China ‘should be the focus of foreign-policy questioning’ at the next Republican primary debate, the Wisconsin lawmaker said.
Representative Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.), the chairman of a new House panel on China, urged Republican presidential candidates to speak clearly about the nature of the Chinese regime ahead of this evening’s primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.
“To my knowledge, no one has made this point about the nature of Marxist-Leninist regimes and the fact that they sort of paradoxically seem to get more aggressive as you become more accommodating of their interests,” the Wisconsin lawmaker told National Review in an interview ahead of the debate.
He added that this misunderstanding is behind “the Biden administration’s naïve engagement strategy,” apparently referring to the series of high-ranking U.S. officials who have traveled to Beijing for meetings with their Chinese counterparts this year in a bid to jump-start bilateral dialogue.
Gallagher’s committee heard testimony on the ideological underpinnings of the Chinese Communist Party — which runs the People’s Republic of China as a Leninist dictatorship — in its first hearing this February. Former deputy national-security adviser Matt Pottinger provided an in-depth analysis of Chinese general secretary Xi Jinping’s speeches to party audiences. During those engagements, Pottinger noted, Xi’s rhetoric took on a decidedly more hard-line tone defined by Marxist ideology than it does in speeches for foreign audiences.
Pottinger quoted a speech that Xi gave in 2018: “Just like Marx, we must struggle for communism our entire lives. A collectivized world is just there, over [the horizon]. Whoever rejects that world will be rejected by the world.”
During the first GOP primary debate, in August, the candidates were only asked one question about China-related issues.
Gallagher said that this time “it should be the focus of foreign-policy questioning.” He added that he hopes that candidates will share their views on military readiness, the Biden administration’s crackdown on U.S. capital flows to China, efforts to restrict TikTok, and the White House’s engagement with China.
These questions could draw out important differences between the candidates, all of whom call themselves China hawks but have different views on everything from TikTok to the effect that supporting Ukraine has on Taiwan to restricting outbound capital flows, Gallagher said.
Former president Donald Trump skipped the last debate and is not expected to attend the debate tonight either, but he remains at the top of virtually every primary poll. Speaking to NR, Gallagher leveled tough criticism of the apparent GOP front-runner’s approach to China.
Gallagher said that while Trump deserves credit for “reorienting American policy on China and stimulating a debate on China,” a “smart Republican candidate could create a distinction between himself and Trump.”
That candidate, Gallagher said, could point to the volume of U.S. capital that went to China under Trump’s tenure. “More money went to China under Trump than under any other administration,” Gallagher said, adding that over $1 trillion in active and passive investment flowed to China at the end of the Trump administration.
He also called Trump’s Phase One deal with Beijing “a failure,” citing the fact that China’s pledged purchases of U.S. goods never materialized.
And Gallagher faulted Trump for repeatedly praising Xi at the start of the pandemic. (At one point, in February 2020, the former president tweeted: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.”)
“Trump was saying nice things about Xi Jinping. And you know, were it not for the brave actions of a few members of the administration, we wouldn’t have gotten some of the intelligence disclosures that were necessary to start peeling back the layers of duplicity from the CCP on their Covid cover-up,” Gallagher said.