As President Donald Trump prepares for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, bipartisan senators James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Angus King (I-Maine) are urging a focus on the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) history of repression and human rights abuses. The senators aim to bring attention to what they describe as "countless lives the Chinese Communist Party has destroyed and the people currently living in fear."
The push comes as the CCP marks its 105th anniversary and ahead of the summit scheduled to last from Wednesday to Friday. Lankford stated that for over a century, the CCP has "oppressed its own people, persecuted people of faith, and denied basic freedoms." He emphasized that as the United States engages with Beijing, "we cannot forget the millions who have suffered under the CCP or those who continue to live under its repression today," adding that the U.S. must "continue to stand for religious freedom, human rights, and the dignity of every person."
The senators' resolution outlines numerous instances of CCP-led violence and repression. These include the Yan’an Rectification Movement (1942-1945), which resulted in over 10,000 deaths as the CCP purged dissidents. The Chinese Land Reform movement (1949-1953) is cited as having led to the deaths of between 200,000 and 5 million people during the redistribution of rural property. During the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950-1952), millions were arrested, imprisoned, and over 700,000 were executed. Concurrently, the Three-Anti Campaign and Five-Anti Campaign saw the humiliation, terrorization, exile, imprisonment, and killing of thousands of political opponents and capitalists.
The resolution also points to more recent actions, including the undermining of Hong Kong's autonomy, the targeting of religious groups through "insidious tools of repression," and the detention and alleged torture of an estimated 1 million Uighur Muslims in re-education camps over the past three decades.
Trump is scheduled to meet Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews. Lawmakers are hopeful that Trump will adopt a strong stance during the meetings, advocating for trade deals and an agreement on the artificial intelligence race, among other key issues.