine flotilla. They are making outlandish claims now while at the same time building up their fleet for the right to control large ocean areas, like the entire South China Sea. Their naval forces are beginning to have routine patrols around the world's most vital sea lanes and communication and trade lanes.
Indeed, between 1987 and 2009, while the U.S. submarine force was cut in half, China's Navy commissioned 31 new attack submarines. Their new model diesel subs are nearly undetectable by U.S. and allied naval forces, and they are deploying a new missile that can take out a U.S. aircraft carrier 900 miles away. Nevertheless, on February 19, 2009, The New York Times reported that U.S. Pacific Commander Admiral Keating offered the U.S. Navy to assist China in learning how to operate its own aircraft carriers. Boy, that's going to make the world safer. We're going to teach them how to run their aircraft carriers.
Worth noting, a senior Chinese military officer proclaimed that once the Chinese get their aircraft carriers that the United States can claim Hawaii east, and China will take Hawaii west and the Indian Ocean. ``Then you will not need to patrol the western Pacific anymore,'' he said.
How nice. This while we are reducing our own fleet. They are telling us to stay out of a certain area of the world and to stay out of it while they are bullying Japan over some islands in the middle of nowhere. Tomorrow, they are going to declare that they have the rightful domination of over half of the Pacific.
Wake up, America. Don't just look to the ocean for the threat. Look up. Space, the high ground of any future conflict, will soon no longer be our domain, America's domain. It is already now no longer our domain, obviously. China is aggressively moving forward, yes, in the exploration of space but also in space-based and related weapons systems.
In 2006, for example, the U.S. Department of Defense reported that China used a ground-based laser to blind certain U.S. satellites. In January 2007, the People's Liberation Army successfully used an antisatellite missile to intercept a weather satellite. They've blown their satellites out of orbit without any care for the fact that they left heavy debris that threatened all other space activity in that area of space.
No need to complain, of course, because these guys aren't listening.
China's supposed civilian space program has made spectacular gains. Much of it can be traced back to the tech transfer that happened during the Clinton administration, which has now been incorporated into China's rockets and its missiles.
Again, if our aerospace is at risk, blame us. Don't blame them. We gave them the technology. But we can blame them for commissioning hundreds of spies who have penetrated U.S. defense companies and agencies to steal the blueprints and charts needed to enhance their weapons systems. They have a monstrous organized effort for attacking and stealing America's technological secrets by breaking into our computer systems. Yes, we can blame them for that, but we just keep inviting them to observe our military exercises and--oh, yes--teaching them how to use aircraft carriers.
Today, almost every part of the western and central United States is under the potential threat of the increased capability of China's weapons systems. We have given them our secrets. By
agreeing to a trade policy that has been unfair, uneven, and a drain on America's wealth and technology, we have provided them the resources to use this technology, to expand and to modernize their own military.
By agreeing to a trade policy that has been unfair, uneven, and a drain on America's wealth and technology we have provided them the resources to use this technology and to expand and modernize their own military.
Such stupidity is nothing new. Before World War II, there was an effort by the Brits to invest in Hitler's Germany to build economic ties that would prevent conflict. Boy, did that work. And it wasn't just Britain's deal where they betrayed Czech security that convinced Hitler that the West was gutless. It was also British money invested in his country in the 1930s.
We gave the Japanese scrap metal and oil even as they raped China. Eventually the Japanese mayhem in China was too much, even for American capitalists. Not enough, however, to discourage corporate interests from negotiating the sale of, for example, B-17 blueprints to Japan as late as 1940. They never consummated that deal because the attack on Pearl Harbor shortened those negotiations.
Today, we're giving the Chinese our genius and the benefit of our R&D worth billions of dollars, and it's deja vu all over again. Foreign and U.S. satellite operators are maneuvering to loosen the security export controls on the launching of advanced communications satellite systems on PLA--that's People's Liberation Army--controlled rockets and then the companies that make those rockets. Oh, yes, China is offering 30 to 50 percent below market price in order to attract those launches. I wonder why. They must just want to do us favor, or maybe they just remember the last time they made such agreements with American companies and ended up with billions of dollars of American technology that they now have to use against us. What a great deal.
