WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on ending trade that cheats American workers, U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) slammed China for their continued deception, fraud, and inhumane practices and called on Congress to hold China accountable.
Watch the Senator’s full remarks here.
“I do think the focus needs to be China, but there are other bad actors. We have allies who are bad actors, but I think we need to have a broader view. I’ll give you an idea of how I think we should go against China, and have them notice a whole of government, a whole of Congress approach across many committee jurisdictions. Last week, I met with the DEA, and the transnational criminal organizations have completely changed the game on how they launder money. They don’t go to semi-sophisticated people carrying cash around. They go to a global network or banking entities that are moving across this globe and laundering billions of dollars. Known entities that the DEA knows, we need to be able to track them down and we can do that maybe in the Banking Committee or here in Finance.”
Senator Tillis on China Cheating North Carolina Companies
“I have two companies in North Carolina, Nucor, which is not a union shop but a very well-regarded steel producer that are being ripped off every single day of the year for the last decades. And I’ve seen some of our partners have bad behavior dumping illegal steel in the country. Charlotte Pipe is a family-owned business in downtown Charlotte that has a very sophisticated business but still maintains its old-time foundry image. You can go to a province in China, and they have a Hollywood movie set, it looks just like Charlotte Pipe, it's called Charlotte Pipe, they print Charlotte Pipe on it and they dump it in this country and other countries. We need to let China know, we know what they’re doing.”
Senator Tillis on Holding China Accountable
“We need to let them know, that they are literally benefitting from slave labor and forced imprisonment. We need to let them know that they are exploiting our finance system. We need to let them know that they are making it unfair for union labor to actually compete on a level playing field. Can we get all of the links back in the supply chain? Absolutely not. And even if we could, we may want to think strategically about countries that we do want to have strong trading partners with, especially in this hemisphere […] but also know that China is sending precursors to Mexico and poisoning hundreds of thousands of people across the globe and killing about 100,000 people from opioids and fentanyl. We need to let them know we know this. And the best way we can do this is to have a coordinated effort with the House and the Senate and the committees of jurisdiction to say we got you. We're going to match you on trade, we're going to compete fairly, and we're going to move supply chain links out of China to countries we can rely on. We cannot forget how we saw those supply chains break down with COVID. So I think this a great opportunity and I believe there is a huge bipartisan base of people here to vote on it. If we have the hearings and we have the markups, we can send a message to China that’s going to benefit the free world, and it’s going to benefit free markets.”
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