Senior congressman re-introduces China Trade Relations Act for 2023, condemns Beijing’s organ harvesting atrocities and ‘unrestricted warfare’ against the U.S.
U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) (L) and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) (R) speak to the media after a meeting regarding the Sandy aid bill with Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) January 2, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
By Leo Timm
Leo Timm covers China-related news, culture, and history. Follow him on Twitter at @kunlunpeaks
Published: February 9, 2023
A senior Republican
congressman representing New Jersey and a longtime critic of Communist China
has revived a bill intended to strip the regime of its trade privileges in
light of Beijing’s “systematic economic espionage against the United States and
egregious human rights abuses.”
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ)
highlighted the importance of confronting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on
its attempts to undermine the U.S. as well as its vast crimes at home —
including a massive organ transplant industry believed to be fueled by the
murder of political and religious prisoners.
Speaking on Fox News with
popular host Tucker Carlson on Feb. 7, Smith noted that despite decades of
preferential trade treatment touted as helping China liberalize, the CCP has
“gone from bad to extremely worse.”
Titled the China Trade Relations Act of 2023 (HR
638), the bill is a follow-up to a previous
attempt by Smith in March 2022 to bring back human
rights as an effective factor in U.S.-China economic relations.
It takes aim at the 1994
decision by then-President Bill Clinton to set aside human rights concerns in
America’s economic relations with China, giving Beijing preferential trade
status.
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That year, Smith held a press
conference on Capitol Hill to protest Clinton and others for ignoring the
Chinese regime’s growing abuses; just five years prior, the Communist Party had
deployed tanks and armed soldiers to kill thousands of student protesters at
Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Now, “the Chinese Communist
Party has gotten a pass for its gross human rights violations while benefiting
tremendously by stealing American jobs and growing into the economic superpower
it is today,” Smith is quoted on his congressional website as
saying.
“China is an exporting
nation,” Smith said on Carlson’s program. “Without exports, that economy dries
to a trickle. … They have to clean up their act, or else their ability to send
exports to U.S. markets will be severely and substantially tariffed.”
Bent on tyranny
The CCP seized power over
mainland China in 1949, following a long struggle to spread throughout the
impoverished Chinese countryside before conquering the nation’s cities and
becoming the deadliest regime in history through political persecutions and
mass starvation.
The Party aims to establish
the dominance of its Marxist-Leninist system worldwide, and actively vies with
the United States with the ultimate goal of replacing it as the world’s
superpower. A famous book penned by two Chinese military officers, Unrestricted Warfare,
details the various efforts by the CCP to surpass
and bring down the U.S.
While many Western elites and
scholars advocated increased trade ties with China as a vehicle of encouraging
political reforms, the CCP did not do so, and instead doubled down on its
ideology and dictatorship.
“The Uyghurs are being
subjected to genocide, religious freedom is being decimated all over China,
[the CCP] is horribly oppressing the people of China,” he said, adding that
Beijing now threatens democratic Taiwan, having recently destroyed the freedoms
enjoyed by residents of Hong Kong after millions rose up demanding political
reforms in the 2019 protests.
Smith has frequently spoken
out against the CCP’s human rights abuses, being one of the first U.S.
legislators to openly condemn the regime’s harrowing crime of forced organ
harvesting.
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“I just had a hearing in July
on this horrible practice of stealing people’s organs. Fifty thousand to
100,000 people — victims — every year who are killed for their organs,” Smith
said. “It’s from people like Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghurs, and the
Falun Gong practitioners,” the main religious communities that the communist regime
targets for persecution. “This is something Nazi-like that is going on right
now.”
In particular, the Chinese
transplant industry burgeoned starting in the year 2000, right after then-CCP
head Jiang Zemin ordered the suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual discipline
and its tens of millions of adherents. For many years of China’s economic rise,
the majority of those killed for their organs are believed to be
practitioners of Falun Gong.
Changing the US-China relationship
“America should never let
genocide and slave labor become a ‘permanent’ or ‘normal’ part of U.S. trade,”
said Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI), a cosponsor of the legislation, as quoted on
Smith’s website.
“It’s time we stopped
overlooking widespread human rights abuses as just the ‘cost of doing business’
in Communist China and restored the annual congressional review of China’s
‘most favored nation’ trade status,” she said.
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“The Smith-Tiffany
legislation would relink China’s trade status with its record on human rights
and require annual affirmation by the President that the CCP is making serious
and sustained improvement in respecting human rights in order to achieve
preferential treatment in trade protocols, sometimes referred to as most
favored nation (MFN) status,” Smith’s website reads.
Smith has chaired the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) since the Republicans took
the House in last November’s midterm elections.
The United States started
taking a tougher stance on the Chinese regime during the Trump administration,
when the government actively called out the Party’s communist ideology and
slapped escalating tariff schedules on Chinese exports to the U.S. The Biden
administration has continued some of these efforts, though shying away from the
ideological dimension.
Tucker Carlson described the
prospective bill as the “only lever that could get any change at all in the relationship
with China.”
In their conversation, Smith
said that he was working to gain support for HR 638.
“We’re building a group, I’ve
talked to a lot of people, we’re going to get a lot of cosponsors.”
“Many if not most business
and political leaders have long bought into the ‘China Fantasy’ that overlooks
human rights abuses while asserting that increased trade will make China more
like us,” Smith said, according to his website. “It was not true then and it’s
not true now.”
https://www.visiontimes.com/2023/02/09/remove-chinas-trade-privileges-to-stop-funding-communist-abuses-nj-rep-chris-smith.html
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