Feb. 28, 2022 - Epoch Times
08:06
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| - Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, from the Epoch Times, Jan Jekyllic. - So I'm gonna Jan Jekyllic. - So I'm gonna start with a little bit of a history lesson Congressman Perry gave us a little bit. | |
| I'm going to start a little bit earlier. | |
| Some of you will know some of this story, and others won't. | |
| But it's worth a listen. | |
| So in the late 1980s, China has always been a communist dictatorship. | |
| But in the 1980s, there was a kind of opening up, okay? | |
| There were a number of pro-freedom people that had ended up in the leadership and assumed positions of considerable power, actually, in the Communist Party. | |
| And a student movement for democracy emerged. | |
| The center of these demonstrations for the student movement was in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. | |
| And on June 4, 1999, as many of you do know, the order came down to, quote, pacify the students. | |
| And the People's Liberation Army The military that's responsible for the Chinese Communist Party opened fire on the students. | |
| 5,000 people were murdered in cold blood. | |
| So the cruelty of the Chinese regime has been basically on full display for the world since that time, since 1989. | |
| But fairly quickly, while publicly condemning the massacre, President George H.W. Bush actually sent a secret delegation to China to maintain strategic relations. | |
| There was this public face, but then there was this hidden private face that was different. | |
| The real position was different. | |
| And in 1993, President Bill Clinton, who had campaigned on being tough on the Chinese regime, wrote an executive order giving them most favored nation trade status. | |
| But he tied it To China's progress on human rights. | |
| I recently interviewed on my show, American Thought Leaders, Congressman Chris Smith, who was there. | |
| He's been in Congress for years. | |
| And he had learned some of the harsh truths also of what was happening in Communist China. | |
| Constituents had presented him of evidence of the regime's forced abortion policies. | |
| This was in the 80s. | |
| We already knew this. | |
| 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 trade status was in jeopardy because they hadn't come close to meeting their obligations. | |
| Remember, this is five years after Tiananmen Square. | |
| But the officials laughed at him. | |
| The Chinese knew that Clinton was bluffing, even before many congressional members did. | |
| And reportedly, Clinton basically tore up this executive order. | |
| And at that moment, one of the worst things happened for America and for China, I would argue. | |
| Human rights and trade were decoupled. | |
| Okay, this is such a pivotal moment. | |
| And I might add, right, the mantra in DC at the time and onwards, often, has been that more trade will eventually transform China into a democracy, into a free society. | |
| And this has been a bipartisan position, frankly, throughout for years, and it's really only started to change fairly recently. | |
| So what we did, we actually built the Chinese Communist Party into the world's largest and most dangerous dictatorship. | |
| We have to accept that. | |
| So, Congressman Perry mentioned in 1999 that this initial MFN has led to access to the World Trade Organization, okay? | |
| The Chinese regime never intended to play by the rules. | |
| So 1999, entrance into the WTO, at the same time, The Chinese Communist Party felt uninhibited to basically launch a campaign to eradicate a spiritual group, Falun Gong. | |
| Literally, that was the words of the dictator. | |
| 70 to 100 million people became illegal. | |
| Hate propaganda straight out of Nazi Germany came out. | |
| And any means were allowed to re-educate these people. | |
| Okay? | |
| Deaths of people in the forced labor camps were to be considered by verbal order, Suicides. | |
| Those were the rules. | |
| This is 1989 when they entered the WTO. And the U.S. had no meaningful response. | |
| In fact, the opposite. | |
| So we've been, you know, extremely aware of these realities. | |
| And today, we're very aware of the genocide of the Uyghur people, right? | |
| Indeed, at the same time as the 2022 Beijing Olympics have been dubbed the genocide games. | |
| So I wanted just to mention that the Epoch Times, the outlet that I work for, was founded back in 2000 by Chinese Americans to specifically to expose these types of realities. | |
| And it's only again recently, I guess, that we've been successful in getting the word out to a broader audience. | |
| The Chinese regime propaganda organs have been very, very powerful and long accepted as credible sources by many media. | |
| So 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 whole groups of people, the Tibetans, the Uyghur people, and Falun Gong practitioners. | |
| And at the same time, there's a multi-billion dollar industry in China A murder for organs industry, verified by multiple independent investigations. | |
| Something that I've heard described as an evil yet to be seen on this planet. | |
| So think about it. | |
| You know, genocide is the worst thing, I think, as humanity, that we can do, that human beings can do to others. | |
| Right? | |
| So, but trade somehow is fine? | |
| One China expert told me, if you were in a shop which had all sorts of wonderful things in it to buy, but when you looked into the back room and discovered jars of people's forcibly harvested organs in them, would you still want to shop at that shop? | |
| I worry that in the West, we've lost the ability to even understand that evil exists. | |
| So we can't assume the good intentions of a regime that continually, repeatedly, in so many ways, demonstrates bad intentions. | |
| And here's my suggestion. | |
| We have to recouple human rights and trade with China. | |
| Bring those things back together. | |
| Not just for the Chinese people, but for the American people, and the Canadian people, and frankly, the world's people. | |
| And we have to enact policies that cascade from that. | |
| We have to assume the worst and enact unambiguous oversight to make sure that the regime really does change if we're going to work with them. | |
| We can't keep funding a regime, like previous speakers to me had said, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, effectively, that is a hybrid of communist ideology and state capitalism, and keep feeding it US dollars. | |
| I'm afraid that might mean the end of the American experiment. | |
| I also suggest, let's give support to these people, especially the ones who are facing genocide. | |
| At least moral support, at the very least. | |
| The Tibetans, the Uyghurs, the Falun Gong practitioners. | |
| And finally, finally, with all of America's flaws, and I know there are many, and I know we've been thinking about them, 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. |
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