Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I rise to commend the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman) on his leadership on H.R. 2415, which, of course, emphasizes the need to enhance the security of the United States overseas diplomatic missions as well as our U.S. personnel overseas. As the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman) has stated, among the greatest threats to the security of American diplomatic missions and personnel is by Osama bin Laden and his legion of terrorists who train and operate out of Afghanistan. The primary benefactors of bin Laden's terrorists are elements in Pakistan and the extremist Taliban militia, who not only host and protect bin Laden but have imposed a reign of terror on the people of Afghanistan and especially on the women of Afghanistan. Mr. Chairman, on numerous occasions I have charged and I repeat today that the Clinton administration, despite statements to the contrary, has a covert policy of cooperating with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that has orchestrated the creation, the rise to power, and the ongoing tyranny of the Taliban. The Taliban are now competing with SLORC, the SLORC dictatorship in Burma, for the role of the world's largest producer of opium. They are harboring anti-American terrorists such as bin Laden, and the Taliban's fanatical leaders are waging a psychotic reign of terror on millions of women in Afghanistan. On August 25, 1998, using my oversight responsibility as a senior member of the House Committee on International Relations, I sent a letter to the Department of State requesting the pertinent cables and documents related to U.S. policy on Afghanistan, especially when it relates to the Taliban. The State Department ignored my original request. As the Taliban's tyranny against women and human rights abuses against their entire population intensified in Afghanistan, and at committee hearings, I repeatedly restated my call and my request for documents to the Assistant Secretary of State Rick Indefurth and other State Department officials. And even as my requests for information were ignored, actions taken by the State Department seemed to confirm my charges of a covert U.S. policy of support for the extremist Taliban cult in Afghanistan. In November of 1998, at a closed hearing on Iraq, for the record, I asked Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when the Afghanistan material that I requested would be delivered. She said it would be coming soon. Christmas, Hannukah, and the New Year came and went and still no documents. At the outset of this Congressional session, in February at a full committee hearing in full public, I reminded Secretary Albright of her commitment to release the Afghan documents. At that time the gentleman from New York (Chairman Gilman) supported my request for the record. Again Secretary Albright told us the documents were forthcoming. During the following weeks, my staff and the committee staff of the gentleman from New York (Chairman Gilman) continued to call on the State Department about this commitment for Afghan documents. To cut the story down to size here, we still have not had one document from the State Department that would either confirm or disprove my charges. I am, therefore, ever more convinced and I would hope the women who have testified here today will join me in insisting that the State Department provide requested documents that would prove one way or the other whether or not this administration is again committing a sin against the people of the world whether it believes in human rights in supporting the Taliban, one of the world's worst human rights abusers and one of the world's worst enemies of women's freedom. So I would ask my fellow colleagues to join me. After over a year of stonewalling and blockading our attempts to get to the information, I ask Members on both sides of the aisle to join me in getting the State Department to give up this stonewalling and to give us the pertinent information about Afghan policy and what the real position of this government is.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I yield to the gentleman from Nebraska.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time, that is correct. This gentleman believes that the policy of this Congress is to be very careful about our technology exports to Communist China and other potentially hostile governments. However, in stating this policy, the State Department has used a sledge hammer and swung the pendulum so far over that it is getting in the way of business dealings and technology transactions with countries that are friendly, Democratic countries, Brazil, Sweden, Belgium, you name it. And we do not want that. But my amendment says we should try to expedite that, and it emphasizes that those dealings with China and other potential hostile powers not be expedited. That is the purpose of my language.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I have been a Member of this House now for 11 years, and I have to say that I have never met a man more principled and more honest and more open than George Brown. I loved George Brown dearly, and I think I am talking for the rest of us, certainly on our side of the aisle, and I know many others will come up, but George Brown was such a principled human being. And sometimes people who feel so strongly about their principles get caught up in bitterness and partisanship, but George Brown had such a wonderful spirit and a happiness about him that he diffused tension with his principles and his spirit rather than creating tensions. I just would like to add my words and to say that working under his leadership in the Committee on Science was a joy. And here we are at the 30th anniversary of our landing on the moon, and George Brown certainly deserves such a great deal of credit for the leadership he provided over the years in this great achievement of our country. George Brown was an honest liberal, an honest man, a man with a dear heart, and we will miss him.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I plead with my fellow Republicans, and I say ``plead'' with them, to pay attention to what is happening here. How can we claim the mantle of being responsible in the budget process, in the budget decisions we have to make, when we are providing the President of the United States with a slush fund to spend billions and billions of dollars on foreign interests? How can we look our people in the face, the veterans in the face that we have to sometimes, or the jobless or the seniors and say we cannot spend $10 million more here or $100 million more here because we are trying to be responsible?. If we do not vote for the Sanders amendment to say there must be a vote in Congress to spend these billions of dollars overseas, we are betraying these citizens of our country. How can we look at them in the face and say we are being responsible at home when we prevent unaccountable spending overseas? Please support this amendment.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this amendment. We have heard arguments on both sides tonight. But I would ask people to use their common sense. I would ask the people at home to listen very carefully to the arguments, those reading the Congressional Record to read the words very carefully. The proposition is very simple. If there is a $1 billion transaction or more from the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which means American tax dollars, the American people's money, there should be approval by Congress. It is almost nonsensical for us to suggest that the American people do not deserve accountability for expenditures of over $1 billion. I do not understand it. I hope the people listening to this debate, I hope those people reading the Congressional Record begin asking themselves, why is it that we have such heavy debates on issues, for example, of whether we should increase spending for veterans benefits by $100 million or $50 million, yet we have people that are going to the floor defending a policy of having unelected officials, shadowy figures, who we do not know who exactly is making the decision, spending billions of dollars of American tax dollars to help foreign currencies? The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul) made a very important point tonight. The original purpose of the Exchange Stabilization Fund was to stabilize the American currency. At least, there is some justification, or perhaps there was at that time, that we were watching out for the interest of the American people. Now, what we have here is yet another example, and I hope people look at this example, of American liberty being sacrificed on the alter of globalism: America has to come second. The interest of the American people should not be considered. We cannot hold ourselves accountable to the American people, even though it is billions of dollars of their money. Count me out on that, please. I came here to Congress to be held accountable. Now, we disagree on a lot of things. The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) and I, we disagree on a lot of things. The gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), the author of this amendment, and I disagree. We debate about them on the floor. I happen to believe that less expenditures are good. That is a good policy for the United States. The gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) thinks that we should have more government intervention here at home. But that is an honest debate. We are held accountable for that. To have people here say that, for the government of Brazil or Indonesia or some crooked regime in some other country, far-off country of the world, we have to give the power to some unelected officials to spend billions of dollars of our money without a vote of Congress, talk about undermining the democratic principles on which this country is founded. I think this is very clear. I hope everyone pays attention to the debate. Unfortunately, it is happening at 10 o'clock at night. But I hope the American people pay attention to who is making the arguments and who is on their side. Unfortunately, when one gives the power to an unelected elite to spend the money without any approval of Congress, and that is what we are talking about, billions of dollars being spent by an unelected elite, sometimes that money does not go to people who really share our values. Sometimes it goes to people like in Indonesia when it was being controlled by an autocratic regime. Sometimes it goes to people who are just part of the same international country club, the guys making the decisions, these Ivy Leaguers who get hired to make these decisions. Now, after all, we Members of Congress cannot be trusted to make decisions like that. We have to leave it up to these guys from the Ivy League schools who are not elected by anybody to watch out for the American people. No, I am sorry. That is not the way it works here in America. What works here in America is we have trust in the people. We have trust that, if we make the wrong decision, we are going to get kicked out. But everything is supposed to be up front. Unfortunately, over the decades, we have permitted the freedom and the accountability of the democratic system to be eroded, and this is perhaps the best example in our government today. My hat is off to the gentleman from Vermont, again a man who I disagree with philosophically on a number of issues, but who stands for democracy, stands for accountability, stands for liberty. And under those concepts, we can disagree on what the government should do.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this legislation, and I think it is really important for us, when we are discussing discrimination and discussing how to treat each other decently in the society, to come to an honest analysis about whose ox is being gored in this society and whose toes are being stepped upon. I think there is a wide consensus in our society today that people who live less traditional lives, let us say, or have different types of values, sexual values, et cetera, have a right to their privacy and a right to their personal lives and a right to live as they see fit in their own lives. But, frankly, in the last 10 years, what I have seen, which is very disturbing to me, is that people with more traditional views, especially more traditional Christian views, although I think that this is true of Muslims and Jewish people, who are deeply involved in their religious traditions as well, that those people are being told they cannot make determinations for themselves and for their lives and for their families that are consistent with their religious values. I see the greatest victim of discrimination in our society today as being these people, these Christians, these Jews, these Muslims, who have more traditional religious values. If someone wants to have certain sexual activities, and this is what they desire and they do so in their privacy, there are very few people today who want the government to intrude in that. But there seem to be a lot of people trying to force their way into the lives of others. For example, the Catholics cannot have a parade. They attempted to have a parade in New York, and people whose social lives and social values are totally in conflict with what Catholics believe feel that they can force their way into a Catholic parade, which is, to me, violating those Catholics' right to have their own beliefs. We have the Boy Scouts of America, which is a private organization, and they have certain moral standards that they believe in. Now, who is under attack? Who is under attack here? The Boy Scouts of America are spending millions of dollars just to maintain what they consider to be their moral standards. No one is out forcing their way into the homes of other people who want to live in their privacy and want to live decent lives with their own values in terms of whether or not they are in agreement with some of these more traditional values, but the ones with the traditional values are under attack all the time. I think this piece of legislation is going to try to swing the pendulum back. Certainly 25 and 30 years ago there was great discrimination in our country against certain nonconformists, one might say, of people who had different than the traditional values. Today, that pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that people with more traditional values are under attack, and we need to protect their rights as well. So this, I think, is a balance and I support the legislation.