Washington D.C. — Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX), Lead Republican of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke on the House Floor in support of H.R. 6210, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

-Opening Remarks as Delivered-

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“Madam Speaker, I want to start this debate with a simple truth that we cannot afford to forget – that truly free trade cannot involve slave labor.

“Today the Chinese Communist Party is using the forced labor of the Uyghurs and other minorities to help bank roll its cultural genocide against those very same groups. The repression taking place right now in Xinjiang is breathtaking in its scope and in its brutality. It involves the detention of one to three million people in concentration camps. It involves surveillance and attempted brainwashing on a massive scale. It involves breaking up families and taking children from their parents. It involves forced sterilization and, Madam Speaker, forced abortions.

“This should be a terrifying warning to the world, to China’s neighbors, and to the American people that the Chinese Communist Party is fundamentally focused on expanding its power, its control, and its authoritarian style of government. It views things that it does not control – like religion, cultural identity, and the yearning for all people for freedom – as threats that must be destroyed. And because we have drawn the CCP into our most essential supply chains, it can hold our national security hostage while it uses U.S. consumers to subsidize its atrocities. As many as one in five cotton garments globally could be tainted with Uyghur slave labor.

“In July, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized a 13-ton shipment of human hair. Madam Speaker, human hair that originated in the forced labor system. We haven’t heard about human hair since the nazis in the concentration camps of the war that my father fought in, World War II. It’s brazen and sickening. It’s brazen, and it’s sickening. We must refuse to be complicit, financially or otherwise, in the CCP’s crimes against the Muslim Uyghurs.

“For that reason I support this bill before us today. I must also point out the abuses in this province are only one part of the grave and growing threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to the interests, the values, and the security of the United States. That threat is global and has military, economic, public health, and philosophical aspects.

“I know that many on the other side of the aisle share my concerns. I, unfortunately, regret that during this Congress the majority has not given the CCP threat even one tenth of the time they put into their partisan efforts to bring down this president. We were told that the China Task Force was going to be bipartisan, Madam Speaker, and at the last minute, the majority pulled out. For the past four months, I’ve served as Chairman of the China Task Force. This task force, again, was supposed to be bipartisan, because I believe this is not a Republican or a Democrat issue.

“Confronting the generational threat that the CCP poses should be a bipartisan issue. It is an American issue, the greatest national security threat to the United States of America. I believe this failure of perspective needs to change.

“On the China Task Force, we have met with 125 people from both sides of the aisle to gain better insight into our foreign policy – as we speak here from the Foreign Affairs Committee – and how we need to treat the Chinese Communist Party from a foreign policy standpoint. This again is an American issue, not Republican or Democrat.

“This report coming out October 1st will include 400 recommendations, including 100 pieces of legislation that have bipartisan support like the bill before us today.

“So I strongly urge my colleagues to support this legislation. And then once we get past this election, Madam Speaker, let us come together on both sides and analyze objectively our foreign policy with the Chinese Communist Party and address the bipartisan bills that will be recommended by the task force to address the Chinese Communist Party’s malign activities throughout the world.

“With that, I reserve the balance of my time.”

-Closing Remarks as Delivered-

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“Thank you, Madam Speaker. In recent years, the world has stood by idly as the Chinese Communist Party rounded up more than a million – probably a lot more than that – ethnic minorities into concentration camps, where they are tortured, brainwashed, and forced into labor.

“This is all part of a deliberate program by the CCP to wipe out their ethnic identity, their religion, their culture – anything that might compete with the Communist Party for their loyalties and affection.

“We have a moral duty today to speak out against these horrifying crimes against humanity and against the Uyghurs, and as the speaker mentioned, against the Tibetans and Christians as well, who are persecuted in the Chinese Communist regime.

“But we have an even greater duty to avoid funding this genocide by paying for slave labor in Xinjiang. 

“There can no longer be business as usual with China. Madam Speaker, the world is watching.

“I urge my colleagues to vote ‘yes,’ and I yield back the balance of my time.”

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