China Panel Democrat Pledges Bipartisan Approach Against Beijing

Peter Martin
·3 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- The top Democrat on the House China committee said he wants to keep a bipartisan approach, even as relations between the parties grow more fractious with the approach of the 2024 elections.

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China’s Communist Party is “counting on us being fractured and partisan and unable to prepare ourselves for the future,” Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois said in an interview. “If we can investigate and uncover the facts surrounding the nature of the challenge, the hope is that we can start to come up with bipartisan ways to deal with those facts.”

Krishnamoorthi said that he and Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who leads the committee, are on the same page even as the Biden administration shifts to softer language on its economic approach to Beijing. Biden’s team now emphasizes “de-risking” instead of “decoupling.”

“Decoupling from the PRC economy is not possible,” he said, referring to China by its formal name, the People’s Republic of China. “Much more important is de-risking parts of the supply chain where we are very dependent on the PRC or may be unavailable to us for other reasons.”

The panel’s goal is to focus on military and economic threats posed to the US by the world’s second-largest economy. A hearing on May 17 will concentrate on how the US should confront the economic challenge posed by China, Krishnamoorthi said.

Witnesses will include Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., the holding company of Google, and Robert Lighthizer, a former US trade representative.

Other recent congressional efforts have included bills to ban the use of some China-based apps, particularly TikTok. Senate Democrats have been forging a bipartisan bill intended to enhance US economic competition with China and respond to aggression against Taiwan.

Krishnamoorthi said the hearing would seek to “elevate awareness of these issues with the general public as they think about how to prepare for the intense competition” between the US and China.

Asked for comment, Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said “the relevant individuals should take off the tinted glasses of ideology and uphold the spirit of equality and mutual respect, stopping making frequent accusations against China.”

Economic rivalry has been a key factor in the rapid deterioration in US-China ties in recent years. US officials say that decades of Chinese industrial policy and economic espionage have skewed the playing field in favor of Beijing.

In response, the US has tried to limit China’s access to high-end semiconductors and blacklisted Chinese companies for their ties to the military or their use of forced labor. Restrictions on US investment in China are also in the works. China characterizes these actions as protectionism.

“We need American businesses to take off their golden blindfolds in China and become clear-eyed about the risks of partnering with the Chinese Communist Party,” Gallagher, the panel’s chairman, said in a statement to Bloomberg. “These are common-sense principles that both parties can get behind.”

--With assistance from Erik Wasson and Daniel Flatley.

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