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, by the end of July, the Congress will again vote on most-favored-nation status, that is, granting this special status to the People's Republic of China. This is the 11th year in which I will have voted on this issue, and this time, however, it will be called, instead of MFN, most-favored-nation status, it will be called NTR, normal trade relations. Every year, as the Communist Chinese refuse to lower their huge tariffs on American exports, goods that in fact make it impossible for us to have a trade balance with them and we end up with, every year, even though we vote most-favored-nation status, they keep those huge tariffs on our goods while their goods can flood into our country at very low tariffs and thus we end up every year with a huge deficit in our trade balance with the Communist Chinese and they have a huge surplus, 60, $70 billion worth of surplus. So what are we doing? Why are we doing this year after year after year when the final result is always that they maintain high tariffs against our products while we permit their products to flood into our markets? What is going on here? Is that something that is good for the United States of America? Is it good for us to have an unfair trading relationship with the world's worst human rights abuser? Of course we are being told that if we do this, other things will happen, like, for example, not only will they lower their tariffs eventually, but eventually they will liberalize their country and become more democratic. Of course, we have not seen any evidence of that at all. There has been no evidence that they are reforming in terms of opening up their markets to our people who would like to sell our products there and there is no evidence that they are becoming more liberal or that there is less oppression in Communist China. The difference between this year's vote and past years when we voted on this will be that Congress is voting most-favored-nation status, or, I should say, normal trade relations status and we are granting that to the Communist Chinese, not only knowing that it is not lowering their tariffs and their trade barriers to our products coming in while they exploit our own, putting our people out of work with cheap products, of course, again knowing that it is not having any impact on liberalization, in fact it is more repressive now in Communist China than it was 10 years ago. There was an opposition 10 years ago. Now there is none. There are no free newspapers, opposition party or anything such as that. No, but we have known that all along. What is the difference this time is that we are doing this this year, Congress will be voting on this issue this year knowing, thanks to the Cox Committee and the New York Times and the Washington Times that the Beijing dictatorship is at this moment now beginning to produce nuclear weapons based on technology that it has stolen from us. So here we are about to vote to grant this trading status, normal trading relations with Communist China, this Communist dictatorship, knowing that at this very same moment they are beginning to go into production on the first generation of weapons of mass destruction that have been improved and made possible and their delivery made more reliable and more certain by U.S. technology. These weapons of mass destruction, which will soon be able to incinerate any city in the United States, will be delivered by a new generation of Chinese rockets that have been made, as I say, more reliable and more deadly by American corporations and scientists working on either our government's payroll or working on the payroll of these huge American corporations. But, of course, the technology that they are giving and bestowing on the Chinese to make their rockets more reliable and more effective, this is deadly weapons technology which cost us, the American taxpayer, tens of billions of dollars to develop over the Cold War. They taxed it from our pockets in order to protect our country. We were told we were doing this in order to make our country more secure. But instead, this technology has been used and when we vote for normal trade relations with Communist China, we will now do so knowing that our relations with Communist China have not made it better for us economically in terms of the trade barriers are still there, it has not made China any freer but that they have actually, on top of all of these things, managed to upgrade their rockets, upgrade their capabilities with this technology, billions of dollars of technological secrets from the United States, and, of course, the rockets are loaded with their most deadly weapons, weapons beginning to be built based on the technology again that they got from the United States. In that case they stole it from us. Of course we are being told that our trade relationship with Communist China is mutually beneficial. It is a mutually beneficial relationship. That means it must be good for us in some way, as well as for the Chinese people in some way. Well, it is not good for the Chinese people. It is good for their clique that holds power with an iron fist in China beating down all opposition. And it is good for a few billionaires here in the United States--I call them Bill's Billionaire Buddies--but it certainly is not making China any less a threat to the peace and it certainly is not making our country any more prosperous, and even though China supposedly is more interdependent on us now, they do not seem to be any less belligerent, hostile and aggressive than they were 10 years ago. Yet every year, 50 and $60 billion in hard currency, because we have molded the relationship with Communist China, these are the rules we have set down. The leaders of the United States of America have determined what the rules of the game are. They have sat down with the Communist Chinese, their bosses in Beijing, and said, we agree to these rules of the game. And at the end of the year, the Communist Chinese gangsters who run that country, they earn and they have to play with $60 billion in hard currency. So any talk about human rights and all these other things that are paraded up and down like the administration will suggest they believe in these things, the Communist Chinese dictators know that that is a lot of baloney, because if we really meant that we supported democracy and human rights or we were really concerned about the massacres in Tibet or the massacres of Muslims in the far western reaches of their country, we would be changing the rules of the game so that the Communist Chinese would not end up with these tens of billions of dollars of hard currency. They laugh at us. They think that it is a big joke. They think that our leaders do not believe in a darned thing and that human rights is nothing more than sloganeering; and that when this Congress again votes for most-favored-nation status or, as it is called now, normal trade relations, we too will be confirming for these dictators in Beijing, the world's worst human rights abusers, the people who now are using our technology to aim weapons at our cities that could potentially incinerate our populations, they know that we are still if we bestow on them this status, that Congress itself does not care enough about these violations in order not to vote to change the system that is working against us. Yes, in this hall all of us, all of my colleagues, we will all vote on this issue, and it will be a message to those Chinese dictators, and unfortunately it will be a message to the people of China. What is really unfortunate is that the people of China are America's greatest allies. Those people who are now trying to defend their horrendous actions in supporting the Communist Chinese dictatorship are doing everything they can to try to divert the argument by claiming that this is in some way antiChinese. Those of us who are concerned about Communist Chinese power and what the economic relationship and what the other relationships we have had with the Communist Chinese have done to our country, we are, we are not in any way condemning the people of China. The people of China live under a Fascist like dictatorship. We cannot blame them, and in fact they are our greatest allies; we are on their side. What we want is freedom for those people in China, and when China has a democracy and the people of China are able to choose their own leaders and demand honest government and demand humane government and demand a government that respects the rights of people and does not waste their money on militarism and weapons systems, then China will no longer be a threat to the world; China will be a friend. In fact, if China had a democratic system now like Great Britain or Italy or Japan or other countries like that, we would not even be concerned that perhaps they would learn some of our nuclear weapon secrets. We would not care because it was a democratic, peace loving country. No, those people who are arguing that there is some kind of racism behind this are trying to deflect criticism, trying to deflect those who would unravel this mystery that has been left behind of what our policy is all about and why we have a policy that is so demonstrably against the economic and security interests of our country and of the Western World. Tonight I hope to convince anyone willing to listen that our trade relationship with Communist China is wrong. It is not working for the benefit of the American people, and it is not making China more open, nor is it making it more democratic. It is not making peace more likely, and in fact our China policy is merely filling the bank accounts of a new class of billionaires, both billionaires here and billionaires there. You have Chiang's cronies, his crony comrades, and Bill's billionaire buddies. At the same time, this perverted process bolsters the military might and economic power of, as I say, a nation that is controlled by a militaristic dictatorship that is the planet's worst human rights abuser, a government that is engaging in genocide in Tibet and has recently obliterated any organized political opposition among its massive population. It is a ruthless government that even while modernizing its military is already bullying its neighbors, and let us remember this when we are talking about China: We just spent tens of billions of dollars in the Balkans in order to save those people in Kosovo who were under the threat of genocide. Yet China, Communist China, is committing that same kind of genocide on the people of Tibet. They are committing similar genocide, and we are conducting, we do not know what is going on right now, but in the far reaches of western China against their Muslim population. But the people of Tibet continue to face this brutality in an attempt to wipe their culture off the face of the map. But yet when it comes to China, we have policies that encourage American businessmen to invest in China, building up their industrial capabilities while a reaction in Serbia and in Kosovo is to basically declare war on Serbia. Now let me just say for the record I did support the Kosovars' right to freedom and independence, and I thought we should have armed the Kosovars and recognized their independence. I think that the people of Tibet and other people in the world have that right, but the United States, and now I am not advocating that we go into Tibet and go into these countries around the world where they do have people who are being oppressed like this, but we should always side with people who are being oppressed by dictatorial regimes, by monstrous dictators like Mr. Milosevic. Mr. Milosevic is a Serbian dictator, and we have put a price on his head. At the same time we are shaking hands with the monsters in Beijing who have committed bloody crimes that are at least on the scale of Mr. Milosevic, and we are setting up a trading system which will be reaffirmed by a vote on Most Favored Nation status, normal trade relations, that will in the end result in tens of billions of dollars, $60 billion of hard currency at the end of the year, at the end of the accounting, will be in their hands because of the rules that we have set up. This makes no sense. It is contrary to the principles of our country, it is contrary to the values of our people, and worse than that, it is contrary to our national security interests. It is contrary to the safety, it undermines the safety of each and every person who lives in the United States of America, and we have seen that because they are taking that money and modernizing their weapon systems and using technology that they have stolen from the United States and that they have used to lure American businessmen into giving them to enable them to have rockets and missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction capable of incinerating millions of Americans that they would never have had in 20 or 30 years from now if it was not for the help that we were giving them and the relationship that we have established with this incredibly nonsensical, idiotic trade relationship. Dealing with China today is reminiscent to the threat that the world faced from the emerging Japanese military power in the 1920s. It is almost deja vu. As Yogi Berra said, it is deja vu all over again. Think about the 1920s. We are now in a period of prosperity as we were in the 1920s, and there was a new power emerging in the world, but yet the United States did not feel that it could focus on that power, and in fact in Europe where Adolf Hitler just a few years later would emerge, the Japanese were ahead of Hitler. We ignored that threat as well because by the time that threat happened things were too ominous for us. And in the 1920s, we had a country, the Japanese empire; it was run by thugs, it was run by gangsters, these people who brutally beat up and murdered anybody who believed in democracy in their country, and there was a bit of a power struggle there with people who wanted to go toward the west in Japan in the early 1920s who were murdered and suppressed. We saw that happening. The thugs that ran Japan in the 1920s believed in racial superiority. They are perceived that they had an historic right to dominate Asia and the Pacific; and, of course, they saw something else. The Japanese realized that the United States was the only country capable of standing between their goals of domination of Asia and the Pacific and that we were the only country, the courage of our people was the only thing, that could stop them from expanding their brutal regime and its control to all of Asia and the Pacific basin. I am afraid, Mr. Speaker, that that is the kind of threat that we face now in Asia. It is not the 1920s, but there is a regime that is run by gangsters and dictators, thugs, people who are murdering their opposition, people who hate the West and hate everything that we stand for, people who believe that they are racially superior, people who believe that they have an historic right to dominate all of Asia and the Pacific basin. This country, of course, that I am referring to is Communist China. Communist China, again, if it was a democracy, would be no problem. This would be an era of hope. It would be an era of incredible opportunity for all humankind if China would be ruled by democracy rather than ruled by gangsters and thugs who commit heinous crimes to maintain their power and stand for everything that we oppose. Yes, just like with Japan, the Communist Chinese regime understands that only the United States has the power to stand between them and their goals; and their goal in Communist China today, their goal is to dominate all of Asia, all the way from Central Asia, where I predict soon we will see a massive influx of Chinese into the sparsely populated Central Asian republics. We will see territorial claims made there and claims on Siberia and Mongolia and Manchuria, and we will see claims as we have already seen of the Communist Chinese, rights to dominate all of Southeast Asia down through Burma and Cambodia and, yes, our