House Republicans are finding ways to fight the Chinese Communist Party. House Democrats aren’t interested.
House Republicans are finding ways to fight the Chinese Communist Party. House Democrats aren’t interested.
T he outset of the coronavirus pandemic — and the Chinese Communist Party’s conduct in the months that followed — have accelerated a reckoning with U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic. Whereas top policy makers once believed in the prospects of liberalization through engagement, an emerging bipartisan consensus sees the CCP as a global opponent with ambitions that span the globe. Over the past several months, the Trump administration has — as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it in July — effectively ended the age of “blind engagement” by implementing a series of measures to push back against malign CCP activity in a number of areas.
Now Congress is joining the charge. Combating the CCP’s global influence has become a top target for lawmakers of both parties. In June, the Republican Study Committee — which comprises some 150 members of Congress — launched a report that included headline-catching proposals to go after the CCP’s united-front influence network. Another list of proposals is expected on October 1, this one from the House Republican conference’s China Task Force, which was convened in May with an eye toward a legislative overhaul of U.S.–China relations. National Review’s Jimmy Quinn spoke with Representative Andy Barr (R., Ky.) last week to discuss his work on the task force, how the CCP leverages its influence over private companies to exert its power abroad, and the prospects of bipartisan cooperation on China going forward.
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Jimmy Quinn: With the China Task Force report coming out in the next couple of weeks, can you give us a preview of what we can expect and the work that you and your colleagues have been doing?
Andy Barr: This task force is some of the most consequential work that many of us who serve on it have done in our entire time in the Congress. And I say that because not only are we getting to the origins of China’s mishandling of the pandemic and their disinformation propaganda campaign that covered up the seriousness of the disease, but also their malfeasance, which enabled it to spread to the rest of the world. Not only are we focused on the pandemic and China’s role in it, but we are also issuing recommendations, a laundry list of policy recommendations to both Congress and the executive branch to prepare the United States for a multi-decade strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. So it’s more than a pressing national-security imperative that we’re doing this work. It is extremely important, and I would argue there is no more important national- and economic-security issue. So I just set the table with that comment.
And then what I would say about the task force itself: The way we organized it was in pillars. We are of course focused first on the pandemic and the origins of the pandemic and the cover-up from the World Health Organization and the Chinese Communist Party. But we’re also focused more broadly on national security. That’s another pillar, and then a pillar that I have co-chaired is the economics and energy pillar, where we’re really focused on Chinese economic warfare and U.S. economic competitiveness and preparing the United States to more forcefully compete with China’s unfair trade practices, its mercantilist economic system, its subsidies to state-owned enterprises, its theft of intellectual property, its forced transfer of technology, countering the Belt and Road Initiative and a variety of other issues, including countering malign investment through CFIUS, and also better competing with China through the Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation, among other issues. In that pillar, we’re also very focused on capital flows and leveling the playing field so that Chinese state-owned enterprises that receive subsidies from the Chinese government don’t get an additional advantage by accessing U.S. capital markets unimpeded.
Then there’s the competitiveness pillar. I also serve on that subgroup and we are looking there specifically at strengthening U.S. STEM education. We are also looking at academic espionage and countering the Thousand Talents Program and some of the ways in which Chinese nationals infiltrate U.S. research institutions to steal our R&D and actually exploit U.S. federal research grants to actually misappropriate that research for the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party. Then there’s another pillar, ideological competition, where we’re looking at taking a page out of the Cold War, really, and looking at how we can better communicate to the rest of the world the true, nefarious intentions of the Chinese Communist Party and build up our alliances better to encircle China and make sure that their hundred-year marathon goal of overtaking the United States as the world’s global superpower is not achieved.
Then we also created a specific pillar for supply chain to reduce our overdependence on China with technology, pharmaceuticals, API, and also medical devices, medical equipment, personal protective equipment, and the like. We obviously learned the hard way that not only did China expose this virus to the rest of the world, it also then weaponized the supply chain against us. In fact, one top Communist Party official in Beijing was reported as saying — I think in February — that they were going to throw Americans into a sea of coronavirus by virtue of their hoarding of personal protective equipment.
The final pillar is the technology pillar. We’re really looking at 5G telecommunications, how to counter Huawei and also supercomputing and semiconductor manufacturing and there’s a lot of good work that’s being done in this task force to secure communications and to make sure that China does not dominate global communications networks in a way that would jeopardize our security.
Quinn: It seems that countering the CCP’s ambitions is an emerging bipartisan issue, where even when there are disagreements on some policy details, there’s broad bipartisan agreement that the CCP is a threat to be countered. What are the political prospects of the ideas that CTF is advancing and the outlook for cooperation on this across the aisle?
Barr: This absolutely needs to be and should be bipartisan. This is an issue of American national security, and it shouldn’t be a partisan issue. In fact, I think our position is weakened when we take a less than bipartisan approach to an issue that has the national-security gravity that this one has. We need to be united as Americans in countering the China threat. And Leader McCarthy, when he originally proposed this task force, he proposed it to the Democrat leadership, [Reps.] Pelosi and Hoyer, and they agreed that this threat demanded a bipartisan response and agreed to join us with this task force. But after impeachment and after the coronavirus started, this, for whatever reason, became political in the minds of the Democrat leadership.
