Speech by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton on Hong Kong Democracy and Human Rights Act

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — U.S. SENATE November 19, 2019

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton for Arkansas

"The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act is really about promises— making promises and keeping promises. Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of making promises but not keeping them.

You can ask a rice farmer from Stuttgart. You can ask a software programmer from Fayetteville, a factory worker from Fort Smith, or a Christian missionary from Searcy.

In this case, China promised in 1984 that it would uphold the ‘‘one country, two systems’’ approach to Hong Kong when it took over in 1997, a promise to preserve the freedoms that have made Hong Kong distinctive—the freedom to practice one’s religion as one sees fit, to speak one’s mind, and to participate in the political process.

But that is just another promise they are on the verge of breaking. Apparently, the ‘‘one country, two systems’’ approach can’t satisfy Beijing’s rapacious appetite. They look at and covet Hong Kong’s wealth, and they fear and loathe its freedom, which stands in shining contrast to the Orwellian oppression on the mainland. In fact, they fear that mainland Chinese might look across the bay and start to get ideas.

So the Chinese Communist Party has been breaking its promises to Hong Kong and to the world, waging a brutal campaign to absorb Hong Kong into its dystopian, high-tech dictatorship.

Hongkongers are bravely resisting in the face of this kind of escalating violence. In recent days, Hong Kong secu- rity forces have shot a protestor in the stomach. They have trapped hundreds of students in the university, using rubber bullets and tear gas on them. They have threatened them with mass arrest.

Beijing’s propagandists have been hinting that even harsher measures are on the way.

An article in the party-controlled China Daily argues that Beijing must accelerate Hong Kong’s integration with the mainland and then reeducate Hongkongers, just like they are doing on a mass scale to 1 million Uighurs in concentration camps in Xinjiang.

I said this in the summer when the protests started. Let me say it again. It would be a grave mistake of historic proportion—surpassing the massacre of Tiananmen Square—if Beijing were to impose martial law, occupy, or other- wise crackdown on Hong Kong.

But the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act is about more than China making and breaking promises. It is also about the United States fi- nally enforcing China’s promises.

We have a shot to avert catastrophe, protect the people of Hong Kong, and to finally enforce Beijing promises or hold them accountable for breaking those promises.

Very soon, the Senate will pass this legislation on a unanimous, bipartisan basis to give you a sense of sentiment in the Congress. This legislation re- quires the Secretary of State to certify Hong Kong’s autonomy from the main- land each year. Otherwise, they will lose the special privileges that U.S. law currently grants to Hong Kong.

The bill will freeze the assets and travel of officials who are responsible for abducting Hongkongers, like journalists, booksellers who have been vanishing without a trace since 2017, and it will ensure that pro-democracy protesters cannot be denied visas to the United States despite their specious arrests. But if the Hong Kong Chinese Communist Party will simply pull back from the brink, if they will keep their promises, if they will respect their one- country, two-system approach, none of this will happen.

So Beijing has a promise. Keep its promises, or give Americans and the world one more reason to treat China like an outlaw regime.

Choose wisely, Mr. General Secretary Xi.