“A Policy for Freedom in China”

Full Remarks by
Hon. Chris Cox

On the Occasion of His Acceptance of
the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame”

28 October 1997

Thank you, Fred [Thompson]. I hope you do understand that the reason all these people came here is to hear your introduction – not to hear me. That’s the same reason I had you out in California! We’ll just keep doing this, as many times as it takes. I suppose that, since the rule in politics is you can accomplish anything as long as you don’t care who gets the credit, Fred Thompson showing up here as my introducer makes a lot of sense for a man this humble. Fred Thompson care about who gets the credit? After all, he co-starred with Clint Eastwood!

For my part, I used to co-star with Jon Kyl, and I am delighted, now that you are over in the Senate, to be up here with you again.

It is an honor and a great pleasure to see so many good and old friends here, many of whom worked in the Reagan Administration, where I had my first political job. Not only did we get to participate in the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, but I also got a chance to meet my wife in the Reagan White House. I am forever indebted to Ronald Reagan for introducing me to Rebecca. I may be this year’s “Keeper of the Flame” winner, but Rebecca is my flame, this year and every year. Thank you very much, Rebecca, for all your support. By the way, Rebecca out-ranked me in the White House, as most of you who worked there recall. I have found that was good preparation for marriage.

It was my privilege to introduce Jon Kyl when he won this “Keeper of the Flame” award. It is an honor for me to be here for that reason. And of course, as we all know, Frank Gaffney is the real “Keeper of the Flame,” and these annual dinners are actually our opportunity to show up and thank Frank Gaffney and all of your colleagues at the Center for Security Policy for all of the hard work that you do, day in and day out. The advice that Congress routinely gets from the Center for Security Policy is always timely, insightful, well-researched, and reliable. You never let America down, and you never let us down. We are very, very grateful for all that you do.

As we meet tonight, America’s security policy toward Asia – and the Center’s own advice on this subject – are much on the minds of people in Washington and across the country because of the visit of Jiang Zemin to Washington. For those of us who have long been working on Asia policy, and China policy in specific, this is a great opportunity. Since I have been Chairman of the House Policy Committee, with the help of Mark Lagon (whom we have courtesy of Jeane Kirkpatrick – thank you very much Mark, and especially thank you, Jeane, for giving us Mark), we have put out nine white papers on the People’s Republic of China alone. This year I have traveled twice to the People’s Republic of China and met myself with Jiang Zemin. Since I have been Chairman of the Policy Committee, we have introduced several pieces of legislation relating to East Asia policy, nine of which will come to the floor of the House a week from tomorrow in a full-day session of over 12 hours devoted to China policy – an unprecedented opportunity.

In early 1996, at the time of the Taiwan missile crisis, the Policy Committee produced, and I introduced on the floor of the House, a very pointed resolution that stated that if the People’s Republic of China were, without provocation, to attack Taiwan, the United States would defend Taiwan. And that resolution passed the House of Representatives with – 369 votes in favor, and only 14 votes against it. Immediately following this, the Clinton Administration abandoned its policy, which they described as “strategic ambiguity,” and sent two carrier battle groups into the Taiwan Strait – immediately following which the People’s Republic of China lifted the blockade of Taiwan, and called off the balance of the missile tests. The scheduled Presidential elections on Taiwan went forward as planned. The months following have been peaceful. That is all to the good.

But it is ironic that the Clinton Administration described its own policy as “strategic ambiguity,” because that is exactly what I would say about it in criticism. How was the government in Beijing to know what would be the United States’ response if the PRC did attack? And why would we want to keep that a secret from them? Yet there were even sharper ambiguities than that. The Clinton policy was ambiguous about our security perimeter in the region, recalling Dean Acheson’s tragic misstep concerning South Korea in 1950. And the policy was morally ambiguous. It equated the kind of provocation for which the People’s Republic of China was responsible in launching missiles into the Taiwan Strait with the supposed provocation of the government of Taiwan’s holding democratic presidential elections or sending its leader to receive an honorary degree from Cornell University.

Strategic ambiguity is a dangerous policy, because uncertainty risks war. A security policy of strategic ambiguity is the opposite of a policy of peace through strength: it risks war through weakness. But even ambiguity doesn’t quite capture the Clinton policy, which is, even more than ambiguous, uncertain and unpredictable.

In 1992, when Vice President Al Gore was still in the United States Senate, Congress passed the Gore-McCain Act. The Gore-McCain Act prescribed sanctions for the sale of advanced conventional weapons by any nation to Iran. That same year, Bill Clinton criticized President Bush for a policy of coddling dictators in Beijing. But over the last three years, Communist China has transferred at least 60 C-802 cruise missiles to Iran, and the Clinton-Gore Administration has entirely waived the Gore-McCain Act and its application to the People’s Republic of China – even though the Clinton State Department has found that “these cruise missiles pose new, direct threats to deployed U.S. forces,” and Admiral Scott Reed, the former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, reported that these new missiles give Iran a “360-degree threat that can come at you from basically anywhere.”

