Democrats Have a Chance to Offer a Smarter China Policy. Will They Take It? |
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Democrats Have a Chance to Offer a Smarter China Policy. Will They Take It?
It’s time to pursue a more pragmatic strategy—one that prioritizes domestic strength, targeted competition, and continued engagement.
In January, I was supposed to participate in a routine academic exchange with China as part of my graduate education in international affairs at Columbia University. Congress canceled it. Making broad allegations about links between the trip’s funding partner, the China-US Exchange Foundation, and the Communist Party of China, the clunkily named House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party demanded that Columbia end the exchange. Fearing another round of political scrutiny on top of recent turmoil, the university quietly complied.
My experience was no isolated incident. Since its establishment in 2023, the Select Committee has strong-armed myriad universities and businesses into ending long-standing and beneficial exchanges with Chinese counterparts. Recently, describing Chinese students as a “Trojan horse,” the Select Committee pressured Purdue University to stunningly ban admitting any graduate students from China.
US-China competition is here to stay, and real national security concerns exist. But the Select Committee’s conduct betrays a troubling overreach, where a congressional panel with neither lawmaking nor regulatory authority is able to stifle academic freedom and shut down exchange programs at will. Why does a body that styles itself as the vanguard of America’s strategic competitiveness focus so much on bullying American universities and businesses that interact with China, rather than fostering our own competitive edge? Whose interests does the committee’s anti-China zealotry actually serve?
In Washington today, it is nearly impossible to find an issue that Democrats and Republicans agree on. A rare exception has been a hawkish reaction to China’s rise as a peer competitor. Established against this backdrop, the Select Committee’s stated purpose is to “investigate and submit policy recommendations” on China’s “economic, technological, and security progress and its competition with the United States.” Yet, under bipartisan leadership, it has gone beyond that authority to effectively function as an enforcement body for a neo-McCarthyite political orthodoxy that treats any engagement with China as suspect and isolation as virtuous.
Paradoxically, for a body charged with “strategic competition,” it has done remarkably little to actually boost American competitiveness. The clearest illustration of the committee’s bipartisan “tough on China” bankruptcy is the multiyear TikTok saga which consumed a huge amount of political oxygen and crowded out real questions about how we should address our profound domestic malaise, increase our own strength, and both compete and coexist with China in ways that serve the interests of the American people.
Instead of cosplaying as the House Un-American Activities Committee of the Cold War past, the........