Congress takes the policy initiative on China

The US House of Representatives has created a committee to devise policy towards China, an unusual role for a congressional committee; can Westminster learn here?

The US Congress is very different from the UK Parliament but hides some of the scale of the differences behind superficial similarities in language and procedure. A British parliamentarian visiting Capitol Hill would recognise the bicameral system, select committees, a speaker of the lower house and even more niche issues like financial privilege—it is very limited in Congress but according to the Revenue Clause of the constitution financial legislation must be introduced in the House of Representatives rather than the Senate—and some linguistic heritage: a US bill will use the formulation “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That…”, an echo of the usual enacting formula of UK legislation, dating from the 15th century:

Be it enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows…

Functionally, however, the two legislatures are very different. The US Congress is, of course, constitutionally separate from the executive, while British governments are by overwhelming convention and precedent drawn from the House of Commons and the House of Lords. (This is not prescribed: in theory, ministers need not be members of either House, and, for example, until the position was transferred to the devolved Scottish administration, the solicitor-general for Scotland, the lord advocate’s deputy, was often not a member of either House.)

That Congress is a wholly separate branch of government gives it a kind of initiative which Parliament lacks. In the House of Commons, Standing Order No. 14(1) stipulates that, unless a conscious decision is made otherwise, government business takes precedence, as encapsulated by the fact that the Order Paper, which sets out the matters to be taken each day, is “controlled” by the government: that is, while the document is compiled and produced by independent parliamentary officials, they work under instruction from the government as to its content. Very few private bills are considered nowadays, and of the public bills which proceed to statutory force the vast majority will be proposed by the government. In any given session, only half a dozen will have originated as private member’s bills (and the government can in effect kill the passage of a bill it doesn’t like).

The US committee system is different too. It is much more lavishly resourced: House committees on average are served by something like 70 staff members, while in the Senate it is around 45. These are explicitly partisan officials, working for the majority or the minority, and are distinct from the staff if individual congressmen and senators. By contrast, UK select committee staff are scrupulously impartial and will rarely reach double figures in terms of full-time roles. When I joined the House of Commons in 2005, the “Platonic ideal” of a select committee team was six: a clerk, a second clerk, two committee specialists or inquiry managers who would be policy experts, and two administrative staff.

This sense of initiative and independent activity reads across to congressional committees. UK select committees do generally set their own agendas, but in practice they are often reactive, scrutinising areas of policy on which the government has already taken action or intends to take action. They do try to scan the horizon and examine issues which are still at an early stage of policy development, and hope thereby to have some upstream influence on the formation of policy; but often this is crowded out by the sheer weight of events.

All of this makes the United States House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, often “abbreviated” to the House Select Committee on China, or on the CCP, a curious beast by US standards and a very curious one by UK measures. It was set up at the beginning of this year, after the Republican Party assumed control of the House of Representatives, as a policy-making body, in its own words to “develop a plan of action to defend the American people, our economy, and our values”, a statement which would be unthinkable in Westminster both for its proactivity and for its robust political framing.

The committee was the culmination of Republican ambitions during the 116th Congress (2019-21) to create a forum for considering policy towards China, which the GOP leadership was unable to agree with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. A “plan B” emerged by which a task force was created under the supervision of Rep. Michael McCaul (R, Tex), the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Although the group was in essence a Republican one, it enjoyed substantial bipartisan support, and in September 2020 it published a partly classified report which dealt with a broad range of policy areas. Late last year, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R, Wis) began campaigning for a new cross-cutting committee which would improve the coherence of policy making. It gained the support of the Republican candidate for speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R, Cal), who wrote in uncompromising terms:

To win the new Cold War, we must respond to Chinese aggression with tough policies to strengthen our economy, rebuild our supply chains, speak out for human rights, stand against military aggression, and end the theft of Americans’ personal information, intellectual property, and jobs. We must recognize that China’s “peaceful rise” was pure fiction and finally to confront and respond to the Chinese Communist Party with the urgency the threat demands. To do that, House Republicans will establish a Select Committee on China in the new Congress.

Rep, Gallagher was named as chairman-designate, and framed his task in similarly robust language.

The greatest threat to the United States is the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP continues to commit genocide, obscure the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, steal hundreds of billions of dollars worth of American intellectual property, and threaten Taiwan. The Select Committee on China will push back in bipartisan fashion before it’s too late.

The committee has identified 10 areas of policy which it will examine: Uyghur genocide; Taiwan; CCP economic aggression; transnational repression; critical infrastructure and cyber; defence; CCP international influence; American business; the environment; and CCP internal repression. Those areas alone show how much of another committee’s time and attention would be absorbed by the task for making policy towards China. So far, the committee has published recommendations on the Uyghur and on Taiwan. Its chairman and members have carried out a number of visits, both domestically an abroad, and the committee has held six hearings on policy towards China.