great ally, Thailand. The communists in Vietnam, that dictatorship, is frightened to death. We see that the Communist Chinese are trying to expand their area of domination. They now have taken over small islands very close to the coastline of the Philippines. The Philippines, one of our great allies, a country struggling to be democratic, a country that has such close ties with the United States, a country that has a free press and freedom of religion, a country that represents the type of democratic reform and economic progress and the attempts by their new president to uplift the poorest of the poor in the Philippines, these people are trying their hearts out, they are doing everything they can to uplift their country only to be confronted with a militaristic threat of Communist China on their doorstep, where the Spratly Islands now, which are only 100 miles off their shore and 800 miles off the shore of Communist China, the Communist Chinese have come in and occupied some of those islands and built fortifications and stationed war ships in the lagoons; this to a practically demilitarized Philippines. This kind of bullying cannot be ignored. We ignored it when the Japanese did this during the 1920s, and it led to a war that cost millions of lives. Today we still have a chance to try to change that. We sold the Japanese during this time airplane designs. We sold them fuel. We sold them metal. We had quite a trading relationship with them. In fact, Germany with all this talk about how free trade and interactive trade is going to make somebody less aggressive, totally was interactive economically with the rest of Europe. We even had exchange programs with the Japanese. We let the Japanese militarists study our systems up close. There were military exchanges. We actually gave Japanese military officials the right to look at our military bases and talk to us about our military tactics and have interaction with our military in the 1920s. Of course, the Japanese thought we were weaklings. Their reaction to our openness was not, oh, my, the Americans then are not really our enemy. Instead, the Japanese militarists were saying what weaklings these are, because we were dealing not with a democratic regime that would have looked at that as a friendly gesture but a dictatorship, tough guys running a country, and that is what we have in China today. They interpret our willingness to have these same type of military exchange programs, our willingness to let Communist Chinese scientists come into our laboratories, our willingness to permit a trade relationship to continue that gives them $60 billion a year of hard currency, they look at that as weakness. They do not look at that as being friendship. I went to the Spratly Islands. I went there. The State Department did everything they could to prevent me from going there, and I went with a member of my staff, Al Santoli, and a couple of other Americans, with a couple of Filipino legislators, and we flew right over the Spratly Islands and saw them building those fortifications. Our government, the State Department, tried everything they could do to prevent me from getting there so that I could not explain that to the American people and take the pictures that would open up this debate. I have also led the congressional opposition to what I consider the mind-boggling military exchange program that we have had between the Pentagon and the Communist Chinese. This year, the so-called game plan for military exchanges included Communist Chinese officials attending workshops or seminars on supplies, how to supply their army and do so effectively, on logistics, on special operations, on military strategy. This was part of the Clinton administration's game plan for how we were going to interact with the Communist Chinese military. It included letting the Communist Chinese attend sophisticated air and naval war games as well as observing our elite 82nd Airborne Division at its paratrooper training operations at our National Training Center in California. Now, this was part of the administration's game plan for this year, despite the fact that the administration already knew that the Communist Chinese had a major espionage effort that had stolen our most sacred secrets, our most well-kept secrets on nuclear weapons. They knew the Communist Chinese had come into possession of nuclear weapons secrets that had cost us tens of billions of dollars and were upgrading their rockets and upgrading their weapons systems based on this technology. But yet they went right ahead to plan this military exchange program as if there was nothing wrong. Yes, well, something is wrong. Something is wrong all right. Something is terribly wrong here in Washington. And despite the revelations of Chinese weapons espionage, the espionage at our weapons laboratories, a Chinese delegation, now this is after we have known all about how the Chinese have managed to get their hands on some of this technology that eventually came from our weapons laboratories, this administration still had scheduled a Chinese delegation to visit Sandia National Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in New Mexico. All of these exchange programs with the military even went there. First of all, what I want to know is why any potential hostile power to the United States has its scientists roaming around our laboratories in the first place. But now we are being told even after the administration knew that they had stolen these secrets, secrets that could put in jeopardy or are putting in jeopardy, these secrets are putting in jeopardy the lives of tens of millions of Americans, they are still moving forward with this, blase, blithefully moving forward and blithefully, again, coming to Congress asking us, forget all about that, forget about all the security stuff, go ahead and grant most- favored-nation status, normal trade relations with the communist Chinese as if none of that has taken place. We have learned a lot of this since last year. For 10 years we have been voting to grant this. If Congress votes again to do this, it will do so knowing these revelations, knowing about these revelations of this espionage and about how damaged our national security has been. Of course, we are being told that China is being liberalized by our trade. Let us just tackle that question, is China actually being liberalized because we are trading with them? And by the way, no one is talking about cutting off trade. We are just talking about not granting them the same trade status we would to a democratic society. During this time when we have granted this vicious dictatorship the same trading status we would to Italy, Belgium, or England, we have found that they were going in the opposite direction. There is no more opposition in China. They are either in their Lao Gai prison camps or they are in exile or they have been murdered. Ten years ago there was an opposition. Tibet is still being destroyed. There is still genocide going on. In fact, the World Bank, supported by our tax dollars, is thinking about spending $100 million in order to help transport regular Chinese people into the territory where Tibetan people live. Gee, thanks. Our taxpayers are even subsidizing the genocide. There is no free press in China. There has been no evolution towards a free press. Now the Chinese, of course, are insisting that we register religious people. If you just register these religious people, they will be free to practice their religion. We have heard that before. Did we not hear that in Germany in the 1930s, if the Jews just register, everything will be okay? We have seen this in the past in China, where people were lured out into the open, and then a few years later when the hammer came down, they were arrested and they were slaughtered. Anybody suggesting, and this goes for Billy Graham or whoever else is trying to convince Christians to register in China, should be ashamed of themselves because they are not reading history and they are giving the benefit of the doubt to this bloody regime, and they in the end will cost the lives of these believers. Of course, they also have forced abortion, which continues unabated, and we have seen no development of an independent judiciary. In fact, the President of the United States, for us to vote on most-favored- nation, for it to be granted, I should say normal trade relations, the President has to certify every year that there has been some progress made toward these democratic goals, that human rights are being more respected. Is there any evidence of that at all? No. The only evidence is that the President is not taking that job seriously when it comes to certifying that there has been human rights progress. I think that is the most charitable way that I can put this, because he certifies that there has been progress made in China on human rights when all of this bloody repression goes on. This trade relationship has, as I say, resulted in this annual trade surplus for the communist Chinese. We are being told if you believe in free trade, you have to believe in this. You have got to support it, because after all, you are for free trade. That is one of the reasons we have been having some good times here in the United States is because we have free trade. I have three words for that: Baloney, baloney, baloney. We are not talking about free trade here. Free trade is something that is mutually beneficial. We have already demonstrated that this is not mutually beneficial trade, it is going to help the clique that runs communist China who are billionaires, and a few of our billionaires. It is trade that is manipulated by this powerful and ruthless and calculating communist Chinese regime. On our side, of course, we do have these multinational corporations who have shown us just how loyal they are by taking their first chance. Whenever they can get away with doing it, they will bestow upon the communist Chinese weapons and technology that could very well end up killing Americans, and they know darned well that that is the risk of what is happening, but they are eager to make a buck, a very quick buck. These multinational corporations, and by their very nature, multinational means they end up with the flag of the United States not even sometimes being flown outside. Sometimes they will fly the U.N. flag or whatever. Then of course we have a clique of billionaires who also are benefiting, because we have set up this system so it not only provides the communist Chinese with $60 million in hard currency, we have set up a system that subsidizes businessmen when they decide to close up a factory in the United States and open it up in China; in other words, building the industrial capacity and technological capacity of this vicious dictatorship. That is what this vote, by the way, is all about. It is not about the ability of American corporations to sell American products in Communist China. It is not about that at all. If we do not grant most-favored- nation status or normal trade relations, as they now call it, it will not deny any American businessman the right to sell over there. The only difference is whatever business he does in Communist China will have to be done at his or her own risk. By granting most-favored-nation status, we are permitting these businessmen to obtain loans that are subsidized or guaranteed by the American taxpayer through the Export-Import Bank, through OPEC, through IMF, World Bank, Asian-Pacific bank, all kinds of things. There are so many of these institutions out there that we do not even know about, but of course if we do not grant them official status, they will not get these guaranteed loans or these subsidies. And thus, by voting on ``free trade,'' what we are really doing is subsidizing businessmen for closing jobs here and closing factories here which will only make them 5 or 6 or 7 percent, because they have competition and environmental laws and things like that that they have to deal with here; but instead, it permits them to have it guaranteed in order to set up a factory over in a Communist dictatorship, taxing our people in order to guarantee the loans so the guy will set up a factory providing jobs in Communist China which will eventually put our people out of work over here. Almost none of the trade we are talking about with Communist China is where we are selling refrigerators or selling some product that is manufactured here, because the Chinese erected all these barriers that we cannot get through. When they talk about business with China, what they are really talking about is American companies going over there and setting up factories for production in China. Does that make any sense? This is not good for the United States of America, it is not good for our people, especially when it is a dictatorship. On top of that, we have other countries that are democratic countries, even in Indonesia now, where they actually are trying to have democracy after 20 years, and I think they have a real chance if we get behind them and try to help establish the democracy in Indonesia. They have such a corrupt, terrible dictatorship now the Indonesian people have risen up. Let us try to help them and the Philippines. But certainly, why should we do that, why should we encourage people to invest in a Communist dictatorship, instead of the Philippines or these other countries? What is happening is we have some very powerful interests in the United States of America who are making big bucks off short-term profits, and it is done at the expense of our country, at the expense of the economic well-being and the expense of our national security. These people are having a tremendous impact. They are in fact doing everything they can to ensure that this system continues. Today we heard evidence at the Committee on Science. It was a report given to us by former Senator Rudman, who gave us a report on the security situation of our national labs, which he had been studying for several months. He verified a story that recently ran in the New York Times just a few days ago that the White House actually knew of the Chinese espionage that we have been talking about tonight, that the White House was made aware of this in 1995. This was Senator Rudman today verifying that fact. This is a full year before what we have been told now. Up until now the White House has always told us, remember, like there were only going to be a few FBI files and it turned out to be hundreds of FBI files? The White House until now has told us they did not know about it until 1996. That was bad enough. Now we find out they were actually alerted to this in 1995, and Senator Rudman's report condemned the administration for not treating this information with the due diligence that it deserved. What Senator Rudman did not put in his report was what happened to those loyal watchdogs who warned the White House of this communist Chinese espionage at the Department of Energy that resulted in their ability to operate their nuclear weapons systems and their rockets. What Senator Rudman did not put in his report was that Notra Trulock, who was someone who was overseeing security at the Department of Energy, tried to warn the administration and was demoted and was castigated and was attacked and almost thrown out of a job. What we did not hear about was Ed McCallum, Chief