First appeared on FOX: Top House Republicans are leading a bill to overturn the Biden administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Chinese companies involved in the persecution of the Uighurs.
The bill targeting the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s (MPS) forensic science lab was introduced Wednesday by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) and is co-sponsored by House China Committee Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) and House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY).
“The United States [Chinese Communist Party’s] “We need to take tough action against human rights violators, and in the absence of a strong commander in chief, Congress needs to take the lead,” Ogles told Fox News Digital.
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House Republicans want to reinstate Trump-era sanctions against the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping. (Getty Images)
He accused China’s authoritarian government of a “long and sordid history of human rights violations.”
“Joe Biden has made the unacceptable choice to reward Communist Chinese companies despite their genocidal crimes and human rights abuses against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. This legislation to re-list Chinese forensic science laboratories on the Entity List would return us to President Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ strategy and ensure that American technology does not aid Communist China in its human rights abuses,” Stefanik said.
The bill is co-sponsored by more than a dozen House Republicans and is also supported by conservative groups Heritage Action and the America First Institute.
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President Biden lifted the sanctions last year. (Hannah Beyer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Chinese Communist Party entity was one of nine entities sanctioned by the Trump administration in May 2020.
A press release at the time accused the Chinese government of “being complicit in the repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, high-tech surveillance, and other human rights violations and abuses against Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR).”
The sanctions were lifted in November 2023, but the U.S. had been trying to persuade China to play a more active role in cracking down on the flow of synthetic drugs and fentanyl precursors from within the country into the U.S.
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The Biden administration lifted sanctions to strengthen cooperation in disrupting the flow of synthetic drugs. (U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration)
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State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters at the time that sanctions “present an obstacle to achieving cooperation” on drug trafficking.
“We have assessed the issue and considered all the merits of delisting it from the IFS and ultimately determined that it is an appropriate step given the steps China is prepared to take to reduce smuggling of precursors,” he said.
