New Committee on Competition With China Will Enjoy ‘Target-Rich Environment’

Members of a new House select committee on China are going to be working through years of distrust and dysfunction to contain China’s single-minded focus on economic and military dominance — and that’s just among themselves. House lawmakers voted 365-65 to create the Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. All 65 votes against the committee’s formation were Democrats. The chairman-designate of the committee is Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican of Wisconsin who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He has decried China’s Communist Party leadership and spearheads the charge for banning Tik-Tok, which he calls a “trojan horse” for Chinese spying. He has also called for greater penalties on Chinese-owned companies accused of economic or industrial espionage or sanctions violations. The congressman’s office told the Sun that Mr. Gallagher plans to reintroduce legislation to put China’s Huawei and Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation on the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals List, which would prevent the companies from having access to the American financial system and prohibit Americans from conducting business with them. An accompanying Senate bill last session was co-sponsored by Senators Cotton and Scott, both Republicans, as well as Senators Schumer and Van Hollen, both Democrats. The Heritage Foundation vice president for foreign and security policy, James Jay Carafano, told the Sun that Mr. Gallagher is a systematic and disciplined lawmaker who will be operating in a “target-rich environment.” He called the scope of China’s activity “literally stunning,” and said, “You name an issue and we can find a China angle.”Relying in part on recommendations from a 141-page report issued in 2020 by a Republican-only China Task Force, Speaker McCarthy said the select committee will look to end dependence on China, protect national security, prevent intellectual property theft, even out supply chains, stop the purchase of American farmland by Chinese entities, roll back Chinese-owned social media platforms, and end financing of genocide and military modernization. Mr. McCarthy added that the committee will also look at how economic, social, and governance policies promoted by the Biden administration benefit the Chinese Communist Party. With China’s resources overextended and the government facing domestic unrest due to Covid, a struggling economy, and a damaged brand worldwide, “now is exactly the time to get tough on China,” Mr. Carafano said.He suggested targeting foreign direct investment, which would have a two-fold impact: serving as a bellwether to show that the United States is serious and hitting the Chinese economy when it will have a big impact. “You start to slow or restrict Chinese access to American money for liquidity investments and that kind of stuff and that it’s really going to be something,” he said, noting that Democrats and some Republicans in Congress previously pursued this approach. The select committee’s actions may be undermined by the Biden administration, which is reportedly looking to reduce the focus of its executive order limiting semiconductor exports to China. The administration has noted issues implementing regulations after pushback from global industries, so the rules may not be finalized until April or May.A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Derek Scissors, told the Sun that curbing exports of semiconductor technology is important to reduce the impact of China’s economic and military threat. However, the administration’s regulations historically have been weak. “Regulations can be weak or strong and the history of the Department of Commerce says they’re going to be weak,” Mr. Scissors said.Opponents of the new House China committee include key figures of the Progressive Caucus as well as seven of the eight “squad” members. One member, Representative Ilhan Omar, voted in favor of the committee. Democrats attribute their opposition to “reckless and prejudiced rhetoric and policy” against China by Republicans. “America can and must work towards our economic and strategic competitiveness goals without ‘a new Cold War’ and without the repression, discrimination, hate, fear, degeneration of our political institutions, and violations of civil rights that such a ‘Cold War’ may entail,” a joint statement from 22 House Democrats, including the Progressive Caucus chairwoman, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, said after the vote. “This committee should not be used as an open invitation to engage and traffic in blatantly xenophobic anti-China rhetoric,” Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat of California who heads the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and opposed the committee’s formation, said. Mr. Carafano called such concerns a “hyper-partisan” exercise.“Going soft on China just because the other guys are hard on China really puts your political credibility at risk,” he said.Action to quell Chinese dominance has broad appeal, even among average Americans. The Chicago Institute of Global Affairs reports that 52 percent of Americans view China’s ambitions to be a vital threat to American interests. In his floor speech before the vote, Mr. Gallagher pledged that the select committee would be a bipartisan affair. He quoted Secretary Blinken, who said last year that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and increasingly the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.”“The CCP doesn’t pose a danger to just Republicans or Democrats. It’s a threat to all Americans,” Mr. Gallagher said.

New Committee on Competition With China Will Enjoy ‘Target-Rich Environment’

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