The Export-Import Bank already has a troubling history of subsidizing China’s largest financial institutions. Unfortunately, President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Ex-Im Bank, Reta Jo Lewis, appears likely to embrace that past.
For decades, the bipartisan consensus in Washington was that the economic modernization of communist China would, as if by magic, create a demand for and a willingness to adopt democratic reforms. It is long past time to admit that this reasonable-sounding aspiration has failed. The United States needs an Ex-Im Bank nominee who understands that China is a threat, not a partner. Lewis is not that nominee.
China has swiftly become wealthy since Deng Xiaoping opened its markets to international trade in the late 1970s. Indeed, China’s abandonment of socialist ideology and its embrace of free-market capitalism has lifted a billion Chinese people out of poverty, dramatically reducing world poverty in the process. That is a good thing, but it is also something to worry about as long as China’s government remains in the hands of genocidal psychopaths.
In sheer size, China’s economy is set to overtake that of the U.S. sometime in the 2030s, and there is no political liberalization on the horizon. In fact, China has become more authoritarian and belligerent in recent years. Its government brutally crushed dissent and destroyed democracy in Hong Kong, trampling its own international commitments. It practices genocide against its own minority Uyghur population. It constantly threatens its neighbors — especially Taiwan, which is now under a near-constant threat of military invasion, but also Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, who find their territorial waters and sea lanes under threat from constant Chinese imperialistic expansionism.
Every agency of the U.S. government should be looking to contain and isolate China whenever possible. To the extent that the federal government does help private sector companies overseas, it should be to promote competition against and dominance over China, not cooperation and partnership with the communist regime’s largest state-run enterprises.
Unfortunately, the Ex-Im Bank has been subsidizing China’s largest state-run firms for decades, including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the very entity whose mission is to establish China’s commercial dominance worldwide.
Lewis, Biden’s nominee to be the next president and chairwoman of the Ex-Im Bank, appears ready to continue the bank’s pro-China policies as if nothing in the world changed. A member of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s National Finance Committee, Lewis was later appointed to be a special representative under Secretary of State Clinton, assigned to develop subnational government relations between Chinese and U.S. state and local governments.
While serving in the State Department, Lewis told the U.S.-China Governors Forum that she believed “closer engagement at the subnational level will build strategic trust and create new opportunities for our companies and workers.” Since leaving the State Department, Lewis does not appear to have changed her views, signing on to become a “strategic adviser” for the United States Heartland China Association, an organization created for “building stronger ties” with China.
Lewis did tell the Senate Banking Committee that she would faithfully implement the new “strategic competition with China” provisions included in the Ex-Im Bank’s latest reauthorization. However, considering her past, senators should doubt her commitment. Taxpayers and workers deserve an Ex-Im Bank nominee with an established track record of recognizing the threat posed by China’s government and its state-run entities. Lewis is not that nominee.
