Republicans want the Biden administration to do more to pressure China on pushing Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine and to make the consequences clear to Chinese leader Xi Jinping if he decides to help Russian President Vladimir Putin even more.
China is attempting to present itself as a peace mediator in Russia’s war against Ukraine while amplifying Kremlin narratives justifying the conflict and pointing the finger at the United States and NATO. President Joe Biden spoke with Xi for two hours last Friday, during which time China says it laid some of the blame on NATO for Russia’s invasion and reiterated its claims over Taiwan, while the White House says Biden described what the consequences would be if Xi gave material support to Russia.
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“President Biden’s call with General Secretary Xi Jinping reportedly failed to convince China to stay on the sidelines,” Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Washington Examiner. “But the reality is China is not on the sidelines — they’ve supported Putin’s war from the beginning. They have effectively declared a new Cold War against the West.”
Gallagher added: “We need to wake up to that reality and make the consequences for any concrete Chinese intervention in Ukraine clear. This includes publishing any evidence of China sending military equipment to Russia, banning the export of semiconductor equipment and design software to China, and ending negotiations between the Securities and Exchange Commission and its Chinese counterpart over audit standards that would give a lifeline to Chinese firms trying to list on U.S. exchanges.”
Rep. Michael Turner, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, is asking national security adviser Jake Sullivan for a briefing on Biden’s phone call with Xi.
“If the president continues to show weakness, it is going to embolden these authoritarian regimes that have self-declared themselves our adversaries,” Turner told the Washington Examiner.
Biden argued on Thursday that U.S. sanctions against Russia were not meant to deter Putin from invading Ukraine and that sanctions never deter, even though numerous high-ranking Biden administration officials argued that the sanctions were meant to stop or end the invasion.
“The Chinese Communist Party has proven it is not willing or capable of acting as a constructive party in Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine,” Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on House Foreign Affairs, said Monday. “Rather, they are complicit.”
McCaul added: “The United States must unleash technology and financial sanctions on Xi’s regime until it proves through action that it is stepping back from a cliff that drops into outright hostility.”
During a Thursday press conference, McCaul said there were a number of actions that the U.S. should take against China, including export controls against Chinese state-owned companies such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and 5G tech leader Huawei, worrying that U.S. capital flows were helping China advance its military. He said the U.S. licenses $40 billion to go from the U.S. into China for their semiconductor industry and $60 billion more for Huawei, which he said “has to stop.”
“China, they’re very deceptive, and they’re going to be a friend as much as they can to Russia without getting in trouble with the international community, but they’re gonna play it very skillfully like they usually do,” McCaul told the Washington Examiner on Thursday. “They’re economically helping them now, so they are starting to bankroll them. And they value their relationship with Russia, although Russia is looking more like a bad date — Putin is not looking so great to them right now. But they’re just going to play in to the extent it’s valuable to China — and that is, are you going to back us with Taiwan?”
Last week, Republican Sens. Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and Todd Young introduced the “Crippling Unhinged Russian Belligerence and Chinese Involvement in Putin’s Schemes Act.” The bill said it would “require the imposition of sanctions with respect to Chinese financial institutions that clear, verify, or settle transactions with Russian or Russian-controlled financial institutions.”
“We need to be sanctioning every one of these Chinese entities that does business with Putin and is helping Putin invade,” Rubio said on Sunday Morning Futures on Fox News. “Simple as that. We need to announce: any Chinese company or entity that is helping Russia evade sanctions will also be sanctioned.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was asked on Friday about sanctioning China over Russia.
“I don’t think that that’s necessary or appropriate,” Yellen told CNBC. “Senior administration officials are talking privately and quietly with China to make sure that they understand our position.”
McCaul responded on Saturday that he was “extremely concerned by yet another public display of the Biden administration’s failure to grasp the growing threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”
“There is simply no reason to believe that ‘talking privately and quietly with China’ will have any impact or stop their malign actions, including their ongoing complicity in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” McCaul said. “Taking sanctions off the table is the opposite of what the Biden administration should be saying right now.”
Putin and Xi met at the start of the Olympics in February to announce a broad strategic partnership “without limits” amid Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s border. Since the full-scale invasion was launched, China has carefully avoided condemning Russia. While the U.S. criticizes China for its “at least tacit approval” of Russia’s invasion, China has repeatedly sought to place blame at the feet of the U.S., calling it one of the “culprits of the crisis.”
“There is little doubt that Xi Jinping is underwriting the war,” Matt Pottinger, a former Trump deputy national security adviser, said during a Hudson Institution podcast Wednesday, adding, “I think they probably won’t be able to help themselves and will end up providing financial support for the war, and perhaps military material for the Russian campaign.”
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Pottinger added: “I think there’s a recognition in China that there is no easy way in the near-term to escape the punishing effects of the types of sanctions that we put on Russia, kicking Russian commercial banks out of the SWIFT system, and so forth — there is no way that they’re going to be able to MacGyver their way with scotch tape and paper clips to basically make up for that loss. But China has had a long-term desire to try to break free from U.S. dollar dominance.”
