House Republicans this week are bringing a raft of China-focused legislation to a vote in a pre-election bid to bolster the party’s foreign policy credentials, as Democrats and the GOP compete to chart a path for managing an increasingly fraught relationship with the United States’ most powerful adversary.
But the broadly bipartisan sense in Congress that Beijing poses a significant national security threat has also turned the rallying cry “tough on China” into a point of contrast in a tight election year. Republicans cast their effort as a show of strength compared to their rivals, while Democrats have sought to burnish their own tough-on-China bona fides and panned the event’s timing as a cynical ploy for votes.
Republican leaders this week framed the slate of bills as proof of the Biden-Harris administration’s “failed foreign policy of appeasement,” House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) said during a Tuesday news conference.
Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (N.Y.), the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, questioned the usefulness of the GOP-led exercise and accused his colleagues of hypocrisy. Speaking Monday during a debate over one of the bills, to fund the U.S. government’s efforts to counter China’s “malign influence” worldwide, Meeks said, “We can hold all the China Weeks we want, but if House Republicans keep cutting the funding for the State Department and USAID, we’re not going to win the competition with China.”
Administration officials this year have repeatedly warned lawmakers about the absence of Senate-confirmed ambassadors across critical regions, including in dozens of countries in Africa and Southeast Asia where the Chinese government has made considerable investments to bolster its military, political and economic influence.
The China Week proposals join close to 600 related bills introduced during the 118th Congress, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a marked increase from the previous two legislative sessions. But so far only five of those proposals have passed both chambers of Congress to make it into law. One of the most significant — a measure to ban or force the sale of the popular TikTok social media platform on the grounds that Chinese ownership of its parent company could allow Beijing to spy on or politically influence American users — remains mired in legal challenges.
“There is little prospect that any of these bills are going to be signed into law,” one Democratic foreign policy aide said of the China Week bills, alluding to the limited days remaining on the legislative calendar in the notoriously slower-moving Senate. “While we’re glad they are doing a China Week, we wish they did it far earlier.” As is common for congressional aides, this person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
Craig Singleton, a China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, summarized it this way: “There’s no ignoring the political calculus here.” The GOP’s move, he said, enables lawmakers to return to their districts this fall “with a clear message — ‘I am tough on China.’”
The House Republicans’ scramble to pass these bills before voters go the polls coincides with a period of intense engagement between Washington and Beijing, with several high-level visits to China by senior U.S. administration officials in recent months and another call planned between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The Biden administration has overseen modest but notable gains in relations with Beijing since November, when the two sides agreed to reopen military-to-military communications following numerous near miss incidents in the South China Sea.
Republicans — including former president Donald Trump — have sought to cast such engagement as weakness, a view House Republican leaders echoed this week. “Because the White House has chosen not to confront China and stand for Americans’ interests, House Republicans will,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said at a Tuesday news conference.
Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, on Tuesday night sparred briefly over China policy during their first presidential debate. Trump claimed that “China was paying us hundreds of billions of dollars” while he was in office because of his tariffs, and Harris countered that “the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit” for the United States and, in fact, “sold us out” to China.
By Tuesday night, 15 of the China Week bills had been approved, more than half with broad bipartisan support, including several co-sponsored by Democratic lawmakers.
Beijing said the flurry of legislation was illustrative of U.S. lawmakers’ habit of making China out to be a boogeyman. These bills are “full of Cold War thinking and zero-sum game concepts,” said Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu.
U.S. lawmakers have expressed growing anxiety over Chinese state-backed enterprises that are alleged to have stolen American intellectual property; a Chinese government accused of violating environmental and international trade laws; and a global market flooded with cheap, Chinese-subsidized products that U.S. companies say they have struggled to compete with.
China’s military has antagonized U.S. partners, such as Taiwan and the Philippines, in territorial disputes, and Chinese materials have found their way into Russia’s arsenal in its ongoing war against Ukraine.
Beijing also has sought to outpace the United States in the development of cutting-edge technologies and corner the markets, critics say, in its exploitation of the critical minerals necessary for manufacturing everything from iPhones to advanced weaponry.
Among the week’s most consequential bills was the bipartisan Biosecure Act, which passed the House on Monday. The law would ban U.S. tax dollars from going to five Chinese drugmakers, including WuXi AppTec and BGI, both of which operate extensive U.S.-based drug manufacturing and genetic-sequencing businesses.
Other bills that passed with Republican and Democratic support would boost oversight of Chinese officials’ finances, shutter Hong Kong trade offices in the United States, and ban new models of Chinese drones. Proposals to expand surveillance of suspected Chinese espionage, restrict funding from universities partnering with entities with suspected ties to the Chinese government, and prevent Chinese companies from receiving U.S. tax credits for electric-vehicle technology all passed Tuesday with Republican votes alone.
Some Democrats chastised their GOP colleagues for pushing through even the bipartisan bills without performing what they called sufficient due diligence.
“God forbid we wait a few weeks and get this right,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said of the legislation targeting the Chinese drugmakers, which he said had been “jammed through” without fairly assessing whether the companies pose a true national security threat. “This is not the way we should be doing things.”
One of the companies targeted, WuXi Biologics, is building a facility in his district.
Others lamented that several harder-hitting bills were absent from the lineup, including a bipartisan initiative to ensure that private outbound U.S. investments aren’t enhancing China’s military capabilities, and a Republican-backed effort to revoke China’s preferential trade status, which would trigger new U.S. tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods.
Also absent from the lineup is a bill seeking to close a legal loophole that allows Chinese postal packages under a certain value to enter the United States duty free and with minimal inspection. Critics say that has been exploited by narcotics dealers and has undercut U.S. competitiveness in legal markets.
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, where a number of this week’s bills originated, said in an interview that although he wasn’t surprised by the political conjecture, the work specific to his panel represents “the most bipartisan effort” he has seen since he entered Congress nearly a decade ago.
“The members are very serious and want to help move our country in a better direction,” he said.
“Some bills are still a work in progress,” he continued, “where we’re tweaking and making some improvements in the process, and that’s typical. … We expect to continue to build on this momentum in the weeks ahead.”
