WASHINGTON: Top American lawmakers have expressed concern over human rights abuses in China and sought a change in the US' policy towards the country.
The top US Senators expressed their views during a Congressional hearing 'Rule By Fear: 30 Years After Tiananmen Square'.
The hearing came on the anniversary of the Chinese government's violent crackdown on student demonstrators who occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese government deployed the military to suppress a six-week long pro-democracy protest in the capital.
The Communist Party of China continues its war against the people of China and treats the rest of the world with similar disdain, rued Senator Ted Cruz. He said that China poses the greatest long-term geopolitical threat to the United States.
"They have to be dealt with, and dealt with, with clear eyes. We can't break off relations with Beijing, but we must begin to rethink the assumptions that have guided US policies toward China since Tiananmen Square," Cruz said.
China has continued down the path it began 30 years ago with Tiananmen Square massacre with Xi Jinping declaring himself president for life cracking down on civil society and human rights, introducing and Orwellian system of mass surveillance, advancing militarily in the South China Sea and with predatory economic practices in Africa and the Western Hemisphere China's trajectory is clear, alleged Senator Robert Menendez.
Under the guise of so-called reeducation campaigns, the Chinese Communist party has brutally forced nearly one million Uighurs in Xinjiang into heavily surveillance forced labour camps, a model Xi may intend to expand throughout the country.
"Tibetans facing widescale repression and harsh controls on religious, educational, cultural and linguistic freedom were in many respects the test subjects for the sort of ethnic surveillance we see in Xinjiang," he said.
Lawyers, journalists, students, labour activist and human rights defenders are all at risk and behind it's great firewall China has created a social credit system that rewards good and punishes bad, he said.
"Sadly China's authoritarian model is appealing in all too many places around the globe where dictators are happy to accept China's assistance in repressing their own people.
From Cambodia to Venezuela to Angola, we find the Communist Party of China sharing the technologies and techniques they have refined to crush democracy in their own country," Menendez said.
"Developing an effective policy that keeps our values at the center of our China policy is uniquely challenging and increasingly urgent. Just being more confrontational with China does not make us more competitive with China nor does simple confrontation help us resolve core human rights concerns," he said.