‘I believe that American businesses, American investors, want to do the right thing,’ said Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.).
WASHINGTON—A bipartisan House committee on China has prioritized legislation restricting U.S. investment in China, according to the panel’s chair.
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said that U.S. investors should not be “funding our own demise.”
“We have to have an outbound investment regime that basically says, ‘No investment in these businesses that are on some kind of a list,’ that says, ‘We shouldn’t be helping the Chinese military, we shouldn’t be supporting genocide,’” Moolenaar said at an event held at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Sept. 25.
“That’s probably our No. 1 priority right now.”
There have been bipartisan concerns that when American companies invest in China—particularly in sectors such as artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors—U.S. capital, intellectual property, and innovation would flow into entities that could support communist China’s military.
A recent report issued by the committee and the House Education and Workforce Committee found that millions of dollars of U.S. funding have indirectly helped the Chinese regime develop technology in fields such as hypersonics, nuclear, and AI.
There are other risks in allowing the regime access to U.S. technology.
“We just always have to be thinking about [a] worst case scenario, which is, if they were to embed themselves in an energy supply chain, what could they do at that point?” said Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
Moolenaar and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Sept. 26 introduced the Patriotic Investment Act to remove tax breaks for U.S. investment in China and encourage divestment from Chinese securities.
Human Rights Concerns
Some Western companies have been accused of helping the Chinese regime in its suppression of dissidents.
Thermo Fisher, under pressure, stopped selling DNA kits to Tibet because of concerns that the technology could be used for identifying individuals.
Tech firm Cisco has faced a lawsuit from practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual group under severe persecution in China, who said the company has collaborated with the Chinese authorities to develop a surveillance system to surveil and track them.
The solution from Congress is to have clear guidelines for U.S. companies, Moolenaar said.
“I believe that American businesses, American investors, want to do the right thing. But they need clarity in terms of … investments,” he told The Epoch Times.
“And so that’s why we’re working on an outbound investment that would look at industry—industries as well as companies that are blacklisted for their actions. And so I think there needs to be clarity, and that’s why we’re working hard in a bipartisan way and taking our time to make sure we get it right.”
Moolenaar said at the event that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) “would like to have something before the end of the year.”
Andrew Bremberg, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, also thinks that policy is critical to mitigate such concerns.
“The administration needs to set clearer standards on impermissible tech transfer into China,” Bremberg told The Epoch Times. “They’ve taken good steps to begin that process but have not gone far enough to ensure that none of these technologies go into China, not just only from a national security perspective but also from a human rights perspective.”
Eric Patterson, president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said that U.S. corporations and the government should be “much more vigilant.”
“We really need to be thinking in terms of a strategic, competitive climate with the leaders of the Communist Party,” Patterson told The Epoch Times.
“They are [a] strategic adversary, who does not wish the best for us, so we need patriotic Americans in the business community to be very thoughtful in thinking through what might be the applications of the business softwares, of their technologies, when selling them to Chinese corporations.”
In January, the Department of Defense announced new additions to its list of Chinese firms that it says are working with the Chinese military. The firms on the list include Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), China Mobile, BGI Genomics, and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC).
The U.S. government has placed sanctions on some Chinese companies for their alleged roles in the repression of the Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region and their contribution to the regime’s surveillance activities.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have determined that “genocide” was taking place in Xinjiang, citing the CCP’s detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs in internment camps.
The regime’s records of human rights violations are not limited to one region.
“Like organ harvesting, where living human beings, their organs are torn out of them, murdering them in order to create this organ trade that happens for those who are engaged in medical tourism to get organ transplants,” Morse Tan, former ambassador-at-large for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, said at the 10th annual China Forum hosted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation on Wednesday.
In 2019, after a year-long investigation, the London-based China Tribunal concluded that forced organ harvesting had taken place on a “significant scale” in China, with Falun Gong practitioners being the primary source of organs.
The CCP launched a sweeping campaign to eradicate Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, in 1999. Since then, millions have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated and untold numbers killed, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Transnational Repression
Beijing has also been trying to silence overseas dissidents and activists with tactics such as intimidation, coercion, and harassment—actions that are collectively known as transnational repression.
Hong Kong Democracy Council and Students for a Free Tibet used open-source research and facial recognition technology and found at least 12 leaders of CCP-influenced groups who participated in attacks against protesters during CCP leader Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco in November last year.
“I think it’s important that we know the CCP will use any leverage they can. And so whether it’s threatening young people on campus, threatening their families in China, working to intimidate them from their free speech rights in this country, we need to bring that to light and make people aware of it,” Moolenaar told The Epoch Times at the China Forum.
The CCP has also been engaging in lawfare to silence critics, Moolenaar said. He noted a recent hearing that he co-hosted with Krishnamoorthi, where a professor said she received threats of a lawsuit after speaking about the national security risks with several Chinese biotech firms.
“That is not acceptable on American campuses. And so we need to continue to be vigilant [in] protecting our free speech rights here, and make sure that people who are experiencing that know they can come to the FBI or others, and report this kind of intimidation harassment as we’ve seen with the Chinese police stations,” Moolenaar said.
Jan Jekielek contributed to this report.