[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 63 (Monday, April 17, 2023)] [House] [Pages H1751-H1755] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Date: 2023-04-17
Chamber: HOUSE
Mr. BIGGS: I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. There is a great Chinese scholar, Professor Sheridan wrote a book called ``China in Disintegration,'' and he analyzed the fall of China's government in the early 1900s before you moved to kind of an anarchical situation where you saw the rise of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang versus, ultimately, post-World War II Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist long march as they marched around and eventually the U.S. wavered and China fell to communism under Chairman Mao. What was the premise of ``China in Disintegration''? It was an analysis of why great powers, great nations, great empires fail. They fail because of a loss of geographical integrity. They fail for--that is the first thing. The second thing is they fail because their currency loses value and trust. Once that goes, and the culture begins to change, they are either overextended, or they allow individuals with malevolent intentions to come into their country and influence the population. So what do we have? We have a wide-open border, so we have lost our geographical integrity. We have $31.4 trillion in national debt and rising inflation. We have nations like India contemplating moving to the Chinese yuan for their currency of exchange instead of the dollar. They have settled on the rupee. We have lost economic integrity as well. What has happened? Well, China views, as they always have, themselves as the center of the universe. They have viewed Westerners as barbarians. Mao and his ambitions were superseded ultimately by Deng Zhao Ping, who said we are going to put a unique spin and have a hybridized economy, and it is going to have some elements of capitalism, but it is going to be Communistic overall. Now, why did he do that? Because they were failing as a Communist state. We built the Chinese middle class. We built the Chinese deep water navy. We gave China superior telemetry. Ladies and gentlemen, we have basically given China our technology. What we haven't given them, they have stolen. Now you have reached a point where you have a CEO of a company like Nike, who says, we are not an American company anymore, we are a Chinese company. How have they done that? There are literally tens of thousands of Chinese national students in our universities. When we talk about the billions of dollars that have come in in donations, a more insidious thing is the out-of-State tuition that funds these State universities who rely on out-of-State tuition, so they come in and they pay that tuition.  It is not a normalized situation. To come over here as a student, you have to be a member of the CCP. There are 330 million people in the CCP, as many as we have living in the United States today. They send their students over here and they exit. They leave and they go home with what? Our technology and experience that we have given them to defeat ourselves. We can continue to put our head in the sand and hope that it isn't true. There are those who believe it is xenophobic to talk about this. I appreciate the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bean) being here tonight and leading this Special Order because Americans need to know the peril that we are in because China doesn't view us as an economic opponent or competitor. They view us as an adversary, a geopolitical adversary.  For them, they want to be the world's dominant hegemon. That isn't me saying it. You can look at any modern writing within the top leadership of the CCP. It is pretty clear. I would suggest that we need to take back our educational institutions. Couple that with the integration, we need to decouple our economic integration and dependence upon China. They know we are dependent. They know they can exploit that. We saw how they exploited it just recently in the COVID-19 epidemic. Let's be wise. We are going to have to take action.  {time}  2120