of Security at the Department of Energy, who warned the administration that something terrible was happening and that we had to look at the security issues, and right now he has been put on administrative leave because they went digging and digging until they could find something on that man to try to hurt him for alerting us to that information. Victor Reis, Victor Reis, who today Senator Rudman applauded for his diligence, an assistant secretary, one of the shining lights of responsibility at the Department of Energy, was fired just this week from the Department of Energy. Three people trying to warn America, watchdogs, trying to scream out, ``danger, danger,'' and instead what are they given for their diligence, for their hard work and loyalty to this country? They are beaten up, they are cast off out of their jobs, their families are put in jeopardy of losing everything. These are civil servants. This is a pattern of abuse, it is a pattern of abuse of these contentious watchdogs, and it is beyond imagination that this administration has been doing this, and we just sit by and let it happen. These watchdogs warned us that the communist Chinese were acquiring these deadly weapons which put Americans in jeopardy by the tens of millions, and for it they were fired, they were demoted, attacked, humiliated, their families' lives were put in jeopardy in terms of their income. This is a pattern by this administration of coverup, of deceit and betrayal. This cannot happen. We cannot let this happen. Ronald Reagan once said that there is nothing that is wrong with the United States Government that cannot be cured by one good election, and we just need, and I am not talking about Republicans or Democrats, I am saying we need to elect people with integrity, we need to elect people who are honest. We need to elect people whose main loyalty is to the people of the United States of America, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. We may disagree about what direction, but we have been tied to some billionaires who are making money in China even though it is not in the interests of our country. We have got to change that. We have got to change that right here in Congress. We are going to vote on that very shortly. There will be a vote sometime before the end of July. But, like anything else that we can accomplish, we cannot just do it here. We need the American people to be involved. If anybody is listening to this presentation or reading it in the Congressional Record who thinks that, well, we can just leave it up to the politicians, see how bad all the politicians are, no. If the American people do not act, our country is going to go to hell in a hand basket, and we are already halfway there. Our security, tens of millions of our citizens, hundreds of millions of our citizens now are at risk from weapons systems that came from our own technology development, that were taken from us and are now aiming in our direction. We have got jobs that are being taken away, plants being closed here, and we are subsidizing jobs being created in communist China, so when they build these new factories over there, they are doing so with guarantees for money that is taxed from us. We have to end this policy, that gives them a $60 billion surplus which they can use to modernize their weapons systems and terrorize their neighbors and brutalize their own people. But we need the American people to be active. The American people must express their will, and that means each and every American, veterans organizations. Anyone who is part of a veterans organization should be making sure that in this July 4th recess, when we go back, and we are leaving Friday for a full week back in our districts, every Congressman should be contacted by their veterans, by religious organizations concerned about the oppression that is going on of religious believers in China, labor unions that know this relationship, where we are building factories over there to compete with our own jobs there, that is wrong. We have got to make sure people who believe in human rights are concerned about China's domination of Burma. We had a gentleman here talking about the drug problem before I got up. Yeah, where do those drugs come from? A lot of that heroin comes from Burma. And who controls Burma but the communist Chinese, in a bloody deal with that dictatorship called the SLORC dictatorship. They have given them the weapons they need, and they are slowly but surely turning Burma into a vassal state and taking their teakwood and opium and selling it on the world market. No one wants to talk about that. Oh, you can't prove that. Where does it go? How does it get past, if the communist Chinese dominate that part of the world? We need people who are concerned about the people of the United States and our safety, about people in our military who are going to be facing technology, facing technology that was developed in the United States and then it might end up killing Americans. When I was a young boy my father was a United States Marine. I lived in Japan with him, and he flew missions, they were spy missions along the coast of Japan. He told me he would fly at very low altitude taking pictures, and they would take pictures of the coastline to see if anything was going on on the communist coastline that could threaten Japan, Korea or Taiwan. There were a group of men that did this. We lived in this little enclave of American families, and one day one of those men was shot down. That is when I was 10 years old. I still remember the tears of my young playmates and the fear in the eyes and the sorrow in the eyes of the wife of this pilot who lost his life defending his country, and I do not remember his name. I bet nobody remembers his name. But he gave his life defending this country against communist Chinese aggression. I will tell you something else my father did. There was one of the things he did in the Marine Corps, he really did not have a major career, he was there for 23 years, but one thing he did was develop the Navy way of dropping the atomic bomb. It was like this. It is sort of a maneuver where the plane goes down, and it can be with a fighter bomber. It lofts the bomb as the plane goes off this way. It permitted our aircraft carriers to become strategic weapons. During that process, my dad told this idea to the commanding officer, and he was immediately given a squadron and told with all speed get this done. Develop this. It will change the formula of the Cold War and make your country safer, because we will have a better balance of these nuclear weapons. My dad went out and he pushed these pilots in this squadron, and they knew what they were doing. They knew they were trying to protect our country, and four of them lost their lives during that time period of six months where they were pushing the envelope to try to figure out how to develop this new weapons system, this nuclear weapons system, in order to protect our country. My mother told me of how they and my father had to go to a family, to a wife who was waiting for her husband, and her husband had died in a crash that night. It was their first wedding anniversary. She was never told why her husband died, because it was top secret that he was developing this new way of delivering this bomb. People have died to protect this country. I do not remember the name of that woman or those four men who gave their lives or even the father of the playmates that I used to be with who died, but we owe it to them to keep our country safe and secure and not to let these secrets go to our enemies, not to let weapons that can shoot down our own pilots get into the hands of the enemy or weapons that could incinerate us. This is obscene. It is an obscene betrayal of our country. Most-favored- nation status is at the heart of it, because it tells the Chinese communists we do not care. Well, I hope that you will visit your Congressman and you will visit anyone who will listen and make your voice heard at the 4th of July parade, saying no most-favored-nation status for communist China. Democracy for China. Then this government will listen and we can save America and save freedom and save the peace of the world.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman) and the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Gejdenson) for incorporating my amendment into this legislation, H.R. 963, that calls for the transfer of excess naval and Coast Guard patrol vessels and fixed wing aircraft and helicopters to the Republic of the Philippines. We should be under no illusion. The Philippines is a strategic partner, and I think those words have been misused by this administration in regard to China, but certainly the Philippines with a democratic government is a strategic, a vital strategic, partner of the United States and is a front line Nation in the growing designs of China to militarily control the Pacific in the 21st century. The ongoing Chinese construction of naval bases and facilities and fortifications in the Spratley Islands and repeated incursions of warships and fishing fleets into Philippine territorial waters has increased the urgency of our longtime ally's need to modernize its naval and air patrol capabilities. I believe that the current availability of excess U.S. defense articles such as POINT class Coast Guard cutters, and in this case it is the Point Evans, and UH-1 helicopters and A-4 aircraft would make an immediate impact on strengthening the Philippines' defense capabilities. And the section also instructs our government to offer the naval vessels such as frigates, amphibious landing craft and cutters to the Philippines when available, and the section instructs our government not to oppose the transfer of F-5 aircraft by third countries to the Philippines. This section of H.R. 9063 reaffirms the importance of America's friendship and mutual defense partnership with the people of the Philippines and their democratic government, and the most important phrase is ``their democratic government.'' They have just recently passed a Visiting Forces Agreement in which American military personnel will be able to, permitted, to come to the Philippines and transit and to land there for rest and relaxation purposes. They are strengthening ties with the Philippines, and all of this happening while the Philippines has been expanding the concepts of democracy and freedom and liberty and justice that we hold so dear here in the United States. In fact, part of this overall legislation, part of H.R. 963, is a code of conduct provision that has been spearheaded by the gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. McKinney) and myself, and I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Ms. McKinney on her efforts to ensure that American military equipment not be sent to dictatorships. So I would like to add my congratulations to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. McKinney) who spent a lot of time and effort to make sure that when we are transferring weapons, especially modern weapons of mass destruction that we built for the Cold War, trying to deter war with the Soviet Union, that now those weapons will not find their way in into the hands of dictatorships, nor should weapons manufacturers who are building weapons today be selling weapons that will permit these dictatorships to oppress their own people and to commit acts of aggression against their neighbors. So I salute the gentlewoman from Georgia (Ms. McKinney) and have been very happy to join with her on this effort. I think it is a tragedy that the United States of America, that our government, has been treating dictatorships the same as we do democracies. We have most-favored-nation status with China which encourages people to invest in China, while democratic countries like the Philippines and countries like Indonesia, struggling to be democracies, and other countries around the world that are trying to develop their democratic institutions that could use investment in their countries; but instead here we provide Vietnam with an equivalent of a most-favored-nation status; China, a communist China, dictatorships like that, in order to encourage American businessmen to invest in those countries that are ruled by vicious dictatorships rather than investing in countries like the Philippines. Again I thank the chairman and the ranking member of the committee for including my provisions into H.R. 963 which will, at the very least, help the Philippines and aim towards the Philippines, a country that is struggling now with a major national security threat while at the same time having democratic elections, freedom of the press and freedom of religion, the things that we hold true, and they want to be friends of the United States. So this is a very good sign to the people of Philippines and the other people throughout the world struggling to have democratic government.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise to commend President Lee Teng- hui of Taiwan, who has announced Taiwan's decision to provide $300 million in aid for Kosovar refugees and the reconstruction of war-torn areas of Kosovo. The aid includes emergency food and shelter for Kosovar evacuees in Macedonia, as well as short-term occupational training in Taiwan to help refugees speed the reconstruction of war- ravaged areas. President Lee and the government and people of Taiwan are to be congratulated for voluntarily participating in the international relief effort for the people of Kosovo. Their actions are in stark contrast to People's Republic of China's hostile attitude toward the United States and NATO and their political obstruction to maintaining peace in the fragile democratic nation of Macedonia. This generous humanitarian action by Taiwan, a nation of 21 million freedom loving people, who live in the threatening shadow of tyranny imposed on mainland China, emphasizes the reason that the United States must remain a loyal friend and unwaveringly support the defense of freedom for the Taiwanese people. I am enclosing for the record a copy of President Lee's June 7, 1999 presidential statement regarding assistance to Kosovar refugees. Presidential Statement Regarding Assistance to Kosovar Refugees The huge numbers of Kosovar casualties and refugees from the Kosovo area resulting from the NATO-Yugoslavia conflict in the Balkans have captured close world-wide attention. From the very outset, the government of the ROC has been deeply concerned and we are carefully monitoring the situation's development. We in the Republic of China were pleased to learn last week that Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milosevic has accepted the peace plan for the Kosovo crisis proposed by the Group of Eight countries, for which specific peace agreements are being worked out. The Republic of China wholeheartedly looks forward to the dawning of peace on the Balkans. For more than two months, we have been concerned about the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees who were forced to flee to other countries, particularly from the vantage point of our emphasis on protecting human rights. We thereby organized a Republic of China aid mission to Kosovo. Carrying essential relief items, the mission made a special trip to the refugee camps in Macedonia to lend a helping hand. Today, as we anticipate a critical moment of forth-coming peace, I hereby make the following statement to the international community on behalf of all the nationals of the Republic of China: As a member of the world community committee to protecting and promoting human rights, the Republic of China would like to develop further the spirit of humanitarian concern for the Kosovar refugees living in exile as well as for the war-torn areas in dire need of reconstruction. We will provide a grant aid equivalent to about US $300 million. The aid will consist of the following: 1. Emergency support for food, shelters, medical care, and education, etc., for the Kosovar refugees, living in exile in neighboring countries. 