‘Certain things require a machete’: House China Committee chair defends approach to Beijing

Since it was created a year ago, the House Select Committee on China has produced a raft of proposals to get more aggressive against Beijing. 2024 will be the test of whether it can turn any of that into legislation.

The bipartisan committee was formed in January 2023 with the goal of better tackling national security threats from China. And it has been loud and ambitious in pursuing that goal.

Chair Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) has trashed President Joe Biden’s efforts to thaw relations as “zombie engagement” and slammed U.S. businesses that deal with China as accepting “golden blindfolds.” And the committee proposed a slate of 150 policy recommendations this month that would radically overhaul the U.S. economic and trade relationship with Beijing — including imposing a raft of new tariffs that some lawmakers argued would hobble the U.S. agriculture industry by blocking off its largest market.

But that aggressive approach to Beijing has sown internal divisions and dismayed some China experts who warn that the committee’s approach harms administration efforts to stabilize the U.S.-China relationship. And that may make finding consensus on legislation difficult.

The committee’s tone “has veered toward hyperbole, inflating China’s strengths and overlooking its handicaps and problems … in dealing with real security threats, we should be wielding scalpels, not machetes,” said Winston Lord, former assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

The original slate of recommendations — which were later softened — would have pushed the U.S. “into an overly protectionist stance, when we should be making investments in the basics and pursuing more trade and investment ties with the world,” member Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) said in an interview.

Gallagher is unapologetic. “There are certain things that require a machete…and then there are things that require a scalpel,” Gallagher said in an interview. The U.S. “must use both in order to successfully prevent a war with China in the near term, prevent China from controlling the commanding heights of critical technology in the midterm and win this new Cold War over the long term,” said Gallagher.

But now the committee wants to turn a year of hearings and proposals into legislation.

Gallagher says he is aiming for “a big China bill” in 2024, one that will wrap in all the recommendations and “actually get a vote on the House floor.”

And it’s unclear what he will be able to get committee members — much less the larger House — to agree to in the New Year.

Farm district Republicans committee members including Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) and Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), teamed up with Auchincloss and Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) to get a call to revoke China’s permanent normal trade status removed from the recommendations. They’d argued that such a move would likely lead Beijing to retaliate with higher tariffs for American agricultural products.

Gallagher says that China’s normal trade status shouldn’t be sacrosanct and “the right sort of revocation” could be a way “to force China to abide by its WTO commitments.” He notes that there are both GOP and Democratic members “uncomfortable” with that strategy, but doesn’t see that dissension as a barrier to finding a compromise. The committee’s recommendations to date can translate into “a very bipartisan product” in terms of legislation next year, Gallagher said.

And even some of the dissenters argue that they’re getting closer to crafting a passable bill. Johnson, the South Dakota Republican, said “there is tremendous momentum that is being built behind actual legislative proposals.” That has echoes on the other side of the aisle. “I literally have a list of three dozen pieces of legislation that have been recommended by the committee or by other committees of jurisdiction that can move in a big China bill,” Auchincloss said.

Throughout the committee, members argue that they’ve been bolstered by a rare bipartisan camaraderie that should help them overcome their differences.

“It's not like red shirts versus blue shirts,” said Gallagher. The committee’s bipartisan spirit “may offer a model for how you do business in Congress,” said Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the committee’s ranking member. Torres, Krishnamoorthi and Auchincloss all described the committee as an “oasis” in a Congress mostly paralyzed along party lines. “There are fewer [partisan] fissures on the China committee than there are on the Foreign Affairs committee and the Financial Services Committee…The Select Committee is specifically designed with the idea that we should forge consensus on bipartisan policies, and we've largely done that,” said Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), another member.

The committee’s rigor — a year of blue ribbon panels of China experts and a trio of deep-dive research reports focused on Taiwan’s defense, Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang and the perils of China’s massive economic muscle — has won it powerful fans. Despite its lack of legislative authority, the committee is “a place of substance … they understand that more than ever technology is at the red-hot center of national security,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in an interview.

But partisan rifts are still powerful.

“We Democrats have a broader conception of strategic competitiveness … what we do for ourselves is as important or even more important than what we do to China,” said Torres.

GOP committee members broadly favor an approach that includes sanctions aimed to limit China’s access to technologies that can benefit its military industrial complex while boosting the military might of the U.S. and its partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific. Most Democrats favor an approach that includes addressing strategic competition through government investment in key domestic industrial sectors and immigration reform to allow greater numbers of highly skilled immigrants into the U.S. to boost breakthroughs in high technology development.

Support for industrial policy — government financing for strategic sectors — divides the committee. The committee’s GOP members voted as one against the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocated billions of dollars to support the development of a domestic high-end semiconductor industry in the U.S. “Government subsidies for industries is not the best way to compete and win against China,” Barr said.

That irks some committee Democrats. “We're missing the big picture,” Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) said in an interview. The committee is increasingly “only looking at [strategic competition] through our military might, and only looking at it through the threats that we see and not enough about how we invest in ourselves, our innovation, our workforce,” said Kim.

That split may hamper bipartisan agreement on China-focused legislation in the New Year.  “There’s no real consensus about how to move forward on issues of economics and finance,” Torres said in an interview. Committee Democrats ”have an alternative vision of strategic competition … but we've been less effective at shining a spotlight on it,” Torres said.

GOP legislative proposals that lack domestic investment provisions are likely to get a cold shoulder from Democrats. “You can't just do export controls on semiconductors and quantum and call that a science and technology strategy — our side is pretty aligned on wanting to fund science and education,” Auchincloss said.

Gallagher’s dismissal of the value of diplomatic engagement with Beijing, his insistence that the U.S. and China are already in a new Cold War and his view that China poses a greater threat than climate change have raised hackles of both Democratic committee members and former career diplomats. The committee is “influencing public opinion to view China as an adversary and limiting administration efforts to stabilize relations with it,” said Susan Shirk, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs.

There are also concerns that the committee’s confrontational stance undermines potential bilateral cooperation. “It seems to be more anti-China than it is honest to goodness constructive investigation of how to deal with this relationship,” said former U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus in an interview. Beijing agrees. The committee “is obsessed with attacking and smearing China, is biased and hostile and has no rationality,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said earlier this month.

But even if the committee’s legislative push stalls in what will be a highly polarized presidential election year, its public outreach efforts may yield ballot box dividends.

The committee “puts these major issues on the voters’ radar, making these policy issues accessible to the American public … so when elections come around, they actually vote for candidates who are protecting American interests,” said Nazak Nikakhtar, former Assistant Secretary for Industry and Analysis at the Department of Commerce from 2018 to 2021.