(The hearing is scheduled to start at 7 p.m. ET. Please refresh the page if the above video is not playing at the moment.)
WASHINGTON — A newly formed House committee dedicated to examining economic competition between the U.S. and China is holding its first hearing on Tuesday night, capping off a day of maneuvers on Capitol Hill geared toward holding Beijing accountable for recent national security offenses.
The Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the USA and the Chinese Communist Party was formed in January shortly after Republicans took the bulk within the House. Its inaugural event, scheduled for primetime at 7 p.m. ET, comes as lawmakers within the House and Senate renew their deal with China after the U.S. shot down a CCP surveillance balloon earlier this month.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) (C), chair of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the USA and the Chinese Communist Party, joins Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) (L) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) for a news conference following a GOP caucus meeting on the Republican National Committee offices on Capitol Hill on February 28, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Committee Chair Rep. Mike Gallagher said the hearing will highlight human rights.
“We may call this a ‘strategic competition,’ but this shouldn’t be a polite tennis match,” Gallagher, R-Wis., will say in his opening remarks, in accordance with a replica reviewed ahead of the hearing. “That is an existential struggle over what life will appear to be within the twenty first century — and probably the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
An example is the U.S. government’s targeting of the favored social media platform TikTok. The House Foreign Affairs Committee announced plans Monday to advertise laws giving the president the authority to ban the China-owned app within the U.S. TikTok boasts over 1 billion energetic users.
TikTok has been in lawmakers’ crosshairs since former President Donald Trump proposed using executive powers in 2020 to ban the app over security concerns.
The Biden administration has also sanctioned six Chinese aerospace corporations supporting the nation’s military balloon program after the U.S. military shot down the Chinese spy balloon that drifted across the U.S. a couple of month ago.
Gallagher and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Unwell., rating member of the select committee, called the balloon a “violation of American sovereignty” in a joint statement.
The administration’s move prompted the advancement of several bills designed to bolster U.S. national security against China. Seven out of 10 bills passed by the House Financial Services Committee Tuesday addressed China or its neighbor, Taiwan. While they’d still have to clear the total House and Senate before becoming law, the amount and speed of the anti-China bills moving through the lower chamber indicate a growing chasm between Washington and Beijing.
The House panel approved the next bills Tuesday:
The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs also queried witnesses Tuesday on advancing U.S. national security through sanctions and export controls.
“The Chinese government made its goals clear: to dominate advanced technology and global strategic supply chains,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, chair of the committee, said in opening statements. “The ‘Chinese Communist Party’s’ civil-military fusion policy erases the road separating industrial and military use of finished goods – and of the technologies that go into them.”
Gallagher will echo these statements in the course of the Tuesday night hearing.
“The CCP laughed at our naïveté while they took advantage of our good faith,” Gallagher will say of previous economic approaches by the U.S. “However the era of wishful considering is over. The Select Committee won’t allow the CCP to lull us into complacency or maneuver us into submission.”
Matthew Pottinger, former U.S. Deputy national security adviser; former U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster; Yong Ti, a Chinese human rights advocate; and Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, are scheduled to testify on the hearing.
