WASHINGTON DC — Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party appeared on the Federal Newswire's "China Desk" podcast with host Steve Yates in a new episode released today. During the discussion, Chairman Moolenaar addressed his leadership of the Select Committee and outlined his congressional priorities to counteract the Chinese Communist Party's global ambitions, including issues related to fentanyl, supply chains, and trade.
"We need to be very clear-eyed about what China's ambitions are, and they are global in nature. Then, how do we reset that relationship accordingly, on the military, economic human rights across the board," said Chairman Moolenaar.
Chairman Moolenaar highlighted the bipartisan nature of the Select Committee: "The members on the committee are very serious-minded. You don't have a lot of effort to score political points. You have people asking very good questions on how US policy should address the changing nature of this relationship with China. It has really been a pleasure to see this. My goal of the committee is to continue to build on the excellent work that Mike Gallagher and the team have started, which has been very bipartisan and meaningful across a wide spectrum of different issues."
Discussing the Select Committee's report on fentanyl, Moolenaar stated: "The groundbreaking report that our committee presented with actual evidence of China was their tax policy where they are actually offering tax rebates to chemical companies in China to manufacture and export the chemical precursors for fentanyl. Not the fentanyl used in hospitals for medical purposes, but the fentanyl that's used to poison people. Ultimately, the idea that was their government policy being promoted through websites and an active drug distribution that was going on was shocking."
On addressing CCP's trade practices and global actions, he remarked: "Most of us believe in free and fair trade. It is free trade among free nations and when that gets distorted, it makes it very hard to say let's just have free trade. We know that China has been stealing our intellectual property, coopting businesses, showing aggression in transnational repression, and intimidating people on our soil. It is a different kind of relationship... for the last several decades, the hope was that China would become more open, more freedom-loving, more democratic, but under Xi Jinping, they have gone in exactly the opposite direction."
