By Jimmy Quinn
Monday, July 05,
2021
As the Biden administration made
clear that it would adopt many aspects of the Trump administration’s approach
to China, it seemed as though a new bipartisan consensus had emerged
on countering Beijing.
And to a large extent, one has. Both
parties have begun emphasizing the need to push back on the Chinese Communist
Party’s efforts to exercise more influence in the world. The Senate has passed
a massive bipartisan legislative package that would reform and grant
funding to U.S. technological research and development to that end. The Senate
bill, despite its many faults and omissions, has the backing of Democrats
and Republicans working in concert to meet the geopolitical challenge of the
moment.
But unfortunately, the same can’t be said
for the House’s companion legislation. The House Foreign Affairs Committee last
week held markup sessions on the EAGLE Act, a China bill conceived by the
panel’s Democrats to mirror the parts of the Senate package that don’t involve
technology. (The House already passed legislation mirroring the Senate bill’s
provisions on scientific research funding last month.)
For all the bipartisan agreement on
certain fundamental aspects of China policy — particularly Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and Xinjiang — there remain significant schisms between the two parties about
how to address the challenge. “Unfortunately, Democrats passed up the
opportunity to work on a meaningful, bipartisan legislation to counter the
threats of the Chinese Communist Party and instead made it another green energy
bill,” said Representative Michael McCaul, the panel’s top Republican.
In addition to their complaints that the
EAGLE Act puts money into an unaccountable U.N. climate fund, McCaul and his
colleagues charge that Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Gregory Meeks and
other Democrats are rushing through the bill despite its failure to address the
CCP’s egregious behavior on the international stage. In response, these
Republican critics have proposed a dizzying number of amendments — the
committee’s website lists 98 — to toughen the House legislation, which is
essentially guaranteed to pass out of the Democratic-controlled committee. But
their proposals, for the most part, will not make it into the final bill.
Starting last Wednesday, a series of
committee meetings yielded hours of quick, sometimes acrimonious debate on the
dozens of amendments that Republican members put forward. The conversation did
not always remain cordial. On Thursday afternoon, debate on a measure to
penalize the NBA for kowtowing to the CCP’s position on Hong Kong and other
human-rights issues sparked a clash over procedure, offering some telling
insight into where the China debate currently stands in Congress.
“We’re getting a lot of proposals that are
you know — that are hortatory, that are not effective, that are gonna keep us
here for hours and hours and days and days at a time, but that are actually not
well thought through as legislation,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, a
Democrat who has led the way on a number of measures to address Beijing’s
behavior. He pointed out that a separate bill under consideration would already
have the effects Republicans seek. Given that there were nearly 100 amendments
put up by the committee’s members, Malinowski’s criticism was likely fair in
some cases.
But Republicans Andy Barr and Mark Green
offered a riposte: If Democrats are serious about bipartisan action on these
issues, why did party leadership decline to appoint anyone to the House Foreign
Affairs Committee’s China Task Force and a panel investigating the
coronavirus’s origins? (Both efforts are now steered exclusively by Republican
members and don’t have the same powers that they would have if they’d been blessed
by House leadership.)
“If you really don’t like a bill, that
might mean that there might be a lot of amendments to try to make it a better
bill to fit your side. To suggest that there’s some kind of tactic here — you
got a 600-page bill, and you don’t like a lot about it, that might mean there’s
a lot of amendments, and you might want to record a vote on it,” said Green,
about Republican demands for roll-call votes that extended the duration of
debate.
Later, a Republican aide put it more
bluntly to National Review: “The
markup wouldn’t have taken so long if they hadn’t dropped such a terrible
bill.”
And Republicans tried to make it better. They really
did.
The EAGLE Act currently fails to do much
about malign Chinese influence networks operating in Western democracies. One
amendment, proposed by Representative Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), would have created
new sanctions to target the Party’s shadowy “United Front” network, which seeks
to coopt the Chinese diaspora abroad, foreign elites, and minorities and
business leaders within China to do Beijing’s bidding. A blockbuster report by
the Australian Strategic Policy
Institute explained the impact of the network
on the world’s democracies last year: “This undermines social cohesion,
exacerbates racial tension, influences politics, harms media integrity,
facilitates espionage, and increases unsupervised technology transfer.” The
United Front has been so effective that Xi Jinping has used Mao Zedong’s
formulation in referring to it as a “magic weapon.”
Like many of the other measures rejected
last week, Wilson’s amendment to the bill is a no-brainer, but Democrats
opposed it. “The malign descriptor is undefined, and the broad generalities
contained in this amendment leaves [sic] such sanctions open to
significant politicization and ambiguity,” Meeks said. But the sanctions would
have been required to meet a restrictive five-pronged test, making it all but
impossible to wield them against anyone but participants in United Front
efforts.
That Democrats would oppose such an
innocuous and important amendment suggests that they’re not interested in
strong efforts to counter some of the essential parts of the Party’s strategy.
It’s certainly encouraging that, say, calling out China’s Uyghur genocide has
broad bipartisan support, but the consensus, at least in the House, is pretty
limited beyond that, backing Taiwan, and some other core issues.
That was illustrated when Democratic
members spoke out against a number of Republican amendments that would prohibit
new EAGLE Act funding for the U.N. Green Climate Fund from being sent to China,
where forced labor plays a significant role in solar-panel supply chains. They
also opposed amendments that, among other things, would pull federal assistance
from the production of films that honor Chinese requests for political
censorship, crack down on U.S. exports of sensitive technology, and require the
executive branch to put together a report identifying Chinese nationals
involved in fentanyl trafficking.
It’s true that some of the Republican
proposals, such as a Wilson-authored amendment concerning China’s ties with
Iran, won adoption. But the debate over the EAGLE Act suggests that while
Democrats in Congress are happy to talk tough on China, too few of them are up
to the task of crafting concrete measures to confront the threats Beijing poses
to the global order.
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