By Jimmy Quinn
Thursday, December 03, 2020
America’s relationship with the Chinese Communist
Party-State has entered a new age — and it’s about time. The Trump
administration over the past four years jettisoned the conventional wisdom that
once saw the CCP like any other geopolitical competitor, whose authoritarianism
and pretensions to global dominance were just another portfolio to be managed.
Beijing itself has also shattered the old American
illusions about its rise as it sought to gaslight the world about the
coronavirus pandemic’s origins, strangled democracy in Hong Kong, and built
a system of industrial-scale prison camps in China’s West. Today’s emerging
consensus endorses a no-holds-barred competition with the Party across numerous
interconnected areas.
As congressional Republicans fear the reversal of
Trump-era gains under the incoming Biden administration, they’re releasing
today a suite of legislation designed to codify and expand on them. Information
about the legislative push was provided exclusively to National Review
ahead of its Thursday-afternoon launch by the Republican Study Committee, the
150-member caucus of conservatives in the House of Representatives that’s
leading the charge.
“Republicans must stay united to keep up the same level
of pressure on China as we had under Trump the last four years, and these
pieces of legislation proposed first by the Republican Study Committee are part
of our plan to do that,” said Representative Jim Banks, who will lead the group
next year.
The proposals, which span everything from China’s IP
theft to prohibiting the use of U.S. funds to purchase goods made by
Chinese-military-linked enterprises, are the direct outgrowth of a June 2020 RSC
report that called for numerous legislative changes to compete with China.
And they complement the work of the House GOP’s China Task Force.
Among the most notable of the RSC proposals is a bill
introduced by Representative Steve Chabot that creates an entire category of
sanctions to deter the theft of intellectual property by Chinese firms.
Combating IP theft has been a hallmark of the Trump administration’s
work on national security. In 2018, the Justice Department established its
China Initiative, a program focused on investigating and prosecuting the theft
of trade secrets by individuals spying for the Chinese government. During a
speech at the Hudson Institute this year, FBI director Chris Wray revealed that
his agency opens “a China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours.”
The RSC bill expands on these efforts, directing the
Treasury Department to create a list of IP-related crimes carried out on behalf
of the CCP and to sanction the perpetrators. “Taking these steps is the only
way to ensure that the Chinese Government takes us seriously, and realizes that
the United States will no longer tolerate the continuation of such crimes,”
Chabot said in a statement to NR.
Although this bill, in addition to others that will be
introduced by Representatives Debbie Lesko and Ken Buck, aim to protect
American businesses from IP theft, they implicate other crucial issues.
“Members of the RSC are putting the Chinese Communist
Party on notice that Congress will not tolerate their continued theft of
intellectual property and human-rights abuses,” Representative Joe Wilson, who
leads the group’s national-security task force, told National Review,
drawing a link between the two issues. All of this is to say that the theft of
intellectual property doesn’t just harm American companies; it also contributes
to Chinese military research, and stolen technologies have played a role in the
CCP’s human-rights atrocities.
It’s an important reminder as Joe Biden prepares to take
office. It remains to be seen whether his administration intends to adopt the
key Trump administration framework of linking seemingly distinct issues in the
U.S.-China relationship. As the RSC’s members, the White House, State
Department, and others have laid out in a number of documents over the past
several months, no single issue in the U.S.-China relationship can be tackled
in isolation.
If Biden seeks negotiations with China over climate
change, as many analysts and observers in the president-elect’s orbit have
urged, the Chinese would almost certainly ask for concessions in other areas.
The same goes for cooperation on the COVID-19 pandemic and getting the support
of the People’s Republic for U.S. initiatives at the U.N.
China hawks might be encouraged by Biden’s apparent
embrace of a more stringent U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic — his
campaign, for example, pledged to designate the Xinjiang mass atrocities a
genocide and push back against the Chinese censorship regime’s emergence on
U.S. soil — but they might miss the Trump team’s unequivocal stand against China’s
malign activities around the world.
The sense that the CCP is a global threat that must be
confronted is one nevertheless shared by Republicans and Democrats alike on the
Hill — most recently, the House passed bipartisan legislation to delist foreign
companies from U.S. stock exchanges that fail to certify their independence
from foreign powers, a move that primarily targets Chinese firms. The two
parties also share a similar resolve to confront Beijing’s trampling of human
rights.
They diverge in some other key respects, though. One RSC
proposal likely to face pushback from Democrats would prevent the U.S.
government from issuing visas to senior CCP officials and officers in the
People’s Liberation Army.
This is a significantly narrower proposal than one
considered by the Trump administration to ban the Party’s over 90 million
members from entering the United States. Still, visa restrictions targeting
Chinese researchers with potential military ties have previously been met by
charges of xenophobia and racism.
With little time left before the adjournment of the
current session, these bills stand scant chance of becoming law — or even
getting a vote — in the near future. But they set a benchmark, and draw
partisan lines of battle, for future debate about how best to push back against
the CCP during the Biden presidency.
No comments:
Post a Comment