New China Committee in Congress Challenges Regime in Beijing

It’s not anti-Asian as some on the far left claim

U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) delivers remarks in the House Chamber during the second day of elections for House Speaker at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington on Jan. 4, 2023. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Commentary

There’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is Mike Gallagher. The congressman from Wisconsin will chair the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

The committee was established by a largely bipartisan vote on Jan. 10, and none too soon. Given the CCP’s increasingly militaristic and genocidal policies, it’s time to stop mincing words. The war that the CCP threatens against Taiwan, for example, would be devastating not only for Taiwan and China, but likely for the U.S. military.

The committee is being cheered as a much-needed bipartisan effort to correct deficiencies in the U.S. strategy against the CCP, including by showcasing the need to increase U.S. military defenses, strengthen our economy, diversify supply chains, and decrease Beijing’s ability to profit off U.S. largesse.

“I think a large part of what we need to do is explain to the American people, explain to our colleagues and by extension the American people, why this matters,” Gallagher told the Voice of America. He wants to make clear that communist China isn’t just a “distant” territorial threat over “claims in the South and East China Sea, or some obscure discussion about microelectronics.”

Gallagher said he wants to connect those broader geopolitical concerns to the “day-to-day reality for Americans and explain why this is ... the biggest challenge of our time.”

The vote in favor of the committee, which included all House Republicans and more than two-thirds of House Democrats, promises a more energetic Congress on the China issue.

On Jan. 12, the House voted for a bill that would ban the sale of U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve oil to China or Chinese companies.

The Bryan Mound Strategic Petroleum Reserve, an oil storage facility, is seen in this aerial photograph over Freeport, Texas, on April 27, 2020. Adrees Latif/Reuters

The bipartisanship on China is even splitting the far-left “Squad” in the House. One of its members, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), voted for the committee. She has taken a strong stand supporting the Uyghurs, which may explain why she broke with other Squadistas.

Two from the far left who voted against the committee “expressed positions in line with those of controversial think tanks and advocacy groups in Washington, which often carry water for foreign authoritarian regimes, such as Code Pink and the Quincy Institute,” wrote Jimmy Quinn in the National Review.

Both groups praised Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) for his vote against the committee.

According to Quinn, the two groups “played a leading role in 2021 advocacy campaigns that sought to pressure lawmakers to vote against legislation sold as necessary to counter China.”

Some on the far left cited concerns that the committee could foster anti-Asian hate, which is an increasingly tone-deaf argument that self-servingly conflates Asian Americans and the CCP in a manner that is itself arguably racist. By hyping the threat of anti-Asian hate, the far left has found yet another excuse to delay addressing racist threats from the CCP.

As shown through frequent revelations about the more than 100 Chinese police stations abroad—including in the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy—the true threat to Asians in North America and Europe is the CCP, not an anti-CCP committee that would attempt to restrain Beijing from prejudicially targeting and coercing ethnic Chinese on democratic soil.

Gallagher recognized as much in his floor speech about the committee. “It is here at home that the party’s extraterritorial totalitarianism terrorizes Chinese students studying at our universities and targets Americans of Chinese descent,” he said.

The far left’s conflation of the CCP with Chinese Americans is likely not the only reason that significant segments of the Asian American population are starting to abandon Democrats. Many Asian Americans in New York, for example, are leaving the party for its failure to effectively address crime.

But let’s also admit that members of both parties have kicked the can down the road for so long that Americans, and Asians in Asia, face a relatively unfettered and increasingly militaristic and abusive regime in Beijing. The worst anti-Asian hate comes from the CCP itself, in genocidal form against Uyghurs and practitioners of Falun Gong.

If we really want to stop the world’s worst hate crimes against Asians, we should start with the CCP, which targets an ethnicity and religion for total eradication, even if primarily through coercion rather than killing. That fits the U.N. definition of genocide, a definition that’s purposefully broad to nip genocide in the bud rather than wait until its bloody end.

What should be called the new anti-CCP committee is an important bipartisan step in defending ourselves and others, before the CCP’s genocides and militarism get any worse.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.