Rep. Mike Gallagher, (R-Wisc.), the chairman of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said China has successfully defeated efforts by Congress to push back with the help of its friends when China pits Americans who they believe to be greedy and factional against each other to undermine the U.S.
“The CCP has found friends on Wall Street, on K Street, in Fortune 500 C suites, in the public health community, who are ready and willing to oppose our efforts to push back,” Gallagher said at the committee's first hearing Feb. 28.
The strategy has worked in the past, but the committee’s task is to ensure that it no longer works, he said.
Legislation creating the committee said it will work to investigate the status of competition between the U.S. and China in multiple sectors and make policy recommendations.
Before the hearing, Gallagher said, "We want to lead with a human rights-focused, values-focused agenda," Reuters reported.
Ranking Member Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, (D-Ill.), said American values and interests must be protected, and the committee can help advance technological investments, and workforce improvement and fix weaknesses in the economy.
“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 region, including in the PRC, he said. "Instead, the opposite happened, as China’s economy has grown more than tenfold since gaining access to us and world markets.”
Gallagher introduced the four witnesses, who were retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former national security advisor H.R. McMaster, former national security advisor Matt Pottinger, Tong Yi, a human rights activist who has served as secretary to a Chinese dissident, and Alliance for American Manufacturing President Scott Paul.
Pottinger shared a video with the committee to dispel myths about China.
“You could say that the Chinese Communist Party is the Harry Houdini of Marxist Leninist regimes, the David Copperfield of communism, the Criss Angel of autocracy, but the magic is fading," Pottinger said. "There's really no excuse anymore for being fooled about Beijing’s intentions.”
McMaster said that the committee's work was urgent because the U.S. has fallen behind in competition with the CCP for too long.
Leaders across the private and public sectors assumed that China would play by the rules, he said. Reality proved otherwise.
“As a result, the United States and other nations across the free world underwrote the erosion of their competitive advantages through the transfer of capital and technology to a strategic competitor, determined to gain preponderance economic, and military power,” McMaster said.
U.S. companies have exploited cheap labor in China and have in the process enriched the CCP, Tong Yi testified.
“The regime has acquired tools for its digital dictatorship from the U.S. through forced to transfers by theft, and sometimes with the blessings of U.S. companies by purchasing it,” she said.
“Cheating is a core tenant of CCP ambition, stealing intellectual property, cyber hacking, piracy, the cost tens of thousands of factory closures in America $600 billion in IP losses alone,” Paul said. "The CCP also created an impossibly cheap China price that masks the true cost of production.”
The U.S. fell behind the curve on clean energy manufacturing and couldn’t make enough semiconductor chips, which broke supply chains. Paul said it doesn’t have to be that way if action is taken such as building on the highly effective semiconductor technology export restrictions and enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