Rep. Gallagher is man of some breadth and accomplishment. Only 39, he was awarded his first degree by Princeton University, where he changed his language study from Spanish to Arabic, after which he joined the US Marine Corps as an intelligence offer. After serving in Iraq, he studied and was awarded as master’s degree in strategic intelligence (MSSI) by the National Intelligence University in Maryland; he then studied security studies (2012) and government (2013) at Georgetown University before completing a PhD entitled Changing Course: The sources of strategic adjustment, at the same institution. Gallagher then worked as a Republican staffer in the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, and as foreign policy adviser to the short-lived presidential nomination campaign of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. He was himself elected to the House of Representatives in November 2022. As well as chairing this committee, he is a member of the House Committee on the Armed Services and on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Great care has been taken to ensure that the committee remains as bipartisan as possible. Gallagher has worked particularly closely with the Democratic ranking member, Raja Krishnamoorthi (D, Ill), in trying to concentrate on issues which provide substantial overlap between their positions.

But Gallagher is, let us not ignore it, one of the fiercest China hawks in Congress, and that informs the tenor of the committee. Earlier this month, appearing on Fox News, he warned that the electorate, and perhaps some of the political class, simply had not yet absorbed how existential the competition was between the US and China, and how committed the CCP was to winning it. In particular, he stressed the extent of Chinese espionage within the US, warning “we’re just beginning to scratch the surface in terms of this activity on American soil”. He stressed that China’s security agencies were highly secretive even about their mission and approach, pointing to the United Front Work Department, which reports directly to the CCP’s Central Committee and therefore to its general secretary, Xi Jinping; it is believed to have 40,000 employees dedicated to gathering information on, managing relations with and exerting influence over individuals and organisations outside China. (For context, in simple personnel terms, it is more than half the size of the British Army.)

Gallagher believes that the ultimate goal of US policy towards China should be “decoupling”. This may not be the absolute cleavage of an acrimonious economic and political divorce, a return to the isolationist stance of the years before President Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to Beijing, but instead may be a gradual process of diminishing trade and investment links, with a particular emphasis on eliminating any US dependencies on China. There is also a policy flowing in the opposite direction. In 2015, Xi Jinping and his cabinet issued the Made in China 2025 initiative, which seeks to make China more self-sufficient in terms of high-tech goods and services and into which the Chinese government had made huge investment.

In short, the House Committee on China is a strange mix of policy lab and licensed provocateur towards the CCP. It is assembling a selection of proposals which the federal government could adopt, and it is also pushing the hawkish end of the argument in wider foreign policy debates. There is a persuasive argument that Mike Gallagher is the most influential Republic policy-maker in Washington, not least because of the unpredictability and incoherence of the foreign policy of the last Republican president, Donald Trump; of the dramatis personae of GOP foreign policy from those years, only John Bolton, national security advisor in 2018-19, retains any significant profile and credibility (Mike Pompeo, secretary of state from 2018 to 2021, has recently ruled out a run at this presidency next year, though rules nothing out for the future, but his stock is low and he struggles even to convince the public of how he has lost a significant amount of weight). H.R. McMaster, national security advisor 2017-18, has retreated into academia, while James Mattis, Trump’s first secretary of defense, published the obligatory (well reviewed) memoir four year ago but now contents himself with issuing occasional reading lists.

The Wisconsin congressman is certainly pushing the administration: as well as guiding the work of the House Committee on China, Gallagher wrote to President Biden at the beginning of August urging him to restrict US investment in China, monitor closely Chinese investment in the US and take particular care over issues of national security. But he has also made surprisingly bipartisan noises about working with leading Senate Democrats under majority leader Chuck Schumer, who has been sounding punchy towards China in recent months, especially over the importation of fentanyl and its contribution to the devastating opioid crisis.

There is a cautious feeling in Washington, given the travails involved to have the committee set up, that Gallagher’s real-time think-tank is doing some valuable work. Gallagher as chairman is sharp and focused in his contributions but has not trampled all over political conventions or fallen back on pure partisan vitriol, and his close co-operation with Krishnamoorthi has impressed. The mood in US politics is not, after all, especially unified or calm at the moment, nor is China a back-burner issue, but the committee has not burst into partisan flames in the way it might. Perhaps it is a useful safety valve that the Democratic membership of the committee has such a clear identity that it maintains its own website.

The final obvious question is whether there is anything for Westminster to learn from the House Committee on China. The role it is playing is one which is very unfamiliar to House of Commons committees, which are largely reactive insofar as they exist “to examine the expenditure, administration and policy” of government departments or tackle cross-departmental issues, like the environment, in terms of how they contribute overall government policy. It is open to select committees to undertake the kind of forward-looking policy formulation the House Committee on China is carrying out, but they are always desperately short of time and resources compared to the activities they want to carry out. The Foreign Affairs Committee has, for example, conducted inquiries into China and the international rules-based system and UK relations with China, but these have been individual strands of their wider programme of work; the committee currently has nine inquiries at various stages of progress, and could not clear its decks, even for a short time, to devote itself to a single subject.

