China announced sanctions against me this week for the second time in a month. This time it was for speaking out against China’s deepening control of Hong Kong.
The first time, in July, the Chinese government sanctioned me and banned me from traveling to China for condemning the Chinese Communist Party’s horrific human rights abuses against the Uighurs.
The irony is that those atrocities had already made China a less than attractive tourist destination.
CHINA IMPOSES SANCTIONS AGAINST CRUZ, RUBIO, OTHER US LAWMAKERS OVER HONG KONG
The Chinese regime has forced over 1 million Uighurs into concentration camps and has engaged in ethnic cleansing, including through forced abortions and sterilizations.
Last October, I went to Hong Kong and met with pro-democracy activists, dissidents, and protest leaders to express my support for the fight to protect Hong Kong’s autonomy, free speech and basic human rights. Dressed all in black, we stood together in solidarity, demanding that China honor the deal it agreed to pledging to protect Hong Kong’s autonomy.
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China has undeniably violated Hong Kong’s autonomy at the expense of the precious freedoms that the people of Hong Kong fought tirelessly and bravely to preserve. The recent arrests of Jimmy Lai, his family, and other brave journalists who dared to speak out against the Chinese Communist Party are just the latest examples.
More broadly, China is the greatest geopolitical threat facing the United States and our allies — now and for the next century. China’s objective is nothing short of global domination.
Yet many on the world stage, including at the United Nations, turn a blind eye to China’s barbaric behavior and aggression. That is not the case in the United States. We must and will respond.
For example, I spearheaded the Hong Kong Policy Reevaluation Act, which required the State Department to report on whether China was eroding Hong Kong’s autonomy, setting up a formal process for altering U.S. policy if this proved to be the case.
President Trump signed this bill into law in November 2019 as part of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The Trump administration then issued the mandated report, unfortunately, but correctly concluding that China had undermined Hong Kong’s autonomy, and then changing our policies.
As the Trump administration’s actions make clear, America will not stand by and allow tyrants in China to exploit the special treatment Hong Kong received under U.S. law.
As we all know, China violated that deal. The Communist Chinese government was hoping it could silence and oppress the people of Hong Kong in the dark of night without anybody noticing. But we’ve noticed, and we won’t back down.
Unfortunately, China’s treatment of Hong Kong and the Uighurs is part of a pattern of despicable behavior including China’s aggression, human rights abuses, espionage operations, censorship practices and propaganda campaigns.
And what we’ve learned in the past few months is that the Communist Chinese government’s lies, censorship, propaganda, and human rights abuses have serious implications for public health. As brave Chinese doctors and journalists were trying to warn the world about coronavirus, they were silenced, and many disappeared.
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The Chinese lied to the world about the coronavirus, and what began as a regional outbreak is now a deadly pandemic that has sickened over 21 million people and claimed the lives of over 761,000 around the world.
The Communist Chinese government is directly responsible for those deaths.
It’s time for the United States to take serious measures to hold China accountable. That’s why I’ve been fighting in the Senate to fundamentally reassess our relationship with China and counter Chinese censorship in the wake of the Communist Chinese government’s coronavirus cover-up.
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We need to do everything we can to make it clear that the United States will not tolerate China’s relentless attempts to bully its neighbors into submission and will not tolerate China’s espionage operations and propaganda campaigns on American soil. China is expanding its malign influence all over the world.
For the sake of the free world, America needs to win this contest.
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