WASHINGTON - Gary Bauer, former Republican presidential candidate and Campaign for Working Families Chairman, today in a Capitol Hill news conference joined with leading Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, Congressman Frank Wolf, Center for Security Policy Director Frank Gaffney, and Carnegie Associate Robert Kagan to layout both U.S. national security risks and human rights violations as reasons to oppose PNTR for China.
"Passage of permanent most favored nation trade status for Communist China would be an action future Americans would come to regret deeply. This is being billed as a vote on trade relations. It isn't. This is a vote on America's national security," said Bauer
"Beijing is bent on establishing China's hegemony in Asia and the Pacific, and it views expanded trade merely as a means to this end. Trade is a key component in China's overall military strategy.
"This unprecedented drive by corporate America and its political allies to reward an oppressive communist dictatorship is driven by greed, a lust for profits, not by the illusory notion that increased trade will democratize and pacify China. Nearly two decades of growing trade with China have failed to produce any noticeable improvement in China's appalling record of human rights abuse at home or belligerence abroad.
"America's national security interests would not be served by granting China 'normal' trade relations. Though some who are hypnotized by the allure of opening the 'China market' may not want to face reality, the truth is that one day in the near future the democratic West will confront a nuclear-armed China in a contest for world domination. Indeed, this confrontation already has begun to take shape as China maneuvers to replace the U.S. as the dominant power in the western Pacific.
"China has used its $70 billion annual trade surplus with the U.S. to fund a program of military expansion not seen in Asia since the emergence of Imperial Japan in the three decades prior to the outbreak of World War II. The blithe assumption that a wealthy China would inevitably be a more peaceable China is an indulgent illusion unsupported by the record of history. A wealthier communist regime in Beijing will be an even greater threat to America and its allies in Asia and the Pacific.
"V.I. Lenin predicted that capitalists would eagerly sell the rope with which the communists would hang them. Congressional approval of permanent trade relations would prove Lenin correct. The defense of liberty requires eternal vigilance. The great contest between freedom and slavery has yet to be decided. This is not the time to strengthen a brutal communist regime and its tyrannical grip on one-fifth of the world's population.
"If we are to remain faithful to the noble ideals upon which our great nation was founded, then Congress must reject this act of abject appeasement. Otherwise, future generations of Americans will surely pay a heavy price for our foolhardiness," said Bauer. |
