Bashing China Is a Bipartisan Passion in Evenly Divided US Congress
(Bloomberg) -- In a politically fractured Congress, a spate of hearings on Tuesday demonstrated that going after China has become one of Washington’s most unifying causes.
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Just back from a two-week recess, the House of Representatives held no fewer than three hearings and debated more than a dozen bills focusing on the danger posed by what lawmakers argue is an increasingly aggressive Communist Party.
- ADVERTISEMENT -The day was capped with the first meeting of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, a new congressional body led by 38-year-old Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher. Designed to mimic the Jan. 6 hearings on the insurrection at the capital, it featured videos and charts warning of President Xi Jinping’s global ambitions — and was even held in the same room where those hearings occurred.
“We must act with a sense of urgency,” Gallagher said in opening the three-hour hearing, which didn’t attract live television coverage. “Our policy over the next ten years will set the stage for the next hundred. We cannot allow the CCP‘s tech-powered dystopia to prevail.”
The hearing underscored the depth of animosity that has blossomed within the US toward China as the world’s two largest economies spar over everything from Taiwan to the Covid-19 pandemic to high-tech semiconductors and the alleged spy balloon that the US shot down. That bipartisan anger has pressured President Joe Biden to double down on export controls and sanctions to counter Xi despite Biden’s promises to keep the relationship from deteriorating further.
Part of the pressure on Biden is to restrict the US operations of TikTok, the popular short-video app owned by a Chinese company. The administration said late Monday that federal employees had 30 days to remove TikTok from government devices, implementing a congressional requirement.
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