Congress’ ‘China Week’ tensions

Decoding transatlantic relations with Beijing.
By PHELIM KINE
with STUART LAU
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Hi, China Watchers.  Today we look at the rocky rollout of Congress’ “China Week” legislative push, scrutinize how Harris and Trump approached China in their debate and parse the fallout from China’s suspension of foreign adoptions. And we profile a book that argues that despite China’s slide toward totalitarian rule under Xi Jinping, it’s “still a country where ideas matter.”
Let’s get to it. — Phelim.  
House Speaker Mike Johnson isn’t getting quite the “China Week” he’d hoped for. With just one day to go, his plan for legislation targeting Beijing’s national security and economic threats to the U.S. has turned into a spat over his choice of bills and an alleged lack of consultation across the aisle.
Democrats say that Johnson’s China Week list of more than “two dozen bills” favors GOP initiatives rather than bipartisan legislation.  That raises doubts that they’ll pass the Senate and be signed into law by President Joe Biden. 
“A lot of the stuff we see for the China Week are not going to get done. They’re not bipartisan; they haven’t been negotiated; they’re just kind of rammed through,” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) told reporters Wednesday.
Johnson’s office disputes that and provided China Watcher a list of  China-related bills passed by end-Wednesday that it said were solidly bipartisan efforts. Those included legislation limiting the availability in the U.S. of Chinese-made drones, reducing U.S. dependence on Chinese-produced electrical batteries and restricting Chinese access to U.S. citizens’ genetic data.
But the partisan squabbling casts doubt on Johnson’s pledge in July of a “significant package of China-related legislation” signed into law by the end of this year.
“China week became weak on China —what distinguishes China week is what’s left out of the package of bills,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), ranking member of the House Select Committee on China. “Nothing to repair our industrial supply base, nothing on critical minerals and nothing to fix our legal immigration system to enhance our competitiveness, nothing to invest in science and innovation and nothing to upgrade the skills of our workforce. And so China week becomes a nothing-burger without those types of initiatives.”
“This is not lost on the CCP,” Krishnamoorthi added. “They pay extremely close attention … and they feel that we are hopelessly divided and hopelessly partisan and therefore we can’t measure up in the competition.”
Suozzi and fellow lawmakers Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) are furious that a bipartisan bill to reform a controversial tariff loophole called de minimis — blamed for allowing the unchecked import from China of fentanyl and other products — didn’t make the China Week list.
That prompted 126 Democratic lawmakers to send a letter to Biden on Wednesday urging him to address the de minimis threat through an executive order.  
The de minimis legislation and a bipartisan bill to restrict outbound investment in China didn’t get the nod for China Week because “ultimately the speaker’s office just decided [they] were a little too controversial, or perhaps for Republican members seen as overly regulatory,” Craig Singleton, China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told reporters Monday.
Another China Week bill drawing Democratic fire is the “Protect America’s Innovation and Economic Security from CCP Act of 2024” from Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas). Gooden’s bill will restore the Department of Justice’s China Initiative terminated in 2022 due to allegations of racial profiling under the name the CCP Initiative aimed to “curb spying” by Chinese Communist Party operatives.
The bill will revive DOJ’s power “to racially profile our communities,”  Congressional Asian American Caucus Chair Judy Chu (D-Calif.) told reporters Tuesday. Gooden responded by saying Beijing “loves nothing more than seeing Congressional leaders call each other racists, while the CCP robs our nation blind.”
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget declared on Tuesday that it also “strongly opposes” Gooden’s bill because of its potential impact on “Chinese people or to American citizens of Chinese descent.
The budget office also “strongly opposes” or “opposes” three other China Week bills. 
China policy emerged briefly in the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump on Tuesday. China specialists keyed into the debate said that the candidates landed some accuracy-backed hits at the price of nuance and context. 
Tariffs: Harris called Trump’s intention to raise tariffs a “sales tax.”