2. Short-term accommodations for some of the refugees in Taiwan, with opportunities of job training in order for them to be better equipped for the restoration of their homeland upon their return. 3. Furthermore, support the rehabilitation of the Kosovo area in coordination with international long-term recovery programs when the peace plan is implemented. We earnestly hope that the above-mentioned aid will contribute to the promotion of the peace plan for Kosovo. I wish all the refugees an early return to their safe and peaceful Kosovo homes.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the amendment. Simply put, it reduces our troop strength in Europe from 100,000 to 25,000 over a 3-year period. This makes a lot of sense, does it not? The Cold War is over. The threat that we tried to deter for such a long time, the Soviet Union, is no longer a threat. It is time for us to say to our troops, good job, come on home. It is not time to say let us find another way to spend money, let us find another way of using these troops. That is ridiculous. NATO was meant, and we carried a burden for 4 decades, it costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, to protect Europe. Yes, the argument was correct, we were protecting ourselves, because there might have been a Soviet invasion. That has been handled now. Now it is time to decrease the number of troops in Europe so that we can spend that money elsewhere, whether it is in Social Security or Medicare, or whether it is for our readiness and troops someplace else in the world, like Asia, where there may be a threat to our national security. But we do not need to subsidize Europe's defense anymore. In fact, this is not subsidizing Europe's defense, we are subsidizing stability. Is that not great? If we do not reduce our troops in Europe, if we do not reevaluate our position in NATO, there will be many more Balkan adventures, whether it is Moldova or elsewhere, draining tens of billions of dollars, putting us in jeopardy because we will spend ourselves into a position where we are vulnerable to our real enemies and we will break our bank. We will just not be able to do it. Let us have no apologies. We have no apologies about watching out for America's interests, spending money for our defense. But this amendment makes it clear that the Cold War is over and it is a waste of our money to be defending Europe, spending billions of dollars putting troops in Europe to protect their stability. They are richer than we are. Let them pick up their own price tag.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to the Skelton amendment, and let me just say I have my deep admiration for the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton). I am sure he is very sincere, but here we are, in the last minutes or last hours of this debate on such an important piece of legislation, and then at the last minute we get a call from the President of the United States saying a letter is on the way. The gentleman from Missouri does not even have the letter in his possession. We have seen letters from the President of the United States before. We have seen letters from this President that had so many holes in them they leaked like a spaghetti strainer, for Pete's sake. We do not know what kind of guarantee we have from the President. I am sure the gentleman from Missouri is sincere. I want to see exactly what the President has to say before we give him a blank check to spend billions of dollars out of readiness, putting our other people in jeopardy, to spend it down in the Balkans. The American people want us to be responsible and be very careful in our consideration of the lives of these people that are defending our country. I do not believe the President of the United States has demonstrated that same type of consideration, as he has sent our troops all over the world, stretched them so thin that our people are in jeopardy now. I say if the President is truthful, and the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton) does believe that his commitment is true, I would ask him to withdraw his amendment. It is not necessary. The gentleman's amendment is not necessary if the gentleman believes the President's word. If the President's word, if we trust the President's word that he is not going to spend it out of this bill and that he will come to us with a supplemental, the gentleman should withdraw his amendment. It is not necessary.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the amendment offered by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. DeLay). Mr. Chairman, we were just looking at what happened with Secretary O'Leary a few years ago. We found out recently that she has been, when she was Secretary of Energy, she was shovelling out the door our nuclear secrets, just shovelling out the door. In retrospect, it looked like a going out of business sale. It was probably more like a going out of sanity sale. This is insane. The policies this administration has had towards Communist China, our worst, our most deadly potential enemy, is insane. We have heard, we can just plug the leaks, change a little here, change a little there, and that is the way to approach it. No. What we need to protect the interests of the United States and ensure that our people are not incinerated with our own weapons or destroyed or killed, or having our defenders destroyed or killed by tactics that they have learned from us, that our enemy has learned from us, the way we do that is change the fundamental policies that we have toward Communist China. Communism should not be treated as a potential friend. It is being treated as a friend now. It should be treated as a potential enemy. It is a hostile power, it is not a friendly power. Until we start treating communism this way, we will continue to do nonsensical things like training their military on how to better run a military. I have a list here, as of February of this year, of the proposed military exchanges between the United States and the Communist Chinese. It includes quartermaster training, acquisition training, logistics training. It includes special forces training. It includes having their top officers to come for briefings. Here we have what this administration's policies are. This is after they knew, this is after this administration knew that the Communist Chinese had acquired our most deadly weapons secrets, weapons that could incinerate millions of Americans, and this administration was still proposing that we have a military exchange program to teach them how our military functions and how their military can better function. This is insanity. This is total insanity. I strongly support the DeLay amendment, and would request the American people to pay close attention to this vote.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I think we have certainly outlined tonight the magnitude of the problem, and my colleague from California has demonstrated that what we are talking about is the survival or the incineration of millions of Americans. I mean, again, it is worse than our worst nightmare could possibly have been 10 and 20 years ago. No one could ever have imagined that this would come about. But I worked for a guy in the White House who always said that what is important is not just to focus on the problem, but to make sure you always offer a solution, and then look towards the opportunities that you have. So I would just like for a couple of minutes talk about the options that we have and just say, what are they? Number one, first and foremost, we have to start off with a missile defense system. We have to move forward with missile defense. As my colleague from California just mentioned, it is going to be a lot harder now, because they not only have a missile with one warhead, and a missile that was pretty unreliable, but, thanks to some American companies using technology that we paid for, we paid for it, taxpayers developed that technology to protect us during the Cold War, now it has been given away and stolen and actually sold by our major corporate leaders, some of these major corporate leaders. So we have to go forward with missile defense, do it seriously, and do it as if the lives of our children depend upon it. Number two, we have to work closely and reestablish close ties and a trusting relationship with the democracies of the Pacific and Asia and the Philippines, Japan, Korea and Thailand, which no longer trust in the word of the United States, which see us kowtowing before this communist dictatorship in Beijing. The democratic peoples of the world have to know they can count on the United States, and especially in that area in Asia and the Pacific region. Again, we must go back to Communist China and we must alter our fundamental relationship, quit treating them as a friend and begin treating them as a hostile power, which means no more military exchanges, no more scientific exchanges, and especially no more subsidies for our businessmen going over there to invest and building up their economy and their capabilities technologically to build these weapons you are talking about. It is one thing to have the blueprints. It is another thing to have the machine tools and the computer technology in order to accomplish that. We can start, first of all, doing this by eliminating their ability to have an unfair trade relationship with us, by supporting my resolution of disapproval of normal trade relations in the next couple of weeks, which is going to come before the body. The American people, all of the veterans you saw and that I saw and you saw in your Memorial Day services, veterans from around the United States, should be here pounding on doors, demanding, demanding that we eliminate most-favored-nation status, that normal trade status with China be denied. This should be a goal of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Patriotic organizations around the United States in the next two weeks should mobilize behind this and knock on every Congressman's door, and they will listen if the American people speak. Money talks maybe in these campaign contributions, but in a democracy the voice of the people talk louder, and we can be glad we live in a country where the people's will will be heard. We must invest in democracies and invest in democracy. What that means is this: How did Ronald Reagan win the Cold War without having to fight with the Soviet Union? We faced the same type of incineration, by the way, you are talking about, with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had MIRVed warheads too, did they not? They were a horrible threat to our well-being. For decades we lived under that threat. Ronald Reagan ended it in a number of ways. He rebuilt our military strength, which is something we need to do, not only missile defense. But what he did, most importantly, was support those people who believe in democracy around the world, whether it was in Nicaragua, where eventually the Nicaraguan freedom fighters, who people on the other side of the aisle did everything they could to prevent us from helping those people they called the Contras, and eventually there was a free election in Nicaragua, and those communists, the Sandinistas, were booted out, even though our colleagues on the other side of the aisle said they represent the real will of the Nicaraguan people. If we support democracy around the world, and that means especially in China, we should be financing and working just like we did with Lech Walesa in Poland and freedom movements, what Ronald Reagan did all over the world. We should focus on China as if our very national survival depended on us reaching out to the decent freedom-loving people of China. If any message goes out tonight, it should be Communist China, Communist China, may be our enemy. That regime of gangsters may be our enemy. But our greatest ally, our greatest ally, is the people of China. The Chinese people are our friends. They are wonderful people. They long for the same type of human dignity and freedom and liberty and justice and opportunity for their families that we long for for our families. They do not hate the United States. They are not our enemies. We have to do everything to work for the freedom-loving people and build up that democracy movement that was wiped out by the Communist Chinese once Ronald Reagan left office. Let us work with them and build Radio Free Asia. Let us support the freedom movement. It is what is true to our principles. Do not let anybody say we are anti-Asian, anti-Chinese. We are not. We are pro- freedom, and we believe that freedom is the right of every person of every color of every religion and every ethnic background. That is our strength.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, first of all, I would like to commend my colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon). We have worked together over these last 10 years while I have been a Member of Congress on many, many occasions, and I find Congressman Weldon to be a patriot, a man of integrity, a man of courage, and I think when all of this is said and done, when we find out the jeopardy that our country has been put in and take the measures that are necessary to correct this situation and to make our country safe again, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) will be on the list of real American heroes that came about to save the day, and I am just proud to serve with him. Madam Speaker, tonight it is fortuitous that I will be speaking after the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) because my remarks are in parallel with what Mr. Weldon has been talking about. It goes into a slightly different subject. Tonight I will be talking about Most Favored Nation status and our economic, as well as military and diplomatic, relations with China. But of course everything that Mr. Weldon has said today amplifies the need that I will be demonstrating for us to reexamine American policy towards Communist China. In fact, let me state right at the beginning that when it comes to Communist China, we have been treating a hostile power, the world's worst human rights abuser, as a strategic partner, that is what this administration has insisted on us calling Communist China, and I believe that Americans will pay a woeful price for this irrational, amoral and greed-driven policy if we do not change it, and that is what we need to do to change that policy that has been in place to some degree or another for 2 decades, but especially in these last 6 years. Yesterday I introduced legislation to do just that, to change that policy. It is a bill of disapproval of extending so-called ``normal trade relations,'' which was previously known as Most Favored Nation status, with Communist China. So what my proposal is is that we deny Communist China normal trade relations status with the United States, formerly called Most Favored Nation status. The time, Madam Speaker, is long since past when the United States should reexamine its fundamental policies toward the Communist dictatorship that now rules the mainland of China. Our commercial policies, as well as our diplomatic and military policies, for the past decade have worked against the interests of our own people and have not, as we had hoped, increased the level of freedom enjoyed by the Chinese people. In fact, some of the initial progress that we saw in China has now gone in the opposite direction, especially since the end of the Reagan administration and the tragic national reversal in China in 1989 at Tiananmen Square when they had the massacre at Tiananmen Square. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Armey), one of our Republican leaders here in the House, defines ``insanity'' as doing more of the same, but expecting the results to be different. Well, for 10 years the cause of freedom in China has been in decline. Things are getting worse. So much for the engagement theory, the strategy of engagement, and what we hear from those people advocating normal trade relations and to continuing our relations with China is doing more of the same, but expecting that China is going to be different, that there will be different results now. Well, that makes no sense. It is the unreasonable and perhaps irrational optimism of some people to assume that continuing our fundamental policies toward China will bring about different results than the retrogression that we have seen in the past decade. In the past 10 years, the genocide, for example, has continued in Tibet. The Chinese democracy movement has been wiped out, and there has been increasing belligerence by the clique that runs China. The Beijing regime is modernizing and expanding its military power while threatening the United States and bullying its neighbors, especially in Taiwan and the Philippines. Big business falsely claims that China is a country that is liberalizing through commercial engagement. There is no evidence for that claim. So every time you hear it: Well, we have got to engage them, that is what will make them better; just be aware that there is every evidence to show just the opposite. In fact, the empirical evidence shows that China is going in the opposite direction, that engagement is not making things better, is not causing a freer China, but instead for the last 10 years has resulted in more repression, more militarization. Furthermore, the trade relationship is working against the people of the United States. So here we are in an economic engagement that is not helping us bring about a freer China, thus, less belligerent, thus a China that will be more peaceful. It is not doing that, but it is also not even helping us economically. The Chinese are using their $60 billion annual trade surplus with us to modernize their Armed Forces, including building nuclear missiles aimed at the United States, and they are continuing to proliferate weapons of mass destruction. For example, Communist China is reported to be the power behind North Korea's space program. Get into that. North Korea has a space program. This is a country that has people who are starving by the thousands, that we are giving millions of dollars worth of food aid to, but they have a space program? You got it. Communist China is helping the North Korean regime with a so-called space program. In other words, they are helping them build rockets that, when tested, end up flying right over Japan and land close to Alaska. North Korea, of course, is not the only looney country Communist China is helping along with deadly weapons technology. You have got Iran, Libya, Pakistan, all have benefitted from Beijing's helping hand. Of course, some of the technology now being handed over is technology based on things that they have stolen, on ideas and engineering techniques that they have stolen from the United States of America. On April 15 the Washington Post cited a Pentagon study that verified China is continuing to ship weapons of mass destruction technology to the Middle East and South Asia, despite repeated promises to end such activity. A separate U.S. intelligence report found that China has recently provided North Korea with specialty steel used in the building of missile frames. However, the State Department officials, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, have repeatedly avoided answering questions before the House Committee on International Relations hearings when asked about China's ongoing proliferation activities. When Secretary Albright was in China last summer with the President, China conducted its first successful test of a motor for its new DF-31 ballistic missile that can strike the United States from the Chinese mainland. So here was the President of the United States, so eloquent in his presentation, there he was representing us, along with Secretary of State Albright, supposedly representing our interests. They were aware that this new missile engine was being tested, a missile engine that could threaten the people of the United States. They were also aware that weapons technology had been stolen from the United States that would permit Communist China to build warheads, nuclear warheads, that would be on the top of those new rockets, and these rockets could strike the United States. Yet there was no record of the Secretary of State or President Clinton raising this issue with their Chinese hosts. Instead, they continued on that visit to praise the increasingly, I would say increasingly brazen communist leaders, as being strategic partners, strategic partners, and the type of people that we can do business with. This is very sad. It is more than sad, it is frightening. The recent Pentagon report describes how Chinese Government owned companies are selling weapons technology and knowhow and providing training to countries such as Iran and Pakistan. An American military official familiar with the report said that the Chinese are skirting nonproliferation treaties with the United States. So they have agreed not to proliferate. This was the President's great accomplishment, supposedly, with Communist China. We were going to give them all sorts of things in trade benefits so they would not proliferate, yet we know now they are proliferating and developing weapons of their own and giving them to these hostile and somewhat crazy states, states that are lacking in positive and responsible leadership. But Communist China is shipping them these weapons of mass destruction technology anyway, even though they have made these agreements. The Chinese are shipping these rogue nations missile components, some of which, of course, are American products as well as American knowhow, and they are shipping the components rather than shipping the whole missile. That way they are saying they are not really proliferating missiles to these other countries. But they are. They are proliferating on a routine basis, of course, without technically breaking the agreements with the United States, by just sending the parts to the missile. This nefarious behavior could be, we might call it the Mandarin version of a famous Arkansas homily, ``smoke, but don't inhale.'' After reading the Cox report, one is struck by the mind-boggling loss of our country's most deadly secrets. When you hear the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) explain the magnitude of the loss that we have seen, it takes your breath away and makes you wonder how our children will live, what type of lives they will live, whether or not America could be incinerated by a Chinese dictatorship that feels it can afford to lose hundreds of millions of people if it means wiping out its enemy, 100 or 200 million Americans. The theft of U.S. nuclear secrets by Communist China is surpassed only by the complete abandonment of security precautions at our Department of Energy under the Clinton Administration, as well as a brazen attempt by the Clinton Administration to keep the knowledge of this catastrophic transfer of weapons technology, to keep the news of this from the Congress and the American people. On May 30, the New York Times reported the utter cynicism and duplicity of the Clinton administration concerning our nuclear weapons programs. After the Cox committee released its report on Chinese espionage at our nuclear labs, Bill Clinton called protecting atomic secrets ``a solemn obligation.'' That is what President Clinton called it. However, in private, administration officials told reporters, and this is reported by the New York Times, that openness, a euphemism for giving away our nuclear secrets, has its advantages, despite the risks, and has been a potent force for international good. Hazel O'Leary, who the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) has also quoted and talked about some of her policies, in fact Mr. Weldon was right on target and this will even add to what Mr. Weldon was saying, Hazel O'Leary, President Clinton's Secretary of Energy from 1993 to 1997, was the grand poobah of nuclear openness, as we have seen by what Mr. Weldon told us this evening. In fact, she massively declassified secrets and put them on the Energy Department's web site, including the diagrams of some advanced nuclear weapons which we saw tonight in Mr. Weldon's presentation. When asked about that recently, Mrs. O'Leary said, ``we pulled off an impossible feat,'' and she recently boasted this while defending her action. She went on, ``To say that all of our efforts were negative is not to understand the benefits, not to see what we did in terms of building international trust.'' See, the idea is if everybody had all this information, information about deadly weapons technology that we had spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing, that if everyone had it, well then, it might be a more peaceful world. This is worse than the Rosenbergs. This is looney tunes. This is someone who has a fanatical anti-American altitude in a position to hand over to our worst enemies secrets that put our young people and our country in jeopardy. Needless to say, most defense experts obviously disagree with Mrs. O'Leary's bizarre, and I would say strange, logic. It takes more than a postgraduate degree from an ivy league school to have logic like this. However, O'Leary could not have undertaken this massive giveaway of a decade of brilliant and costly weapons research that permitted the United States to be the arsenal of democracy, she could not have done this without at least the tacit support of the Commander in Chief. The New York Times surmised that the new age defense policy emanating from the White House explains why Mrs. O'Leary did this. It explains also the administration's slow response when confronted with very real evidence of Chinese spying and the loss of blueprints for frighteningly powerful weapons. In 1993, O'Leary told a news conference at the start of the openness process, ``The United States must stand as a leader. We are declassifying the largest amount of information in the history of our department.'' O'Leary also did away with a counterintelligence effort, security badges and effective security clearances. She eliminated all of these, as Mr. Weldon alluded to a few moments ago. Remember the promise to reinvent government? Remember that promise? Well, this is it. This administration reinvented our government policy towards its labs. You might say they turned our nuclear labs into a high-tech K-Mart, I guess in Arkansas you might say Wal-Mart, in terms of the giving away or making available to international missile technicians and spies information that we invested billions of dollars to develop. This was not a going-out-of-business sale on the part of the United States Government; this was a going-out-of-sanity sale on the part of the United States Government. Those who benefitted the most were the minions of the People's Republic of China, the Communist Chinese, our erstwhile constructive strategic partners. Madam Speaker, I yield to my friend from Arizona.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Reclaiming my time for a moment, let me just state that the fight on this issue will be over normal trade relations. If we again renew normal trade relations with Communist China, this body is going to send the signal to not only Communist China but to the world that we are backing away, that we do not have the will to protect our interests, we do not have the will to be the world's leader, we do not have the will to even protect our own national interests and our own national security. All those who are listening, all those people, American people who are out in the hinterland wondering what can I do, what can we do, there are policies that we have to make. The Cox report outlined things that we have to do. First and foremost, we have to quit treating Communist China as if it is a friend, as if it is like Great Britain or a democratic society. First and foremost, we have to quit calling it our strategic partner, quit acting like it is our friend and we have to recognize that it is a hostile power. As a hostile power, we do not have their scientists combing through our laboratories, we do not have exchange programs with their military which I found out they were having exchange programs with our military. We were inviting them here, have been having them here to see how our military conducts its business and to train their own military in logistics and how to run military operations. We have got to quit treating them that way. We have to build a missile defense system. We have got to do it. We have now given them the ability to incinerate our people. Our only hope is to make sure that we rush ahead with technology development to protect them now that that genie is out of the bottle. We have got to make sure that the United States of America ends the trading relationship that gives the Communist Chinese $60 billion in hard currency. The Communist Chinese, these people who run Beijing, they understand what is going on. At the end of the year, they have $60 billion in hard currency to do with what they want, to modernize their weapons, to make alliances with dictators and gangsters and drug lords all over the world, $60 billion in hard currency to destroy us. We have got to end the rules of the game that gives them that $60 billion. By the way, it is not a free trade situation. The Chinese have high tariffs against any American products that we want to sell there. And we have permitted them to have those high tariffs while their goods flood into the United States at low tariffs. Is this good for American working people? No. In fact, what is happening when you hear about we have about $14 billion where they say, ``They bought $14 billion worth of goods from us.'' But if you look at what those goods are, those are mainly technologies and manufacturing units, so that we are building up their capabilities, their military capabilities and their manufacturing capabilities with that $14 