China threat to US demands ‘urgency,’ head of new House panel declares

WASHINGTON – The chairman of a special House committee dedicated to countering Chinese threats to the US warned Tuesday night that Beijing has sought to pit Americans “against each other to undermine our country.”

“Just because this Congress is divided, we cannot afford to waste the next two years lingering in legislative limbo or pandering for the press,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) said in his opening remarks. “We must act with a sense of urgency.”

The prime-time debut of the panel, officially known as the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, came as threats to national security from the Asian power dominate headlines.

On Feb. 4, the US shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina after it traveled across the continental US for the preceding week, hovering over sensitive military installations along the way. Meanwhile, a Sunday report revealed the Department of Energy now believes COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab.

Beijing also continues to be the focus of suspicion over its threats to invade Taiwan and its claims over the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, diplomatic and military-to-military communications are increasingly frayed. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken canceled his scheduled visit to Beijing earlier this month over the spy balloon incursion.

A week later, Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe ignored Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s call after the balloon shootdown. The two last spoke on Nov. 22 while attending a meeting of defense ministers in Cambodia, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

In his opening statement, Gallagher, a former Marine who served in Iraq, cited a 1991 book by Chinese academic and Communist Party leader Wang Huning.

“[Wang] wrote a book called ‘America Against America’ — a critique of the internal conflict he found at the heart of American society,” he said. “‘America Against America’ also describes the strategy that Wang, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and the CCP have pursued in the years since — pitting Americans, who they believe are greedy and factional, against each other to undermine our country.”

The House of Representatives voted to establish the committee last month with rare, overwhelmingly bipartisan support.

Gallagher has structured the panel with 13 Republicans and 11 Democrats, making it one of the most politically balanced committees in the GOP-controlled House.

Gallagher has said he wants to continue the work of Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the current House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman whose 2020 China Task Force report solicited input from more than 130 experts — but was produced without the help of any Democrats.

“We must build upon [the task force’s work] as we investigate and expose the ideological, technological, economic and military threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

Gallagher was careful throughout his comments to distinguish the CCP as the enemy – and not the Chinese people, who he said “have always been the Party’s primary victims.”

To drive home that point, the panel played a video at the top of the hearing that Gallagher said depicted “some of the suffering the Chinese Communist Party has inflicted since it came to power over 70 years ago.”

“The CCP is laser-focused on its vision for the future — a world crowded with techno-totalitarian surveillance states where human rights are subordinate to the whims of the party,” Gallagher said. “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”

“Our policy over the next 10 years will set the stage for the next hundred,” he added. “We cannot allow the CCP’s tech-powered dystopia to prevail.”