Our big companies make a couple of hundred billion dollars in profit by cooperating with the Chinese rather than launching with U.S. companies. Certain CEO's add a couple million dollar bonuses to themselves for providing short-term savings, and that savings comes from using Chinese rockets. The Chinese end up with access to defense- related research and development that costs the taxpayers billions of dollars. The Chinese have new technologies to defeat us in the future. We have short-term profit and big bonuses for our CEO's in the present. What a deal. It's a raw deal for the American aerospace industry and for our children's safety, and it will put us in jeopardy by using our own technology to put us in jeopardy.
Let me be clear. Letting the Chinese launch U.S. satellites is wrong. Such launches will put money in the pockets of the People's Liberation Army to facilitate their own aggressive space programs. It will help the People's Liberation Army perfect its missile technology, and it will strangle in the cradle the private launch companies that are now emerging in the United States, which will then leave us totally dependent on China for space transportation.
To accomplish this nefarious goal, launching U.S. satellites on Chinese rockets, the U.S. law will have to be changed in order to accomplish that. One way for this to be accomplished is for the Obama administration, like the Clinton administration before, to sign a Presidential waiver of the Tiananmen Square human rights sanctions. Don't miss one crucial fact. The Chinese national space program apparatus is owned and controlled--it's not a private group like in the United States, like Boeing--it is controlled by the People's Liberation Army. Their profits go to the People's Liberation Army. The three main Chinese space entities are all under People's Liberation Army control. All three of these have been repeatedly sanctioned by the U.S. government for proliferation of missile technologies to countries including Iran and Pakistan.
Wake up, America. They are planning to play us for suckers like they already have in the past. Well, they are trying to play us that way because we're acting that way. This shouldn't even be an issue except, of course, the Chinese have the best lobbyists in Washington, the best lobbyists money can buy, and they've also got the lobbyists from U.S. corporations who are working with them, doing their bidding. And even better, they can buy off the so-called think tanks.
What we've got is money from these corporations doing business in China who are putting that money into think tanks, which then come and testify before Congress about different policies that would, of course, affect whether or not we make decisions like the one I'm talking about.
And who's left out, of course? What we're talking about is the American worker who has been put permanently out of work and the American people who are now in jeopardy. So now the Chinese are using their excessive profit to buy influence here at the expense of the American people. Wake up, America.
A critical event of the cold war was China's repositioning, which put them in friendly relations with the United States and against the Soviet Union. Later when I worked for President Reagan, it was hoped that direct communication and economic ties would result in a permanent, positive change that would better the lives and freedom of the Chinese people. Unlike his predecessors or those who came later, Reagan understood that peace would only be furthered if freedom was simultaneously expanded as we increased economic activity. Reagan made it clear as he visited China in 1985. I worked with him on those speeches. I actually know very well what the message was of the speeches that Reagan gave in China.
If China continued to open up politically and to liberalize, America would keep its markets open and would be investing and trying to uplift the Chinese people.
In 1989, the Tiananmen Square massacre of the Chinese democracy movement was the tipping point. President Reagan, who was committed to human rights and democracy, was no longer President. President Reagan's successors have not been so committed to human rights and democracy. The Chinese ruling clique paid no serious price for this brutal, monstrous atrocity against the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square. Neither President Bush nor Clinton did anything even as the Chinese Communist Party retrenched themselves in power with blood and steel and murder.
And since Tiananmen Square, the repression in that country has gotten worse and worse and worse, not better, and we've continued acting like buddies. That's our offensive, our buddy offensive. Our policies have not been reformed. Our policies have not reformed the tyrannical system in China. In fact, we have expanded it because they have come to believe they can do anything to their own people, repression, build any kind of military threat, and we will still grant them economic policies that will enable the wealth to flow in their direction, even as it is unfair to our own people.
