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At the first meeting of the Bipartisan, Conference Committee on legislation to combat China, Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) wielded a blunt and tough intervention calling for more bipartisan strength and commitment to combat the “existential threat” posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Garcia began his two-minute address by “saying something that may be controversial to some, but China is not our friend.”
“These aren’t good people leading the Chinese Communist regime. They are conducting one of the largest genocides that our globe has seen,” said the Republican, who sits on the conference committee as a representative of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee (TSM).
After explaining that the United States can do nothing to appease China and that a more aggressive approach is needed to measure up to the Asian country in terms of innovation, the representative said that “the Chinese Communist Party is actively attempting to supplant the United States as the driving force in science and technology.”
“To achieve this the CCP has actually targeted American basic research at our universities and our businesses, and they’ve embarked on a systemic campaign to steal American intellectual property,” Garcia continued. “The economic injury of this process and this campaign to steal our IP is roughly $400 billion to $600 billion per year and they orchestrate cyber-attacks which threaten to cripple American businesses and infrastructure in parallel.”
The representative also mentioned that, in the middle of last year, the Science, Space and Technology Committee went so far as to approve several bipartisan measures that sought not only to invest in American innovation, but also ” to counter Chinese cyber-attacks, and to improve intellectual property security throughout the research enterprise.”
However, Garcia lamented that nearly a year was lost “in delaying conferencing the House and Senate passed bills.”
Likewise, the Republican criticized that “when the House finally did act the Speaker chose to put poison pills into the good work of the SST bill.”
Garcia said it included “including unrelated and frankly harmful provisions that actually diminish our competitiveness with China and enable China: funneling more money into slush funds such as the UN climate change fund and adding sense of Congress language provisions which actually don’t protect us from this very existential Chinese threat.”
The Republican concluded that, to seriously confront China, Congress must greatly improve on last year’s provisions and understand that a mild strategy must not be adopted to succeed in beating the CCP on innovation and technology.
Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón is a journalist at El American specializing in the areas of American politics and media analysis // Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón es periodista de El American especializado en las áreas de política americana y análisis de medios de comunicación.
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