Former House Speaker John Boehner shouldn’t lobby on behalf of China due to the Communist regime’s human rights abuses, a House Republican lawmaker said Thursday.
“Now we’ve got John Boehner, our former speaker, joining in the chorus of lobbyists for a dictatorship,” Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., said while co-chairing a congressional hearing on Chinese human rights abuses.
Smith’s remarks about his former colleague came amid a hearing on how Chinese President Xi Jinping is building a surveillance state, often using technology purchased from American companies. The hearing put a sharp focus on U.S. companies doing business in China, as well as the lobbyists who argue their case against restrictions on those sales. Smith suggested that Boehner, who joined a lobbying firm that includes the Chinese Embassy to the U.S. among its clients, could be a particularly high-profile example of that practice.
“If he speaks truth to power behind closed doors, and more than that, that’ll be great; but if he comes up here and just promotes the bottom line of Beijing — of Xi Jinping, who is now one of the rivals for Mao Zedong when it comes to human rights abuse — we have a problem,” Smith said.
Xi’s government has earned that dubious distinction with a recent aggressive crackdown on Uighur Muslims, an ethnic and religious minority in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang. The isolated province’s strategic significance as part of a new planned trade route has enhanced Xi’s motivation to repress the Uighur population, according to a senior U.S. diplomat
“The stated goal of the current campaign is to ‘Sinicize religion’ and ‘adapt religion to a socialist society,’ suggesting that Beijing wagers that it now possesses the political, diplomatic, and technological capabilities to transform religion and ethnicity in Chinese society in a way that its predecessors never could, even during the peak horrors of the Cultural Revolution and other heinous Maoist campaigns intended to remake Chinese society,” Ambassador Kelly Currie, one of the top U.S. officials at the United Nations, told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Thursday.
“To guarantee that this suppression continues beyond the internment camps into the daily lives of all Uighurs, Chinese authorities have constructed a highly intrusive, high-tech surveillance system in Xinjiang, which many experts fear will be extended throughout China,” she added.
“Did we sell crowd-control and police technology to the Soviet Union when it existed?” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., asked a Commerce Department official. Upon learning that the answer was no, he argued that the internal repression conducted by the Communist power — which he dubbed “our number one geopolitical rival going forward in the coming decades” — has direct consequences for American foreign policy.
“They’re plainly using this kind of technology in Xinjiang to oppress their own people and to build their national power in a way to challenge us,” Cotton said. “I mean, one of the reasons why China has been able to turn its focus outward onto the blue seas and challenge us inside the first island chain and in the South China Sea is that they’ve gained they’ve gained greater control over their internal borders, especially Xinjiang and Tibet.”
Of course, China will have access to such technology, whether or not the federal government allows U.S. companies to make the sales. “There’s plenty of opportunities for the Chinese security services to continue to do what they’re doing without U.S. items,” Anthony Christino, a senior official in the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, replied when asked about the availability of the technology.
That observation didn’t dampen the enthusiasm in the room for restricting the sales. “I don’t believe that any of us who are calling for this technology, like the DNA sequencer [to be] prohibited], believe that doing so will prohibit them or stop them from doing this,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who also co-chaired hearing. “We just don’t want American companies to be participants in it.”
Rubio’s sentiment was shared across party lines. “This is the exact argument that was made in Britain to justify the sale of Rolls Royce engines to the Luftwaffe in 1935,” Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Senate Democrats, interjected. “It was a bad argument then and it’s a bad argument now … I don’t want to be complicit in this.”
