China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher: ‘We Must Act with a Sense of Urgency’ to Compete with China

Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), said during the committee’s first hearing, laying out his ideas for the future, that “we must act with a sense of urgency” to compete with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“We must act with a sense of urgency. I believe our policy over the next ten years will set the stage for the next 100. We cannot allow the CCP’s tech power dystopia to prevail,” Gallagher said as part of his opening statement.

The chairman noted that even though Congress is divided — with a Republican House and Democrat Senate — “We cannot afford to waste the next two years lingering in legislative limbo or pandering to the press.”

Gallagher explained that “we must learn from our mistakes” and that the China Select Committee “will not allow the CCP to lull us into complacency or maneuver us into submission.”

“For much of the past half-century, we tried to win the CCP over with honey, with engagement,” he stated. “But that era of wishful thinking is over.”

“The CCP has found friends on Wall Street, on K Street, in Fortune 500 C-suites, [and] in the public health community, who are ready and willing to oppose our efforts to push back,” the chairman said while acknowledging that it is the communist party’s strategy. “This strategy has worked well in the past, and the CCP is confident it will work again. Our task on this committee is to ensure that it does not.”

Looking forward to what the China Select Committee has to offer, Gallagher recognized that he wants it to work as a bipartisan unit in addition to building upon the investigations Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) did when he was in charge of the China Task Force when the Republicans were in the minority.

“We may call this a strategic competition, but it’s not a polite tennis match. This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century. And the most fundamental freedoms are at stake,” Gallagher stated. “The CCP is laser-focused on its vision for the future, a world crowded with techno-totalitarian surveillance states where human rights are subordinate to the whims of the party.”

“For the time being, it’s still up to us to decide if that’s the future we want for our children, but it won’t be for much longer. Time is not on our side.”

Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jbliss@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.