‘Time is not on our side’: US Congress panel says tackling China defines next century

[beijingwalker]

‘Time is not on our side’: US Congress panel says tackling China defines next century​

‘We do not want a war within the PRC, a clash of civilizations,’ says ranking Democrat as new committee holds first hearing

Tue 28 Feb 2023 23.18 EST

Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House committee on strategic competition with China. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

The US Congress must act urgently to counter the economic and national security threats posed by the Chinese government, a bipartisan chorus of lawmakers on a newly created special House committee has warned during an inaugural, primetime hearing.

The two superpowers were locked in an “existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century”, the panel’s Republican chairman, Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, said as the rivalry between the US and China deepens.

In a room including activists and protesters, the panel – formally the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party – began its work at a precarious moment for US-China relations. It comes weeks after a suspected Chinese spy balloon floated across the continental US and amid intelligence that Beijing is considering providing lethal weapons to aid Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Meanwhile, China’s militarization and aggression toward Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own, as well as its response to the coronavirus pandemic, have further escalated tensions.

Underscoring the broad range of challenges the panel hopes to address, lawmakers peppered the witnesses with questions on human rights abuses, trade policies, the influence of TikTok, aggression in Taiwan, the origins of Covid-19 and international espionage.

Gallagher hopes his panel will help guide and shape China legislation that can win support from both parties. But with the 2024 presidential campaign looming, and Republicans eager to paint Joe Biden as “weak on China”, the possibility of bipartisan action is likely to become increasingly narrow.

“Time is not on our side,” he said, imploring a bitterly divided Congress to come together to confront China. “Our policy over the next 10 years will set the stage for the next hundred.”

Illinois congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat on the panel, echoed Gallagher’s sense of urgency. He said Democrats and Republicans had for years “underestimated” the Chinese government, believing that economic integration would “inevitably lead to democracy”. But it did not and now the US needed to move quickly to pursue economic and trade policies that would “up our game” as Americans to compete with China.

“We do not want a war within the PRC,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China, “not a cold war, not a hot war. We don’t want a clash of civilizations.”

The hours-long proceeding featured two former advisers to Donald Trump: former national security adviser HR McMaster and former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, a China expert who resigned after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Offering a sweeping overview of China’s rise, Pottinger said the success of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) at presenting itself as “responsible” and “normal” was “one of the great magic tricks of the modern era”.

“You could say the CCP is the Harry Houdini of Marxist-Leninist regimes; the David Copperfield of Communism; the Criss Angel of autocracy,” he said “But the magic is fading.”

McMaster said the US and western leaders were guilty of decades of “wishful thinking and self-delusion” in its efforts to integrate China into the international system.

The panel met in the same chandeliered room where the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol held its hearings. In the audience were Hong Kong pro-democracy activists as well as anti-war protesters who interrupted the proceedings, yelling “we need cooperation, not competition”.

Several members remarked on the interference, noting that the right to protest was a hallmark of American democracy and a freedom not afforded to those in China.

Highlighting human rights concerns will be a major focus of the panel. On Tuesday, the panel heard from Tong Yi, a human rights activist who was the former secretary to one of China’s leading dissidents. Yi told how she was arrested and detained by the CCP in the 1990s. After spending nine months in a detention center she was charged with “disturbing social order” and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a labor camp.

“In the US, we need to face the fact that we have helped feed the baby dragon of the CCP until it has grown into what it now is,” she said.

The committee also heard from Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, who argued that the US dependency on China has had a crushing impact on American workers and wages. “While conflict with China isn’t inevitable, fierce economic competition is,” he said.

On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan consensus has emerged around measures banning TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app, bills barring Chinese citizens and companies from purchasing land near sensitive military sites, and efforts to limit US exports and technology trade to China. But there are also sharp divisions.

Republicans continue to assail Biden over his response to the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, which was downed by the US military after it sailed across the continental US. And revelations that the US energy department concluded with “low confidence” that the Covid-19 pandemic was the result of a lab leak in China has again inflamed anew a partisan debate over the virus’s origins. Officials in Washington have stressed that US agencies are not in agreement over the virus’s origins.

Critics of the special panel have raised concerns that heated rhetoric casting China as the US’s enemy would amplify anti-Asian sentiment amid a surge in hate incidents. Addressing those fears directly, Krishnamoorthi would avoid “anti-Chinese or Asian stereotyping at all costs”.

