House Select Committee On The CCP Holds Hearing About China's Global Surveillance Technology

3 months ago

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party held a hearing entitled, "The Great Firewall and the CCP’s Export of its Techno-Authoritarian Surveillance State."

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Transcript

00:00:00The Select Committee will come to order.

00:00:04Good morning, everyone. Today we are here to discuss a topic of important strategic

00:00:10value, the Chinese Communist Party's Great Firewall. The Great Firewall is a dystopian

00:00:17censorship regime designed to advance near-total societal control over the Chinese people.

00:00:25With an army of censors boosted by artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technology,

00:00:31it monitors all information and expression within China, rapidly stamping out anything

00:00:37that diverges from the Party line.

00:00:41The Great Firewall also controls all contact between Chinese citizens and the outside world.

00:00:48Information is stopped from flowing into China, and the Chinese people are not allowed to

00:00:52get information out. Facebook, X, Instagram, and YouTube, and any platform you could watch

00:01:01this hearing on, are blocked.

00:01:05Behind the Great Firewall, the CCP has the Chinese people trapped in a parallel reality

00:01:10where they are fed a steady stream of propaganda, tightly controlled by Xi's authoritarian regime.

00:01:18The CCP has turned the Internet, designed as a tool of freedom, into the ultimate tool

00:01:24of control. As it has grown more powerful, the Party has only expanded its ambition to

00:01:31maintain total control. In fact, despite spending historic amounts on a massive military build-up,

00:01:39the CCP still spends more on internal security than it does on its military.

00:01:46Unfortunately, the CCP's quest for control does not stop at China's borders. The CCP

00:01:52is rapidly exporting its surveillance technology abroad, enabled by state-backed champions

00:01:59like Huawei, Hikvision, and ZTE. It has found plenty of buyers. From the tyrannical Maduro

00:02:08regime in Venezuela to the ayatollahs of Iran, the CCP exports its malign technologies to

00:02:15help authoritarian governments control the Internet and oppress their populations. Not

00:02:21only does this undermine human rights globally, but threatens America's national security

00:02:27by creating a network of pro-CCP governments that increasingly owe their hold on power

00:02:33to the CCP.

00:02:35Over the last year and a half, the Select Committee on the CCP has worked tirelessly

00:02:40to champion the rights of the Chinese people to speak freely. We have held hearings where

00:02:44dissidents and Chinese students have described violent threats they have faced right here

00:02:48in the United States, and we have called loudly for an end to their oppression. We have tried

00:02:55to break the barriers between the Chinese and American people, but the Great Firewall

00:03:00stands in the way.

00:03:03Today the Select Committee will again champion the rights of the Chinese people. This hearing

00:03:08will focus on the ways we can expose the Chinese people to the irresistible power of unarmed

00:03:13truth, a phrase first used by Russian author Boris Pasternak and repeated by former President

00:03:22Ronald Reagan in 1988 as his dream for people trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

00:03:29The CCP fears that power and spends tens of billions of dollars on global propaganda and

00:03:34censorship to control it. We should set it free and give the Chinese people unfettered

00:03:41access to the truth. This means countering Chinese censorship with honest information

00:03:47and fighting the CCP's export of surveillance technology worldwide. It also means ensuring

00:03:53transparency at home. Whether in Hollywood or Silicon Valley or on college campuses,

00:04:00CCP censorship has no place in America.

00:04:05What the CCP fears most is the Chinese people learning the truth, the truth about the

00:04:10Uyghurs, about Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, COVID-19, the Chinese economy, corruption,

00:04:19and, worst of all, the truth about the CCP itself. Why? Because they know their rule

00:04:26is built on lies.

00:04:29What Reagan observed in Berlin is still true today. This wall will fail, for it cannot

00:04:36withstand faith, it cannot withstand truth, the wall cannot withstand freedom. What was

00:04:43true of the walls of concrete and barbed wire will be true of walls of code.

00:04:50I am grateful to our three incredible witnesses here today who will discuss how we can repeat

00:04:55Reagan's success and ensure that, once again, freedom is the victor.

00:05:00With that, I would recognize our Ranking Member, Krishnamurti.

00:05:05Thank you, Mr. Chair. Last year, this committee looked at the CCP's message about an alternative

00:05:11reality where democracy is failing and autocracy is on the rise. Next, we examined in our discourse

00:05:18power hearing how the CCP promotes that message outside of China. Today, we look at how the

00:05:25CCP spreads its message inside of China, not only through propaganda but also by stifling

00:05:31alternatives to its messaging through censorship, surveillance, and its so-called Great Firewall,

00:05:38which is the most sophisticated system of Internet censorship anywhere in the world.

00:05:43The CCP's censorship is dangerous because, by denying discussions of human rights and

00:05:49alternatives to its negative messaging about the U.S., the CCP creates a controlled society

00:05:56that is more supportive of its aggression toward the U.S. and our allies, partners,

00:06:01and friends, including Taiwan. Almost 25 years ago, President Clinton argued that giving

00:06:07China full access to our market would help create a future of greater openness and freedom

00:06:12for the people of China. Unfortunately, that prediction was wrong because, instead of allowing

00:06:18greater openness and freedom, the CCP used China's growing wealth and access to technology

00:06:25to build the world's most sophisticated surveillance state, which it now exports to other countries.

00:06:32Today, the CCP spends more on its domestic security services than it does on its military,

00:06:38and it spends a lot of this money on surveillance cameras. It's estimated that of the one billion

00:06:44surveillance cameras in the world, half of them, a whopping 500 million surveillance

00:06:51cameras, are in China alone. Here you can see the city of Wukong, which once was called

00:06:59China's democracy village because, for several years, it was allowed to elect its own leaders.

00:07:05Unfortunately, the CCP ended this experiment in 2016 and now blankets the village with

00:07:10surveillance cameras like the five you see here. You can count them. Five on one lamppost.

00:07:20The CCP also spends its money on the technologies and surveillance bureaucracy behind its great

00:07:26firewall, which experts say has achieved industrial-scale censorship by blocking IP addresses, contorting

00:07:34online conversations, and filtering website data. In recent years, the CCP has started

00:07:41actually shrinking the number of Chinese website domains, which are down more than a third

00:07:47from their peak in 2019, as you can see here, dropping from roughly 51 million domains in 2019

00:07:54to about 32 million in 2023. In contrast, the number of domains in the U.S. in that same time

00:08:01period doubled. It's grown dramatically, and that's not much different around the world.

00:08:07Motivating the CCP's police state is its fear of Chinese citizens holding their leaders accountable,

00:08:13like they did in Wukong's democratic experiment. In fact, at one time, online expression flourished

00:08:21for years in China as netizens found creative ways to evade the great firewall. One of our

00:08:27witnesses, Mr. Xiao Chang, compared this period to Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope, where many

00:08:37fought for a future of greater openness and freedom from the repression of an authoritarian

00:08:43regime. But according to Mr. Xiao, since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, it has been more

00:08:50of this, Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back. Under Xi Jinping, the CCP has put even more eyes

00:09:00on the street and online, and it doesn't intend to stop at Chinese borders. As Xi said in 2018,

00:09:07the countries that take command of the Internet will win the world. We cannot allow the CCP to

00:09:14command the Internet, which was designed to connect people, not to divide and control them. Whether

00:09:19it's countering the CCP's export of authoritarian technologies, or standing by the Chinese people

00:09:26in their fight for freedom of expression, we must make sure that freedom and openness,

00:09:31both in society and online, prevail over censorship and control. This is a fight the

00:09:39U.S. cannot afford to lose. Thank you, and I yield back.

00:09:44Thank you. If any other member wishes to submit a statement for the record,

00:09:52without objection, those statements will be added to the record.

00:09:56We are now privileged to be joined by a great panel of witnesses who have been on the front

00:10:03lines of this important issue. Our first witness is Mr. Nat Kretchen. He is the vice president

00:10:10for programs at the Open Technology Fund, a congressionally funded nonprofit organization

00:10:16that supports the development and deployment of anti-censorship, privacy, and security

00:10:22technologies for populations living under repressive information censorship regimes.

00:10:29Our second witness is Dr. Zach Cooper. Dr. Cooper is a senior fellow at the American

00:10:36Enterprise Institute, where he studies the U.S.-China competition.

00:10:40Finally, we are joined by Mr. Xiao Zheng, a physicist by training. Mr. Xiao became a

00:10:48human rights activist after the Tiananmen massacre and is the founder and editor-in-chief

00:10:54of China Digital Times, a bilingual China news website designed to aggregate, contextualize,

00:11:02and translate online information from and about China.

00:11:07Thank you for being here, gentlemen. And with that, I want to welcome all the witnesses.

00:11:11Thank you all for being here. And, Mr. Kretchen, you are now recognized for your opening remarks.

00:11:17Teri Molnar, Ranking Member, Krishnamurthy, distinguished members of the committee, thank

00:11:24you for inviting me to testify.

00:11:26The Chinese Internet today is unrecognizable from the Internet we all know here. It's been

00:11:31roughly 15 years since Google and much of the free and open Internet was blocked in

00:11:34China and replaced by CCP-controlled domestic platforms such as WeChat and Weibo. An entire

00:11:40generation has grown up never knowing the Internet beyond these platforms. They don't

00:11:44long for the global Internet because, by design, they've never meaningfully experienced

00:11:48it. In that time, the CCP has spent billions of dollars to erect a complex technical architecture

00:11:54to isolate over a billion people from the global Internet. However, its ability to control

00:11:58information has less to do with blocking access to foreign websites and far more to do with

00:12:02its success creating an entirely new ecosystem and reengineering its population's online

00:12:07behavior.

00:12:09This is the fundamental challenge we're faced with today. OTF was established over a decade

00:12:13ago to help journalists and human rights defenders counter online censorship. During

00:12:17that time, the cat-and-mouse game of Internet freedom has remained fundamentally unchanged.

00:12:22Even in countries considered to have advanced information controls, like Russia and Iran,

00:12:26people still download circumvention tools to access the global Internet. Internet freedom

00:12:30solutions are developed based on the assumption that overcoming censorship is simply a technical

00:12:35impediment that, once addressed, will meaningfully restore free online expression. However, this

00:12:40assumption no longer holds in China. The CCP is not simply building an ever-greater

00:12:45firewall. It has undertaken a much more ambitious project, erecting multiple layers of self-reinforcing

00:12:50technical and social controls, the result of which is not a globally recognizable Internet

00:12:55with key redactions but a wholesale substitution of an entirely distinct online ecosystem.

00:13:01This ecosystem is characterized by the substitution of global platforms for domestic alternatives.

00:13:06Although highly censored, these platforms are extremely compelling. They're well-designed

00:13:10and content-rich. As a result, most Chinese Internet users have little reason to explore

00:13:14beyond China's own social media universe. What this substitution does is provide China's

00:13:20censors with a huge home-field advantage. The amount of control that can be asserted

00:13:24through WeChat and other platforms is far beyond what's possible on the open Internet.

