Chinese Communist Party Is ‘Generational Threat’ to US, GOP Task Force Warns

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) arrives for a press conference in Washington, on Sept. 30, 2020. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

House Republicans on Sept. 30 released a report described as a “comprehensive blueprint” to counter a range of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The China task force, after a months-long probe, made more than 400 recommendations to respond to the regime’s malign actions against the United States and the free world, dubbing the Party a “generational threat.”

Among the recommendations are moving critical industries, including medical supply chains, away from China to the United States, modernizing the U.S. military, and imposing new sanctions to punish the regime’s human rights abuses and malign influence activities.

The report concluded that decades of engagement with the regime in the hopes that it would liberalize were a failure, leading the United States to turn a “blind eye” to the regime’s rights violations, economic and military aggressions, and broken promises.  

“For decades, the United States and its allies have been asleep at the wheel,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the task force, said at a press conference on Sept. 30. 

The report comes as Congress and the Trump administration are taking an increasingly tougher stance against the regime. Congress passed several human rights measures focused on Hong Kong and Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region with broad bipartisan support over the past year. But Democrats have been reluctant to focus on the CCP’s role in the global spread of the CCP virus, and instead concentrated their efforts on criticizing the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic.

“The severity of the pandemic is the direct result of the CCP’s obsession with its control and reputation,” the report states, referring to Beijing’s coverup and suppression of those who sounded the alarm about the outbreak early on.

“The CCP downplayed the crisis and continues to hide key information from the world. The result was a global disaster. The CCP’s communist ideology itself brought the world to a deadly, painful, and costly standstill.”

McCaul said the regime’s response to the outbreak and its subsequent hoarding of medical supplies created an “awakening experience” for the American people.

Sixty percent of the recommendations were bipartisan, according to the task force. The group, composed of 15 Republican House members, was initially meant to be a bipartisan committee although Democrats declined to join.

The report also called for a government-wide information campaign to combat the CCP’s propaganda and disinformation efforts, heightened scrutiny of Chinese investments in U.S. companies, and negotiating a free trade agreement with Taiwan.

Over the course of this year, Beijing’s actions domestically and abroad have drawn condemnation from the international community, including its crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedoms, oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, and military aggression in the South China Sea and toward Taiwan.

About 200 of the recommendations are directed at Congress, and about one-third of those are measures that have already passed in either the House or the Senate with bipartisan support.

Human Rights

In response to Beijing’s widening subversion of Hong Kong’s autonomy, the task force recommends that the administration provide safe harbor to Hongkongers fleeing the city.

It also urges Congress to require an interagency assessment of the Chinese regime’s organ harvesting practices, and if necessary, to identify Chinese officials overseeing the system for sanctions. Beijing forcibly extracts organs from prisoners of conscience, mainly Falun Gong practitioners, to supply its official transplant system, according to the 2019 findings of an independent expert panel.

The administration should also consider whether to designate the CCP’s oppression of Uyghurs a genocide, the report recommends.