This vacillating policy apparently applies throughout East Asia. In 1993, when unmistakable evidence of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development was uncovered, President Clinton took what appeared to be a clear stand: “North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. We have to be firm about it.” That is very clear. But today, North Korea, according to published CIA analyses, has a nuclear bomb. And according to testimony last week in the U.S. Senate, Kim Jong Il is frantically working to complete building the long-range missiles to carry it 3,100 miles away, as far as Alaska.

What then does being “firm about it” mean? For the Clinton Administration, it means that for the first time, North Korea is a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid. President Clinton is using millions in taxpayer dollars to provide the Stalinist regime in North Korea with two nuclear reactors and fuel in return for Kim Jong Il’s empty promise not to make nuclear weapons – a promise that is not only unverifiable, but almost certainly already broken.

But the President’s China policy remains the clearest example of a lack of constancy.

In the face of Communist China’s ongoing export of chemical weapons technology to Iran, even the Clinton State Department cited seven Chinese violations in May of this year. The CIA has designated the People’s Republic of China “the most significant supplier of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) related goods and technology to foreign countries.” In August, of this year, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency concluded that it is “highly probable” Communist China is violating the biological weapons convention. Just last month, the United States Navy reported that China is the most active supplier of Iran’s chemical, nuclear and biological weapons program. What will be the Clinton response to all of this at the summit tomorrow?

The answer is that Bill Clinton is expected to activate the 1985 Nuclear Cooperation Agreement with China – an agreement that requires a presidential certification that the People’s Republic of China has become a responsible member of the non-proliferation community. A more self-defeating example of coddling dictators in Beijing, to use Bill Clinton’s words, would be hard to find.

The Clinton policy of so-called engagement – unilateral and unconditional engagement, to be sure – is premised on the sound notion that the United States should wish China to be our friend. That is indeed a sound notion. We should, and we do, wish China to be our friend. But we must seek more than that. We must also desire to have friendly relations not with the largest Communist nation on earth, but with a free China.

While the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union gives us hope that China, too, will one day be free, the current government of the People’s Republic of China exercises control over more people than any one-party dictatorship in history. Communist China, with two-thirds of its urban work force employed in state-owned industries, is anything but a free market. The notorious Laogai prison system, on which my colleague Rep. Chris Smith has held hearings today, holds between six and eight million Chinese citizens captive and employed in slave-labor industries – some 140 export industries that ship to 70 countries around the world. There is no rule of law in China. Transparency International recently declared that China is the fifth most corrupt nation in the world. Private rights of ownership in real property are negligible. And the People’s Liberation Army, whose official military budget has more than doubled in the 1990s, supplements that spending with off-budget subsidies through the ownership of an enormous conglomerate of commercial firms that themselves are significant marketplace actors. This is not free enterprise.

Yes, China is changing. But it’s not changing any more than anyone would expect a modern Communist state to change. Many people in the Clinton administration and in the business community argue that China’s economic progress is miraculous. It means, they say, that China cannot be Communist. If China still has a Communist economy, they say, how could it grow by 10 percent a year?

Well, that’s an old and meaningless argument, considering the base of poverty against which Chinese economic growth is measured. Communist China reported a growth rate in 1958 of 22 percent at the height of the tragic “Great Leap Forward.” Twenty-two percent annual economic growth is simply fabulous – provided you are more interested in statistics than food. During this same period, China’s economic policies led to a man-made famine that claimed 20 million lives.

Yet throughout this period, even up to the time of Mao’s death in 1976, foreign business people were saying exactly what they are saying today. Many U.S. investors expressed open admiration for what was going on under Mao. David Rockefeller, for example, praised “the sense of national harmony,” and argued that Mao’s revolution “succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose.”

But while the enthusiasm for Chinese Communism is remarkably long-enduring (and seems willing to endure anything), such endorsements, just as in the case of Stalin’s Russia, have borne little or no relation to the truth. Just as “miraculous” as these reported economic growth figures is that after so many years of such progress, Communist China is still so poor. The truth is that today, even after all of these years of “miraculous” growth, the per capita gross domestic product of the People’s Republic of China ranks it below such emblems of Third World poverty as Lesotho, the Congo, Senegal, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Even today, the People’s Republic of China needs our help. And they deserve it. All of this history means not that we should refuse to engage China, but rather that America should seek to influence China for the better.

But following the Clinton Administration’s policy of passivity has coincided with a trend away from freedom and the rule of law. We should do the opposite. We should actively promote freedom.

What more reason could we have to act than the most recent State Department Human Rights Report on China? It offers a brutal assessment: “All public dissent against the Communist Party was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile, the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention or house arrest. No dissidents were known to be active at year’s end.”

The antidote to Communist corruption, slave labor, and the denial of commercial freedoms in China is free enterprise. U.S. policy should be based on promoting it.

Yes, we have seen the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Empire, so that Bill Clinton could say in February 1995, “We won the Cold War.” (Note the “we.”) But the fight against Communism is only half finished. Today, we need a new policy not of ambiguity, but of clarity. And a “Policy of Freedom,” which is what our new initiative in Congress is called, begins with a policy of clarity of language.