Trump said: “I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China [in tariffs].”
Both candidates were right, sort of. “A tariff is a tax on imports, not a sales tax. … It’s a mix of the exporter taking a lower price, and the importer, the intermediaries and the final consumer paying higher prices,” said Christine McDaniel, a former Treasury Department deputy assistant secretary in the George W. Bush administration. Treasury Department data show that cash raised by tariffs rose from $35 billion in 2016 to $80 billion in 2023. McDaniel called tariffs “still a relatively small share” of the total $4.4 trillion in total federal government tax receipts that same year.
Semiconductors: Harris said that Trump “ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military.”
Trump responded that China “bought the chips from Taiwan. We hardly make chips anymore because of philosophies like they have and policies like they have.”
Harris’ comments “were politically smart but factually misleading,” said Jonathan Lang, former director for international economic affairs in the Trump White House’s National Economic Council and National Security Council. The Trump administration tightened semiconductor export controls but some export licenses slipped through due to an “administrative Commerce Department process which the Trump administration subsequently sought to address,” Lang added. If any of those chips reached the People’s Liberation Army it was a result of “China’s civil-military fusion” policy not a direct sale, Lang said.
Covid-19: Harris said that Trump “actually thanked [China’s] President Xi [Jinping] for what he did during Covid. Look at his tweet. ‘Thank you, President Xi. Exclamation point.’ When we know that Xi was responsible for lacking and not giving us transparency about the origins of Covid.”
Trump didn’t respond. But he did thank Xi in a post on X on Jan. 24, 2020, for China’s “efforts and transparency” in containing the spread of Covid-19. He added that it “will all work out well.” That was four days after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control recorded the first cases of Covid-19 in the U.S. and a day after Beijing imposed a strict lockdown on the city of Wuhan where Covid first emerged in late 2019. 
Two months later, Trump was blaming Beijing for the pandemic and calling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus.”
The State Department and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are increasingly flummoxed by Beijing’s suspension last week of almost all adoptions of Chinese children to foreign adoptive parents.
China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs is now restricting adoptions to “foreigners adopting stepchildren and children of collateral relatives within three generations in China,” the State Department said last week.
Adoption agencies say that bars around 300 prospective U.S. adoptive parents who have spent years navigating Chinese bureaucracy and spent thousands of dollars in processing fees from adopting Chinese children.
“It’s so perplexing. … Nobody is going to be advantaged or disadvantaged from a national standpoint by these adoptions going through,” said Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), co-chair of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption.  Aderholt suspects that the suspension is linked to Beijing’s increasingly “isolationist view” amid rising geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who criticized Beijing’s decision to temporarily freeze adoptions at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, also suspects a political motive. “I sincerely hope the impetus wasn’t to make children pawns in geopolitical matters,” said Grassley.
The policy change is grim news for the U.S. families that the Chinese government had approved as adoptive parents. But it’s even more so for the children they had been waiting to bring home. “These are children with cerebral palsy, with heart conditions, with Down’s Syndrome, not healthy infants … children that are in an orphanage and in some cases aren’t getting the resources and ongoing medical care that they need,” said Myriam Avery, executive director of the nonprofit Washington State-based adoption agency Agape Adoptions.
Beijing has told the State Department that the decision applies to all foreign adoptions and that it isn’t singling out prospective adoptive parents in the United States. But it hasn’t provided any justification for the suspension.  
“We are engaging the Ministry of Civil Affairs and different levels of government to understand the reasons behind this announcement,” said a State department spokesperson unauthorized to speak on the record about an ongoing diplomatic negotiation.
China shows no sign of reversing the policy. The new foreign adoptions policy is “in line with the spirit of relevant international covenants … [made] to best suit the current situation,” said Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu. 
