Top Dem Blocked Push to Punish Chinese Disinformation Efforts

H ouse Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Gregory Meeks (D., N.Y.) quietly blocked an attempt late last month to place sanctions on the United Front Work Department (UFWD), a bureau that oversees the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign-influence network, Republican officials tell National Review.

In recent years, alarm about the UFWD’s efforts to influence how Western democracies view China has grown. Last year, a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute warned that the lack of publicly available information about the United Front network — which comprises the UFWD and other affiliated entities and individuals working to influence foreign opinions of China — has led policymakers to underestimate the network’s reach into elite circles. According to the report, the network “undermines social cohesion, exacerbates racial tension, influences politics, harms media integrity, facilitates espionage, and increases unsupervised technology transfer” outside China’s borders.

In recent months, Republican lawmakers have proposed legislation to sanction United Front–linked entities, but Meeks has blocked two such proposals.

The second, a proposed amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), would have required the secretary of state to submit a report to Congress detailing whether the UFWD can be sanctioned under existing laws that authorize the executive branch to punish entities involved in the CCP’s crackdown in Hong Kong, its repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, its cyberattacks, and its transnational criminal activities.

Although the NDAA is debated every year in the House Armed Services Committee, the amendment in question fell under the jurisdiction of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The amendment’s authors thus needed a waiver from Meeks, in his capacity as chairman of that committee, before it could be debated in other committees. But when Representative Jim Banks (R., Ind.) asked Meeks for the waiver on August 30, ahead of the markup of the NDAA, Meeks’s staff declined the request, effectively preventing consideration of the amendment, according to Banks’s office.

Banks himself blasted the move in a statement to National Review. “This is the second time Chairman Meeks has blocked taking action against the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party, an organization which literally exists for the purpose of undermining our democracy and engaging in political warfare,” he said. “It baffles me why Chairman Meeks seems to oppose any measure holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.”

Indeed, this wasn’t the first time that Meeks had snuffed out a Republican push to punish Chinese propaganda efforts. In June, he nixed a proposal by Representative Joe Wilson that would have given the executive branch new authorization to target state-backed disinformation networks such as the United Front. That proposal was considered by the Foreign Affairs Committee during the markup of the EAGLE Act, House Democrats’ companion to an extensive China-policy bill adopted by the Senate.

In justifying his opposition to Wilson’s plan, Meeks objected that “the broad generalities contained in this amendment leave such sanctions open to significant politicization and ambiguity.” After Meeks spoke out against the Wilson proposal, the committee’s Democrats voted it down. He then pledged to work with Wilson in a different setting to craft a better amendment for inclusion in the EAGLE Act, but a House Republican staffer tells National Review that his refusal to waive jurisdiction over the Banks amendment suggests he isn’t serious about reaching a cross-aisle compromise.

In fact, the Banks amendment is a watered-down version of what Wilson proposed. Republicans had hoped that Meeks would be more amenable to a proposal that, they believed, addressed his concerns about granting the executive new, overly broad sanction authorities.

Meeks’s office declined to comment either on the record or on background for this story. But isolationist-minded groups such as the Quincy Institute have argued against efforts such as Banks’s and Wilson’s. The Washington-based think tank has expressed opposition to the Senate China-policy legislation while endorsing Meeks’s EAGLE Act, in a campaign that aligned it with far-left groups that have taken a pro-Chinese Communist Party line and peddled Uyghur-genocide denialism. In language that echoes Meeks’s objections to the Wilson amendment, Quincy fellows have called the Senate version’s use of the phrase “malign influence” too expansive and liable to stoke anti-Asian racism.

But China’s malign influence is a very real problem in the United States. In November, a Newsweek feature by the German Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Didi Kirsten Tatlow found that some 600 United Front groups currently operate within our borders, in realms ranging from the business world to academia to think tanks and civil-society groups.

For whatever reason, Meeks appears to be giving a free pass to a rich, powerful, authoritarian regime with its sights set on undermining American democracy.