Political Quotes

“this is a high water mark for me in the last 2 years I have been able to be in Congress, being able to be a part of this discussion on our relationship with China. It is bipartisan, it makes a difference, it is Congress at its best and its most exciting. Over the last 25 years, since President Nixon reversed our policy of isolating ourselves from China and the rest of the world, we have seen a safer and more prosperous world. It helped hasten the end of the cold war, it helps keep peace today on the Korean peninsula, where China is one of the few countries that actually exercises some control over the North Koreans. It has pointed toward more prosperity and freedom for the Chinese. Even the progress with American missionaries on the ground in China in the last half dozen years would have been unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago. Most important, it has planted seeds for a dynamic change in the future with access to information and to markets. The reason it sounds to people today that we are talking about a multiplicity of countries is the fact that China, although large and with an ancient culture, is complex and it is not monolithic. We cannot treat it as such. The notion that somehow MFN will force a monolithic Chinese ancient society to change and accommodate us is misguided. It did not work during World War II, when there were over 1 million Japanese soldiers on Mainland China and we were giving them billions of dollars.”