Conservatives: Xi ‘Breathing a Sigh of Relief’ at China Bill

C ongress is about to vote on a gargantuan bill meant to sharpen Washington’s ability to compete with the Chinese Communist Party around the globe, but conservatives are starting to raise public doubts about whether the package is all that it’s chalked up to be.

The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act — the latest version of this 1,400-page, $200 billion legislative Frankenstein combining four previous bills — is filled, primarily, with fluff, they worry. At least 120 of the bill’s sections are dedicated to “sense of Congress” declarations, reporting requirements, and other largely symbolic measures, while giving short shrift to GOP proposals that take a harder line against Beijing.

In recent days, a number of Republican senators have put forward proposals that they say are necessary to make the bill less symbolic and more impactful. Meanwhile, as the Senate gets closer to passing this latest version amalgamating previous proposals, members of the Republican Study Committee, the House’s largest group of conservatives, are warning that the package fails to include some crucial measures, in a memo to its members that was released today and obtained exclusively by National Review.

“Xi Jinping is breathing a sigh of relief at this bill. He and the Communist Politburo just dodged a bullet,” said Representative Jim Banks, the caucus’s chairman.

The upshot is that as some members of Congress continue closed-door negotiations to strengthen the legislation, it’s still missing some significant reforms, which puts Congress at risk of squandering an opportunity to get America’s posture right in the initial stages of what is becoming a drawn-out geopolitical contest with the Chinese party-state.

In addition to House conservatives, Senate Republicans are making their own complaints, as the package approaches a vote there in the coming days.

“While I am still reviewing the hundreds of pages that comprise this legislation, it is my belief that this bill would need to be seriously improved through the amendment process to attract broad support,” said Senator Bill Hagerty. “Enhancing U.S. research and development is an important part of countering Communist China, but that alone is not enough for the Senate to say it has checked the box and held the regime accountable.”

Passing a deficient bill and moving on is exactly what these Republican members are worried about. Once such a large package wins approval, they are afraid that Congress will return to complacency, without taking further necessary actions.

They’re proposing some alternatives in the meantime. The RSC memo calls for the enactment of a range of proposals that include fixing the executive branch’s ability to crack down on Communist Chinese Military Companies and popular apps compromised by Beijing, mandatory sanctions on the Communist Party’s shadowy United Front political-influence network, prohibitions on former lawmakers’ lobbying for Chinese government–backed entities, and for funding the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent to modernize U.S. nuclear capabilities.

“The challenge of China is unlike anything we have ever seen before, and it’s going to require tough policies to take on the CCP’s theft of intellectual property, their malign influence in our society, and their increasing military buildup,” said Representative Greg Steube, who introduced one such RSC-backed proposal to prohibit Chinese Communist Party funding of U.S. universities.

In the Senate, a number of amendments have focused on improving portions of the bill drawn from the Endless Frontier Act, a proposal that has been rolled into the larger bill currently being debated.

The original Endless Frontier legislation, which was sponsored by Senators Chuck Schumer and Todd Young, would have doled out a whopping $100 billion to research institutions via the National Science Foundation for high-tech research. Conservatives don’t oppose funding critical new technologies, per se, but they had expressed concerns that the original version of the legislation failed to protect intellectual property, unproductively routed funding through universities, and gave a cold shoulder to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Subsequent amendments whittled the bill down and restructured some of the funding.

But conservatives still aren’t completely happy with it. Senator Ben Sasse called yesterday for doubling the agency’s budget over the next five years because, as he said on the Senate floor yesterday, “DARPA’s research is directly applied to our most critical national-security challenges.” Other members say there’s more to be done to protect any new research conducted under the Endless Frontier funding from theft by the Chinese government.

For all the omissions from the legislation that GOP members have identified, it does include some noteworthy reforms that have been met with widespread acclaim from China hawks on the Hill, such as new rules to crack down on Chinese influence campaigns in the U.S., by allowing the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States to exercise jurisdiction over university donations from foreign entities and lower the threshold at which universities must disclose such foreign gifts.

The legislation also authorizes strong new sanctions to punish the Communist Party’s forced-labor practices and population-control techniques that have targeted Uyghurs in a campaign that seeks to destroy the ethnic minority group.

But the list of these commendable proposals is short, compared with the full extent of what Congress could do, and there’s some reason to believe that the window for improving the bill is closing, though more debate on it is expected before the Senate votes. A House aide told National Review that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Banking Committee have already cut off debate on new sanctions amendments on the bill.

To be sure, things could be worse. Better to pass a watered-down congressional China package than to do nothing. But unless members seize this chance to act on this once-in-a-generation threat, they’ll throw away the political momentum that could have enabled them to have done so much more.