With bi-partisan support, Republicans hope to fast-track the majority of the 30 bills aimed at protecting farmland, trade secrets, and critical infrastructure.
WASHINGTON—The House of Representatives is poised to kick off its fall session with a slate of China-related legislation planned for a “China Week” upon returning to Washington on Monday.
Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) office
published more than 30 bills, including those protecting U.S. farmland, trade secrets, critical infrastructure, and advanced technology from the Chinese regime’s predatory practices.
The Republican leadership has been working on such legislation for some time. Before the summer recess, Johnson
said at Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, that he hoped to have a “significant package of China-related legislation signed into law by the end of this year.”
He added that China poses “the greatest threat to global peace” and that “Congress must keep our focus on countering China with every tool at our disposal.”
With just a four-seat majority (220–211) and the November presidential election around the corner, Republicans hope to pass a number of noncontroversial bills on China. As a result, the package covers issues on which both parties have consensus and suggests procedural changes that are less substantial.
Republicans hope to expedite the majority of these bills. The fast-tracking procedure, which requires the votes of two-thirds of the congress members on the House floor, will limit the debate to 40 minutes. However, the prospect of the same package of legislation passing the Democratic-majority Senate is uncertain.
Sponsors of some of these bills emailed statements to The Epoch Times on how their legislation addresses areas in which China poses threats to the United States, including aggressions over Taiwan; buying farmlands, especially near sensitive military installments; enabling Russia in the Ukraine War; interfering with the U.S. elections; and exploiting U.S. tax credits and export control loopholes.
“Deterring China’s aggression on the world stage is crucial to ensure stability in the United States and our allied nations,” Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) told The Epoch Times about the coming week. His bill in consideration
requires the Department of Treasury to map out the financial assets of the leading Chinese communist aggressors toward Taiwan.
The security threat China poses goes beyond the Indo-Pacific region. At its annual summit in Washington in July, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
declared China a “decisive enabler” of Russia in the Ukraine war due to its “large-scale support for Russia’s defense industrial base.”
Rep. Rich McCormick’s (R-Ga.) bill aims to address the issue partly by
requiring a State Department report on China’s sanction evasions. He told The Epoch Times that his bill is an “important step” in “ensuring that dual-use technologies that we produce aren’t used against our allies and partners.”
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) introduced a bill in April to
restrict foreigners’ remote access to a U.S. device or cloud computing service under export control. He said his goal was to ensure that China had “absolutely no way to access and steal American tech for their own nefarious purposes.”
China’s ownership of U.S. farmland has been a top concern of lawmakers and state leaders. It’s also Rep. Dan Newhouse’s (R-Wash.) signature issue.
Facing an uphill battle in his reelection in November, he
introduced a bill on Aug. 30 to include the Secretary of Agriculture on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an inter-agency committee for national security reviews. He told The Epoch Times, “Food security is national security, and for too long, the federal government has allowed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to put our security at risk by turning a blind eye to their steadily increasing purchases of American farmland.”
Federal agencies
don’t have reliable information on China’s purchases of U.S. farmland because of “flawed” data collection and reporting processes, according to a report released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in January.
Chinese interference in the U.S. elections has been a known threat for years.
During his visit last month, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told Beijing that interfering in U.S. elections is “unacceptable” for any nation, and he covered the topic each time he met with Chinese officials. The Chinese communist regime’s disinformation networks on social media are using fake user accounts to impersonate Americans, denigrate U.S. candidates, and push divisive messages ahead of the November presidential election in the United States, according to a
Sept. 3 report by New York-based intelligence company Graphika.
Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas)
wants to ban any colleges that get funding from China from receiving Department of Homeland Security grants. He said he’s alarmed by the CCP’s infiltration of America’s campuses to “engage in espionage, steal our intellectual property, intimidate Chinese dissidents, promote communist propaganda, and funnel sensitive information back to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) aims to
prohibit tax-exempt organizations that accept money or gifts from China from funding political activities. She told The Epoch Times that America’s foreign adversaries “will find any loophole possible to wreak havoc on and influence our political system” and that they shouldn’t be allowed to “exploit our electoral process off the backs of taxpayers.”
Rep. Carol Miller’s (R-W.Va.) bill also touches on tax benefits. It
bans Chinese firms from applying for manufacturing tax credits for renewable energy-related production in the United States under the Inflation Reduction Act. The lawmaker’s office has expressed optimism to The Epoch Times that the bill will pass the House when it’s voted on next week.
Alex Wu contributed to the article.
