Economic Crisis May Expedite Beijing’s Timeline for Attacking Taiwan: Rep. Gallagher

Subcommittee chairman Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) speaks during a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies and Innovation hearing about artificial intelligence, on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 18, 2023. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The impending economic storm in China could accelerate the Beijing regime’s timeline for mounting an invasion of Taiwan, House China Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) is warning.

The property sector driving the world’s second-largest economy is in an accelerating crisis as some of its biggest players miss payments to lenders amid mountains of debt. On top of that is what the lawmaker called communist China’s “demographic buzzsaw unlike any society in human history,” worsened now with millions of Chinese youth out of work and seeing their lives on hold.

With the long-brewing crisis now visible on the horizon, the risk is that China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its current leader, Xi Jinping, could become “particularly more aggressive in the near term,” Mr. Gallagher told The Epoch Times.

“Perhaps, he expedites his timeline for taking Taiwan by force, in part, to distract his people from their internal economic issues, and in part because they'll never get a better chance than he will in the next five years,” Mr. Gallagher said of Mr. Xi. “That’s why I think we’ve entered the window of maximum danger with respect to a kinetic confrontation with China over Taiwan.”

A Chinese warship fires at a target during a military drill near Fuzhou, Fujian Province, near the Taiwan-controlled Matsu Islands that are close to China's coast, on April 8, 2023. Thomas Peter/Reuters

The CCP has never disavowed its desire to take over Taiwan, by force or otherwise, and tensions have been further escalating in the past few years. Chinese warplanes are now buzzing the Taiwan Strait on a near-daily basis, including dozens on Aug. 19 after the Taiwanese vice president’s stopover in the United States.

Letting Taiwan fall into Beijing’s hands would be “far more destructive for the global economy than any short-term economic storms that the CCP has to weather,” Mr. Gallagher said, noting that the self-ruling island is a “semiconductor superpower” that sensitive U.S. military technology relies upon.

“If the CCP were to take Taiwan, they could hold the rest of the world economically hostage,” he said.

Taiwan’s geographic location also matters. As an anchor point to a network of U.S. allies and partners, the island plays a critical role in ensuring that the CCP can’t enforce its socialist rules with Chinese characteristics over the prevailing international norms of freedom of navigation enjoyed by all the Indo-Pacific, enforced by the U.S.-led security alliance that’s historically based in liberal democratic values.

A successful Taiwan invasion would allow Beijing to expand its economic coercion. With U.S. assistance hampered, regional powers such as Japan and the Philippines, whose closest islands are just 70 and 120 miles from Taiwan, respectively, would also become far more vulnerable to the regime’s threats, Mr. Gallagher said.

A protester holds a sign against a Chinese Coast Guard law during a rally in Manila, Philippines, on Feb. 24, 2021. AP Photo/Aaron Favila, File

But “bailout talk” over China isn’t an option, the Wisconsin Republican said.

The economic pressure on China needs to continue, he said, as does the effort to rebuild a military deterrent. Mr. Gallagher believes that the United States is currently “ill-prepared” for potential conflict.

With the flow of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine, which as of mid-August has amounted to over $43 billion, weapon stockpiles for the United States have hit “dangerously low” levels, rendering it difficult to defend Taiwan should a war break out.

“We need to be moving heaven and earth to ensure that Xi Jinping never wakes up and thinks he can actually successfully accomplish an invasion of Taiwan,” he said.

‘Subsidizing Our Own Destruction’

The House ​​Select Committee on the CCP recently opened probes into BlackRock and MSCI, the world’s leading asset manager and investment index provider, after finding the two companies allegedly facilitated the flow of U.S. dollars into a total of more than 60 Chinese entities that the United States has blacklisted.

Mr. Gallagher particularly pointed to investment in military-linked Chinese genetics firm BGI Genomics, which the United States has found to be complicit in forced-labor abuses, and runs China’s national gene bank.

“I don’t think anyone, Republican or Democrat, would think that we should be allowing American money to invest in companies like this,” he said. “We are, in some meaningful sense, and in some very troubling sense, subsidizing our own destruction.”

Activists protest against U.S. investment company BlackRock calling for a climate tax on the rich, on the eve of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 15, 2022. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

During the Trump administration, officials took action to halt a federal retirement fund, known as the Thrift Savings Plan, from its planned China investments. But exposure risks remain.

“The reality is that we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of how much money is being invested in China,” Mr. Gallahger said.

Beyond the “immediate risk” of subsidizing Beijing’s abuses and socialist military ambitions, “overall, what’s happening is you’re making the health of American retirees dependent upon the success of the Chinese Communist Party, and that success augers for a very bleak future,” he said.

As the United States steps up efforts to reduce economic dependence on China, Wall Street investors who already made billions off China’s rise have been “all over Capitol Hill” saying that “we can make money, we can go back to the good old days.”

“It’s a total fantasy,” Mr. Gallahger said.

“How much more evidence do we need to understand that we are not dealing with a responsible stakeholder in the form of the Chinese Communist Party, we’re dealing with an increasingly hostile Marxist Leninist regime that’s threatening war over the near term and threatening to dominate the globe over the long term. That’s what we’re up against here. [It’s time to] take off the golden blindfolds.”

Ahead of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s four-day visit to discuss bilateral relationships and “areas for potential cooperation,” Mr. Gallagher suggested it would be a mistake for the U.S. official to agree to join any Chinese working group.

“The fact is that the Chinese Communist Party shouldn’t get any say in our decisions over export controls,” he said. “We have legitimate national security concerns about American technology going to China to fuel its ongoing genocide“ in Xinjiang and help perfect an ”Orwellian totalitarian surveillance state.”

“I hope that we won’t continue to slow key defensive action we need to take in order to sit down and have photo ops with high-level CCP officials.”

His committee’s primary mission, he said, is to make the case that the threats from a communist China are “not a distant-over-there problem” but a “right-here-at-home problem.”

“We need to shake ourselves out of our complacency,” he said. “We’re in the early stages of a new Cold War, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.”