00:13:29On these platforms, censorship is faster, more nuanced, and more complete. Surveillance

00:13:33is harder to avoid, and party messages are spread more forcefully by committed little

00:13:37pinks. For those who want to look for information or connections that are unavailable on domestic

00:13:42platforms, precisely how to do so is far from simple. The Chinese government has engaged

00:13:47in a novel project of meta-censorship to obscure even the possibility of circumvention from

00:13:52its own citizens. They have criminalized circumvention tools and thoroughly blocked discussion of

00:13:58how to download them. Domestic search engines don't index censored sites. App stores, notably

00:14:03those run by Apple and Google, remove thousands of apps at the request of the Chinese government,

00:14:07including most Internet freedom tools. And as if these obstacles weren't enough, it is

00:14:12only then that users must contend with the Great Firewall, which, as was mentioned, remains

00:14:17the world's most advanced national filtering system. From the vantage point of an average

00:14:21Chinese user, it's become increasingly difficult to even imagine what exists beyond China's

00:14:26domestic ecosystem, much less discover how to access it. The end result is a dramatic

00:14:31change in user behavior. As researchers at Stanford concluded after they gave students

00:14:35in Beijing circumvention tools, even with these technologies, few students use them

00:14:39to access the global Internet unless they were actively incentivized to do so. The era

00:14:43in which we could reasonably assume that most Chinese citizens could and would naturally

00:14:47seek out uncensored content is unfortunately over. Traditional circumvention tools such

00:14:52as VPNs remain an important part of any Internet freedom strategy. However, moving forward,

00:14:57we must adopt an updated approach that fosters more purposeful connections between information

00:15:01seekers and information providers. While China's Internet substitution model provides

00:15:07its citizens with the bread and circuses of contemporary online culture, what it intentionally

00:15:12omits remains in demand when people know how to seek it out. In the same Stanford study

00:15:17I mentioned a second ago, researchers found that Chinese students who were exposed to

00:15:20the global Internet maintained a lasting demand for politically sensitive content and circumvention

00:15:24tools. There's no single unifying policy solution to peel back the layers of China's information

00:15:30controls, but some key starting points are Internet freedom tool developers will need

00:15:34to more intimately understand and design around the technical limitation and socialized online

00:15:39behaviors of users in China. Creators of objective, otherwise unavailable content will have to

00:15:44seek out connections with their audiences in less traditional online spaces. Apple,

00:15:49Google, and other U.S. technology companies must end their current practice of aiding

00:15:52CCP censorship efforts. And to counter the normalization of techno-authoritarianism,

00:15:58we must join with like-minded partners to advance a vision of a free global Internet

00:16:02despite the realities of fracture and fragmentation. It took the CCP decades and billions of dollars

00:16:07to engineer a socially and technologically distinct online environment. The elements

00:16:11of any effective response will necessarily take patience, time, and significant resources.

00:16:16While I focused today on the domestic implications of China's information controls, we're already

00:16:19seeing other governments adopt these same strategies. If we don't contest China's model

00:16:23of Internet substitution at its source, we'll be unable to counter it where it spreads.

00:16:27The scale of the challenge is immense and yet unquestionably worthwhile. There's no

00:16:31message the U.S. could deliver that's more credible or more powerful than helping facilitate

00:16:35Chinese citizens' own search for the truth. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

00:16:40Thank you. Dr. Cooper, you may now proceed.

00:16:43Chairman Molnar, Ranking Member Krishnamurti, and distinguished members of the committee,

00:16:50thank you for inviting me to testify today.

00:16:52As this committee has highlighted, the Chinese Communist Party has developed and implemented

00:16:56the most sophisticated censorship and surveillance apparatus in the world. What has happened

00:17:01in the last few years, however, is not a simple evolution of the Party's tools and techniques.

00:17:06Rather, it is a whole new threat to Internet freedom, not only in China but beyond. Not

00:17:12only is the Communist Party gathering enormous amounts of data on the Chinese people, at

00:17:17the same time it is actively eliminating Chinese-language portions of the global Internet. Chinese-language

00:17:23Web sites now account for just 1.3 percent of the global total. As a result, the Communist

00:17:29Party now knows more about its people than ever before, but the Chinese people know less

00:17:34about the outside world and, indeed, even their own domestic realities. This information

00:17:39asymmetry is no accident.

00:17:41The Communist Party's strict information controls do tremendous harm to the people of China,

00:17:46but I want to focus my remarks here today on the effects on Americans. Increasingly,

00:17:51the Great Firewall is not only an obstacle for the Chinese people but also a roadblock

00:17:55for U.S.-China relations. U.S. Ambassador to China, Nick Burns, recently warned that

00:18:00Chinese leaders, quote, say they are in favor of reconnecting our two populations, but they

00:18:05are taking dramatic steps to make it impossible. He cited the Chinese Government's efforts

00:18:10to, again, quote, denigrate America, to tell a distorted story about American society,

00:18:15American history, American policy, end quote.

00:18:19In short, efforts to stabilize the U.S.-China relationship are now bedeviled by the Communist

00:18:24Party's censorship and disinformation apparatus. Moreover, if the Chinese economy continues

00:18:29to stumble as a result of the Communist Party's poor management, Beijing may feel that it

00:18:34has to rely more on nationalism to bolster domestic support. If this occurs, the Communist

00:18:39Party might lean even more heavily into blaming the United States for China's own woes. Setting

00:18:44the record straight will be critical to guard against this strategy.

00:18:48Moreover, techno-authoritarian tools developed by Beijing will not stay in China. Over the

00:18:53last decade, the Chinese Government has exported censorship and surveillance technologies to

00:18:57over 80 countries worldwide. These tools and techniques will be adopted by autocrats from

00:19:02Russia to Iran to Venezuela and beyond. And through multiple international technical and

00:19:07standard-setting bodies, the Chinese Government is attempting to reconfigure foundational

00:19:11elements of the Internet.

00:19:14In short, the Communist Party's information controls not only harm the Chinese people

00:19:19but also obstruct their ties with American counterparts and threaten to proliferate around

00:19:22the world. Now is the time for us as a nation to rise to meet this challenge. I want to

00:19:27quickly outline four recommendations with which we could do so.

00:19:30First, the United States needs an ambitious moonshot project on Internet freedom. One

00:19:36estimate suggests that the Communist Party spends on the order of $10 billion per year

00:19:41to develop and refine its system of surveillance and control. U.S. Internet freedom efforts

00:19:46receive much less than 1 percent of these resources. We must do more. The time to act

00:19:51is now, before these systems proliferate globally.

00:19:55Second, we should insist that American companies do more to counter information controls. Some

00:20:00major U.S. companies restrict access to virtual private networks and other apps in China while

00:20:05allowing the Communist Party to replace these networks with ones that the Party can covertly

00:20:10monitor. Companies must disclose major cybersecurity incidents. They should have to do the same

00:20:16when they enable foreign censorship and surveillance.

00:20:19Third, the United States should insulate itself against censorship and surveillance here at

00:20:24home. The Communist Party has long barred most American media companies from operating

00:20:29effectively in China, yet the United States has few reciprocal protections. U.S. media

00:20:34companies themselves should be required to disclose when they disseminate information

00:20:38or accept payments provided by entities affiliated with designated foreign adversaries.

00:20:44Fourth, the Congress should conduct additional and should support additional research on

00:20:49Chinese censorship and surveillance. We need a deeper understanding of the tools and techniques

00:20:54that the Communist Party is using if we are to understand the evolving nature of the threat

00:20:59that it poses. Detailing the Communist Party's information control strategy is fundamental

00:21:04to building an effective U.S. government response.

00:21:07The information competition with China is not a minor aspect of the relationship but

00:21:12rather a central pillar. Xi Jinping often references Mao Zedong's exhortation to, quote,

00:21:18seek truth from facts, but increasingly the Communist Party has become focused on reconstructing

00:21:24facts to hide the truth. I therefore thank the committee for bringing these issues to

00:21:29light, and I commend your efforts to build an ambitious bipartisan agenda in these areas.

00:21:34Thank you.

00:21:36Thank you. Mr. Zhao, the floor is yours.

00:21:39Thank you, Mr. Chairman and respectable members of the committee. I want to thank you for

00:21:54giving me this chance to address this very crucial topic.

00:21:59Let's start from gray firewall. The chairman's opening statement already said gray firewall

00:22:06is a broader definition. Both include the domestic censorship and also at the gateway,

00:22:13the technology apparatus. Let me start with a little bit of a narrow definition of gray

00:22:18firewall, which is, that's a nickname. Now Chinese government gave an official name publicly.

00:22:26It's called State Data Cross-Border Security Gateways, and that is a collection of institutions

00:22:32and technologies, both hardware and software, serves as the national censorship apparatus

00:22:40in the PRC that restrict those websites, which opening statements already mentioned.

00:22:46Let me also say the central government organ or party organ is called Cyberspace Administration

00:22:53of China, CAC. That's the Agency for Internet Regulation, Censorship, Oversight and Control,

00:23:00and the CAC reports to Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission led by Xi Jinping himself.

00:23:07And since 2008, CAC directly managed this apparatus called gray firewall.

00:23:15Let me also say that the Chinese, in a more broader sense now gray firewall, the CCP always

00:23:23thought legitimize the regime by shaping public discourse, mobilizing support and suppressing

00:23:28dissent. I'll give you one example. In 2015, leaked documents revealed that Chinese government

00:23:35mobilized over 10 million college students through the Communist Youth League for their

00:23:41so-called online public opinion struggle tasks. And then all the companies, internet service

00:23:48providers, data analysis companies, and social media platforms in China contribute to this

00:23:54digital control. Sina, Weibo, Toutiao, Kuaishou, they employ thousands of censors to remove

00:24:01illegal content, so-called. And often outsource to companies. One's called Beyondsoft, which

00:24:07employs over 8,000 workers. But what's the gray firewall, that critical piece on the

00:24:15gateway? Because the entire censorship propaganda mechanism in China, controlling both traditional

00:24:21and social media, relies on gray firewall for this information security. Without it,

00:24:27the suppressed content could become accessible again by the Chinese public. And now we also

00:24:34talk about circumvention of the gray firewall. There are tens of millions of Chinese internet

00:24:39users using VPNs or homemade tools, open source tools, to circumvent gray firewall. But also,

00:24:46the gray firewall itself enhances blocking capacity through the methods, active plogging,

00:24:53special responses, and pushing the criminalize the circumvention efforts. Let me give you a

00:25:04telling example in this hearing, which is a blogger called Ren Xiaohuan, and he is a cybersecurity

00:25:14specialist. And he began a anonymous blog called Program Think in 2009. The blog provided cybersecurity

00:25:23advice, methods to bypass the internet censorship, and the political commentaries critical to CCP.

00:25:30The blogger dared the CCP to catch him, using his cybersecurity expertise to evade capture for 12

00:25:39years. Millions of Chinese netizens admired him as a legend and a hero, cheering, worrying,

00:25:46praying, and crying for his fate. In May 2021, Ren was arrested by Shanghai police. On February 2,

00:25:56last year, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for, quote, inciting subversion of state

00:26:04power. And I want to use this opportunity to call American Congress members to nominate him,

00:26:10along with Peng Lifa, the bridgeman, the protester at Stone Bridge, on October 13,

00:26:152022, two of them, for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize in support of the Chinese people's struggle for

00:26:24human rights. And now, let's talk a little bit about the surveillance technology. We already

00:26:30talked about how they export, how PRC exports surveillance technology. Let me give you two

00:26:36examples. In Venezuela, actually in 2020, the U.S. Treasury Office sanctioned this company called

00:26:44China National Electronic Import and Export Corporation to Venezuela for the Chinese version

00:26:50of Great Firewall. But who is a chief scientist of that Chinese company? Fang Bingxin, the father

00:26:56of Great Firewall. And only last month, or two months ago, in Myanmar, the military junta deployed

00:27:04a new system that can intercept and descript web traffic, blocking applications, and blocking VPN.

00:27:11Who provided that technology? Chinese company again. Same company that U.S. just sanctioned.

