Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the Chairman for the House Select Committee on the CCP, said that American citizens are funding the CCP without even knowing it. In an opinion piece from August 29 which Gallagher published in the Washington Post, the Chairman said that Congress must address the problem of investing US money in China.
"We are quite literally funding our own potential destruction," Rep. Gallagher wrote in his op-ed.
According to his Washington Post op-ed, Rep. Gallagher said that Americans are unknowingly supporting the CCP financially. Their savings fund companies producing weapons for the Chinese military and those implicated in the Xinjiang genocide. Gallagher, along with Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), recently investigated major U.S. investment firms and venture capital companies focusing on their financial support for Chinese businesses. Gallagher said they specifically looked into funding which the U.S. government had prohibited due to national security and human rights concerns. He wrote that MSCI and BlackRock and other big firms were discovered directing funding to Chinese companies associated with military and nuclear weapons. Gallagher said that these were not the only large companies involved, and said, “Investment in problematic Chinese companies is rampant across Wall Street and Silicon Valley.”
According to a release from the White House, Pres. Joe Biden passed an executive order on August 9 which put some restrictions in place on the Treasury Department allowing investment in Chinese companies.
However, according to Gallagher, the executive order is not enough to stop the problem. Gallagher said, “It is up to Congress to erect strong, enduring guardrails around outbound investment in China.” In the article, Gallagher laid out his plan to limit investment in dangerous Chinese companies. First, he said, it is important to understand the full scale of the problem. He also said that there should be no investment in companies supporting the CCP military or which violate human rights whatsoever, and that this ban must be imposed on Wall Street and the big firms which continue to do exactly that.
Gallagher continued in his opinion piece and said that the US also must sanction types of companies, which would prevent blacklisted Chinese companies from creating subsidiaries in order to get around restrictions. He also recommended that the US ensure financial stability by performing stress tests on banks and uncovering how much money banks are actually lending to CCP related assets.
In his opinion piece, Gallagher ultimately highlighted the limitations of Biden’s recent executive order and urged for Congress to act. He said that the American people do not deserve the outcomes of these investments, and that BlackRock and others must realize that “investments in malign Chinese firms create danger for our men and women in uniform, mortal peril for the targets of the CCP’s human rights abuses, and systemic risks for the global economy.”
