Chairman Gallagher's Opening Remarks

WASHINGTON, D.C.-- Today, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party will hold its first hearing, titled "The Chinese Communist Party's Threat to America". Please find Chairman Gallagher opening remarks below, embargoed until 7:00 p.m. this evening.

Chairman Gallagher: "In 1991, a Chinese academic by the name Wang Huning wrote a book called America Against America—a critique of the internal conflict he found at the heart of American society. 

These days, that academic is one of the most powerful men in the world and a member of the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee, the highest governing body within the Chinese Communist Party.

'America Against America' also describes the strategy that Wang, Xi Jinping, and the CCP have pursued in the years since — pitting Americans, who they believe are greedy and factional, against each other to undermine our country. 

The CCP has found friends on Wall Street, in Fortune 500 C-suites, and on K Street who are ready and willing to oppose efforts to push back. 

This strategy has worked well in the past, and the CCP is confident it will work again. Our task is to ensure that it does not.

Thanks to Speaker McCarthy and Leader Jeffries, we have an excellent group of thoughtful legislators on this committee. 

We’ll be working hand in hand with our teammates on the standing committees, particularly my friend House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, who helped set the stage for our work through the 2020 China Task Force. Chairman McCaul’s leadership produced a number of bipartisan proposals that we must build upon as we investigate and expose the ideological, technological, economic, and military threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.

We may call this a “strategic competition,” but this is 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. 

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. Just because this Congress is divided, we cannot afford to waste the next two years lingering in legislative limbo or pandering for the press. 

We must act with a sense of urgency. Our policy over the next ten years will set the stage for the next hundred. We cannot allow the CCP's tech-powered dystopia to prevail.

Therefore, we must learn from our mistakes. For much of the past half century, we tried to win the CCP over with honey, believing that economic engagement would lead to reforms in China. 

We were wrong. The CCP laughed at our naïveté while they took advantage of our good faith. But the era of wishful thinking is over. The Select Committee will not allow the CCP to lull us into complacency or maneuver us into submission.

Tonight, we’re joined by a distinguished group of dissidents, including Wei Jingheng, a titan of the Chinese democracy movement. You will hear some of their voices momentarily in a video that looks at some of the suffering the Chinese Communist Party has inflicted since it came to power over 70 years ago.

This should remind us that this committee must constantly distinguish between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people themselves, who have always been the Party’s primary victims."