billion, while they flood into our market with about $80 billion worth of goods and services which they sell to us with almost no tariff. So, in other words, when they talk about, ``We can't isolate China, we have to trade with them,'' they are not selling our products over there, they are building factories over there and they are doing it by closing factories here. And here is the real stinger, which I mentioned earlier. Most-favored-nation status or normal trade relations, as they say, what does that really mean in terms of government policy? The real impact of it is, because even if we do not pass it, people can still sell things, we are not saying you cannot sell things to China, all it means is if someone is going to set up a factory in China, he has to do so at his own risk. When he takes his money over there, he does not get a subsidized loan from the Export-Import Bank, or the IMF or the Asian Pacific Bank or any of these other multitude of financial institutions that receive U.S. taxpayer funds. All we are talking about is cutting off these big businessmen from having their investments guaranteed by the taxpayers and these very same taxpayers are having their jobs taken away because they are setting up factories in China to export back to the United States. Now, who has it been good for? Who has this economic policy been good for? It has not been good for our security, we have already shown that. My colleague from California demonstrated that these companies ended up doing, what, doing something that strategically national security-wise is a nightmare, so it is not good for our national security. It is not good for us economically. They say, ``Oh, look at our big economic boom.'' Well, our good, big economic boom, yes, why do these Americans have to be investing overseas in Communist China for us to have a boom? They could invest in a democratic country like the Philippines, for example, they need investment there. No, they are investing in Communist China because they can cut one deal with a gangster and they think they are going to get a quick profit. So who has it been good for? It has not been good for our country, for our economy, for the working people. It has been good for a few billionaires. I call them Bill's billionaire buddies. That is who this China policy has been good for. We have got to have the courage to sever ourselves from the policies of the past and fundamentally reexamine those policies and strategies, not for isolation, not for isolation. We want engagement, yes, just the way we would engage Adolf Hitler or Tojo or someone like that. We engaged them in a way that showed them courage and determination and engaged them only in a way that would benefit the people of the United States and the security of the United States, not in a way that would make them think that we were whimpering cowards. At the end of the day, when the President of the United States goes to Beijing and says, or Madeleine Albright goes to Beijing and mouths some cliche about human rights or talks about, oh, you have got to have a better trade barrier, lower those trade barriers, you got to do this, you got to quit persecuting Christians, you got to quit doing these things that get our Congressmen mad at you; the Chinese dictators, these gangsters, take that as a sign that we do not believe in a darned thing. They take that as a sign that even our President and even our leaders care more about these billionaires than they do about the American people and the national security.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Reclaiming my time for a moment, Madam Speaker, the first point the gentleman made, one would understand that. During the Cold War, when we were in a contest with the Soviet Union, we used the China card. We played the China card. And, yes, just like during World War II, when we allied ourselves with Joseph Stalin in order to defeat Adolf Hitler, which was the major threat to peace and freedom at that time, that was a moral thing to do. We were allying ourselves with one bad group in order to defeat a greater threat. It was okay to defeat Adolf Hitler by working with the communists, but after Adolf Hitler was off the scene and defeated, it was no longer the right thing to do working with the communists. That is number one. When Ronald Reagan was President of the United States and continued to have this policy of working with China, because the Soviet Union was still our enemy, even then we were supporting a democracy movement in China. We were supporting those people who were struggling to build a free China. That is why there was a great surge of democracy at the end of the Reagan administration. And at Tiananmen Square, which, of course, happened right after Reagan left office, there was this great upsurge of democracy in China, and within a few months they were massacred. They were massacred at Tiananmen Square, which was just 10 years ago. But let me go to this point about the companies that my colleague from California is talking about. I am the chairman of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the Committee on Science, and it was the activities of several of these American aerospace companies that first led me several years ago to investigate this issue. I spent 6 months of my life investigating that American companies were upgrading communist Chinese rockets. Perhaps my friend from Arizona remembers me stopping on the floor and saying something terrible is going on here and I am looking into it. I went around telling people, ``I investigated this. I went to the contractors and subcontractors.'' And, finally, I got enough information to prove exactly what the Cox report has verified and there was an official investigation launched by the Cox report. But what is significant here is these companies are part of an engagement strategy. My colleagues have to remember we have set down the rules for these companies to go into China. The idea is that engagement will make China more liberal and will then pose less of a threat to the United States. But what are we reading? What is the gentleman telling us? What that report verifies is this policy has had the opposite impact. In a horrible way it has made us vulnerable like we never dreamed we would be vulnerable. Our children now are in jeopardy to be incinerated by these high-tech weapon systems we spent billions of dollars to develop. We could not have imagined that in our worst nightmare. It has been a wrong policy. We have to go back and reexamine it. We have to change that policy. And what has it done? It has made us less safe over here. It has not been good for us economically. Our companies are setting up factories over there to put our own people out of work. It is corrupting our own political process. Those same companies and other companies are lobbying us. They are not over in China lobbying for democracy. They are lobbying us. They are giving us contributions in order to protect their slave trade and their blood money. I yield to my friend from Arizona.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, perhaps the most disturbing part of this whole controversy is the response that we have had from people who are trying to protect the administration from being held accountable for certain things dealing with this controversy. For example, I heard in a committee hearing, those of us who were complaining about this were accused of vulgar partisanship, as if in bringing this up we were doing this out of partisan concerns. I certainly explained at that point that the only thing vulgar and the only vulgar partisanship going on was that certain people on the other side felt compelled to have to try to block those of us who were trying to investigate this, trying to hold those who have committed this sin against the American people accountable, claiming that we were being partisan in doing so. Even today we hear people who are apologists for this, and this has to be labeled a national security catastrophe of a magnitude that we have yet to experience. Even the Rosenberg catastrophe, where Josef Stalin got his hands on the first nuclear weapon, that was horrible, that was a bad thing. That affected the entire Cold War. It probably led to the war in Korea. But that probably was not as bad for our long- term national security as what has happened here. But we are told even now by these people who are trying to say that, well, it is not really that bad, and how many times will we hear someone say, we spy, our allies spy, everybody spies, so how can we blame China? Yes, in a way, how can we blame China? We have to blame the incompetence or culpability of people in our government to let this happen. But let me point out, it is not the same when Great Britain or Belgium or Italy or a democratic country spies on us. If Great Britain were to receive these benefits of all of this research that we have had into these terrible weapons systems, no one would worry. It would not be a big problem. We would not like it, but it is a democratic country. Great Britain is not aiming its weapons at the United States. We cannot perceive and conceive of a situation where they will. But what we are talking about when someone says that, well, we spy, they spy, everybody spies, what they are talking about is a moral equivalency argument. This is the same moral equivalency argument that says there is nothing, no difference between a democracy and a vicious dictatorship. What this leads to is this, this leads to the type of actions that were taken by Mrs. O'Leary there at the beginning of the administration and probably consistent with the President's world theory that you can just shovel all this information out so every country can have it, regardless if they are a dictatorship or a democracy, and it will not make any difference. It is more likely, and this is the motive here if you have a moral equivalency argument, we can then let all of this information out and we can build a world authority, and perhaps that was the goal. Two things we should know about, moral equivalency and globalism. Moral equivalency and globalism, that is a formula for tyranny. It is a formula for the destruction of the United States of America. There is nothing morally equivalent about a democratic country that protects the rights of its people, permits people to worship as they see fit. And yes, we are not perfect, but we have freedom of speech, and where we have imperfections, we can work together and we can try to make things better. But when there is a corrupt official, those who complain are not shot, like they are in Communist China. They are not thrown into a Lao Gai prison system. There is no moral equivalency between dictatorship and a democratic government, especially the United States of America. It is this leftist concept that probably led Ms. O'Leary, Secretary O'Leary, to give this information out. Now it is being used right in front of our eyes to say, well, spies here, spies there, everybody spies. That is a fallacious argument. A country that is a dictatorship, unlike a country that is a democracy, cannot be a trusted partner of the United States and a friend of the United States. If we do so, if we put our faith in dictators and gangsters and people who commit these types of heinous abuses against their people, we will pay an awful price. We are paying that price today. Our administration continues to call it a strategic partner. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Hayworth), and then I will give some reasons why China cannot be a strategic partner of the United States.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I would like to go through a few reasons of why China is not our strategic partner. People have to understand, there is a lot of rhetoric about China being the worst human rights abuser. People do not understand the specifics of what we are talking about. What we have here is the world's largest dictatorship. According to Amnesty International, there are thousands of political prisoners who remain even today in the Lao Gai forced labor camps, which are a prison system where you have basically slave labor. Sometimes these are just, as we say, thousands of political prisoners who are making some of these low-cost items, and this suit did not come from China. But perhaps the suit worn by someone who is reading this Congressional Record or listening tonight is made in China. One must remember that that suit might have been made by someone who simply was a religious believer who was thrown into a prison system and forced for decades to work as a slave laborer because of his or her faith. There are at least 2,000 persons in prison for so-called counterrevolutionary crimes. Some 200 Tiananmen Square protesters, after 10 years, are still in prison for peacefully participating in pro democracy protests. During the past 2 months, the Chinese Communist government has issued new laws, this is just the last 2 months, that strengthen the Communist party and further restrict freedom of speech and the formation of political parties. Genocide continues in Tibet where hundreds of thousands have perished since the invasion of 1950. China's own statistics show that, during the 1959 freedom uprising in Tibet 87,000 Tibetans were ``eliminated.'' Today the Tibet Information Center in London cites at least 183 political prisoners at the end of 1998, including 246 women. The Physicians of Human Rights have reported the brutal torture of Tibetan political prisoners by their Chinese jailers, and this torture by their Chinese jailers is rampant. The Chinese Government has recently issued a new law in Tibet eliminating religion in and promoting Marxism. This is the Chinese Government in Beijing that has kidnapped this young religious leader who would then take the seat of the Dalai Lama someday if he is still alive. What monstrous regime would take a little child who is nothing more than a pacifist religious loader, a figure of pacifism and a religion of Buddhism, and take him away and perhaps murder him. On May 29, the South China Morning Post Newspaper reported that, since March, Beijing has deployed extra troops to tighten control over Tibet. In addition, they have recruited former People's Liberation Army troops from China to migrate to Tibet to act as sort of a civil guard to assure China's control of Tibet by force. So here we are, here we are fighting and spending tens of billions of dollars to try to thwart ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but we are calling the Communist Chinese regime our strategic partners when they are engaged in ethnic cleansing every bit as brutal and every bit as tyrannical as what is going on in Kosovo. When some people claim that China is not a threat to its neighbors, they conveniently forget that when Mao Tse Tung conquered China in 1950, Tibet was a sovereign country with its own language, its own religion, and its own culture. There is no difference, as I say, between China's occupation and the genocide of Tibet than Japan's brutal occupation and the ethnic cleansing of Manchuria in the 1930s. The United States tried to pretend at that time in the 1930s that the Japanese were not committing an aggression. They had hoped that by trade and finance that the Japanese would be able to be turned, that the presence of Japanese