Today, Jiang Zemin conversed with an actor portraying Thomas Jefferson at Williamsburg. Thomas Jefferson, our third president, when he served as governor of Virginia in Williamsburg, wrote his Statute of Religious Liberty, which became the basis for the freedoms of conscience in our own Bill of Rights. This is the person to whom Jiang Zemin “spoke” today; yet the irony was not even noticed by our own Administration.

What would Ronald Reagan have said? Ronald Reagan made a career of speaking truth to evil. He did it when he was President of the United States, and it made America an even greater country. It’s well known that President Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” but that wasn’t the only occasion when plain speaking served him well. On July 8, 1985, President Reagan spoke to a very distinguished and educated group, the American Bar Association. And whatever else one might say about the American Bar Association, it is a group comprised exclusively of men and women with advanced degrees. (Laughter.) All of whom appreciate refined language.

In his prepared remarks, the President – I call him the President, and you all know whom I mean – said this, in his prepared remarks, about five nations, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Libya: He branded them members of “a convention of terrorist states.” A convention of terrorist states. One has difficulty imagining Bill Clinton being so judgmental. But he didn’t stop there. They were “outlaw states run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney toons and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.” (Laughter.)

We needn’t be so undiplomatic in our conversations with Jiang Zemin. Just as President Reagan on national television demanded the release of Nelson Mandela, we should demand the release of Wei Jingsheng.

And the American President should say simply to Jiang Zemin what the American President should say to the world: We wish an end to Communism to China. Because we love the peoples of China, we wish them to be free.

Last year, the then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Winston Lord, paid a visit to my office. We discussed these matters, and I asked him why it is that the President of the United States cannot say that we wish that China were not Communist. He replied that of course we wish it were so – but we just can’t say it.

And thus, with a silence as eloquent as President Reagan’s international appeals for freedom that helped topple the Soviet Empire, the Clinton Administration has forsworn a policy of anti-Communism.

We have an opportunity to do better. Next Wednesday, November 5, 1997 we will spend 12 hours on the floor of the House o f Representatives debating nine bills covering nearly every major aspect of the United States-PRC bilateral relationship. These bills together embody a clear Policy for Freedom.

The legislative approach in each case is tailored to the particular subject matter: enforcing the ban on slave labor, demonstrating our commitment to religious freedom, expanding Radio Free Asia, denying normal commercial status to the Communist Chinese military, reporting to Congress on Communist Chinese espionage and active measures in the United States, enforcing the Gore-McCain Act against China’s sending cruise missiles to Iran, assisting Taiwan with defense against China’s missile attacks, and so on. Yet despite the breadth of this legislation’s coverage, the well-known and well-worn vehicle of Most Favored Nation status is nowhere to be found in this debate.

It is possible to pursue a Policy for Freedom that works.

Communism is not something that must be tolerated in China. It’s not something that we must accept if only we were to understand Chinese history, because the truth is, Communism is alien to China.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin are hardly the fountainheads of Chinese culture. At the same time, obedience to the state is hardly a uniquely inbred value of Asia. It is something that we have known all to often and for too many years in the West, just as it was known under China’s imperial monarchy. Philip II, Louis XIV, Bismarck, Hitler, Mussolini – they were all fond of this so-called value. The truth is that in 5,000 years of history, and in 22 dynasties covering four millennia, China’s cultural experience has prepared it for almost anything. Certainly the Chinese people are prepared now for freedom.

From the year 618 forward, when the T’ang Dynasty welcomed Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and opened up ties to India, China grew rich in art and literature, and became technologically advanced. By the year 1000 – one thousand years ago – China had reached a population of 65 million (about the same one-fifth of the global population it represents today) and was easily the most technologically and culturally advanced civilization on the planet. This China was tolerant, commercially and scientifically advanced, and open to the world. Only Western Europe at that time had experienced five centuries of Dark Ages. China had not. Our world was then the least important area of civilization on earth, by far. This rich Chinese heritage, and not a bastardized “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” represents China’s birthright.

I’d like to conclude with a further story from Chinese history, and a thought.

When the Ming Dynasty replaced the Mongols in the 14th century, China embarked on its own Age of Exploration-an era that antedated, and rivaled in all respects, anything that was going on in Europe. Chinese fleets scoured the Indian Ocean, visiting Indonesia, Ceylon, even the Red Sea and Africa – where they picked up giraffes and brought them back to the amazement of the people back home.

But this is where Chinese exploration ended. Who knows? With a little more wind, the Chinese might have rounded the Cape of Good Hope. They might have reached Europe. They might even have discovered America.

Today, the irrepressible dreams of human freedom live on in China’s diverse and tolerant peoples. But China’s explorers and discoverers are kept down by worst of the 20th century’s legacies, the last vestiges of totalitarianism, which also live on still in Communist China.

It’s my hope that as we close the 20th century, America – whose unique mission in world history is to promote freedom – can provide the Chinese people with a little more wind to fill their sails, so that this time they will round the corner, so that this time they will actually be free. When that happens, China and the United States of America will truly be friends. And the world will be a much safer place.

End of Full Remarks