And when Leader McCarthy went back to Speaker Pelosi and said, well, now, especially in light of China’s role in the origins of the pandemic, we absolutely need to proceed with this task force, at that point in time Speaker Pelosi apparently changed her mind and viewed China as a distraction from her efforts to criticize the Trump administration. And so, regrettably, they backed out, they reversed course. They broke their commitment to us to make this bipartisan, and then they refused to allow any of their members to join us. And that’s despite the fact that many in the Blue Dog Coalition expressed an intense interest to join us. We’ve invited them, and we continue to invite them to join us in these recommendations. As evidence of our good faith to make this bipartisan, we included many bipartisan proposals and pieces of legislation in our recommendations.
When you review this [report], you will see some bills that have been actually introduced by Democrats. I’ll give you one prominent example from my committee of jurisdiction, the Financial Services Committee, where you saw the bill that came out of the Senate that Senator Kennedy introduced. That was a bipartisan bill to require any Chinese companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges to have their auditor subject to oversight by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Right now there’s limited investor protection for folks investing in Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges because we don’t have access to their audit work papers, their books. Their auditors are not subject to the same oversight standards that American companies or other public companies are. So that legislation simply would require any Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges to be subject to the oversight standards, that the PCAOB review their auditors. Congressman Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, introduced that companion legislation in the House. I support that bill. It’s H.R. 7234, the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act. I support that bill, Representative Gonzalez supports that bill on our committee. And we’re going to include it as a major recommendation in the economics and energy pillar. So we don’t look at it from a partisan lens. Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi has.
Quinn: You introduced legislation that tackles a similar issue, the Transparency in Chinese Government Investment Act. And, if I understand it correctly, it’s going to require publicly traded companies to disclose their ties to the CCP. Obviously this is a huge issue. When you were introducing this legislation, did you have any particular companies in mind, and how do you diagnose this problem?
Barr: There are specific companies that we have in mind. I’m not going to go through a specific list with you, but the Defense Department and other government agencies — including the intelligence community — are actively looking at many Chinese companies, state-owned enterprises and other companies, especially, that facilitate China’s military–civil fusion and companies that manufacture items that are used by the People’s Liberation Army and have military applications. We are definitely looking at those companies, and we certainly need to counter China’s military ambitions. But we certainly shouldn’t be funding and financing and providing capital to those very companies that threaten U.S. national security.
I think it’s a matter of investor protection as well. We think it’s material information that the Securities and Exchange Commission should look at. We think investors — individual investors, institutional investors, pension funds — we should disclose to those investors companies that have ties to the CCP and companies that are actively working with the CCP to advance their military and technological ambitions.
Quinn: What we’re seeing now is the party is exerting greater control over nominally private enterprises. And just this week General Secretary Xi issued new guidelines that increase the party’s role in these private enterprises. And all of that goes through the United Front network. How did the United Front figure into your discussions with colleagues on the China Task Force, and what is the task force going to recommend with regard to the United Front?
Barr: The United Front is certainly at the forefront of our considerations. We are obviously very cognizant of the way in which the Chinese government is expanding in all spheres of private life. There is no private life in China. The state and the CCP dominate that country and their culture. And so it’s displacing all private activity. All of these recommendations have that in mind. We have no beef with the Chinese people. Our efforts are directed towards the government in Beijing and the CCP.
Quinn: More broadly speaking, how do you compare the U.S. response to Chinese influence operations to what other countries have done so far? How would you rate our response?
Barr: Well it’s been, it’s been inadequate so far. We have made some mistakes that have enabled China to rip us off in trade and theft of our technologies. And I think we’re starting to wake up to the threat. We’re starting to recognize the mistakes that we’ve made. We clearly were hopeful that if we allowed China into the World Trade Organization, if we exposed China to our markets, if we entered into commercial relations with China, that the hope was that China was going to evolve and adapt to international norms. Instead, everything that China has done since we’ve normalized relations with them is to exploit that and to try to manipulate the international order to meet China and the CCP’s ambitions. They have not adhered to those international norms, and as a result they have increased in power, militarily, economically, and diplomatically. It’s time that we rethink our relationship with them and not just decouple everywhere, but decouple in a strategic way so that we strengthen our economy, decrease our dependence on China’s supply chains, and also look at our military posture and counter the threat and deter the threat from China. That also means we need to look at alliances. We need to build up our alliances, and an Indo-Pacific trade, economic, and security bloc that is able to encircle China and counter it.
Quinn: As we approach the presidential election, what are the prospects for getting some sort of action on this in Congress in the next couple of months? Are we going to have to wait until early 2021? And which of the proposals that CTF will put forward are the most promising in terms of Congress’s ability to get them done soon?
Barr: Well, we have to act soon, and I think there is a bipartisan consensus building on supply chains and our overdependence on foreign sources of medical and pharmaceutical equipment and active pharmaceutical ingredients. We need to build up resiliency there. And I do see the prospects for legislation on that front being significant.
I do think the elections have consequences, though. And the Republicans have taken this threat seemingly a lot more seriously, and this president has as well. And Joe Biden has dismissed the threat. We risk — if we make the wrong decision in the election — continuing down this very dangerous road of enabling China’s rise. I think that threatens our economic security and it threatens our national security as well. It’s important that we reelect President Trump and elect a majority-Republican Congress because the Republicans have led on this China Task Force. We have these ideas that we can just take off the shelf and pass into law. For whatever reason, the Democrats don’t seem as interested. That is a major mistake that could really come back to bite us if we don’t act.