Over the past month, there’s been a new campaign to push back against the long overdue bipartisan effort to align America’s policy toward the Chinese Communist Party with reality.
Nowhere was this clearer than in the knee-jerk reactions to the initial hearing by the new House Select Committee on countering the Chinese Communist Party, a serious effort at explaining the threat and facilitating new legislative solutions. The opening hearing on February 28 featured testimony from prominent national-security experts and Tiananmen protest leader Tong Yi; a sophisticated analysis of Xi Jinping’s speeches; and high-quality questions by and dialogue from members on both sides of the aisle.
The committee’s work builds on steps taken under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Even as Republicans and Democrats disagree on some important issues, there is broad bipartisan support in Congress for a strategy that seeks to counter the national-security risks posed by Beijing’s increasingly extreme posture toward the outside world and to promote deterrence against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. That’s a big and welcome change from even five years ago.
Not everyone is a fan. Some stalwarts of the Washington commentariat, such as Fareed Zakaria, have called this “dangerous groupthink.” He claimed that to watch the hearing “was to be transported back to the 1950s” and that it encouraged irrational policy-making. Max Boot called it “disturbingly one-sided” and, extraordinarily, took issue with Chairman Mike Gallagher’s assertion that “the CCP has found friends on Wall Street, in Fortune 500 C-suites and on K Street who are ready and willing to oppose efforts to push back.” The CCP does have friends in all of those places, of course, as has been extensively documented by National Review and other publications, and they influence policy on behalf of their business interests in China, in a way that’s corrosive to American national security.
Contrary to what those and other critics claim, the new bipartisan consensus is about taking tailored, judiciously reasoned steps to prevent harm to Americans. By contrast, the guardians of the old consensus are promoting cooperation with Beijing, apparently for cooperation’s sake. Their critiques have lacked discussion of specific policy ideas, glossed over discussions about the Chinese government’s human-rights abuses, and downplayed the malign consequences of the Party’s meddling in American society.
Some have also resorted to ridiculous smears. The most revealing such reaction came from Jude Blanchette, the China studies chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who rejected Zakaria’s implicit McCarthyism comparison — but only because he believes the congressional CCP committee’s hearing allegedly recalled the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The committee’s work “strikes me as all the hallmarks of antisemitism with shadowy cabals that have racial implications,” he said. (He later apologized for making that absurd comparison.)
And even when some of the advocates of an “engagement” policy have steered clear of over-the-top rhetoric, they’ve made dubious claims.
For one, the New York Times editorial board asserted this month that U.S.-China cooperation on climate issues would deliver substantial benefits to Americans, without ever explaining why — or even whether such cooperation remains possible in the Xi era.
The editorial also made two glaring errors. “China continues to show strikingly little interest in persuading other nations to adopt its social and political values,” it stated, incorrectly. In fact, CCP officials have trained foreign officials from developing countries on propaganda and censorship work, and Xi has extolled the value of China’s model in his speeches. And the Times also claimed that there are “signs that China’s leaders are not united in supporting a more confrontational posture,” as if there are more moderate figures within the party positioned to challenge Xi’s confrontational approach. There aren’t. Xi has further solidified his grip on party and state apparatuses over the past six months.
While it’s important to have a vigorous debate that tests the assumptions of America’s foreign-policy pivot on China, the proponents of a softer stance have so far largely advanced specious theories, engaged in emotive bluster, and displayed an unimpressive command of the facts.