Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) warned that China is not a "distant threat" in a preview of the House select committee on China's first hearing on Tuesday.
The hearing, which will be aired in prime time, marks the beginning of a two-year initiative by lawmakers to convince voters of the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses to the United States.
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Gallagher, the committee's chairman, said during an interview on Fox News that the hearings will reveal how the CCP penetrates all aspects of the U.S., urging the public not to ignore the stakes.
“Though we call it a strategic competition, it is not a polite tennis match. This is an existential struggle over what type of world we want to live in. Do we want to live in an Orwellian world of total totalitarian techno control?" he said.
The committee’s first hearing is expected to be a broad overview of the CCP’s “threat to America" and focus on human rights and the committee’s “values-focused” agenda, Gallagher said. The committee was established under House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in January with bipartisan support.
The hearing will be the first of several over the next two years as lawmakers seek to navigate a complicated relationship with China, which has only become more strained in recent weeks after a suspected spy balloon was discovered hovering over U.S. airspace.
Committee members will also focus on the economic competition with China, with Gallagher emphasizing that the U.S. cannot continue to support “communist propaganda.”
“To me, [strategic competition] means we compete and win,” Gallagher said. “We’re far too dependent on China for critical goods. … We need to reclaim our economic independence so we can compete more effectively and ultimately win this competition so the world doesn’t look like them going forward.”
The select committee is also expected to investigate the CCP and its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many Republicans claim the coronavirus most likely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. The Department of Energy announced on Sunday that it had come to the “low confidence” conclusion based on new intelligence gathered by the agency.
The DOE joins the FBI in its conclusion, while four other U.S. agencies say COVID-19 most likely emerged from nature. Two other agencies, including the CIA, have not yet reached a firm conclusion.
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“For the life of me, I don’t understand why [the White House is] downplaying this. It is clear that evidence is stacking up in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. 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. It should 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 can’t be trusted," Gallagher said.
The select committee will meet at 7 p.m. on Tuesday and will feature four witnesses for its first hearing: H.R. McMaster, who was the national security adviser in the Trump administration; former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger; Tong Yi, a former secretary for a Chinese dissident who was jailed for two years; and Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.