March 7, 2023Updated: March 7, 2023
Chairman Mike Gallagher
(R-Wis.) speaks during the first hearing on national security and Chinese
threats to America held by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist
Party on Capitol Hill on Feb. 28, 2023. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)
News Analysis
A new bipartisan
consensus in Congress on the threat posed by communist China has resulted in a
barrage of proposals and hearings to strengthen the U.S. position against the
regime in Beijing.
Salvoes of legislation
focused on supplying arms to Taiwan, curbing illicit organ harvesting, banning
the social media app TikTok, and uncovering the true origins of COVID-19 have
all come to the fore since the House’s Select Committee on the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) held its first hearing on Feb. 28.
“We may call this a
‘strategic competition,’ but this is not a polite tennis match,” Select
Committee Chair Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) said. “This is an existential
struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century, and the most
fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
Fortifying Taiwan
Leading the charge to
counter the CCP’s malign influence are a number of efforts to further fortify
democratic Taiwan against a CCP invasion. The CCP claims that Taiwan is
part of its territory, although the regime has never controlled the self-ruled
island. The United States, for its part, is legally required to furnish Taiwan
with the weapons necessary to maintain its self-defense against the CCP.
To that end, the United
States approved on March 3
the potential sale of $619 million in new weapons to Taiwan, following
continued intimidation efforts by the communist regime, which frequently sends
military aircraft and ships near the island.
The deal includes 200
anti-aircraft air-to-air missiles and 100 air-to-surface missiles capable of
taking out land-based radar stations, which would help to give Taiwan an
asymmetric advantage against the much larger CCP regime.
The United States is also
working to overhaul its acquisition of
certain high-end precision munitions, which experts are concerned might be
depleted in the event of a war with China.
U.S. Army officials are
in the process of ramping up production to overcome challenges associated with
replenishing domestic stockpiles of munitions that were either sold to Ukraine
or would be needed for a potential fight in the Indo-Pacific, according to
Assistant Secretary of the Army Douglas Bush.
Members of Congress are
also working to shore up ties between Taiwan and the United States.
While House Speaker Kevin
McCarthy (R-Calif.) is preparing to meet with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen,
that meeting now may take place
in the United States rather than in Taipei to keep from provoking China.
Ending TikTok
An emerging bipartisan
consensus also is forming about Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok, which
has been repeatedly flagged by U.S. intelligence officials as a national
security threat.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance,
maintains close ties to the CCP; ByteDance employees previously used TikTok
data to illicitly stalk American journalists who
reported on the company’s relationship with the regime.
A bipartisan group of 12
U.S. senators, led by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and John Thune (R-S.D.),
announced legislation on March 7 that would pave the way for the Commerce
Department to “ban or prohibit” tech
companies owned by hostile governments or rogue nations from doing business in
the United States.
The move follows a Feb. 27
order from the White House to implement a new law banning TikTok from U.S.
government devices.
Likewise, the House
Foreign Affairs Committee voted on Feb. 28 to advance a proposal that
would give President Joe Biden additional powers to ban TikTok from the United
States completely.
Punishing Forced Organ Harvesters
Congress has also
directed legislation toward the CCP’s state-sanctioned campaign of forced organ
harvesting. The House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously voted on
Feb. 28 to advance the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023.
The bill would bar entry
to the United States by perpetrators of forced organ harvesting and also block
financial transactions on U.S. soil by those known to be engaged in the
practice.
“People are finally
waking up to the brutality of the CCP,” lead sponsor Rep. Chris Smith
(R-N.J.) said in a Feb. 28 statement.
“We in the United States,
in the medical field in particular, must examine our moral complicity in this
most heinous of crimes.”
An independent people’s
tribunal in 2019 found that the
communist regime was forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience on
a “significant scale,” with the prime targets being detained adherents of
persecuted spiritual practice Falun Gong.
Congress Seeks Intel on Wuhan Lab Leak
Perhaps most notably,
lawmakers are calling on Director
of National Intelligence Avril Haines to turn over materials related to her
office’s latest assessment of the origins of COVID-19.
The move comes after a
contentious week in the intelligence community in which the FBI and Department
of Energy (DOE) both concluded that
COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
To that end, the U.S.
Senate unanimously approved a
bill on March 1 that would require the Biden administration to declassify
intelligence related to the origins of COVID-19.
The legislation, known as
the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, specifically seeks to investigate the
possibility that the virus which causes COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan
Institute of Virology.
Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.)
and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) reintroduced the bill on Feb. 27 after the DOE provided
a classified intelligence report to the White House and certain members of
Congress on the matter.
“I will just make the
observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its
best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here,” FBI Director Christopher
Wray said in an interview with Fox News.
“You’re talking about a
potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of
Americans.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/flurry-of-us-actions-strike-back-at-ccps-malign-influence_5105417.html
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