US-China Tensions Are All About the Party
US President Joe Biden, right, meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, outside San Francisco on Nov. 15.
Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP
When the House of Representatives set up a special panel charged with looking at how the US can counter Beijing’s growing global influence, lawmakers named it the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, not “on China.”
Committee Chair Mike Gallagher, a Republican, made the differentiation clear in the first hearing: “This committee must constantly distinguish between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people themselves,” whom he painted as the CCP’s prime “victims.” That’s not, of course, how China’s leaders frame their relationship with America.