The Chinese Communist Party’s Transnational Repression Against American Citizens on U.S. Soil

Unveiling of a Statue in Honor of Chinese Dissident Attorney Gao Zhisheng, Liberty Sculpture Park

Delivered April 4, 2026, in Yermo, CA

Thank you for inviting me to share this special day with you, when we honor the legacy of Gao Zhisheng—and a special “thank you” to his wife, Geng He, for her gracious invitation. Today we celebrate Gao’s commitment to human rights and rule of law. As a Christian, Gao Zhisheng articulated the premise that human dignity is grounded in the notion that every individual is created in the Image and Likeness of God.

We will honor Lawyer Gao in a very special way unveiling a statue that showcases the talents of Chen Weiming, whose life work is set forth in this sculpture park dedicated to the cause of freedom.

Indeed, the artwork around us testifies that the desire for liberty is universal, but it finds its unique expression in America. Making his home in this vast expanse of desert, embracing freedom of creative expression and proudly exercising his right to keep and bear arms, Chen Weiming has dedicated the opportunities that America has given him to defying tyranny and to mocking the tyrant.

And because of this defiance, the long arm of tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party and the tyrant Xi Jinping came to America’s shores, to this very soil on which we stand here today in Yermo, California.

I was here, along with Congressman Chris Smith and many of you gathered here, on June 4, 2021, at the dedication of a statue cast in the image of another man, one who is the antithetical opposite of Gao Zhisheng.

That statue portrayed the tyrant responsible for unleashing the Covid virus throughout world as a Covid molecule, using mockery as a weapon.

The funny thing about tyrants, however, is that they have very thin skins, and wear only “frowns, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.”

The following month, that statue was burned down by agents alleged by our government to be acting at the behest of the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

You, Mr. Chen, nevertheless were resilient, and rebuilt the statue—stronger, better—but they too did not give up, and yet again, in August 2024, attacked the sculpture park—including your workshop, with its computers and files.

Ladies and gentlemen, that this could happen on American soil, here, should anger us all—the long arm of Chinese Communist Party oppression has no place here.

Yet we saw how, in November 2023 at the APEC Summit in San Francisco, thugs affiliated with the United Front Works Department attacked people exercising their First Amendment Rights. I commend to you an excellent article by the Washington Post that exposes the role played by officials at the PRC consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco in directing attacks upon those peacefully protesting the presence of Xi Jinping. These are violations of law on so many levels, from the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations on down, for which there needs to be accountability.

We have also heard how Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices, or HKETOs, track Hong Kong dissidents who have had bounties placed on their heads in the United States—including in at least one case, an American citizen—and how in the United Kingdom, the London HKETO acted as a foreign intelligence service in tracking down dissidents, with an HKETO official along with his co-conspirators charged under the UK’s National Security Act.

That long arm of transnational repression has touched you, and through you, it touched even me, when I served in Congress.

Just last year, Pastor Bob Fu, along with Anna Wang from IPK Media and others, organized a symposium on Capitol Hill where I also spoke, commemorating the brave lawyers who were targeted a decade ago in an incident known as the 709 Crackdown—lawyers who followed in the footsteps of Gao Zhisheng. Indeed, Rep Chris Smith used the occasion to call for the passage of a bill he introduced named after Gao Zhisheng.

The day before the event, Pastor Fu called and warned me that someone was threatening disrupt the commemoration. I arranged for the Capitol Police to be there, and alerted the Sergeant-at-Arms. The event ended without incident, but as soon as the last speaker’s remarks concluded, while people were still gathered, the Capitol Police disappeared. It was then that the disruption and the harassment occurred. I called the police back to do their duty, but because they had not remained present all the way through, they were confused as to who the good guys were, and who was the bad.

To give another example, Grace Jin Drexel, the brave daughter of Zion Church Pastor Ezra Jin, was a colleague of mine at the Congressional Executive Commission on China. Even she has had to endure being stalked and followed while working on Capitol Hill—right under the nose of Congress! And then there were the harassing phone calls and slashed tires directed at her mother—threats similar to what I am sure many of you have experienced… Pastor Fu and his family have had to flee their home after it was surrounded by paid demonstrators.

This underscores a problem that we have with addressing transnational repression by the CCP: even among the police in our nation’s capital, there is a lack of awareness as to what is happening right before them.

There is a lack of knowledge at the state and local government level, about the structure of the United Front Works Department, or what it means when someone “invites you to tea.” Yet we depend on local prosecutors and local law enforcement to protect people like you, Americans of Chinese descent, and dissent. It is thus up to us—to you, to me—to educate them.

And here is the nub of the problem: the Chinese Communist Party sees you, and anyone who has Chinese blood in them, as within their control and command.

The Communists refuse to accept that each and every one of us, who has immigrated to the United States from abroad, can now, by choice, become American.

The notion of “Wǒmen dōu shì Zhōngguó rén”—"we are all Chinese”—to the Chinese Communist Party means that they think they control you, and your descendants, because of your bloodline. But what that phrase should mean is that we can both be proud Americans, and proud of our origins and heritage.

Every American who viewed the Olympics felt pride, and joy, at the victories of Alysia Liu. As a representative of her country, the United States, performing at the highest level of athletic competition, she truly became America’s sweetheart. And I know people here in this audience also share in pride over her, both for who she is and for her inheritance.

I myself, too, am proud of my Italian heritage—indeed, my name marks me as someone whose family was rooted in Italy. As with many of you here—Geng He, Chen Weiming, Zhou Fengsuo, so many of you—my name betrays my Italian origins (though I hear my mother’s voice reminding me that I am also half Swedish).

Like many of you here today, I too am here because America once offered refuge to my family. Like many of you, my grandfather felt compelled to be involved in the politics of his age, to speak out when he saw injustice. And like many of you, he could not keep his opinions to himself.

In the 1920s, in Italy—just as in China today—injustice was personified in a tyrant, Benito Mussolini, who preached a twisted ideology, Fascism. The ideology Mussolini professed will sound very familiar to you: “All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

For in Fascist Italy, as in Communist China, the State—controlled by a single Party, governed by a single ideology—is elevated above all, including the family, and the most intimate of personal ties.

Fortunately, in the case of my grandfather, as I am sure in the case of many of you here, an evil ideology cannot entirely extinguish friendship and human heartedness, or “rén ài,” a spark of which may remain even among those who pledge loyalty to the Party.

In my grandfather’s case, it was a friend, who, despite being a member of the Fascist Party, warned him “Tomorrow morning, we will come to arrest you.”

And so he got on a train that night, made his way to France, and eventually found refuge, like you here today, in America. And that is how it is that I am here before you right now, speaking to you, and why I have a bond with so many of you that I have gotten to know over the years, those whom I can call “friend.”

America is our home, and we will not let the long arm of the Chinese Communist Party intimidate us. We will proclaim the truth. We will preserve memory—what historians like Yang Jisheng and Rowena He/He Xiaoqing do in their books—we also will do, proclaiming truth by the written and spoken word, and in some cases, in reinforced steel, like this statue of Gao Zhisheng, a statue that is a materialization of memory.

But while we preserve the past, we are also firmly rooted in the present, and look forward to the future.

And while we all should be proud of our origins and our history, it is here, in this land of freedom and opportunity, that we can truly say, no matter where our ancestors came from, that “Wǒmen dōu shì Měiguó rén”—“We are all Americans.”

Thank you.