China is a Frankenstein monster of our own making, a monster that now threatens the world peace, economics, and democratic evolution. One would think as this threat becomes ever more clear that there would be some change in our policy, but no, the insanity continues.
Not long ago, there was a highly publicized visit to China by Secretary Hillary Clinton, who brought a legion of reporters with her to the Shanghai World Fair. Secretary Clinton proudly showed them an American exhibition hall built with $60 million in contributions from American corporations. How nice--the companies paid to build an exhibition hall. Unfortunately, it was so vapid and uninspiring without a hint of love of democracy and freedom that reflects the core values of the American people. No, the so-called charity's leader of that pavilion, who built that hall in Beijing, Frank Lavin, explained why there wasn't any reference to freedom or democracy, ``We're not trying to be provocative'' or ``insulting'' to the Chinese viewers, he said.
What does all that say about us? What does it say about them? Secretary Clinton, being as uninspiring as she is, pointed out that the world's fair was introducing America to the world as a rising power, according to our Secretary of State. This world's fair is a
coming out party also for China. Well, it is really of historical significance, she said. Yeah, it is of historical significance. It's basically saying that America doesn't care about freedom and democracy. China is coming out, that's right. A new style of 21st century tyranny is being created with Chinese characteristics that fuses the control mechanisms of Communism with corporate funding and high-tech savvy.
The leadership of this potential juggernaut has global ambitions and is ruthless and persistent. We need to undo any optimistically generous policies that have been giving away our industrial base and transferring resources and power to China.
Most importantly, however, through our actions we must reaffirm to ourselves and to the world our commitment to the ideals that made this country strong and democratic, a role model for humanity, regardless of culture or language.
Advocates of our current China policy promised peace and mutual prosperity and the expansion of freedom as China grew stronger. Yet the stronger China has become, the more repressive it has gotten. We thought we were creating a peaceful new member of the international community. But instead we've shifted power to a government that remains the world's worst human rights abuser, repressing its own people while building its military and making aggressive claims on boundaries and territorial waters that threaten its neighbors, as well as the flow of international commerce through long-established shipping lanes.
Exchanges, like the World's Fair exhibits, were supposed to promote U.S. values. Investment in Chinese manufacturing was supposed to have led to liberalization of their society. Where are the reforms? Where are the benevolent liberals who were going to democratize China? You know where they are? They're in jail. They're in prison, or they've been murdered by the regime. They sit in cells right next to uncompromising religious leaders, believers, and the Falun Gong practitioners.
Crackdowns on dissent, religious freedom, and free speech have escalated in Tibet; missiles facing Taiwan have grown to more than 1,400 in the past few years; and the cyberdestabilization on a global scale is often traced back to the Chinese military facilities. These things should be alarm bells for all people who want peace and believe in freedom.
This is an enemy who has no shame and, perhaps, as we show weakness, has no fear. It is an enemy that hates religion and sees freedom and human rights as an anarchistic evil that needs to be obliterated. This is the threat over the horizon, a dragon which has been made stronger, more aggressive, and more hungry as a result of misguided American policies. Those policies must be changed. We must have the resolve to meet this evermore and present challenge.
China is not the only society that honors its ancestors and forefathers. We must respect the sacrifices and legacies for all those brave Americans who worked, struggled, fought, and often perished for our freedom, for liberty, for justice, for the rights of every person. These principles are what not only bind us together as a people but bond us with people of every land, especially those people in China and others who are oppressed by dictators, those people who long for freedom. It is their success in reforming and transforming their country, in throwing off their chains of oppression, and in doing so, they will free us from the threat of a powerful dragon country as they create a peaceful and a democratic and prosperous country with which we can trade and have equal and positive relations.
If we have courage and stand tall, the next century will not be the century of China. It will be the century of free people, technologically united throughout the globe, united in respect for the rights of people everywhere and committed to respecting each other and the building of a more peaceful, prosperous, and free world.