Conservative lawmakers eye measures to sharpen the bipartisan congressional overhaul of U.S. China policy.
Conservative lawmakers eye measures to sharpen the bipartisan congressional overhaul of U.S. China policy.
W ith Congress gearing up to pass two major legislative measures to confront the Chinese Communist Party, conservative members of the House of Representatives are making their own entry into the debate with eleven bills designed to complement the bigger bipartisan packages.
These bills, which were obtained exclusively by National Review this week, will be introduced by lawmakers in the 154-member Republican Study Committee (RSC) today, and they tackle everything from China’s human-rights abuses, to intellectual-property theft, to U.S. support for Taiwan.
The measures that stand out among these proposals take square aim at Beijing’s efforts to buy influence in the U.S. political system, cracking down on technology companies that are exploited by China’s party-state. They would prevent former lawmakers from lobbying for China and would also patch up certain vulnerabilities in the U.S. government’s ability to confront the CCP’s cooptation of nominally private enterprises such as TikTok.
The Republican Study Committee has historically played the role of a policy shop for congressional conservatives, and as Congress eyes legislative action on China, the committee has taken up that mantle. In addition to holding gatherings with a number of potential 2024 candidates — Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, and Tucker Carlson — it met on Thursday with Matt Pottinger, a former deputy national-security adviser and an architect of the Trump administration’s China strategy, to discuss some of the RSC proposals.
A common thread across these huddles, even the meeting with Carlson, has been China. With recent movement on China-related bills in Congress, conservatives see an opportunity to advance their ideas.
“While any bipartisan effort on China is a good start, conservatives are leading the way with strong proposals to counter the CCP and their efforts to undermine democracy around the globe,” Representative Joe Wilson, who chairs the RSC’s national-security task force, told National Review. (The South Carolina congressman is introducing his own bill that prohibits U.S.-funded media from giving a platform to Party members and their proxies.)
The good start to which Wilson was referring? Last month, lawmakers introduced the Endless Frontier Act, which would grant more than $100 billion to the National Science Foundation for research on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other advanced technologies. Meanwhile, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the Strategic Competition Act, a gargantuan bill that shapes U.S. strategy toward Chinese influence around the world, responds to the CCP’s human-rights abuses and intellectual-property theft, and beefs up American export controls.
The RSC’s members believe that this is all fine and good (though some have expressed misgivings about the Endless Frontier Act), but they want to take a more direct approach to combating China’s influence in the United States.
One of the RSC bills, introduced by Representative Mike Johnson, bans former members of Congress from lobbying for a Communist country or an entity controlled by a Communist country, effectively targeting China and enterprises under its control.
The measure aims to solve a real problem and eliminate the skewed incentives that have turned some former members of Congress into agents for Beijing. After leaving Congress, lawmakers of both parties have entered into lucrative contracts with Chinese firms and other organizations that have direct links to the Chinese government. In April, the Hong Kong Free Press reported on an extensive lobbying effort by the Hong Kong authorities, in which Bart Stupak, a former Democratic congressman, coordinated meetings among U.S. lawmakers and representatives of the city’s pro-China government. (The effort was unsuccessful, and Congress passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in 2020.) Former director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told lawmakers last year that dozens of members of Congress had been targeted by such lobbying campaigns.
These former members have worked for a dizzying array of tech companies and CCP-backed nonprofits. Former representative Charles Boustany registered to represent the U.S.-China Transpacific Foundation, a Chinese government-funded group that brings congressional delegations to China. Former senator Mark Kirk registered to represent the China–United States Exchange Foundation, a group with close ties to the CCP’s United Front. Last year, former senator Barbara Boxer registered to lobby for Hikvision, a state-owned enterprise that manufactures technology used to create the high-tech surveillance network in Xinjiang. After Axios reported on her lobbying, Boxer resigned from the role.
Two of the other most notable bills patch up the U.S. government’s ability to go after Chinese firms that are permitted to operate in the United States.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. government rolled out a series of actions that targeted nominally private companies as well as state-owned Chinese companies for activities that threaten American national security. Some of these steps, however, ran into roadblocks, requiring legislative action.
The Trump administration tried to force a sale of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, or ban it altogether. TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is legally obligated to hand over all data to the Chinese government under a 2017 law. But the Trump administration hit a brick wall when courts ruled against executive orders designed to address the threat. The Biden administration has indicated that it is reevaluating whether it will proceed with litigation to enforce the Trump-era orders.
A bill by Representative Lisa McClain would codify the Trump-era TikTok orders and require ByteDance to divest itself of U.S. citizens’ data, giving the White House the option to act against the company if it chose to do so. “My commonsense legislation ensures Americans’ data is not accessed, stored, and nefariously used by the CCP through TikTok,” McClain told National Review.
A similar roadblock came in March when a federal judge struck down the addition of Xiaomi, a Chinese phone manufacturer, to a Pentagon blacklist created in 1999 by a provision that allows the president to sanction Chinese military companies.
The court ruled in favor of Xiaomi’s claims that it could not be considered a Chinese military company under the law, as it is a nominally private company. The problem with that argument, of course, is that China doesn’t distinguish between private companies and those owned by the state. The law, which hadn’t been enforced until 2020, is out of date. Given Xi Jinping’s efforts to exert greater CCP control over industry, many more Chinese companies today are involved in projects with military applications than was the case decades ago.
A much-needed legislative update by Representative Jim Banks would expand the definition of Chinese military companies to include those affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party or any National People’s Congress delegate; Chinese firms engaged in certain high-tech sectors, such as 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology also could be considered military companies under the new definition.
President Biden is still reviewing the Trump-era designation of Chinese military companies and the TikTok situation, and it’s unclear where he will land on these issues. Ideally, he’ll end up keeping many of the Trump-era policies in place.
With the introduction of the RSC bills, and the broader legislative push against the CCP, there’s a broader lesson here, too. However quickly this bipartisan consensus has emerged, Congress is still playing catch-up, and policy-makers currently lack some of the tools they need to compete effectively.