00:27:18And again, that is the chief scientist of Great Firewall, Mr. Fang Bingxin. Finally, let me just

00:27:27say, we are in the internet. Not only internet, but AIH. Previously introduced me to, I said,

00:27:35used the Star Wars two episodes, The New Hope and The Emperor Strikes Back. But now, we're on the

00:27:41next episode. Unfortunately, it's not called Return of the Jedi. I called it The Emperor Got AI.

00:27:49AI can be the force for the good, but it also can be used for surveillance, censorship,

00:27:58manipulation. This technology relies heavily on the centralization of the massive data.

00:28:05AI tends to empower centralized autocrats, autocrat governments, rather than the decentralized

00:28:13democratic system. The PRC is the most powerful under technologically advanced dictatorship.

00:28:20By using these technologies, CCP consolidates its power at home while weakening democratic

00:28:28competitors abroad. The CCP is providing the world with a blueprint for establishing a digital

00:28:35totalitarian state and presenting a real threat to the world peace. So we must work in solidarity

00:28:44to defend and preserve freedom and dignity at home and globally. This is one of the greatest

00:28:49challenges we must meet in this 21st century, and I include six of my recommendations and policy

00:28:56in my written statement. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Xiao, what do you think would happen

00:29:06if the Great Firewall ceased to exist and information flowed freely in China?

00:29:16The People's Republic of China will no longer exist, given enough time. Let me put it this way.

00:29:24Why they really, really want to block the Great Firewall? Because just like the Berlin Wall,

00:29:33if without that wall, the other half of the city of Berlin will walk across to freedom.

00:29:39And for the Chinese people, if the Great Firewall is not there to stop the people to

00:29:45access information, they will seek freedom online in their heart and minds.

00:29:50Dr. Cooper and also Mr. Quachman described particularly the sort of alternative or the

00:30:02parallel cyber reality in China. But that so-called cyber reality doesn't really hold water

00:30:08if the Great Firewall is really down. And let me also say this. This is fundamentally about

00:30:15the legitimacy of the Chinese government. If they cannot answer the question who elected them,

00:30:27who they represent, and who participate in the daily decisions, if those questions

00:30:34are being openly asked and a debate can be freely let people express,

00:30:40then fundamentally the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy is undermined. So in this way,

00:30:47Xi Jinping is correct to say that the information security is his regime security. And that regime

00:30:56is critically held by the Great Firewall. Dr. Cooper, why do you think the CCP is

00:31:04investing so much in this Great Firewall? And why is controlling information at home and abroad so

00:31:12important to their strategy? Well, I think Mr. Cao put it really well. At the end of the day,

00:31:18the party's legitimacy doesn't rest on the support necessarily from the people for the

00:31:23policies that it's pursuing, especially when those policies don't appear to be working.

00:31:27You look at what's happened to the Chinese economy the last few years. You look at the

00:31:32increase in political repression. And it's hard to say that the Communist Party is delivering for

00:31:37its people. But it's very clear that the party has become more reliant on information controls.

00:31:43And so I think at home, increasingly, we're probably going to see the party rely more and

00:31:48more on information control rather than actually being able to deliver for the Chinese people.

00:31:53And that downward cycle is probably going to get worse. I would just say abroad, I do think this

00:31:59idea that China needs to make the world safe for autocracy, as some people have said, makes sense.

00:32:04And ultimately, there's no way for China to do that without trying to pacify the criticism that

00:32:10it sees from the outside world. And so I would expect that we would see China try and proliferate

00:32:16the tools and techniques that it has. It's already doing this. But I think we're maybe

00:32:21at the first phase of a strategy that will go well beyond that ultimately.

00:32:26And then, Dr. or Mr. Kretchen, what should be done to enhance the flow of information across

00:32:34the Great Firewall? You mentioned there's no one policy. But what would it take to

00:32:40effectively combat the CCP's surveillance and censorship?

00:32:45Yeah, I think from the United States' perspective, it's going to take a lot more focused

00:32:49coordination across a lot more of the agencies and different actors that we have on our side.

00:32:59The way that China has designed its information control system is to try to ensure that most

00:33:05Chinese citizens never even hit the Great Firewall, that they're mostly trapped inside

00:33:10of this domestic ecosystem of WeChat and other kind of giant platforms. And since that's the

00:33:15case, we're going to have to be able to more nimbly reach in to find folks with the kind of

00:33:21solutions we can offer in terms of circumvention tools to be able to provide uncensored, truthful

00:33:27content to folks where they are on the Internet they've been socialized into and lead them back

00:33:32out into the global Internet, which at this point they've kind of lost the muscle memory of.

00:33:41And Dr. Cooper, do you have a thought on that?

00:33:45Well, as Nat just said, I have the honor to be the chairman of the board of the Open

00:33:51Technology Fund. And I think the kind of work that OTF has been doing has been incredibly

00:33:56important in this area. But I do think the scale at some point does matter, right? The Chinese

00:34:02government is putting billions and billions of dollars into this year after year. I think

00:34:07increasingly, this has to be a central pillar of our own strategy too, even if we're not going to

00:34:13spend that kind of money. I do think that we have to be talking about significant investments

00:34:18over time or else the closure that we're seeing in China will get worse, and it won't stay in

00:34:23China. It will expand to other authoritarian states. So that's why I said I think this is

00:34:29time for a moonshot. We need a major societal decision that this is something that we have

00:34:34to deal with over the next decade or two. Thank you. Ranking Member Krishnamoorthy.

00:34:42Thank you, Mr. Chair. Nobody understands the Great Firewall better than the Chinese people,

00:34:48who despite the CCP's denial of human rights and despite the CCP's aggressive rhetoric about the

00:34:56U.S. and our allies, still find ways to talk about censored topics. For example, when the CCP blocked

00:35:03the Me Too hashtag, activists in China began using the Chinese characters Me Too, which you

00:35:11can see here, which mean rice, rabbit. Now they even use rice and rabbit emojis to get around the

00:35:19censors. Mr. Kretchen, Chinese netizens often use these kinds of techniques to discuss sensitive

00:35:26topics, correct? That's correct. Let me show you another image. This is the image of the tank man

00:35:33from the Tiananmen Square massacre. This is also censored in China, correct, Dr. Cooper?

00:35:40Yes. But some Chinese citizens do know about tank man, including from U.S. broadcasters like

00:35:47Voice of America. Hence, they developed memes like this one to discuss what happened at Tiananmen

00:35:55Square. Mr. Kretchen, the CCP eventually detected these ducks and actually blocked searches for big

00:36:05yellow duck. Isn't that right? That's correct. Chinese language content produced by VOA,

00:36:13which is critical for countering the CCP's narrative of aggression, gets almost 2 million

00:36:19views every day. Unfortunately, funding for VOA has flatlined, and this year its China program

00:36:24received just about $15 million, which is roughly the annual cost to operate, let alone buy,

00:36:31two F-35 fighters. Mr. Kretchen, increasing funding for VOA and programs like Radio Free

00:36:38Asia would help Chinese citizens get better access to non-CCP messaging and lower support

00:36:45for aggression towards neighbors and friends, right? I think so. Now I want to turn your

00:36:52attention to this woman. Her name is Tsai Xia, who famously managed to evade the CCP's censorship.

00:37:01She once taught at the CCP's Central Party School, but was expelled from the party after comparing

00:37:07Xi Jinping to a, quote, gang boss. Ms. Tsai expressed these views in a recording that went

00:37:14viral inside of China, right? Ms. Tsai says that a trip in Spain in 2008 was when she became fully

00:37:23aware of the CCP's repression and realized the need to speak out. Mr. Kretchen, it is these kinds

00:37:32of people-to-people ties and exchanges that, in my opinion, are among our best tools for

00:37:40combating CCP censorship. Would you agree with me? No, certainly. Unfortunately, the number of

00:37:46Chinese students studying in the U.S. has dropped almost 30% in just the last few years. So, Dr.

00:37:54Cooper, even as we compete with the CCP, we need to increase student and other exchanges with the

00:38:00Chinese people. Isn't that right? I agree with that. I think student exchanges are an asymmetric

00:38:05advantage for the United States. 100%. Let me turn to my final topic, namely the CCP's export

00:38:12of surveillance technologies. The first problem is the security concerns with the technology itself,

00:38:18for instance, the existence of backdoor access by the CCP. But the second problem is that the CCP

00:38:24exports its surveillance tech to bad guys all over the world, such as the military junta that

00:38:30overthrew Burma's democratically elected government in 2021. Dr. Cooper, Chinese

00:38:37companies like Dahua Technology, which the U.S. sanctioned for supporting the CCP's human rights

00:38:43abuses in Xinjiang, are selling advanced surveillance cameras to the Burmese junta, right?

00:38:49Yes. And the junta is using these cameras to help arrest and imprison pro-democracy activists,

00:38:56correct? Yes, I believe they are. Here's a picture from a Dahua showroom in Burma,

00:39:02advertising some of the tracking software in December 2022. So, we have a sanctioned

00:39:10Chinese company selling advanced surveillance technology to a sanctioned regime. When

00:39:17dictators around the world know they can rely on the CCP to support them, when they're under U.S.

00:39:23sanctions, they are strengthened and enabled to commit more human rights abuses. Thank you,

00:39:30and I yield back.

00:39:33Thank you. Representative Whitman.

00:39:36Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank our witnesses for joining us.

00:39:40Mr. Kretchen, I wanted to get your perspective. The depth and breadth of what China is doing

00:39:47around the world many times is facilitated by American companies. In fact, many times

00:39:52they get co-opted or they feel like they have to be compelled by the CCP because of the 1.4

00:39:59billion people in China. Would you agree that those technology companies have been co-opted

00:40:04and that they are actually enabling in many ways the key enforcers of the Chinese Communist Party's

00:40:10surveillance state? And if you do agree with that, what should we do to hold these companies

00:40:17accountable or to make sure there's consequences for them enabling the CCP?

00:40:22Yeah, absolutely. At the very least, we see that they're at this point not cross-pressured.

00:40:27They're feeling CCP pressure to remove the kinds of internet freedom apps that

00:40:32OTF funds to help develop and basically taking the tools out of Chinese citizens' hands that

00:40:38would allow them to get around censorship and surveillance. And it's a huge problem.

00:40:45And beyond that, we haven't found good ways to compel them to help better support the

00:40:51development of internet freedom technologies or the funding of those technologies. Because

00:40:55at the end of the day, a lot of the tools that those are built on point back to some

00:41:00big American companies who at this point are profiting from them.

00:41:05And in terms of what we should be doing, I think Dr. Cooper has some fabulous

00:41:09recommendations for ensuring that at the very least disclosure happens when these kind of

00:41:15companies aid and abet censorship and surveillance efforts in the CCP.

00:41:18But in a better world, they wouldn't be engaged in those behaviors at all.

00:41:24Very good. Thank you. Dr. Cooper, let me go to you. And I want to follow up on

00:41:28Ranking Member Krishnamoorthi's assertion about the exportation of this technology. We know that

00:41:36China, the Chinese Communist Party, is one of the most advanced states as far as how they

00:41:42prosecute advanced technologies for surveillance and really repression of their own people.

00:41:48They look to export that because they don't believe in the rule of law. They like to enable

00:41:53other governments that operate the same way that they do.

00:41:57But let me ask this. Give me a sense of your priority where we should look at. That is the

00:42:02most immediate threat of places where this technology is being exported. And then what

00:42:09should we do to respond to this exportation? We talked a little bit about that. Mr. Krishnamoorthi

00:42:14talked a little bit about it. But I want to know what is the most immediate threat. And then what

00:42:17can we do as a nation, policy-wise and as a Congress, to most immediately impact that?

