One year into President Biden’s term, Republicans see appeasement.
One year into President Biden’s term, Republicans see appeasement.
O ne year into his presidency, Republicans see President Biden’s handling of the China portfolio as an unmitigated disaster.
They give him a failing grade — an actual F — in a forthcoming report evaluating his first year. That document, an initiative of the Republican Study Committee’s national-security task force, will be released today.
With chances rising that Republicans can reclaim the majority in at least one chamber of Congress in the midterms — and then use that leverage to press for a tougher stance on China — it’s all the more important to understand where conservative lawmakers are drawing a contrast with the president.
In their report, which is based on a year-long oversight investigation led by RSC chairman Jim Banks, House Republicans point to several instances in which the administration declined to speak out clearly about the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.
First, they fault deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman for using the formulation “healthy competition” to describe Washington’s efforts to compete with Beijing. The report points out that China’s ministry of foreign affairs had used the same phrase just a few months before. They also hit the State Department for saying that it is curtailing its use of the phrase “malign influence” to refer to CCP misconduct.
There’s one straightforward explanation for this, the report argues.
“The Biden administration has prioritized working with China, especially to confront climate change, over the broader geopolitical competition, calling climate change ‘the most important element’ of the decade,” the RSC task force finds, according to an advance copy obtained by National Review. “The Biden administration downplays the China threat, subordinating the exigency of managing the China challenge to its radical climate agenda.”
Top U.S. officials repeatedly emphasized throughout the past year that even as they embark on a competition with Beijing, they will simultaneously seek cooperation on climate change. And so, climate envoy John Kerry undertook a breakneck series of talks with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, leading up to November’s COP 26 global climate conference in Glasgow, where they unveiled a framework for future cooperation.
The rest of the GOP indictment of Biden’s China policy details a number of episodes in which, according to Republican lawmakers, the administration pulled its punches: declining to sanction China for its coverup of the origins of Covid-19, removing certain Chinese military-linked companies from a government blacklist, and rescinding a Trump-era rule that required universities to disclose their partnerships with Confucius Institutes.
The Republican Study Committee also accuses Biden of taking “a weak approach to stopping China’s genocide of the Uyghur Muslim population.” It cites the administration’s early decision to review the Trump administration’s genocide determination (the administration later backtracked, confirming that it stood by the decision to label the situation a genocide), as well as a Washington Post report that Sherman lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
The RSC promotes its own alternative approach to dealing with Beijing in the form of its Countering Communist China Act, a comprehensive China-focused bill that its members introduced last year. Pitched as an alternative to industrial-policy legislation intended to bolster U.S. efforts to compete with China, that legislation restricts Chinese political-influence campaigns, authorizes tough sanctions against entire sectors of the Chinese economy engaged in intellectual-property theft, and allocates more funding to offices in the Treasury and Justice Departments involved in activities with a direct bearing on enforcement of sanctions and national-security prosecutions.
If House Republicans take the majority in November, they’ll have a chance to offer their alternative to the president’s approach.