Congress Is Dropping the Ball on China Policy | Opinion

In an acrimonious and divided Congress, the emerging bipartisan consensus on China has been a heartening development. Americans increasingly see Beijing's soaring ascent as a threat to our security and way of life. Congress has responded with an avalanche of cross-party legislation, with Republicans and Democrats alike introducing new tough-on-China laws. But in keeping with President Ronald Reagan's old line that "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help,'" lawmakers are too often getting it wrong.

Some experts paint the threat from Beijing as an equivalent of the Soviet Union. That's accurate. But the Soviet threat was a military one. It was the Red Army and Russian ICBMs that Washington planners feared, not the proletariat's pathetic economy. As China's military threat grows, so too does the economic threat. Beijing's vast market makes American companies salivate. The population of China has grown by almost a billion people since JFK's presidency. That's hungry people in Shanghai who devour South Dakota soybeans, film buffs in Hainan who crave Hollywood drama, and eager motorists in Chengdu who love Detroit's pickup trucks. More American exports are a good thing. But they come with a cost. Opening China's ports to American goods meant dropping our guard in ways that the USSR of old could only dream of. And it is in this hazy new economic arena where Congress is fumbling the football.

A financial threat from a communist country is a new problem for lawmakers. While there has been positive momentum, such as the creation of Congressman Mike Gallagher's (R-Wisc.) effective new China Select Committee, Congress has too often taken legitimate problems and, through the deliberative process, made matters worse.

Consider the Inflation Reduction Act of 2021. This immense bill was sold to American voters as, in part, a useful tool for American clean-energy companies to compete with Chinese manufacturing. It was supposed to be good news and fresh jobs for the blue-collar Americans turning wrenches on lithium batteries, electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines. But those are goods that demand vast stores of critical minerals and rare-earth elements. And the champion of that market, the actual processing of all those little boxes on the periodic table, is China. Rather than solving the pressing problem—Beijing's stranglehold on 90 percent of global rare-earth processing and refinement—we turbocharged China's dominance of the renewables market and sent pollutants into overdrive. It was a classic case of what we called in the military "ready, fire, aim."

So too is a bill before Congress that claims to introduce competition in the credit card market. The Credit Card Competition Act sounds innocuous, but it puts massive amounts of private financial data at risk.

Proponents say the bill is tough on China because it bans UnionPay—China's state-owned credit card network—from the American market. Sounds good.

It isn't. China's UnionPay has two American partners for its global expansion—Discover and FiServ. Under this bill, all credit card purchases could be processed on Discover and FiServ's networks, thus giving massive amounts of new financial data to UnionPay's partners. In short, the bill bans UnionPay while making it stronger. Rather than incentivizing U.S. companies to be wary of partnering with Chinese Communist Party-backed entities, Congress would be pumping rocket fuel into UnionPay's expansion efforts.

The CHIPS Act is another example of Congress' tendency to commit medical malpractice when treating legitimate illnesses. Our greatest economic vulnerability is our overreliance on limited overseas suppliers of microchips. If China invaded Taiwan and shut off the island nation's microchip production—that's 90 percent of all advanced microchips—it could trigger an immediate global economic depression. The CHIPS Act was intended to close off that vulnerability and get microchip manufacturing humming here in the states. Instead, the sloppily written legislation created loopholes that could allow semiconductor companies to access billions in American taxpayer subsidies while simultaneously expanding their operations in China. While the Commerce Department has attempted to institute some guardrails to prevent America from funding the burgeoning Chinese microchip industry, experts warn that these measures are inadequate. Too much money was made available with too little fencing around the funds.

It seems that every time Congress tries to crack down on China, it instead hands Beijing easy money and regulatory favors. Congress would be well-served by following the lead of Congressman Gallagher's China Select Committee: flagging all Chinese companies doing business here in the states and the countless quiet partnerships with American firms, and exposing the national security threats they pose.

Cribbing Will Rogers, the only difference between death and America's China policy is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets. Our lawmakers have woken up. That's positive. But so far, the treatment has been worse than the symptoms.

John Noonan served as national security advisor to Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.