The scrutiny system in the House of Lords is slightly different. It has so-called “investigative” or “sessional” committees which examine issues like economic affairs and science and technology; but in recent years it has also run “special inquiry” (formerly ‘ad hoc”) committees, appointed to examine one subject for a single parliamentary session, and dissolving thereafter. There are currently four such committees which will conclude their work before the end of the session in October or November, covering disparate subjects: AI in weapons systems, education for 11-16 year olds, the horticultural sector and the integration of primary and community care.

These special inquiry committees can do very valuable work, addressing issues outside departmental boundaries, focusing on a single subject for a year and drawing on the expertise within the House of Lords. In the 2020-21 session, a committee on risk assessment and risk planning, chaired by one of my former chairs, Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom, produced a thorough and well-researched report to which the government’s response was broadly positive. One must, however, note that, while important, this was not a subject of urgent public interest or sharp political controversy.

It would be perfectly possible for the Lords to establish a committee on, say, UK policy towards China for the next session (probably the last of this parliament). As things stand, there would be a number of obstacles. There would considerable opposition from the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (if not other committees) and the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee on grounds of duplication of effort and trespass on their privileged policy areas (like it or not, demarcation disputes between committees can be very sharp and very heartfelt); one can imagine grimaces at House of Commons Defence Committee and the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy too.

There is, as ever when comparing the apples of Westminster with the oranges of Washington, an issue of resources. Mike Gallagher’s committee employs 33 members of staff, from two press secretaries (and a deputy press secretary) to three general counsel. Of course, this hardly matches the State Department’s 75,000 employees, but it gives the committee some heft and capacity to produce policy which is more detailed than the back of a cigarette packet (or wherever one composes hasty plans these days). By contrast, Lord Arbuthnot’s committee on risk assessment and risk planning had four full-time members of staff. I have written before that I think the small sizes of committee teams in Westminster, while of course imposing some limitations, have much to recommend them too. But even an enormous, unprecedented boost in select committee resources would not give you a special inquiry committee with a staff substantial enough to support the drafting of detailed, coherent and evidence-based foreign policy, especially on so large a subject as China.

Another factor would be that a Lords committee, while it would have access to enormous communal knowledge and expertise—the House does not have any former ambassadors to China but there are ex-envoys to the United Nations, the United States the European Union, NATO, France, Germany, Israel, South Africa, Afghanistan and Australia; I may have missed others—would necessarily have some of the courtliness and distance from the political boxing ring that is one of the House’s characteristics. MPs would be unlikely to be content with being excluded from such an important process.

Could the House of Commons establish such a committee? In procedural terms, I can see no reason why not, though I cannot think of an equivalent in usefully recent history, a select committee created not to scrutinise but to formulate policy on a major issue of government responsibility. Select committees have of course conducted individual inquiries on analogous lines; the Health Committee (after I had moved on, alas) produced a very fine and thorough report on NHS workforce planning in 2007, which owed a great deal to the diligence and judgement of the excellent committee specialist Ralph Coulbeck, then a bright-eyed young NHS manager and now taking a career break after being chief executive of Whipps Cross Hospital. But these tend to be quite narrowly defined areas of policy, often where the government either has not directed its attention or simply doesn’t know what to do.

There would also be the resourcing issue. A big House of Commons select committee might have as many as a dozen dedicated staff members, and access to the expertise of more from sources like the Scrutiny Unit, but that would still be half of the House Committee on China’s roster. Moreover, whether such a committee was created to devise policy on China or anything else, other committees might with some cause feel that resources were being diverted to an issue which happened to capture the attention of the media.

Fundamentally, though, is the question of why. Parliament does not exist to formulate policy; it exists to scrutinise what the government—which is, remember, drawn from its members—is doing and how it is doing it. More fundamentally still, to look at Parliament’s mediaeval roots, it exists to give the consent of the governed to laws and especially to the levying of taxes. While the House of Commons contains several Members who might consider themselves foreign policy experts and secretaries of state in waiting, that is not their key role while wearing their legislative hat. Executive hats will (or will not) be provided.

For all that, the work of the US House Committee on China is worth studying, I think, not just because it is self-evidently important, but also because it shows a different side of legislative (or legislators’) activity in a system which sprang from that of Westminster, in some senses, but has substantially diverged. Policy by Parliament? One should never rule anything out, but in the realistic future I think the Lords and Commons have enough to be getting on with before they seek to unleash their inner Palmerstons.