00:42:23Well, thanks for that. I think this is absolutely crucial. And I would say

00:42:28you could think of sort of a tiered approach to different countries that adopt Chinese

00:42:32surveillance and censorship technology. There is a hard core of highly autocratic

00:42:37countries, your Venezuelas, your Cubas. Frankly, I don't think we've got a lot of leverage in most

00:42:43of those countries. We can use sanctions to try and limit their ability to gain access

00:42:47to Chinese systems. But at the end of the day, they're probably going to be able to circumvent

00:42:50those. You've then got an outer layer, which is countries that are maybe leaning in an autocratic

00:42:57direction or have some leaders who are highly corrupt who would prefer to have the censorship

00:43:01technology. I think in those places, we can actually be quite effective when we're focused

00:43:05on intervening with those countries early on in the process. I'd say there's also a third layer,

00:43:11which includes some close democratic allies of the United States. China's safe cities

00:43:17approach is something that's gotten traction in France. So I would start there at the outer layer

00:43:24and work our way in over time. I think if we can explain and make transparent what the Communist

00:43:30Party has done with these tools, that a lot of people in those countries will think that those

00:43:34tools shouldn't be able to be used either by their governments or by companies in their countries.

00:43:40Thank you, Dr. Cooper. Mr. Zhao, I want to ask, we see as this digital authoritarianism is expanded

00:43:47around the world that I think there's some opportunities for us to point out where the

00:43:55weaknesses are in those systems. And the only way that that happens is through the people in those

00:44:01countries or as we also heard examples of people within China that are speaking out and pushing

00:44:06back against this. How can the United States either enable those folks that are speaking out

00:44:13or undermine the use of these digital tools of authoritarianism?

00:44:20There are several aspects to answer this question. But let me actually start from

00:44:27the voices of Chinese people, even under the repression, that they use the coded language,

00:44:33use satires. But also there are, let me just give you an example, that what kind of

00:44:39the voices on China's internet and being censored and reappear outside of China,

00:44:44such as the China New York Times and my website. Well, let's start from this, even back to your

00:44:52first question, why gray firewall is so important for Chinese Communist Party, right? Because as an

00:45:00autocratic system, it has the common feature, which is few rules many, but in the name of many.

00:45:10They cannot tell Chinese people that the truth. They said, oh, we do this for you, for Chinese

00:45:16people, right? Well, think about this. In the dynasties, the next legitimacy of the emperor,

00:45:24it's because of the bloodline, right? But today's dynasty cannot do that. North Korea,

00:45:31inherent by the blood, but it's called Democratic People's Republic of Korea, right? And China called

00:45:36People's Republic of China. It's not people's, it's not public. And here the quote that online

00:45:41went viral in China and being thoroughly deleted. And what this post say? It says, oh,

00:45:49those peoples are a miracle. The people's daily, which people do not read. People's great hall,

00:45:54where people do not meet. People's government, where people do not rule. People's court,

00:45:59where people see no justice. These kind of voices are common knowledges in China, but

00:46:06without alternative that they're being repressed by this digital authoritarianism and actually

00:46:14and also being confined in a cyberspace by the Great Firewall. Now, the

00:46:23effective ways to respond to this, including a technology piece.

00:46:29If the Chinese regime seems the Great Firewall is so critical to it, it's invested so much

00:46:36resources and technology to it, even to undermine that effort to getting the Chinese internet users

00:46:43to access more freedom of information, it requires much larger budget and resources

00:46:52to build up a counter technology. I'm naming one, not just VPNs. Decentralized

00:47:00generative AI tools. The new AI tools that actually is another threat to the Chinese

00:47:09government control of ideology and online contents. But if right now these generative AI tools are in

00:47:16the big U.S. companies hand. There's a Chinese company doing that, but they have to censor their

00:47:21content. Again, their result will not really meet the demand of the Chinese population,

00:47:29if they are an alternative decentralized AI tool could be made.

00:47:35Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.

00:47:37Representative Kim.

00:47:38Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. Dr. Cooper, I'd like to start with you. You said something that,

00:47:42you know, I guess I kind of missed it when I read through your testimony,

00:47:45but you said it really stuck out to me. If I get this right, you're saying that right now about

00:47:50only 1.3% of global websites are Chinese language websites, and that's down from 4.3% before,

00:47:58about a decade ago, is that correct?

00:48:00That's correct.

00:48:00So just so I get this right, you're not just talking about what the Chinese people have

00:48:06access to. You're just saying like they've actually been deleted from just writ large

00:48:10in the internet across the world. So it's not just about censorship within China, but it's being

00:48:15deleted and in many ways removed from all of us to be able to access. Is that correct?

00:48:19That's exactly right.

00:48:20Yeah. Thank you for that. Just I thought that that was a really interesting another component

00:48:24of this, not just about what the Chinese people are accessing, but just, you know,

00:48:28just the richness of what we hoped is in the internet for all. I wanted to try to kind of,

00:48:35I guess Dr. Cooper, maybe I'll start with you. I guess I'm just trying to get a sense of like,

00:48:38how does someone understand or measure how much of the internet is being restricted,

00:48:46you know, or how much, you know, it's hard for me to really conceptualize, you know,

00:48:51what all is actually being restricted from the Chinese people through this action by the CCP.

00:48:56Do you have an understanding of how to process that?

00:48:59Well, my fellow panelists may have other views on this, but I think there are a lot of tools

00:49:04that you can use to look at different elements of this. So one, for example,

00:49:08the Open Technology Fund helps to support is on app censorship. And you can go on and you can

00:49:14literally see on the Google Play Store, on the Apple App Store, what is censored. And it is a

00:49:19tremendous amount of stuff. And it's many of the apps that not only Americans use all the time,

00:49:25but that others around the world use. So I think it's going to differ from domain to domain. But

00:49:30it is a tremendous amount, not just on the internet, but also these other tools that

00:49:34people use to access information. Yeah, I want to just pivot and just

00:49:40kind of focus in on something that's been kind of touched upon. But just, you know,

00:49:43we're on the advent of this new era of innovation with AI has been referenced in different ways.

00:49:48But I'd like to dig in a little deeper. Mr. Kretchum, you know, I thought you had a really

00:49:53powerful diagram on page three, really showing the concentric circles here of some of this

00:49:58helps me understand this. I mean, some of my concern is that when we look at, you know,

00:50:02large language models and what we've seen so far with AI, you know, what we see if this trend

00:50:06continues is honestly a lot of users having less direct access to websites and a lot more

00:50:14information being, you know, put together and assembled for them. And in some ways,

00:50:17I worry that that kind of falls into that CCP controlled domestic platforms area, you know,

00:50:24if they're able to develop that kind of thing that I think Mr. Xiao was worried about on that front.

00:50:28So I guess, you know, I see this as sort of double edged. And I'd like to, you know,

00:50:32I'll turn to you, Mr. Xiao afterwards to talk about what kind of threats that could pose to

00:50:36the CCP. But, you know, I'd love to just start with you, Mr. Kretchum, you know, just is this

00:50:42going to make things potentially much, much worse in terms of the ability to censor?

00:50:47Absolutely. I mean, the really kind of pernicious, for me, kind of the most

00:50:52dystopian part about the way that the CCP has set up its information control regime

00:50:57is just how self reinforcing it is, and how it really does create kind of like,

00:51:02interestingly, memory holes, to your point about a shrinking internet, there's just fewer sources

00:51:06where those things can be found. So when you've taken people initially, when it was just like,

00:51:10oh, we'll censor websites, we don't agree with new websites will pop up. That's a cat and mouse

00:51:15game that can be played from both sides. Once people are sequestered into platforms that can be

00:51:21much more easily controlled by the CCP, all of a sudden, everything you see kind of reinforces

00:51:27central narrative, and it becomes really hard, because everyone's subject to the same controls

00:51:32to say anything different. Then, as you say, as large language models take over in the way that

00:51:37we like have answers curated for us, if those large language models are trained only on sensor

00:51:43data or data that like has those memory holes well ingrained in them, then anything that model

00:51:49don't have to be reactionary in that way. They're actually just removing that from the knowledge

00:51:52base of the large language models. Precisely. Mr. Xiao, I guess you had mentioned that AI tools

00:51:58could be a threat to the CCP. I think you were saying maybe because maybe their large language

00:52:03models might not be able to do all that people want it to do because it's going to have a limited

00:52:07amount of info, but I'd love for you to just explore that a little bit more for us here.

00:52:11Yeah, let me give you an example. China, actually, it's the only other country, has a tech ability

00:52:19of AI that's developing those large language models. So, as Mr. Kwan said, that is a parallel

00:52:27universe. The Chinese users are using Chinese models, but the difference is they are trained

00:52:32by different data and also under the different supervised training, which in China, the sensor

00:52:37will just monitor the outcomes, right? But there's a difference between the two models

00:52:43if you're trained differently and by different data, and why those differences are so crucial.

00:52:48Because AI is so massive, it answers any common sense questions. I'll give you an example. What's

00:52:53the patriotism? What's the love of the country, right? If you use open AI, chat GPT, it will

00:53:01answer your love of the country. It's different than love your government. It's different than

00:53:04the state. Yeah, it's different than love your culture. But if you use the Chinese under the

00:53:11PRC propaganda materials are trained, the crucial point, every day they're trying to confuse people's

00:53:17mind is love China equals love Chinese Communist Party, equals love Chinese culture, equals

00:53:24Chinese people. They run them together. Logically, it doesn't make any sense, but they use whole

00:53:31propaganda and the censorship to make that only available in the Chinese language space,

00:53:36and Chinese AI will just answer that. Yeah. But the outside of that will do it.

00:53:41So, I'll yield on that, but I think that's an important thing for this committee to explore.

00:53:45Thank you. Mr. Lueckenmaier.

00:53:48Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the commentary this morning and the discussion.

00:53:55I want to take a little bit different tact here this morning. Some of you have talked about,

00:54:01you know, how we can impact what's going on in China. And a couple of you in your testimony,

00:54:07written testimony as well as verbal testimony this morning, talked about

00:54:12investment in China. You know, the Chinese talk, well, I think Mr. Cooper said to invest billions

00:54:17into their Internet. So the question is where they get their money from. And we've had a number of

00:54:24discussions in this committee before and never witnesses testify that we, the Americans, are

00:54:28giving them a lot of the capital they need to be able to do this. And to me, I think a couple of

00:54:33ways we can infect this is to sanction some of the folks, not be able to invest in certain companies.

00:54:40I think one of you made that recommendation. I think Mr. Chow in his testimony as well as,

00:54:48you know, prohibit investment in Chinese companies, period. So I've got some bills

00:54:51to do that. So I think, Mr. Kretchum, let's start with you. Would you like to comment on that?

00:54:58From the OTF perspective, I mean, we come at this from a relatively technical perspective.

