WASHINGTON — House Republicans and Democrats on the new select China committee kicked off their first hearing Tuesday night, vowing to investigate the numerous technological, economic and military threats from the Chinese Communist Party.
The primetime hearing comes amid escalating tensions with Beijing. For days, the nation was captivated by a Chinese spy balloon that floated over Alaska and the contiguous United States before it was shot down off the North Carolina coast.
And this week, the Energy Department concluded in a classified report shared with lawmakers that the Covid-19 pandemic “likely” was spread through a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China. FBI Director Christopher Wray said much the same thing in a Fox News interview that aired moments before the hearing.
“We may call this a ‘strategic competition,’ but this is not a polite tennis match,” China committee Chairman Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., said in his opening remarks at Tuesday’s hearing. “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”
Both the chairman and the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, made clear that the committee is targeting the Chinese communist government — not the people of China who have been victimized by the regime’s oppressive tactics.
“We must practice bipartisanship and avoid anti-Chinese or Asian stereotyping at all costs. We must recognize the CCP wants us to be fractious, partisan and prejudiced. In fact, the CCP hopes for it,” Krishnamoorthi said.
“We have no quarrel with the Chinese people or people of Chinese origin,” he later added.
The high-profile hearing, held in the same cavernous room that housed the historic Jan. 6 committee hearings, began with a video presentation detailing numerous human rights abuses committed by Chinese government officials, from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre to the alleged rape and torture of the Uyghurs.
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Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi tried to set a bipartisan tone early on the panel, inviting four witnesses who are respected on both sides of the aisle.
They included two Trump White House officials — former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger — both of whom publicly criticized Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The panel also heard from Tong Yi, a Chinese human rights advocate who served as an assistant to one of China’s most well-known political dissidents; and Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, who argued that “the economic policies of the Chinese Communist Party represent a clear and present danger to the American worker, innovation base and our national security.”
The hearing was briefly interrupted by a pair of Code Pink protesters, holding signs stating “China is not our enemy” and “Stop Asian Hate.” Without skipping a beat, Paul pointed out that those demonstrators who have an “unlimited amount of free speech” in America would not enjoy those freedoms in China.
With a subject as complicated as China, Tuesday night’s hearing veered from topic to topic, from TikTok and Taiwan independence to China’s man-made islands in the South China Sea.
Pottinger warned lawmakers that the social media giant TikTok, owned by the China-based ByteDance, had already admitted to surveilling U.S. journalists to identify and retaliate against their sources. The larger threat from TikTok, he said, is its ability to influence millions of Americans by controlling what they see on the video-based app.
“The bigger coup for the Chinese Communist Party, if TikTok is permitted to continue to operate in the United States … is that it gives the Chinese Communist Party the ability to manipulate our social discourse, the news, to censor and suppress or to amplify what tens of millions of Americans see and read and experience and hear through their social media app,” Pottinger testified.
“TikTok is already one of the most powerful media companies in American history. And it’s still growing,” he added. “It’s not just dancing and kids stuff, it’s becoming a major source of news for a generation of Americans.”
Kyle Stewart and Julia Jester contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