— INDO-PACIFIC MILITARY CHIEFS CHAT: The head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Paparo, had a long-anticipated video call with his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Wu Yanan on Tuesday. The call included discussions of “issues of common concern,” China’s Defense Ministry said in an otherwise detail-free statement. The Pentagon said Paparo pressed Yan on sources of U.S.-China military tensions in the region including Chinese fighter intercepts of U.S. planes (which Paparo referred to as compliance with “operational safety” norms). Paparo also criticized “dangerous, coercive and potential escalatory” Chinese military moves in Philippine waters of the South China Sea,” the Pentagon said.
— CAMPBELL: BEIJING, MOSCOW SWAPPING MILITARY HARDWARE: Beijing is giving Moscow “very substantial” help to beef up its military and in return Russia is handing over its closely guarded military tech on submarines and missiles, said Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell on Tuesday. Chinese support for Russia’s war on Ukraine goes beyond dual-use technologies — which can be applied for military or civilian purposes — and include “component pieces … to help sustain, build and diversify various elements of the Russian war machine,” Campbell told reporters in Brussels. Stuart has the full story here.
— PALAU AMBASSADOR: MORE COAST GUARD, PLEASE: Palau’s ambassador to the U.S. said that his Pacific Island country needs a more robust U.S. Coast Guard presence to fend off malign Chinese naval activities. Those malign activities include loitering above underwater telecommunication cables that connect Palau to the rest of the world. “We want to see from the U.S. more presence, especially the Coast Guard. … It would deter Chinese from coming to our waters,” Ambassador Hersey Kyota told a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources’ Indian and Insular Affairs Subcommittee on Tuesday.  
Palau has a long-standing strategic agreement with the U.S. to provide economic support and federal government services like U.S. postal and visa exemptions. Marshall Islands and Micronesia have similar pacts. In return, the U.S. has the right to deny other countries access to their waters, airspace and land.
— SPANISH PM OPPOSES EU TARIFFS DURING CHINA VISIT: In a dramatic intervention (and propaganda win for Beijing), visiting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez asked Europe on Wednesday to “reconsider” tariffs on made-in-China electric vehicles. Not only does this mark a U-turn on Madrid’s own policy, Sánchez also singled out the European Commission in his critique of the current approach. 
“We need to reconsider — all of us, not only member states, but also the Commission — our position towards” EVs, said Sánchez, who in the same trip also hailed President Xi as a “defender of peace.” Still, a majority of EU countries would have to be on Sánchez’s side to successfully block the Commission’s tariff plans. 
— EUROPEAN FIRMS INCREASINGLY FED UP IN CHINA: More and more European companies are concluding that the risks of investing in China outweigh the financial returns, according to the latest annual report by the EU Chamber of Commerce in China.
“China’s increasingly challenging business environment, coupled with a deteriorating profitability outlook and more than a decade of limited reform progress, means that simply waiting for answers is becoming harder to justify,” Chamber President Jens Eskelund said in the report. He added that a small number of businesses are already drawing up contingency plans in case “regional tensions” (read: Taiwan) escalate. 
— HOCHUL, STATE SILENT ON CHINESE DIPLOMAT: The Chinese Consul-General in New York City, Huang Ping, is still defying New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s request to the State Department last week that he be removed from the country. Huang is linked to the case of Linda Sun, a former Hochul aide arrested last week as an agent of the Chinese government.  
State claimed last week that Huang had left the U.S. end-August following the end of his diplomatic rotation. Not so. Huang’s X account — which ID’s him as Consul-General — continues to serve up posts on Huang’s activities around New York City. 