00:55:03And in that sense, like, there are lots of places where you'd want to be very careful

00:55:08about essentially either U.S. investment in the kind of firms that we know will blow back into

00:55:15creating better surveillance and censorship technologies that, as Dr. Cooper said, will

00:55:22inevitably be proliferated into a lot of other states who are seeking information control

00:55:29solutions like the PRC is putting together. Mr. Cooper, Dr. Cooper, would you like to comment on

00:55:35that? Yeah. What I would say just briefly is I think there is an important role for outbound

00:55:40investment legislation. And I know many of you have been leaders on this issue. I think as regards

00:55:46the censorship and surveillance question, the outbound investment limitation should,

00:55:51for that purpose, be focused on those companies that are engaged in the most pernicious behavior,

00:55:57either within China or outside. And so I do think there's a logic to restricting the ability

00:56:03of Americans or American companies to invest in companies that we know are infringing on the

00:56:08rights of people, whether they're in China or in Venezuela or beyond. Mr. Zao, you mentioned

00:56:16one of your recommendations, I believe, to prohibit or minimize investment. It looked to me like,

00:56:21why are we trying to help the company, the country that's trying to take us over? It makes no sense

00:56:26to me. If this were Nazi Germany, would we be investing in that? I don't think so. You know,

00:56:31China is our mortal enemy here, and we're continuing to fund them. We need to be stopping

00:56:36all investment, in my mind, and sanction them. What do you think about that comment?

00:56:41Well, my expertise is not global economy. In that sense, I'm not sort of qualified to recommend the

00:56:52sort of blanket assumption. But my recommendation is to targetedly

00:56:59sanction or block, including investment, of those companies, the Chinese companies,

00:57:06who are playing a crucial role on those large-scale digital authoritarian attacks,

00:57:14including the censorship and surveillance and manipulation. And I actually added two more

00:57:22sanction recommendations in my written testimony. Let me just state it.

00:57:27And I used the example of the security expert, Chinese Fang Bingxin, who is widely known,

00:57:36publicly known, in China to Father of Great Firewall. As I said, he is the chief scientist

00:57:41of those US-sanctioned companies who are exporting technologies around the world.

00:57:47Not only those companies should be prevented the US investors to invest, but those individuals,

00:57:57including the scientists, who play the crucial role to develop those technologies,

00:58:02and educational institutions, should be sanctioned on blacklist by the United States.

00:58:08One quick question here. One of you made a comment, the country that takes command of

00:58:13the Internet will rule the world. I think some of this goes back to artificial intelligence. I

00:58:19mean, that's where we all seem to go back to. I've got a hearing right after this one in another

00:58:24committee with regards to artificial intelligence. It scares the heck out of me. It's a wonderful

00:58:28tool on the positive side, but it can be manipulated in a very, very negative way and

00:58:33scares the dickens out of me. And I think the Chinese, if they beat us in AI, we're in really

00:58:38big trouble. I've only got 10 seconds left, so I'll yield back, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much.

00:58:42Mr. Lankford. Thank you. We are going to break briefly so that Members can go and vote,

00:58:47and we'll plan to reconvene shortly after the vote series wraps up.

00:58:53My staff will be in contact with Member offices on timing, and without objection,

00:58:57this committee meeting is in recess, subject to call of the chair.

00:59:02The committee hearing is now reconvened, and we will now complete Member questions.

00:59:09Representative Carson, you are now recognized for 5 minutes of questions.

00:59:13Thank you so very much, Chairman. This question is for everyone. I'd like for you all to elaborate

00:59:20on the risks of the CCP's surveillance and censorship activities on U.S. companies'

00:59:26intellectual properties and data security and the global market. Are there any examples,

00:59:32in your mind, of successful initiatives by our international partners to counter

00:59:40the CCP's efforts, and what collaborative efforts are in place between the U.S. and our global

00:59:44partners? Well, I think this is an incredibly difficult issue for us to even find information

00:59:56about, because many of the companies, as you know, are doing business very differently in

01:00:02China than they do anywhere else. We just had, a few days ago, Microsoft assert that

01:00:08individuals cannot use anything other than an iPhone in China now, and I think pretty clearly

01:00:12that was because of surveillance concerns. But we actually don't know a lot about how most

01:00:17companies operate in China, because those companies are quiet about what they do,

01:00:22because a lot of those American companies want to continue to do business in China,

01:00:26and have had to adjust their activities to comply with Communist Party requirements. So

01:00:31I think there's actually a limit on what those of us outside the business community know about how

01:00:37many American businesses that do business in China are operating.

01:00:40I want to just add on another aspect, which is the Chinese tech companies are building

01:00:54a lot of digital infrastructures around the world. I'll give you an example, the ZTE, right?

01:01:01It operates over 50 countries, providing fiber optic cables, mobile networks, data services,

01:01:11in Turkey, Sri Lanka, Sudan, you name it, Laos. Those Chinese companies also have capability to

01:01:19collect and control data globally, and enhancing their AI data analysis and control models. In

01:01:26other words, those countries who are using the Chinese digital infrastructure are exposing

01:01:32themselves to the Chinese, not only espionage, but even further manipulation and control.

01:01:39This is a global threat, and it's not within U.S. territory itself, but given it is the

01:01:47competitive nature between the United States and China, and the global market and geopolitics,

01:01:55the policymakers must take that into concern.

01:02:01And yeah, just to add a final point, one really interesting thing that we've seen become ever

01:02:06more true about the CCP's surveillance and censorship apparatus is it is now portable.

01:02:12When you take your phone from China to America or anywhere else, that follows you in a lot of

01:02:18ways. There are data trails back to China when you have those apps installed, and when basically

01:02:22your phone is set up as a Chinese national would have their phone set up, they now bring that

01:02:27censorship and surveillance with them in ways that could have unintended consequences.

01:02:32Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. I yield back.

01:02:34Thank you. Representative Barr.

01:02:38Chairman, thanks for holding this hearing. Excellent hearing. Important, important

01:02:41oversight here. Dr. Cooper, let me ask you a little bit about follow-up on this

01:02:46outbound investment strategy that we're working on. Currently, Huawei and Hikvision are both

01:02:53listed on Treasury's non-SDN Chinese military industrial complex list and DOD's 1268 Chinese

01:03:01military company list. Currently, however, being named on these U.S. lists has little or no effect

01:03:07on these companies' operations or operations abroad. What would be the effect on these

01:03:14companies if the U.S. subjected them to full blocking sanctions or implemented a U.S. investment

01:03:20prohibition? Do you think this would be helpful to include in an outbound bill?

01:03:27I think it would be effectively impossible for them to operate if they were not able to access

01:03:32Chinese banks. And so I do think if there were blocking sanctions put on, that would be

01:03:39essentially a kill shot, potentially, for some of those firms that do business globally.

01:03:44And, again, sanctions is a way to, with precision, to really impede their surveillance

01:03:53authoritarianism, digital authoritarianism. Is that fair to say?

01:03:57Yes, it is.

01:03:58What would be a reason that Treasury would not currently designate those companies which

01:04:04are so integral to the techno-totalitarian surveillance systems that we have today?

01:04:10Which are so integral to the techno-totalitarian surveillance activities of Beijing?

01:04:17Well, the bottom line is that the Treasury Department has not used sanctions as a tool

01:04:21against China for, frankly, most of the last two decades. I was in the White House doing

01:04:26sanctions work about 20 years ago, and Treasury didn't want to use those tools then. And,

01:04:31in general, I think the Treasury Department has been hesitant to use them now.

01:04:36Well, we might want to change that. Let me ask any of you to describe

01:04:43the Chinese central bank digital currency as integrated into its digital authoritarianism.

01:04:49Can anyone speak to how China seeks to use the digital yuan as a way to surveil its people?

01:04:58I can say in a very broader sense, currently, that initiative is not taking a full scale as

01:05:11the Chinese government wanted to be. However, for those already being experimented in different

01:05:18cities and the different sectors of societies, it is absolutely true that if you use the Chinese

01:05:25digital yuan, then the state has the bank potentially track every financial activity

01:05:33you do. You have zero privacy under that system. Well, this is why the United States should not

01:05:39adopt a central bank digital currency, right? Because we don't want to counter China by becoming

01:05:44more like China. And we are hearing reports from within China that the plan is to pull all the

01:05:50physical currency out, have a central bank digital currency, have the central government

01:05:55of China and the CCP monitor financial activities, and then if they control that, then they can

01:06:02shut down the people's capabilities of how they spend their money or even take some of their own

01:06:09funds away from them. In a way, they are already doing that

01:06:15through the help of Chinese tech companies using those online payment systems.

01:06:19Those kind of shutdown, blocking account, taking as a form of punishment is already happening in

01:06:26the Chinese financial. But if the central Chinese digital yuan does that, that will give much more

01:06:32power, which is a terrifying future. It is a terrifying future.

01:06:37Real quick on the Taiwan guidance, the PRC guidance regarding Taiwan that includes allowing

01:06:44the death penalty for individuals who are deemed advocates of Taiwan independence. I'm co-chair of

01:06:50the Congressional Taiwan Caucus. To any of our witnesses, given that Taiwan recently inaugurated

01:06:54a democratically elected president, how is the PRC using its surveillance capabilities

01:07:00to surveil or jail pro-Taiwan individuals in China?

01:07:04This raised another very important question, which is the PRC state

01:07:18extended their ability, not only surveillance but cyber attack,

01:07:25way beyond PRC borders. That whether you're Taiwan independence or other

01:07:31activists or political figures or even any other sector, if the Chinese state

01:07:39targets you, their espionage, particularly the cyber attack, leaves no space as a state power.

01:07:49Therefore, it's not just the citizen of Taiwan needs to watch what they do, their activities

01:07:57around the world, but anyone who, if the PRC identified their enemy. So that caused the United

01:08:03States and any sovereign states to give a strong measure to protect their own citizens and to

01:08:11counter that kind of beyond the PRC border attack.

01:08:15Thank you. I yield.

01:08:18Thank you. Representative Auchincloss.

01:08:23Great hearing, Chairman. Thank you, and thank you to our witnesses. I'll co-sign my friend

01:08:26from Kentucky's statements about us not needing to mimic the ideology or tactics of the Chinese

01:08:33Communist Party to out-compete them. One of democracy and freedom's great ideological

01:08:40strengths is that it does not need to rely on propaganda to succeed. It wins in civil

01:08:45society on its own merits. And in free and fair elections this year, Taiwan demonstrated that

01:08:50leaders in the Chinese Communist Party see Taiwan as simply the largest and most organized

01:08:54dissident group in China, and they made many sophisticated attempts to sway voters through

01:08:59mis- and disinformation throughout the campaign season. It didn't work. And we must learn from

01:09:03Taiwan's examples of resilience and build on them.

01:09:07Mr. Chiang, am I pronouncing that correctly? Yes. In your testimony, you recommend Congress

01:09:12support new circumvention technologies and decentralized AI tools through increased access

01:09:17to resources, research, and collaboration opportunities. As you set up the China Digital

01:09:21Times, what circumvention resources did you find most helpful?

01:09:27Well, the circumvention firewall actually doesn't require extraordinary high tech.

01:09:35There is plenty of those open-source Chinese Internet developers' homemade tools that are

01:09:43serving the Chinese Internet users' demand right now.

01:09:46Are they readily available, though, to the average consumer of—

01:09:49That is the difficult part, because the Chinese authorities are cracking down on any spreading

01:09:54of the tools. In the same market, there's also the commercial VPN companies and the U.S. government

01:10:00funded tools development, such as the Open Tech Fund. The issue is really how to get those tools

01:10:09to the individual Chinese Internet users at a scale, which is up against the Chinese

01:10:15authorities' repressive effort.

01:10:17We need to get a whole app store inside the Great Firewall.

01:10:21That we cannot. Even Apple, those U.S. companies are taking VPN apps down.

