Chair of New China Committee: 'We Call It a Strategic Competition, But…It Is an Existential Struggle'

(CNSNews.com) – A brand new House committee focused solely on China will hold a prime-time hearing beginning at 7 p.m. EST Tuesday night.

The committee’s formal name — The Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party — doesn’t say anything about the Chinese threat to the United States, but that’s what it’s really about, Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) told Fox News on Tuesday morning:

“We call it a strategic competition but it’s not a tennis match. It is an existential struggle about what kind of world we want to live in,” Gallagher said.

“I think we have an opportunity to explain to the American people, to our colleagues, that this isn’t a distant threat. This isn’t an over-there threat; this isn’t a matter of some obscure territorial claim in the East and South China Sea. This is a right-here-at-home threat. This is a threat to American sovereignty. The Chinese Communist Party is the greatest threat we face in the world today.

“And I’m not just talking about Chinese spy balloons drifting over our nuclear ICBM facilities.

“On Saturday, I did a rally with human rights groups in front of an illegal CCP police station in the heart of Manhattan, in Chinatown, that was used to harass and surveil Chinese dissidents on American soil.

“We then met with a group of students, Chinese students, that were harassed and, in some cases, physically assaulted by CCP sympathizers on American campuses. So we can’t ignore the growing dimensions of this threat, and again it is right here at home.

“It’s a question of what kind of world do we want to live in? And we’re hoping to communicate the stakes of this competition tonight. We call it a strategic competition but it’s not a tennis match. It is an existential struggle about what kind of world we want to live in.”

Host Bill Hemmer asked Gallagher what “strategic competition” means, and why it’s part of the committee’s formal name.

“To me, it means that we compete and win,” Gallagher said:

“That we give ourselves the tools necessary to beat the Chinese Communist Party. So there’s really three dimensions to that.

“There’s an obvious military component. I just went to Taiwan, and it’s my observation that we’re not moving quickly enough to arm them to the teeth as well as rebuild our own defenses in the Pacific.

“There is an ideological dimension — making sure that we aren’t unwittingly fueling communist propaganda and losing sight of our own values.

“And then there’s a very complicated economic dimension. We’re far too dependent on China for critical goods like life-saving drugs, rare earths, energetics, obviously chips is a huge issue. We need to reclaim our economic independence so that we can compete more effectively and ultimately win this competition so the world doesn’t look like Jinxiang going forward.”

Gallagher said he doesn’t understand why the Biden administration is “downplaying” the origins of COVID, insisting that there is no “consensus” in the federal government that the virus stems from a laboratory leak, although some federal agencies believe that to be the case.

“It is clear that evidence is stacking up in favor of the lab leak hypothesis,” Gallagher said.

“And for two years anyone who said that was called a conspiracy theorist and a racist. We can’t allow this to get in the way of us holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable for covering up the origins of this pandemic.

“This should also tell us something fundamental about who we are dealing with in the CCP, and that’s what my committee will get after. This is a regime that cannot be trusted,” he said.

Gallagher suggested that there are some U.S. scientists who don’t want gain-of-function research to stop, although Gallagher believes it should stop:

“If we were acting rationally we would prohibit all future funding for gain-of-function research and we wouldn’t allow people to experiment with naturally occurring coronavirus to make them in a lab. We need accountability and how it happened to prevent a future pandemic,” he said.

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