TJ Cox: “Mr. Speaker, much of the debate has centered around whether most-favored-nation trade status is capable of addressing…”

“Mr. Speaker, much of the debate has centered around whether most-favored-nation trade status is capable of addressing issues beyond trade. The implicit notion is that once we stop talking about things like theft of intellectual property, once we stop talking about facts, such as that the average tariff levels on United States goods maintained by Communist China are more than 15 times higher than United States tariffs on Communist Chinese imports to our country, that we have gone beyond trade qua trade, that we therefore have extended into the realm of something else; perhaps national security, perhaps international relations, but surely not MFN. Mr. Speaker, it is true that we do have a great deal of concern with China's policies that apparently deal not with trade but other things, like the torture of religious figures. Chen Zhuman was hung upside down in a window frame as his personal torture. The brutal occupation of Tibet is not apparently about trade. The fact that Communist China is a one-party state which is capable of imprisoning for 28 years now a democracy activist like Wei Jing Sheng is not, I suppose, technically about trade. Maybe even the Laogai forced labor camp system, the Chinese gulag that comprises over 3,000 such camps, maybe that is not technically about trade.”