01:10:28And also, I add one more thing to the committee, that because there is actually a strong demand

01:10:34for those VPN circumvention tools, the Chinese government, in addition to Great Firewall,

01:10:39they developed their own VPNs to give to a large significant number of Chinese users,

01:10:45so the Chinese State can have monitoring of the data and also putting another layer

01:10:53of filtering into those kind of Chinese VPNs.

01:10:55I did not realize that. So it's State-supported VPNs that are, in fact, funneling that information

01:11:00right back to the Politburo.

01:11:02Yes. For example, there are plenty of people using that State VPN. They can search on X,

01:11:07but they cannot access to Voice of America and the China Daily Times.

01:11:11So, Mr. Kretchen, then, the Rapid Response Fund provides emergency support to independent

01:11:16media outlets, journalists, human rights defenders facing digital attacks, help individuals and

01:11:20groups stay safe. How can the Open Technology Fund solicit for these kinds of support systems

01:11:29and help what Mr. Zhang is trying to do?

01:11:31Yeah, it's absolutely a challenge and one that we're attempting to improve our tooling

01:11:35all the time. So as Shell said, it's incredibly important to have tools that meet the

01:11:41Chinese users where they are because, as you say, you can't just go to an app store

01:11:45and download them very easily now. We're trying to make sure that for the kinds of developers

01:11:50and human rights advocates who can access our funding, that that's available and as

01:11:56kind of rapid and as secure as we can possibly make it. And then in terms of kind of trying

01:12:02to find ways to inject more secure technology and solutions into ecosystems where Chinese

01:12:08users are already finding these solutions is really important.

01:12:11You need viral adoption, though. Fundamentally, this is a consumer technology, and so it's

01:12:15got to be virally adopted. And how do you create that viral flywheel through a repressive

01:12:22digital regime? Has anybody cracked the code on that one?

01:12:25Unfortunately, no one's cracked the code at scale. And I think part of what we're going

01:12:29to have to do is devolve that a little bit because, like, there's not going to be a silver

01:12:34bullet anymore. But what we can do is understand specific user groups within China who have

01:12:38specific use cases and needs and design tools for them which will, like, allow us to fly

01:12:43a little bit more below the radar of a control system that's designed specifically to prevent

01:12:48virality.

01:12:49Well, because you want and competition is going to induce the best product for what

01:12:53people want to use, right? You're going to get that feedback loop with the consumer.

01:12:56Absolutely.

01:12:57Final question, again, for you, Mr. Kretchen. Technology at scale fund supports the large

01:13:02scale circumvention and secure communication technology needs of the U.S. agency for global

01:13:06media's broadcasting networks, including Radio Free Asia. Nearly all those satellites,

01:13:10though, are owned by only 25 companies worldwide, very few of which have open source technologies

01:13:15due to the extremely high cost of R&D, launch, long-term maintenance. Would it be helpful

01:13:19to have a federal challenge which allows federal agencies to pay only for success?

01:13:23So the Certain Sustain Fund doesn't actually work with satellite technologies. It more

01:13:28runs VPN technologies. But, effectively, that's how that fund functions for VPNs. It only

01:13:33pays for success. It offsets the user-carrying costs of VPN users in highly restricted areas.

01:13:39So our partners come to us and say, okay, this is how many users we were able to support,

01:13:43and here's your per-user cost of those, and that's what we're reimbursing against. So,

01:13:47effectively, that's what we're doing. We're incentivizing tools who can carry users in

01:13:51the hardest places.

01:13:52Are you concerned at all about the concentration of satellite ownership? Is that something

01:13:55that we need to be aware of?

01:13:56Oh, I mean, it's certainly an issue that we have to pay close attention to. Like, from

01:14:00the OTF perspective, it's not a technology we're able to piggyback on in China yet, but

01:14:04we're exploring in a lot of other places, and how that market develops in China, and,

01:14:07in fact, how chipsets evolve to see, like, if we don't need base stations, that sort

01:14:11of thing. Like, that will be an important thing to pay attention to, even though it's

01:14:14not operational today for us.

01:14:16I'll hold back. Thank you for the indulgence, Chair.

01:14:19Representative Newhouse.

01:14:20Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank the three witnesses today for their testimonies

01:14:25on how the CCP strategically executes its great firewall strategy to control its domestic

01:14:32population, as well as expand its authoritarian sphere of influence campaign abroad. These

01:14:39abuses of centralized power through surveillance technologies truly go against everything Western

01:14:45civilization has been fighting for since the creation of our free marketplace of ideas.

01:14:51Unfortunately, the CCP's great firewall strategy, in my humble opinion, goes far beyond just

01:14:57the control of information and possesses deadly implications for the rest of the world. For

01:15:03example, as many of you know, this committee's recent investigation unveiled how the CCP

01:15:10directly subsidizes, awards, incentivizes, protects, and invests in chemical companies

01:15:19responsible for producing 97 percent of the fentanyl in the world, much of that pouring

01:15:28through our southern border, contributing to killing more than 110,000 Americans every

01:15:33year.

01:15:34The CCP allows the illegal export of these deadly chemicals to occur while simultaneously

01:15:40censoring content about domestic fentanyl sales on the Internet. In other words, the

01:15:47CCP knowingly protects its domestic population from deadly fentanyl as they profit off poisoning

01:15:55of Americans. Chairman Molinar has given me the opportunity to lead the Select Committee's

01:16:00Fentanyl Working Group, along with Mr. Auchincloss from Massachusetts, and address this issue

01:16:06by mobilizing legislative efforts.

01:16:09So I've got two questions on this subject. I'll start with Dr. Cooper. If the CCP truly

01:16:15wanted to prohibit fentanyl sales and exports on their highly regulated Internet platforms,

01:16:23how quickly could this occur? And does their inaction or lack of cooperation constitute

01:16:31drug warfare?

01:16:34I do think that the party, after the November meeting between Biden and Xi, made a commitment

01:16:41to follow through on fentanyl that they have not executed. I think that's quite clear.

01:16:46You can talk to officials within the administration, and they expected to have more cooperation

01:16:52from the Chinese. I don't know how fast they could crack down, but I think it's quite clear

01:16:57that officials on our side feel that there's a lot more that China could do that it is

01:17:02not doing today.

01:17:04Any thoughts on whether or not this is drug warfare on their part?

01:17:10I definitely think that it is an effort to well, that it enables efforts to damage the

01:17:16United States in fundamental ways. When I go talk about China across the country, not

01:17:21infrequently do I have someone show up in the audience who's lost a child to fentanyl.

01:17:27And I'm sure you have the same experience. I've talked about this with senior Chinese

01:17:33former officials and some current officials. I think some of them understand the damage

01:17:38that this is doing, and I don't think the party has responded in the way that they absolutely

01:17:43should have.

01:17:44So, Mr. Kretschmer, Mr. Kuang, thoughts?

01:17:53I don't have too much more to add beyond what Dr. Cooper has said, other than to essentially

01:17:59reassert that, yeah, that's the kind of topic that's incredibly well-censored in the Chinese

01:18:05domestic space. It's a thing that, like, when we're analyzing different censorship

01:18:09trends, always comes up as one of the things that's very tightly controlled. So we can

01:18:12definitely co-censor at least that much.

01:18:16I second on that. The aspect of looking at it is that the Chinese public, not where this

01:18:23is one of the important issues between the two countries, United States and China, Chinese

01:18:28public can be kept not only completely in the dark, but often being fed the opposite

01:18:33stories and propaganda narratives. That's giving this challenge even much harder to

01:18:41address.

01:18:42Yes. Thank you. Again, thank you all. I appreciate the contribution to this important subject.

01:18:47Mr. Chairman, I yield back.

01:18:50Thank you.

01:18:51Representative Brown.

01:18:52Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Chinese Communist Party has no equivalent of First Amendment

01:18:58protections for the 1.4 billion people under its control. The freedom of speech enshrined

01:19:03in our Constitution is not respected, recognized, or realized by the CCP. So let's not pretend

01:19:11otherwise. Every Internet-connected device in the People's Republic of China is watched

01:19:19and controlled by the CCP. Groups like the Uyghurs and other minorities are surveilled,

01:19:25tracked, and spied on 24-7 by their government. This is not a terrifying TV show. It is real

01:19:32life. Global independent media sites and search engines such as Google have been banned in

01:19:39China for over a decade. That is how scared the CCP is of the independent free flow of

01:19:47information and the legitimate exchange of ideas and knowledge.

01:19:52So, Mr. Kretchen, can you give us some perspective on what it is like to live under the digital

01:19:59repression implemented by the CCP?

01:20:01Ma'am, to your point, it really does differ based on who you are. If you are in Xinjiang,

01:20:10it is an entirely different world. That has become a laboratory for the kinds of information

01:20:15controls that the panel has been describing today. It is a horrible marvel of data collection,

01:20:24synthesis, and cross-referencing in a way that really is a pretty complete surveillance

01:20:30state in a way that is unreplicated at this point anywhere else. That said, for many people

01:20:36in China, it is that softer control that actually is just as pernicious because they live in

01:20:42what feels like a very content-rich, robust ecosystem of WeChat, and yet there are massive

01:20:48holes in that that are not even apparent. So, the experience can vary widely, but to

01:20:54your point, the surveillance and censorship is pervasive everywhere.

01:20:58And can you tell us how effective are people living in China getting around the CCP's online

01:21:05censorship? How does it compare to, say, the people living under Kim's regime, as you mentioned,

01:21:10in North Korea?

01:21:12It is a very different control strategy between North Korea and China. China is one that is

01:21:20connected to the Internet. They are basically developing technical ways to do things that

01:21:28we basically thought were impossible. In North Korea, they have made much more draconian

01:21:33deletions. You have to have essentially a state-produced device that is open by default

01:21:40and is available by default. The CCP has to find ways to take an iPhone and get around

01:21:46the security protections that are inherent in that device. So, what they have done is

01:21:50use essentially platforms like WeChat and others, and then also network-level controls

01:21:56to be able to do that at a massively aggregated level than in a kind of more on-device, slightly

01:22:05more straightforward way that the North Koreans approach it.

01:22:08Thank you. My last question is, what could the United States or Congress do to further

01:22:12support the efforts of human rights groups, the press, and everyday people to access the

01:22:17Internet freely within China?

01:22:23If the kinds of circumvention tools that OTF funds that Xiao and others have built are

01:22:28to be successful, they need to come along with really good, well-targeted, well-packaged

01:22:36content that folks are looking for. At the end of the day, there is information competition,

01:22:40even if we are attempting to allow users in China to take their own journeys to that content.

01:22:46And so, the more that we can invest in the production of very good, objective news and

01:22:53make sure that it is packaged and distribution is taken into account when it's put together,

01:23:00we're past this era of, oh, if you build a really good website, you'll get Chinese users

01:23:05who come see it. You have to now break that down and make sure you're delivering it to

01:23:08those users and giving them avenues to access it that actually comport with the way that

01:23:16they interact with each other daily online.

01:23:18Thank you very much. I think we all need to pay attention to the digital repression occurring

01:23:23in the CCP. In the People's Republic of China, the Internet is a weapon and free speech is

01:23:30seen as a threat, monitored, restricted, and a tool of further CCP indoctrination.

01:23:37This has implication for our freedoms and rights in the United States where everyday

01:23:41people are denied access to information on what is happening on the ground in China and

01:23:47to talk freely with friends and relatives abroad. Our nation and this committee are

01:23:54united in pointing out this glaring hypocrisy and working to protect and promote Internet

01:23:59freedom around the globe.

01:24:01And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.

01:24:05Thank you.

01:24:06Representative Dunn.

01:24:07Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank each of the witnesses for their testimony today.