State declined to comment on Huang’s continuing presence in the U.S. and reiterated Miller’s comments from last week. Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu said Wednesday that Huang “is performing his duties as usual — he will leave his post as scheduled after completing his posting,” without elaborating. Hochul’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
— MANILA SENDS SOUTH CHINA SEA SOS: Manila is calling in reinforcements to push Beijing toward a diplomatic resolution of tensions between the  Philippines and China in the South China Sea. The Philippines is convening a mini-summit in New York of representatives of more than 20 countries during the United Nations’ General Assembly later this month to discuss China’s increasingly aggressive incursions into Manila’s waters. Participants will brainstorm how “to talk some sense” into Beijing to prevent it from making “the wrong move that we’re all fearing,” said Philippine ambassador to the U.S., Jose Manuel “Babe” del Gallego Romualdez, per Reuters on Wednesday. Beijing says it’s Manila that needs a talking to. The Philippines “backed by external forces has been going back on its words and making provocations,” said Liu at the Chinese embassy. The Philippine embassy didn’t respond to a request for comment. 
— CHINESE COPS GO GLOBAL: Beijing plans to train up to 3,000 foreign police personnel over the coming year as part of the Chinese government’s efforts to “to tackle global security challenges,” Chinese state media reported Tuesday. China will also dispatch police to foreign countries to “conduct joint patrols and investigations” overseas, the report said, quoting Chinese Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong. Beijing already has policing deals with Serbia and Hungary in Europe and with the Pacific Island country of Solomon Islands. Beijing also operated unlawful police outposts in foreign countries, including the U.S., tasked with monitoring and intimidating critics in overseas Chinese communities.
Semafor: Chinese roots deepen in Africa’s last Taiwan holdout
BBC: Thieves snatched his phone in London – it was in China a month later
Radio Free Asia: Airlines now stop ‘undesirables’ from boarding flights to Hong Kong
Bloomberg: TSMC’s Arizona Trials Put Plant Productivity on Par with Taiwan
— BIDEN PLANS FAREWELL QUAD MEETING: Biden will host a farewell meeting of the current leaders of the Quad — the U.S., India, Australia and Japan — on Sept. 21, Nikkei Asia reported this week. The Quad is an informal geopolitical grouping focused on countering China’s rising economic, diplomatic and military power in the Indo-Pacific. The event will bring together Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida — who steps down later this month — India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The White House declined to comment.
The Book: The Idea of China: Chinese Thinkers on Power, Progress and People.
The Authors:  Alicja Bachulska is a Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations; Mark Leonard is director of the ECFR; Janka Oertel is director of ECFR’s Asia Program.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is the most important takeaway from your book?
Although Xi Jinping’s China is becoming more repressive, it is still a country where ideas matter.  
Chinese thinkers are developing big new ideas on the political economy of globalization, technological development and AI and even nature itself. They are transforming the world’s biggest non-Western economy and have the potential to reshape the rest of the world too.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while writing this book?
How not only getting answers would be a challenge, but that we might even be asking the wrong questions. 
Particularly around the areas of green tech, financial power or AI, we were left with a whole set of new questions. Why are Chinese scholars debating AI in the context of Marxism? Why is decarbonization rather than climate change at the center of the debate? It gave us an idea about how scholars relate to the Chinese Communist Party, how their scope for actual research has been shrinking and how they try to square the circle between science, politics — and their own career. 
You write that in China today “Major debates are taking place about demography, feminism” etc. How free are these debates in an increasingly totalitarian system under Xi Jinping?
The CCP is trying to guide the debate on China’s major challenges to create national cohesion and legitimize its own vision of what collective progress means. Yet not everyone in China is receptive to this strategy, with counter-narratives to the official logic emerging in different spaces, mostly online and abroad. And while those debates are often censored, their popularity testifies to the fact that the CCP will find it difficult to create a unifying identity that could apply equally to everyone. 
China’s debate on feminism can serve as a case in point: While ‘Western feminism’ is officially under attack, feminist ideas are flourishing in popular culture and online. 
Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at [email protected].
Thanks to: Heidi Vogt, Robby Gramer and digital producers Ester Wells and Natalia Delgado. Do you have tips? Chinese-language stories we might have missed? Would you like to contribute to China Watcher or comment on this week’s items? Email us at [email protected] [email protected]
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