Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., one of the shrinking number of members of Congress who advocate for engaging with China rather than punishing it, recently published a white paper of his views on how to manage competition with China, how to use both offensive and defensive measures to compete with China, how to improve U.S. governance and competitiveness, and how to identify areas of cooperation.
House Republicans this week urged the Biden administration not to strike a deal with Beijing after Chinese officials reportedly offered to restart counter-narcotics activities with the U.S. in exchange for lifting certain trade restrictions. Beijing asked the U.S. to lift restrictions on the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. The institute was added to the Entity List in 2020 for its ties to human rights violations.
House and Senate Republicans introduced a bill this week that would force nonprofits, university endowments, public pension plans and other tax-exempt entities to divest from Chinese companies or lose their tax-exempt status. The Dump Investments in Troublesome Communist Holdings Act would also require the Treasury Department to publish a report within one year of the bill’s enactment to describe the “patterns of outbound investment into China generally, including a sectoral breakdown,” the House Select Committee on China said in an Aug. 1 news release.
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, applauded the Biden administration's July 28 drawdown of a weapons package for Taiwan but said the “much-needed” sale “should have occurred much earlier and could have been more robust.” McCaul, one of Congress’ most vocal critics of what he said has been a delay by the Biden administration of weapons sales to the island (see 2302210012 and 2306270027), said the administration “should have been expediting weapons deliveries to Taiwan.” The U.S. “must remain committed to providing necessary defense articles to enable Taiwan in maintaining deterrence and self-defense capability,” he said.
The top lawmakers on the House Select Committee on China urged the Commerce Department to strengthen its Oct. 7 China chip controls, saying Chinese firms have “identified workarounds.” In a letter last week to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., said the interim final rule’s threshold for the “bidirectional transfer rate of 600 Gbyte/s should be lowered sufficiently to prevent clever engineering that bypasses the regulations.” They also said the rule, which will be updated in the coming months when finalized by the Bureau of Industry and Security (see 2307260071), should address Chinese firms using cloud computing services to “outsource their advanced computing needs” and evade the export controls (see 2303210037 and 2305160092).
A Senate bill with bipartisan support could lead to new human rights sanctions on top Iranian government officials, including its supreme leader and its president. The Mahsa Amini Human Rights and Security Accountability Act, introduced last week by Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Alex Padilla, D-Calif., would require the administration to report on people in Iran responsible for human rights violations, including against Iranians protesting last year's death of Amini, who died in the custody of the country’s morality police. The bill would require the administration to impose “applicable sanctions” on people identified in the report.
The Haiti Criminal Collusion Transparency Act, a bill that requires the State Department to report on ties between criminal gangs and political and economic elites in Haiti (see 2302140049 and 2303280040), and asks the administration to impose sanctions based on what it finds, passed the House by voice vote July 25.
A bill that sets a 10-year statute of limitation for violating sanctions under either the Trading with the Enemy Act or the International Emergency Economic Powers Act passed the House July 25.
House Republicans introduced a bill last week that would prevent the administration from renewing a general license authorizing certain transactions related to earthquake relief efforts in Syria. The bill would also require the Treasury, State and Commerce departments to notify Congress of any change to the Syria Sanctions Regulations “no more than 15 days prior to the change taking effect.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, introduced a bill this week that could lead to new export controls on certain U.S. “genetic technology” destined to China. The Stopping Genetic Monitoring by China Act would add various types of “genetic sampling and testing kits, analytical technology, and software” to the Bureau of Industry and Security’s Commerce Control List, including: