Jan Jekielek's Speech on Linking China Human Rights & Trade, CPAC 2022

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FULL TEXT OF SPEECH:

I’m going to start with a bit of a history lesson. Some of you will know some of the parts, but not all. So bear with me. In the late 1980’s there was an opening up in China. A number of reformers, pro freedom, had assumed positions of considerable power in the communist party. A student movement for democracy emerged all over the country. The center of the demonstrations was in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On June 4, 1999, the order came down to “pacify” the peaceful demonstrations. Tanks rolled in, and the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on the students. The actual number of people the PLA killed is a state secret in China, but credible estimates range from 2,000-5,000.

The cruelty of the Chinese regime had been put on full display for the world. Yet fairly quickly, while publicly condemning the massacre, President George H W Bush sent a secret delegation to China to maintain strategic relations, telling the Chinese regime that the US public face was quite different from its real position.

In 1993 President Bill Clintion, who had campaigned on being tough on the Chinese regime, wrote an executive order giving the Chinese regime Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status, but tying it to China’s progress on Human Rights.

I recently interviewed Congressman Chris Smith, who was there. He had learned about some harsh truths of Chinese communist party rule when constituents presented him with evidence of the regime’s forced abortion policies in the mid 1980’s. Did you know that today there are at least 35 million more men than women in China, as a result of China’s one-child policy, with girls being preferentially aborted under the threat of forced abortion?

So Chris Smith had a meeting with Chinese officials in Beijing in 1994, telling them that their Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status was in jeopardy, because they hadn’t come close to meeting their obligations. The officials laughed at him. The Chinese knew that Clinton was bluffing even before the many congressional members did.

Tearing up the executive order, Clinton decoupled trade and human rights. And this was a pivotal moment in US China relations. And I might add, the mantra in DC at that time, even among ostensibly well meaning politicians, became that more trade would eventually transform China into a democracy. There was much bipartisan enthusiasm about this. Instead, we built the Chinese communist party into the world’s largest and most dangerous dictatorship.

For the Chinese regime, this opened up the door to our economy through Permanent Trade Relations and eventually entrance into the World Trade Organization. But the Chinese communist party never intended to play by the rules. And we should have known this already.

So in 1999, the Chinese communist party felt uninhibited to launch a campaign to “eradicate” the Falun Gong spiritual discipline, that’s in the worlds of Jiang Zemin, the dictator at the time.
The regime felt fine to mark 70 to 100 million people illegal, demonize them with hate propaganda straight out of 1930’s Nazi germany, and use any means to so-called “re-educate” them; a verbal order came through saying that all Falun Gong deaths in prisons and forced labor camps would be considered suicides. And, there was really no meaningful response from the US.

Today, we’re extremely aware of the Chinese regime’s genocide of the Uyghur people, indeed the 2022 Beijing Olympics were dubbed, The Genocide Games.

I wanted to add that one of the reasons my media outlet, The Epoch Times, was founded back in 2000 by Chinese Americans, was to expose these realities. American officials, media and corporations largely (and perhaps conveniently) didn’t want to accept what the Chinese regime has been doing to its own people, and many were accepting Chinese regime propaganda organs as credible sources. We were founded to tell the truth in the face of these lies.

Today, according to former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, in the Trump administration, Robert Destro, we have three genocides in China, three attempts to eradicate groups of people: The Tibetans, the Uyghurs, and Falun Gong practitioners. Today, started on the backs of the Falun Gong, there is a billion-dollar murder-for organs industry in China, verified by multiple independent investigations, something I’ve heard described as “an evil yet to be seen on this planet.”

Think about it. Genocide, the deliberate attempt to completely eradicate a distinct group of people, is the considered perhaps the worst thing people can do to one another. And we tolerate it. Trade is perfectly fine. One China expert told me, if you were in a shop which had all sorts of wonderful things to buy, but when we looked in the back room, and you discovered jars of people’s forcibly harvested organs in them—would we still want to shop there? I worry that in the West we’ve lost the ability to even understand, that evil really does exist.

We can’t assume the good intentions of a regime that continually, repeatedly, in so many walks of life demonstrates bad intentions—especially in the realm of human rights. Today I heard that the Biden administration has been for weeks trying to negotiate with the Chinese regime, to get them to apply pressure to Russia to not invade Ukraine, a country I might add that recently, China recognized until now as sovereign. If this reporting is true, this engagement failed. Again, how can you expect to negotiate in good faith with a communist regime enacting, as we speak, three genocides?

We have to urgently re-couple human rights and trade with China, and enact policies that cascade from that. We have to assume the worst, enact unambiguous oversight to make sure that the regime has really changed its policies. Many China experts describe the regime functioning a lot more like a mafia organization than what we think of as a government of a nation. We can’t keep funding a regime like this—a hybrid of communist ideology and state capitalism, constantly fed by US dollars. I’m afraid it will mean the end of the American experiment.

Secondly, support all those who are fighting for the most basic rights in China, especially those who are facing genocide at the hands of the regime, the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Falun Gong practitioners.

And finally, with all of America’s flaws, and I know, there are many, we have to remember that we absolutely, truly do have the moral high ground here, and while we’ve lost some of it, we can strive with everything we’ve got, to regain it. Thank you.

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