China and the Town — Tattling-on-China season in full throttle in D.C.

The tattling-on-China season in Washington, D.C., has begun in earnest, with a number of appetizer events over the past few weeks leading up to Rep. Mike Gallagher’s primetime hearing last week on why and how the U.S. should compete with its upstart superpower rival.

A serious look at China’s education challenges

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was established by Congress in 2000, held a hearing on February 24 in a Senate office building about “China’s Challenges and Capabilities in Educating and Training the Next Generation Workforce.”

The program — a daylong affair with experts who flew in from as far as Singapore — was nuanced, in the weeds, and barely attended. The room was nearly empty aside from a C-SPAN cameraman, a couple of overseas Chinese grad students, and a few volunteer commissioners and their staff.

The witnesses were researchers representing prestigious American and British universities who submitted footnoted testimonies for the Congressional Record with policy recommendations. Stanford economist Scott Rozelle evaluated whether China is doomed to fall into the “middle income trap.”

As a longtime observer of China’s macroeconomic policies and rural life, Rozelle noted that while China’s middle class has grown rapidly, the country was at risk of economic stagnation because of its large low-income population. Middle-class Chinese, he said, usually have an urban residence permit (户口 hùkǒu). From early childhood, they attend city schools that are better resourced than those in rural areas. Furthermore, he pointed out, “as many as 45% of rural babies were at risk for cognitive delays” because caregivers, often grandparents who raise the children while the parents are in cities working, may not know the value of reading and singing to babies.

But, he cautioned, “economists who have predicted the downfall of China’s economy in the past at least 40 years have invariably been wrong.”

Other experts also warned against underestimating China. Anna B. Puglisi, the director of Biotechnology Programs at the Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said, “We must not conflate return on investment [ROI] and commercial success with innovation. Sometimes China’s goals are ROI and commercial success, but meeting its strategic goals — even in the commercial area in the short term — does not necessarily mean return on investment or commercial success. Beijing has shown a willingness to accept inefficiencies to meet broader goals.”

Fears of China controlling the electric car supply chain

A few days later on February 27, the conservative Heritage Foundation hosted “Shattering China’s Energy Dominance in African Minerals,” a panel with a South African-American mining trade expert and a former oil and energy minister from Côte d’Ivoire.

The moderator, Diana Furchtgott-Roth — who was the deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Department of Transportation from 2017 to 2021 — opened by asking the audience how many people thought “we’ll have all electric vehicles [EVs] by 2035? Half by 2035?”

Both times, only one person out of the 40-person audience raised their hand. (In China, EVs will account for 35% of all car sales this year, according to a forecast from the Fitch credit rating agency.)

One woman in the audience looked frustrated throughout the discussion. After the event, she volunteered to me that she had spent years leading American delegations to African countries, supporting mining and business development. The Americans continuously talk about the need for good governance, but do not provide any incentives, she said. Americans and other Westerners complain that China invests heavily in African development, but ignore how the Chinese achieve that success. Chinese firms may bring their own workers and are known to be abusive to local staff, but workers from Chinese firms also learn the local languages and buy local property, with the goal of passing it onto their children and grandchildren.

The Americans, she lamented, are routinely transactional in their relationships, sending people who rarely invest in the places with anything more than money. The Chinese who stuck around rarely integrated with local communities, but their money, and people, kept coming.

More worries about electric car dependency, and performative soundbites

The last day of February was when the tattling-on-China season heated up. That evening, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) was scheduled to debut the United States House Committee on Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party in a primetime hearing. (The congressman, whose full name is Michael John Gallagher, is a 39-year-old Republican who has represented Wisconsin’s 8th congressional district since 2017. He has said that his interest in China began after the Office of Personal Management (OPM) hack, and from subsequent conversations with fellow former Marine Matt Pottinger, who gave testimony to the Committee’s first hearing.)

New House committee on China: Concerns and caution, but not all doom and gloom

But before Gallagher’s headline event, there was a different, independently organized get-tough-on-China session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. A hearing on “Chinese Communist Party Aggression” took place in a small, packed hearing room in the Capitol Visitor’s Center.

The first of D.C.’s two sessions on China did not have nearly as much publicity as the second.

There were a few major network cameras there, but they only waited around long enough to chase House Minority Leader Gregory Meeks (D-NY) on his way into the hearing room. Members popped in and out as the four witnesses — professional, politically appointed bureaucrats from the U.S. departments of State, Commerce, USAID, and the U.S. Development Finance Cooperation (DFC) — sat across them for over three hours.

Members fielded questions on behalf of constituents. “Is dependence on China for batteries a national security issue?” asked Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), whose district includes pharmaceutical and manufacturing plants. Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security Bill Estevez, barely breaking a sweat under his rimless glasses, gave a measured response. “Look, there’s a whole bunch of technologies that we need to start doing investment on in the United States. We should not be reliant on China for batteries, for chips, for pharmaceutical precursors, [and] for rare Earth [resources],” he said.

Then there were questions from members posturing for a TV soundbite. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) was armed with a poster-board image of what she referred to as a Chinese-funded “deep space station” in Argentina’s Patagonia Desert. Peering at the witnesses, she jeered, “How dangerous is this station for our national security, sir? Are you as concerned as we are? Yes or no?” Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink responded that China’s efforts to expand its military presence around the world are indeed concerning. Perhaps this would be more appropriately discussed in a classified session?

Before he could complete his measured response, she looked beyond him at the cameras, warning the Argentinian government, in Spanish, not to get too comfortable hosting the Chinese military. Then a staffer took her poster board and she left.

The second session: An “existential struggle”

The entree event, Gallagher’s inaugural hearing a few hours later, had a packed house. It was broadcast live, and not just on C-SPAN.

“We may call this a strategic competition, but it’s not a polite tennis match. It’s an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century,” Gallagher told the Capitol Hill room where the number of cameras were only outnumbered by spectators. NPR led with soundbite coverage of the hearing the next morning.

Gallagher began the hearing by playing a video. A narrator explained the massive human costs of collective farming and industrialization shown in black-and-white photos and old footage from the Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 era. There were images long scrubbed from the Chinese internet — Tank Man in Tiananmen in 1989, firefighters prevented from accessing a burning building during COVID-zero lockdowns, and Bridge Man standing on the Sitong Overpass in Beijing last fall. Video clips from Chinese state media showed military parades and Politburo meetings.

The four witnesses at the hearing were former Trump administration security officials H. R. McMaster and Matthew Pottinger, president of the lobbying organization Alliance for American Manufacturing Scott Paul, and exiled dissident Tóng Yì 童屹.

Their testimonies were thorough, fact-based, and highly emotive. A video shown by Gallagher to set the stage for the hearing used a theatrical piano soundtrack, and stretched as far back as the Great Famine (1959–62) to demonstrate the depth of the Chinese Communist Party’s malice. McMaster, Pottinger, and Tong Yi’s testimonies primarily talked of the CCP as a threat to U.S. security and global human rights. Scott Paul described a U.S. manufacturing industry that had been devastated by offshoring to China.

The hearing succeeded in giving the committee members ammunition to help reinforce the narrative that D.C. is craving: America has the moral high ground. And the very un-American narrative that the Town is drifting toward: America has been victimized by China.