students at our colleagues and universities, that dancing the Charleston would help the Japanese turn a different way, that Japan would be our friend with this type of engagement. In 1941, these delusions lead to the tragedy of Pearl Harbor. Given the lethal power of today's weapons of mass destruction, we would not have the luxury of months to build up our Navy and our military and our Air Force to respond to a devastating surprise attack by China's so- called asymmetrical warfare plans. In the Xinjiang region, in the far regions known as East Turkestan, that is Xinjiang, the suppression of religion, and that is the Muslim religion and political arrests and executions parallel the systematic brutality in Tibet. In 1999, Amnesty International documented 190 executions of political prisoners in that province after unfair and summary trials. The report also cites 200 political prisoners known to be detained at this time with arbitrary arrests continuing. Whether it is Tibet or in East Turkestan, while the local populations continue to decline, part through forced abortion, part through sterilization, ethnic Chinese, as I have stated, the ethnic Chinese are moving in. Hordes of them are coming in and establishing these areas as colonies, as resource-rich territories. China is making major military moves, not only on the continent of Asia, but is moving towards places like the Spratley Islands, bullying our regional democratic allies, such as the Philippines and Indonesia, and threatening the vital sea lanes of the South China Sea. There are some people who claim that it is wrong to compare the Communist Chinese to Hitler and the Natzis. I agree maybe that that comparison is not right. But I do believe that there is a more accurate comparison; and that is, the Communist Chinese should be compared to the militaristic regimes in the Japanese era of the 1920s, perhaps the regimes of Tojo and Yamamoto. What was the goal of the Japanese in the 1920s? They believed themselves to be racially superior. They believed they had a right to dominate Asia and to conquer the Pacific. It is ironic that, in less than 10 years before the attack in Pearl Harbor, that Admiral Yamamoto attended graduate school in the United States at Harvard University and as a student in the United States was made aware of many American military strategies. The Spratley Islands lie close to the coast of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. China is now building fortifications on these atolls and reefs while it builds up a blue water navy and a submarine force. Ironically, there has been no militarization of these islands, the Spratley Islands, since the Japanese used them as stationery aircraft carriers during the early stages of World War II. The Spratleys were turned in at that time, they were turned into military bases in preparation to invade the Philippines. It was incredibly eerie last December, on the eve of Pearl Harbor Day, when my special assistance Al Santoli and my good friend Jeff Baxter toured the battlefield and the tunnels of Corrigedor right outside of Manila. And on this pleasant tropical mountainous island, American military men and women held out as their ammunition ran out and they held out against overwhelming Japanese occupation force. In fact, my wife's Uncle Lou was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines. He was part of the Bataan Death March where he saw innocent civilians being bayoneted and horrible human rights abuses and abuses and horrible things that happened to those American prisoners. That was what happened because of our policy in the 1920s, ignoring what was going on in Japan. That was our policy of engagement with the Japanese, just as our policy is now to the Communist Chinese; and they have the same dream the Japanese had, dominating Asia and the Pacific basin. Two days later after my visit to Corrigedor, my friends and I, including Filipino Congressman Roy Golez, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy flew over the Spratley Islands in an antiquated Philippine air force C-130, which is around 150 miles from the Philippines over to the South China Sea. We dropped out of a thick monsoon cloud cover to about 500 feet over the Spratleys over an outcropping called Mischief Reef. In that lagoon at Mischief Reef, within this oval-shaped reef, there were three large Chinese warships. I witnessed hundreds of Chinese construction workers with sparks flying off their welding torches, building permanent military structures on that reef 150 miles off the coast of the Philippines, and bracketing the South China Sea and all of the routes, the trading routes that go through there. Half or three-quarters of the Japanese trade goes through those areas, that trading route, that waterway. Within 2 months after that flight, Congressman Golez sent me new photos showing me a three-story Chinese concrete command and control building on the very site that we overflew. This grab of territory and this bullying of the Philippines is a warning we ignore at our own peril. Again, it is time to fundamentally change our policies toward the Communist Chinese government that controls the mainland of China. We are not talking about isolating China. Those claiming that we are trying to isolate China are setting up a false dichotomy. We are talking about a rational policy towards a hostile dictatorship, not an isolationist policy of ignoring overseas threats. In fact, those of us who are advocating to have a strong and forceful policy toward China, we are exactly the opposite of those who want to overlook Communist Chinese aggressions. Those are the ones who are more akin to the isolationists of the past. In fact, they are relying on wishful thinking instead of making the tough decisions that are necessary to avert war. We are the realists. We are not isolationists. We are the ones who are asking for a policy that makes sense when confronting a dictatorship. And dictators do not respect weakness. They respect strength, they respect purpose, they respect people who watch out for their own interests. I introduced a resolution, as my colleague is aware. I introduced this resolution yesterday and it is a resolution of disapproving the annual extension of normal trade relations, formerly Most Favored Nation status, and we would disapprove that. That is what my resolution states. And this is not intended to isolate China. Instead, it sends Beijing a direct message that the United States will not stand by and let them bully their neighbors and we will stand, instead, for our own Democratic principles, and we will protect the economic as well as the military interests of our country. And when we talk about our country, we are not just talking about a small business elite, a clique of billionaires who make a short-term profit at a time when the economic policies are hurting us economically and the military consequences are overwhelming. Madam Speaker, I yield to my colleague, the gentleman from California.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition; that is, opposition, to this rule. When the Committee on Armed Services reported this bill, it very wisely included a provision saying that the funds in this bill for fiscal year 2000 could not be used for continuing the war in Kosovo for another year. But the Committee on Rules has decided and have taken it upon themselves to use this rule to strike out that provision. That means, if we are to adopt this rule, this bill would become an authorization to continue the war for another year. This is unconscionable. If our leadership or the Committee on Rules wants to authorize the continuation of this war in the Balkans, they should allow an up-or-down vote on that issue. Instead, they have made this rule a vote on whether or not to continue the war in the Balkans. I say vote no on keeping this war going into the next millennium, vote no on this rule, and send a message to the leadership of both parties that we expect this body to be handled in a democratic fashion and not autocratically.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I think we can both compliment the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Larson) on the hard work that he has put into this. We would not be having this discussion right now if it was not for the diligence on the part of the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Larson) to oversee this project. We want to make sure that we are on the record knowing that although the designation has changed, the Congress certainly wants this project to move forward.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for allotting me this time. Mr. Chairman, today the House is considering H.R. 1654, the NASA Authorization Act of 1999, which I am pleased to sponsor. I want to publicly thank the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Gordon), the ranking member, for his spirit of cooperation during the process. I am saddened, however, that he is unable to cosponsor the bill and vote for it at this time, but I do understand that there are some areas of disagreement and perhaps some areas that he feels that was not dealt with in the way that he would prefer for it to be dealt with, and I am sorry for that. But I do think that we do have a spirit of cooperation among the members of the subcommittee, and I am trying my best to maintain that spirit as well as the spirit of cooperation among the staffs on both sides of the aisle. I appreciate the work that they put in to trying to put this bill together, although the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Gordon) cannot support it at this time. It contains one or two controversial provisions, surely. This bill, however, is overwhelmingly bipartisan. At least it was my intent to make it bipartisan. It includes several provisions and modifications that actually came from the Democratic side. Furthermore, I plan to offer a manager's amendment which will make a few additional refinements, including one that specifically addresses the concerns of the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Larson) who has put a tremendous amount of effort into a project that is very meaningful to his district. This is not a perfect bill, and I admit that. We have asked for an open rule because we want the House to work its will on this legislation. To the degree that we have an open rule and to the degree there are disagreements, I would hope that the open rule would provide us a way of coming to grips with some of the disagreements that are still in place. If any government agency belongs to the American people, surely it is NASA. I am committed to NASA's programs and policies, to make sure that they are reflecting the priorities of the people in the United States as reflected here in the House of Representatives, the people's House. Even so, I believe this piece of legislation is a solid piece of legislation because it sends three messages which are supported by the overwhelming majority of the Committee on Science and I believe the House itself. First, we tell the President and the appropriators that America's civil space agency should be rewarded for the sacrifices and reforms that it has made over the past several years by providing it a steady increase of 1 percent a year, if you take into account the information technology program that we are authorizing separately. Secondly, H.R. 1654 sets realistic overall funding levels and real priorities to guide appropriators. We focus additional resources on areas that our hearing record shows are underfunded and which have bipartisan support, including life and microgravity research, advanced space transportation technology, space science, and education. Third, H.R. 1654 pushes NASA to stay on the road to reform, especially on space privatization and commercialization. We do not want to destabilize the International Space Station or set up programs just to keep people busy. This bill does not micromanage NASA, but it does set clear goals and guides NASA towards them. Mr. Chairman, in closing let me just say that the other body has already marked up a NASA authorization bill and it should be reported to the floor for consideration soon. So after we complete our business today, I hope we can aggressively move forward to negotiate compromises with the Senate and, for the first time since 1992, enact a NASA authorization into law this year.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. When we are looking at the arguments on this amendment, Mr. Chairman, let us take a look. We are not talking about gutting money for research into jet engine noise. Again, this has often been the case in the past where people on the other side of the aisle have taken a look at money that was projected to be spent, increases that were projected, and then when the increase is reduced, that is portrayed as some kind of gutting of a program. That is just not the case. In fact, NASA documents provided to Congress suggest that there would be a $46 million figure spent for this type of research from fiscal year 2000 to 2002. However, updated documents from that agency suggest that NASA will now be spending $71.3 million for noise reduction, which means even without the amendment offered by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Weiner), NASA is planning to spend $25 million more than what it was on this particular issue. So while I believe that the amendment is well-intended, I do believe that, number one, it is an inaccurate portrayal to suggest that we are reducing the spending; but number two, it is irresponsible in an overall budgetary sense. What we have here is an attempt by the administration to set priorities. The money is necessary for the International Space Station, so it decided to reduce the increase in spending, so the administration was trying to act responsibly. Now we have an amendment here to undercut the administration when they have tried to set priorities with a limited budget. I have one more point to make in regard to that. The administration has had to set priorities because it is trying not to bust the budget, not to put us back on this road to irresponsibility that led to such massive deficits in the past. Instead, what is happening here, and again, we have amendments similar to this in the full committee, we find that we cannot just spend money. It just does not come out of nowhere. In this particular case, the gentleman now has decided to try to add on money, rather than take it out of other research areas in the science budget. But then, where does that extra $11 million come from? It comes from what we have designated, we have tried to hold off and protect, not as the social security trust fund, but social security surplus money. We have said we are going to try to keep all the money we do not spend and put it back into social security as a protection of that system. This $11 million is just one example of, yes, it is just a little bit of money, but everybody here has a little bit of money here, a little bit of money there, and eventually we have that surplus that we hope to spend on social security and to solidify social security just being whittled away to nothing again. I do not think that would be responsible.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I yield to the gentleman from New York.