Chairman Mike Gallagher Takes Point on the Covert CCP Bail-out

By Frank Gaffney

As the Chinese Communist Party’s friends in the Biden administration and on Wall Street mount a stealthy campaign to prop up that mortal enemy, a formidable opponent has emerged in Congress.

Fortunately, Rep. Mike Gallagher can do more than simply raise an alarm about this covert effort to stave off with U.S. taxpayers’ and investors’ funds China’s intensifying economic crisis and the political one it is precipitating. As Chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, he can help stop it.

In a powerful interview with the Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders News” program on August 23rd, Mr. Gallagher laid out a vision of the myriad challenges we face from the Chinese Communist Party and its “friends” in official Washington and the financial sector and what we must do to counter them.  Highlights included the following points:

Don’t Invest in Military-related and Human Rights Abusing Chinese Companies

“Reasonable people can disagree about where exactly you draw the line for economic decoupling from China, but no one, Republican or Democrat, would think that we should be allowing American money to invest in [its most dangerous] companies….In some meaningful sense, and in some very troubling sense, we are subsidizing our own destruction.

“American investors and people on Wall Street that have already made billions of dollars off of China’s rise continue to pour money into China and continue to lobby against Congress taking aggressive effort to reclaim our economic independence from China and to selectively decouple in key financial and economic areas.

“They’ve been all over Capitol Hill saying, ‘Hey, China’s open for business again. Xi Jinping has reversed zero-COVID. There’s an opportunity to continue investing. We can make money. We can go back to the good old days.’

“It’s a total fantasy. How much more evidence do we need to understand that we are not dealing with a responsible stakeholder in the form of the Chinese Communist Party? We’re dealing with an increasingly hostile Marxist-Leninist regime that’s threatening war in the near term, and threatening to dominate the globe over the long term. That’s what we’re up against here, and it’s time to take off the golden blindfolds and have a more realistic approach.”

No ”Bail-out” for the CCP; Focus on Deterring Its Aggression, Instead

“There should be no bail-out talk. We need to keep up the economic pressure on China. We need to keep up the efforts to rebuild our military deterrent, because in order to work, our entire deterrent posture needs to be built on a foundation of solid, hard power. That’s where we are really struggling.

“The Biden administration is not taking aggressive steps to rebuild the Navy, and the Navy is getting smaller. We still haven’t replenished our stockpiles of munition systems. We need to be moving heaven and earth to ensure that Xi Jinping never wakes up and thinks he can actually successfully accomplish an invasion of Taiwan.

“If the CCP were to take Taiwan, it could hold the rest of the world hostage economically. Given the amount of trade that goes through the Indo-Pacific, and given Taiwan’s advantageous geographic position, if they were to take Taiwan, they would be able to do economic coercion on a much bigger scale than they’re already doing right now.”

“Furthermore, we would be unable to fulfill our treaty commitments to key countries like Japan and the Philippines. All the more reason we need to be working very aggressively to deter such an invasion and to prevent a war. The best way to maintain peace is through strength, of course. Right now we don’t have a foreign policy built on American strength.”

Instead of Peace Through Strength, We Have “Complacency”

“…The reality is we’ve gotten complacent. We believed this idea that after the fall of the Soviet Union, we were the ascendant superpower. We didn’t have to invest in our own defense. We could focus internally, and that we could somehow integrate China into the global economy, and that would moderate their behavior.

“That policy failed utterly and completely. Now, it’s taken us too long to take off the blinders and understand what’s actually going on. We need to shake ourselves out of our complacency. We need to stand up to this totalitarian regime before it’s too late, before we stumble into a war for which we are ill-prepared, or before we lose a cold war, which we’re not waging aggressively enough right now.”

No CCP Ownership of Strategic U.S. Land, Especially Absent Reciprocity

“Obviously, we don’t want to allow the Chinese Communist Party to control land near sensitive military facilities. Imagine if we were to get into a conflict with China over the defense of Taiwan, what they could do with that land. It would potentially give them the ability to shut off power, shut off normal workings at various bases, prevent our ability to surge men and material forward, or just simply conduct espionage on what’s going on at various bases. It is sensible for us to take steps to restrict such land purchases near military bases.

“As a matter of reciprocity, and as a matter of basic fairness, we should insist that such restrictions go forward, because Americans aren’t allowed to buy land in China. We continually open up the door for China because we’re good-intentioned Americans, but the door remains closed in China. It’s a non-reciprocal, asymmetric relationship. For too long, we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist Party to wage economic and cyber warfare against us to expand its espionage efforts against us without taking the necessary steps to defend ourselves.”

What Are We Up Against?

“…This is a party state. This is a totalitarian, Marxist-Leninist dictatorship in which a small number of elites control everything and they oppress their own people. That stands in self-evident contrast to the republic and the system of self-government that we have in America. More to the point, just as Reagan constantly and brilliantly drew a distinction between the Russian people and the Soviets, we need to do the same today, because the Chinese people are not our enemy.”

“The Chinese people are in many ways the primary victims of the Chinese Communist Party’s depravity. The more we make that distinction, the more we can blunt any accusations that being tough on the CCP is tantamount to anti-Asian racism, and the more effective we can be in terms of pushing back against growing CCP aggression. Because the one thing we know is that the CCP fears its own people more than anything else.”

The Select Committee’s Way Forward

“We have a series of policy recommendations that are coming out in terms of our military competition, our economic statecraft, and our ideological competition. We’re hoping to generate support for a sensible set of policies that put us on a better footing as a country, and that ultimately ensures that we win this competition.

“We’re in the early stages of a new Cold War, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. I think we can win it. We can win it without resorting to actual war, but it’s going to require a lot of energy, and a lot of sacrifice, particularly on the part of our elected officials.”

Rep. Mike Gallager’s clarity on our time’s existential threat to freedom is needed now more than ever. It must inform and impart fresh energy to the work of his Select Committee and result in specific legislative and financial impediments to any bail-out of the Chinese Communist Party with Americans’ investment dollars or taxpayer funds._______
Read More at Committee on the Present Danger: China