01:24:12It remains incumbent on us in Congress to fortify our information systems against this

01:24:17Chinese Communist Party dystopian export of State-sponsored censorship and surveillance

01:24:23in the United States. We must pave this path forward in this area for America and the free

01:24:31world. We cannot allow the PRC to dominate our critical industries and threaten our information

01:24:38systems.

01:24:39The CCP heavily invests in the most advanced techno-totalitarian surveillance state in

01:24:46the world and simultaneously created a very large military. Why do they do this? Because

01:24:52they are a government who fears its own people, most of all.

01:24:57One of the CCP's top strategic priorities is to control Chinese citizens, including

01:25:02what they say, what they know, and what they do. This is because controlling Chinese people

01:25:07is essential to everything else they want to control, from Taiwan to Xinjiang to Hong

01:25:12Kong.

01:25:13This is also their greatest potential vulnerability. Truth is their kryptonite. It would be foolish

01:25:20of us not to seize this opportunity to leverage this in our strategic competition. We are

01:25:27keenly aware that the CCP is not content to stop it at its current borders, and they have

01:25:32invested billions of dollars to construct a global information ecosystem that promotes

01:25:39propaganda and facilitates censorship.

01:25:42It exports these surveillance technologies and capabilities to governments, both through

01:25:48state-owned and through nominally private Chinese companies, such as Huawei, Hikvision,

01:25:54Dahua, and ZTE. Much of this is coordinated with the Belt and Road and Digital Silk initiatives,

01:26:02including the CCP's advocacy of digital sovereignty.

01:26:07So once these systems are sold at absurdly low prices, these surveillance technologies

01:26:13are used to gather vital information for the CCP, to monitor and suppress activist

01:26:20dissidents and ordinary citizens. The CCP frequently uses that technology abroad to

01:26:25gather information about all of us and our governments, and includes incredibly detailed

01:26:32personal data, fingerprints, blood samples, and other things.

01:26:36I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure the United States remains free.

01:26:41We all want to serve the country and preserve a free society. We cannot let this authoritarian

01:26:46state undermine us.

01:26:48Mr. Ketchum, as you mentioned your technology, American technology companies, in your testimony,

01:26:54technology companies like Apple and Google seem to have contributed toward the enforcement

01:26:59of the CCP's surveillance state. If so, how should we stop that?

01:27:03MR. KETCHUM. Yes, the way that they're doing that is in this basically enabling this practice

01:27:10of metacensorship. So at the one hand, we're attempting to build tools that would allow

01:27:15Chinese citizens to get around these digital controls and stay safe while doing so. And

01:27:19yet the way that still in China, everywhere else, people attempt to access these tools

01:27:23is through app stores. And when those app stores systematically remove apps that allow

01:27:28that at the behest of the CCP, that takes off an avenue that takes away an avenue where

01:27:33folks might be able to reclaim some agency and actually seek out the kinds of information

01:27:38that they're systematically denied in the domestic sphere.

01:27:44As I mentioned before, I think Dr. Cooper's recommendations around disclosures for Apple,

01:27:50Google, other American tech companies who are facilitating the censorship and surveillance

01:27:54apparatus in China is a low bar. We'd much rather have it not happen at all, but that's

01:28:02at least a starting point.

01:28:03Q. Thank you. Dr. Cooper, where is the CCP's export of digital authoritarianism most

01:28:10concerning to the United States' interest in security, and maybe a little bit about

01:28:15how we should respond?

01:28:16MR. COOPER. Boy, it's a tough question because it's in 80 countries around the world, and

01:28:21I think there are so many of these places that we should be deeply concerned. But the

01:28:25places I would start are the societies that are sort of on the edge, right, teetering,

01:28:31where a little bit of information control might sway them away from democracy towards

01:28:36more autocratic or corrupt systems. And so I think if we are going to prioritize certain

01:28:42governments, that's certainly where I would begin, those countries that are on the edge

01:28:46where some amount of censorship and surveillance is going to make a fundamental difference

01:28:50in how they are governed going forward.

01:28:52Q. Thank you very much, Dr. Cooper. I have questions for Mr. Xiong as well, but my time

01:28:58is elapsing, so I will submit those in written format. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I

01:29:03yield back.

01:29:03CHAIRMAN POWELL. Thank you. Representative Steele.

01:29:06MS. STEELE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, all the witnesses. You know, China is

01:29:11the biggest threat, not just to the United States, but, you know, you see all over the

01:29:15world, African countries and South America and, you know, in the Pacific regions, and

01:29:22they are building all over and they try to take over. So CCP censorship and surveillance

01:29:30include the Great Firewall allows the CCP to censor foreign websites, international media

01:29:37sources, and digital applications to block its citizens from the world. I have experienced

01:29:43firsthand the CCP using online activity and physical whereabouts of Chinese citizens to

01:29:51block one of its citizens from connecting with family members in Southern California.

01:29:57This is unacceptable. We should be alarmed that CCP uses its power to track their own

01:30:03citizens' movements and predict their activities, especially playing around in the United States.

01:30:10So, Dr. Cooper, the CCP has routinely violated international standards related to intellectual

01:30:19property rights, subsidization, and overcapacity, and yet they do not abide by the international

01:30:28norms and rules, and that has brought it into current economic positions and not playing

01:30:34any fair games in trade, and I'm on the AI task force. I mean, you know what? They are

01:30:40the most dangerous ones right out there. So how can global leaders hold China transparent

01:30:47and accountable in its international system that is free, open, and fair? We've been asking

01:30:54these questions constantly, and there's just no certain answers, but you know what? You

01:30:59are the experts, so if you can give us some of the answers so we can stop them, then how

01:31:03are we going to do it? So my view is that targeted pressure on China is unlikely to stop

01:31:10the massive activities that you're talking about, intellectual property action, etc.

01:31:16I'm not saying that we shouldn't support targeted action against companies and other

01:31:20entities engaged in those behaviors. We should, but I would not expect them to be successful.

01:31:25I do think at some point the United States has to both take actions to protect ourselves

01:31:31against those risks by closing certain elements of our economy that are most at risk to those

01:31:38behaviors while also threatening to increase the pain on China. That is the only thing

01:31:44that has shown to bring Beijing to the table to talk seriously about these issues. So I think

01:31:50it has to be a mix of targeted measures against bad behavior going after specific individuals,

01:31:56specific companies, but also some pressure at the higher political level. Without that,

01:32:01I don't think Beijing will change its activities. So sanctioning those high official names and those

01:32:09Can I give you one example which I know the committee has done important work on? So

01:32:16solar cells, right? American companies invented a huge amount of the advanced solar cell technology

01:32:25in the world. The intellectual property was stolen by China. We have Department of Justice

01:32:31cases in which we indicted multiple people affiliated with the Chinese government for

01:32:36doing this, and yet we've allowed the Chinese companies who benefited from that stolen technology

01:32:43to sell the solar cells back into the United States. I can't for the life of me figure out

01:32:48why we've allowed this to happen. So I think there's just some basic steps that we should

01:32:52be taking to protect ourselves. It might not change Chinese behavior on the whole,

01:32:57but we've got to start somewhere. Well, Chinese behavior is stealing is much cheaper and faster.

01:33:03That's the way it is. So Mr. Xiao Qing, if I pronounced your name wrong, I'm sorry.

01:33:09Why should those who are concerned about the human rights abuses by the CCP worry about their work

01:33:17with authoritarian regimes around the world? Is the CCP working with the communist leaders to grow

01:33:25our repression efforts? Because my both parents fled from North Korea, and I work with Vietnamese

01:33:34government very closely. And North Korea, I mean, these countries that they are actually following

01:33:41what China does, I mean, organ harvesting to just everything there. And you know what,

01:33:47we really have to stop what China's been doing. So what do you think that we really have to do?

01:33:56Thank you that not only North Korea and Vietnam, and I mentioned that China, the full forming the

01:34:02allies on the censorship due to authoritarianism side with Russia, with Iran, they come together.

01:34:12And China is a far leading economic power and technology power providing those services and

01:34:20setting examples and protecting them as well. In this context, United States also needs to look

01:34:28for strategic allies. And in this particular surveillance and censorship, the counter battle,

01:34:36that not only just the United States protecting its own sector and protecting its own people,

01:34:42but working with allies to compete at the global market, and that a global,

01:34:48internationalized competition is the context. And the countries share the same value,

01:34:56has a much stronger reason to work together. So we have to work with our allies, and we have

01:35:03defend our allies and means that we have to have very strong defense here. So thank you so much

01:35:10for coming. And I yield back. Thank you, Representative Hinson.

01:35:15Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We know China's main export of the surveillance technology goes to

01:35:20weak or burgeoning nations and democracies, and it's clearly a blatant attempt by the CCP to

01:35:25extend its surveillance state globally and really undermine these countries' efforts to

01:35:30move toward democracy. We've seen that play out time and time again, and it should be concerning

01:35:34to everyone. We've talked a lot in this committee in previous hearings about how this is kind of an

01:35:40all-encompassing, multipronged strategy by the CCP. They export these surveillance technologies

01:35:46as well, kind of like seeds. They handpick governments that fit their criteria to suppress

01:35:51those personal freedoms. They're utilizing initiatives like BRICS, diplomacy to further

01:35:57spread that influence, ultimately creating that kind of force of control and influence

01:36:02around the world. So, Mr. Cooper, what do you think we can be doing to really

01:36:06prevent these so-called seeds of surveillance from being spread and taking root in these vulnerable

01:36:10democracies and countries? How can we really help support them in safeguarding sovereignty,

01:36:17personal freedoms, and making sure they don't cede that to the CCP?

01:36:20Well, part of the problem, as you know well, is that the Chinese offerings are so cheap compared

01:36:27to anything offered by most of the rest of the world. They're cheap because they're subsidized

01:36:32and because the party has an interest in having that technology spread. But I do think in some

01:36:38countries which are strategically important, the United States is going to have to think,

01:36:42with its allies and partners, about finding ways to provide that technology at a cheaper price.

01:36:47That may mean some amount of subsidization. At the very least, what we should be doing everywhere,

01:36:52though, I think, is bringing transparency to what Chinese practices are, which is why this

01:36:56committee's hearing is so important. So many countries don't even understand what they're

01:37:01signing up to when they sign up to the digital Silk Road. They think they're just getting

01:37:05wonderful, cheap technology. They don't understand that it's bringing with them

01:37:08this censorship and surveillance apparatus. And so I think if we can help tell that story,

01:37:15it will deter some foreign governments and some corrupt leaders in non-democratic countries

01:37:21from accepting those technologies. Right. Well, and obviously, we've been

01:37:23telling that story about the technology that even here in the United States, we have these

01:37:27vulnerabilities from Huawei, ZTE, some of these bad actors. Do you think we're doing

01:37:31enough to analyze these technologies coming into our country to ensure that they don't

01:37:37contain Chinese surveillance? Obviously, we've passed the law for rip and replace.

01:37:41We're trying to find additional funding to make sure we can continue to execute on that. But

01:37:45do you think that there is more that we need to be doing here at home?

01:37:49My personal view is that TikTok is a pretty good example of how serious we are about

01:37:54Chinese technology. Right. We have a world in which the Chinese would never allow a major

01:38:01American social media company to operate in China. And yet the dominant app used by young

01:38:09people in the United States is a Chinese engineered app. It's unbelievable that we've

01:38:17allowed this to continue. So if we take that as the, you know, test of our seriousness,

01:38:23I think we are failing. Yeah. Well, it's clearly rules for the,

01:38:26but not for me in how they act, not only in this space, but other spaces as well.