“We must recognize that the CCP wants us to be fractious, partisan and prejudiced – in fact, the CCP hopes for it,” he said.

Earlier on Tuesday, the House foreign affairs committee held a hearing focused on countering the rising national security threats posed by China. Testifying before the panel, Daniel Kritenbrink, US assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs, said China represented “our most consequential geopolitical challenge”.

‘Time is not on our side’: Congress panel says tackling China defines next century

‘We do not want a war within the PRC, a clash of civilizations’, says ranking Democrat as new committee holds first hearing

www.theguardian.com

 

[beijingwalker]

New US House committee on China cites ‘existential struggle’​

1 Mar 2023

The chair of a new bipartisan committee on China in the United States House of Representatives has framed the rivalry between the US and China as “an existential struggle” at the panel’s first hearing.

The meeting of the committee — formally known as the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — comes amid heightened tension between Beijing and Washington after a suspected Chinese spy balloon flying over North America was shot down.

“This is not a polite tennis match. This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake,” said Mike Gallagher, the committee’s Republican chairperson, as he opened the hearing.

The top Democrat on the committee said the initiative was part of an effort to convince people in the US about why they should care about competing with China, and to “selectively decouple” the two countries’ economies. The committee has strong support across the House and the vote to create it was bipartisan, 365-65.

“Over the last three decades, both Democrats and Republicans underestimated the CCP, and assumed that trade and investment would inevitably lead to democracy and greater security in the Indo-Pacific … Instead the opposite happened,” Raja Krishnamoorthi, a legislator from Illinois, said in his opening remarks.

“We do not want a war with the [People’s Republic of China], not a cold war, not a hot war,” Krishnamoorthi said. “We don’t want a clash of civilisations. But we seek a durable peace and that is why we have to deter aggression.”

Tensions between the US and China have been rising for years, aggravated by China’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in the central city of Wuhan in 2019, actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, aggression towards Taiwan, and the recent spy balloon flight.

The new committee, which includes 13 Republicans and 11 Democrats, is expected to be at the centre of legislators’ efforts to counter Beijing over the next two years and is likely to put pressure on US President Joe Biden to take a firmer line on China.

“It’s another indication of the negative slide, the downward spiral, in the US-China relationship,” Michael Swaine, a Washington, DC-based analyst of Chinese security studies, said of the committee.

Gallagher has assured those concerned the committee’s work could help drive anti-Asian hate crimes that he is committed to ensuring the focus is on the Chinese Communist Party, not on the people of China.

‘Feeding the dragon’​

Tuesday’s hearing had four witnesses, including H R McMaster, a retired Army lieutenant general who was former Republican President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, and Matt Pottinger, a longtime China hawk who was Trump’s deputy national security adviser.

McMaster said the US had to put a priority on expediting delivery of billions of dollars of weapons and munitions that Taiwan has already purchased. “As we might have learned from Ukraine’s experience, it is much cheaper to deter a war than to fight one,” he said in his written testimony.

In a nod to growing US concerns about China’s influence on technology, Pottinger said Washington should partner with US technology firms that are banned in China and find a way for people in China to circumvent the country’s strict internet censorship.


“I think you could punch holes in the great Chinese firewall,” Pottinger said.

Committee members have already held several events to draw attention to China-linked human rights concerns, including a rally on Saturday outside what US officials have said is an illegal Chinese Communist Party “police station” in New York City.

Proceedings were disrupted by two protesters who were removed from the room [Alex Brandon/AP Photo]

Gallagher sent a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last week seeking information about the alleged police outposts. Beijing has denied operating such facilities in the US.

Some Chinese dissidents and advocates also spoke at Tuesday’s hearing.

Tong Yi, who was arrested in the 1990s after serving as an interpreter to a leading dissident who had urged the US to link trade to China’s human rights performance, amplified the concerns. She spent nine months in detention before being handed a two-and-half-year sentence for “disturbing social order” and sent to a labour camp, where she said authorities organised other inmates to beat her up.

Tong is now a naturalised US citizen.

“In the US, we need to face the fact that we have helped feed the baby dragon of the CCP until it has grown into what it now is,” she said.

New US House committee on China cites ‘existential struggle’

New committee’s efforts to counter Beijing are likely to put pressure on US President Joe Biden to take a firmer line.

www.aljazeera.com

 

[大汉奸柳传志]

century.. idiots really think they can last that long