01:38:31Either of our other witnesses care to add anything to that line of questioning?

01:38:35I do. Actually, when we talk about the vulnerabilities of the CCP, but I actually

01:38:41wanted to remind the committees, members, your important work to ups our game in this competition

01:38:49that you have to see that, for example, Chinese tech sectors are incredibly innovative and

01:38:58barely second to the United States tech sectors, but have a lot of potential producing a lot of

01:39:03products going around the world. And then the CCP, we all know it's very good at find the

01:39:12vulnerabilities of the open societies and manipulate them. We cannot just simply sit

01:39:19out and say, Oh, this is another Cold War and we won the last one. So we're definitely going to

01:39:22win this one. There's no guarantee that freedom will prevail unless we make a relentless effort

01:39:29and a strategy and a smart and a vigilant. And so I just want to say to the committee that you're

01:39:35doing great work there. Finally, that the Chinese communist party were using nationalism that to

01:39:41mobilize the Chinese mass and using propaganda to mask this nationalism and the CCP ruling the

01:39:48same thing. But don't underestimate the power of nationalism versus the individual freedom

01:39:58being manipulated in such a digital controlled environment. So we need to meet that challenge.

01:40:05Thank you. Absolutely. Well, and on that note, I guess I'd follow up. What steps do you think are

01:40:10things that either this committee could do or Congress could do to really counteract that

01:40:14digital propaganda short of, I mean, just funding these counter measures, getting that information

01:40:21out there. But we clearly have a Chinese media state that's colluding with the surveillance state.

01:40:29You have the Chinese propaganda state colluding with the surveillance state, therefore,

01:40:34and with a very strong technology power. And that's why we cannot lose this AI competition

01:40:41in this new era. The not only just simply the current project funding, but need a creative

01:40:47thinking and a much sort of higher level of the measure. And that's what I think the committee,

01:40:53you're doing great work. And I hope this hearing, it's a starting point.

01:40:57Thank you. I yield back, Mr. Chair.

01:40:59Thank you. Representative Klein.

01:41:04Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

01:41:08Mr. Chairman, the open exchange of ideas is essential to ensuring a free society

01:41:13that can discern what is true without government interference and influence. And it is a central

01:41:19underpinning to the success and human flourishing that has occurred as a result of the American

01:41:23experiment. One thing is for certain, the contents of this publicly held hearing won't be making it

01:41:28through to Beijing. Instead, this hearing will join a long list of censored content ranging

01:41:33from silly to serious, such as internet memes comparing President Xi to Winnie the Pooh,

01:41:38and unfiltered historical accounts of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre carried out by the

01:41:44CCP on its own people. This is all due to the vast amounts of resources that the CCP is dedicated to

01:41:50transforming their country into a techno-totalitarian surveillance state to create a

01:41:54great firewall that draws 21st century parallels to the notorious Berlin Wall. The methodology,

01:42:00sophistication, and scale of Beijing's censorship complex utilizes a mixed involuntary collection of

01:42:08biometrics, voice prints, facial recognition, and cell phone data combined with dense networks of

01:42:12cameras and so-called convenience police stations in some regions, which has enabled them to

01:42:17surveil, manipulate, or coerce their people to control public debate and prevent challenges to

01:42:22the Party's hold on power. However, we have to be cognizant that this troubling authoritarian

01:42:27model is not limited to the PRC's borders, as the Party has shifted to exporting their tech

01:42:31and censorship know-how abroad. So let me ask Dr. Cooper, besides censoring their own people,

01:42:39focusing in on exporting surveillance tech abroad, what countries would you say have engaged

01:42:43the most with the PRC in buying this tech, and are there any surprises or notable mentions?

01:42:49I think a lot of them are going to be the usual suspects. Venezuela, Cuba, obviously Belarus,

01:42:56Russia are going to be more and more reliant on this sort of technology. But there are some

01:43:02surprises, and the place to look first is probably in the safe cities, so-called safe cities,

01:43:08projects which are all around the world. Marseilles in France, for example, probably not the kind of

01:43:16place that you would have expected to be looking into safe cities, but this has been attractive

01:43:20in a lot of places. And I think in many of these locations, the leadership just simply do not

01:43:26understand what they're getting. Safe cities sounds pretty good. I don't think a lot of people

01:43:31would be opposed to that if they don't dig a little further into what is actually being offered.

01:43:37How has the digital Belt and Road Initiative changed the geopolitical landscape?

01:43:43Well, what I'd say on digital Belt and Road is that actually the digital Belt and Road used to

01:43:48be sort of the sidelines of all of the infrastructure that China was promising,

01:43:54but as the amount of money that China's put into Belt and Road has shrunk because the economy is

01:43:59slowing down, the real focus of Belt and Road has become the digital infrastructure side.

01:44:05And so I think to the extent that we are focused on trying to deal with the challenge that China

01:44:11poses broad through Belt and Road, the digital aspects of Belt and Road are probably in many

01:44:16ways the most concerning. A typical infrastructure project doesn't give the Chinese the ability to

01:44:23surveil and in the future for other governments to censor what their citizens are seeing. Digital

01:44:29Belt and Road is fundamentally different. So I think it's become in many ways the core of what

01:44:34Belt and Road is and it for us should absolutely be the most concerning aspect of what China is

01:44:42doing through the Belt and Road projects. Do you see the potential or do you detect

01:44:47any perceived weaknesses that you think this initiative could reveal about the CCP

01:44:52that the U.S. could follow up on? I think there are tremendous weaknesses.

01:44:56For example, we know that Belt and Road promises are about 10 times what's actually delivered.

01:45:03So most countries, if they're hearing that they're going to get $50 billion of Belt and

01:45:08Road money, they might get five if they're lucky. That's a huge, huge failing by China.

01:45:15Some of this is for political reasons, but much of it is just basic economics, right? There's not

01:45:20as much money to go around in China today as there used to be. So I think that's a weakness.

01:45:27My view, though, is that we can't compete with Belt and Road everywhere. We have to prioritize

01:45:32those places that we think are most strategically important and put our focus on them in a very

01:45:38strictly prioritized way. If we are competing with China in a country, it's almost always the case

01:45:45that we are the preferred provider, right? Countries fall back on China because they

01:45:50don't have other good options. So we've got to be there and provide an attractive alternative.

01:45:55Thank you. I yield back.

01:45:58Mr. Moulton is recognized.

01:46:01Thank you very much, Madam Chair. For the United States and China to have a meaningful dialogue

01:46:08for Chinese citizens to understand when the wool is being pulled over their eyes,

01:46:13they have to have access to good information, right? We can't even be on the same sheet of

01:46:19music for having a conversation if one side is living in the dark. And a lot of Chinese citizens

01:46:25are literally living in the dark today. Mr. Ketchum, in your written testimony,

01:46:30you referred to a Stanford study that found that access to information in itself

01:46:35did not result in Chinese students actively taking advantage of outside information. Only

01:46:39when they were incentivized to do so did they find uncensored info. So given the constant

01:46:46cat-and-mouse game that organizations like yours engage in with the CCP to provide tools

01:46:51for open Internet access, another way to expose Chinese citizens' Internet freedom is not when

01:46:58they're in their country, but just when they spend time in societies like ours. Is there any

01:47:03indication that when Chinese citizens who have lived in the United States return to China,

01:47:06they continue to find ways to access the global Internet?

01:47:10Absolutely. Some of the most sophisticated circumvention users in China are those who

01:47:15have spent significant time overseas. And not only because they have learned about the kinds

01:47:21of technologies that are available that they can then maintain access to when they're back in China,

01:47:25but also because they have motivation. They have friends. They have entertainment or news sources

01:47:32they're used to consuming. And when they go back, they don't want to let those go. And so they have

01:47:37not only some knowledge of the tools that can unlock those, but also a really strong motivation

01:47:41to continue to access that. And so when those seeds are planted in folks by traveling, by

01:47:48studying somewhere else, that's one of the most effective ways to actually ensure that that

01:47:52motivation continues. It's actually a compelling reason to make sure we still bring Chinese

01:47:57students to the United States, even though we obviously have to be concerned and careful that

01:48:01we scrutinize those applications to ensure that we're bringing Chinese citizens and not Chinese

01:48:05spies. Tell me, what are other ways that we can plant those seeds, as you say, to motivate other

01:48:12Chinese citizens back at home to want to get the truth? I think it's going to be much more

01:48:20incumbent upon us to understand the particular needs and what is being systematically denied to

01:48:25smaller subgroups than we're used to working with. Normally, from the OTF perspective, we build a

01:48:29really good VPN and then we expect folks to know how to find it, know how to use it, and basically

01:48:34resume their lives on the global internet as if censorship didn't exist. In China, what we're

01:48:39going to have to do is look at much smaller subpopulations, understand those needs, and then

01:48:43how they are attempting to get information already. Folks in China are very resourceful

01:48:49and figure out ways to get a bunch of the information they need when truly motivated.

01:48:54There are tens of millions of internal migrants who effectively don't have

01:48:58the right hukou for where they live. They're systematically denied resources

01:49:04and information about that. That's a great population that you could serve important news to.

01:49:11They already look for it in certain spots, so we need to figure out ways to put the right

01:49:16information in those spots and to take tools that will allow them to access the global internet

01:49:21more fully and meet them where they are already. That takes a lot more work. That's more expensive

01:49:26on a per-user basis than, say, uncensoring a user in Iran or Russia, but it's worthwhile.

01:49:32I mean, we all have the crazy uncle who gets a conspiracy theory and then, you know,

01:49:38tracks this thing down like crazy on the internet, maybe changes his voting habits as a result,

01:49:43right? I would love to see a more proactive strategy to plant seeds, not of conspiracy

01:49:49theories, but just seeds of the truth in Chinese society. So beyond VPNs, are there other tools

01:49:55that we can use to motivate Chinese citizens to want the truth?

01:50:02Absolutely. I mean, it'll come down to increased support for the kinds of news and reporting that,

01:50:09frankly, isn't being done in a very good systematic way right now.

01:50:13Reporters, in general, are farther away from Chinese audiences than they've ever been.

01:50:18Having isolated the domestic information environment, it's really hard now to do the

01:50:23job of journalism inside of China, much less disseminate it back in. So ensuring that we're

01:50:28supporting good journalism that's coming out of China and then innovative ways to put it back in

01:50:33where folks are actually able to find it is going to be a difficult task, but one that we really

01:50:39need to focus on. Dr. Cooper, I'm sorry we don't have much time left, but anything to add to this?

01:50:44I would just say I think it's absolutely critical that so many of the top reporters on China,

01:50:50they, first of all, have been kicked out of China, but to the extent that they're still

01:50:54reporting on China, the Chinese people can't see the reporting. I mean, just the last few days,

01:50:59there's been an important report about what appears to be some corrupt activity from

01:51:05senior officials associated with major businesses in China, and yet, of course, you can read that,

01:51:12I can read that, but people in China can't. And I think the tools and techniques that we're

01:51:16talking about are the beginning of trying to address that gap.

01:51:20Well, thank you. I'm out of time. Hard to imagine corrupt behavior from senior Chinese officials.

01:51:25With that ironic statement, I yield back.

01:51:29Well, thank you again to all of our witnesses today. A great hearing, and we have a lot to

01:51:33do, right? Questions for the record are due one week from today, and without objection,

01:51:38the committee hearing is adjourned.

House Select Committee On The CCP Holds Hearing About China's Global Surveillance Technology

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