Ayanna Pressley Claims Committee on China That Majority of Democrats Backed Fuels ‘Hate’ and Puts ‘Lives at Risk’

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) seemed to think she was pointing out the obvious when she told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins that the new committee established by the House of Representatives to address competition between the United States and China will “put lives at risk” by emboldening “anti-Asian rhetoric and hate.”

The scope of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party is expected to be broad, addressing geostrategic concerns such as the Chinese regime’s designs on Taiwan and the American economy’s reliance on China, as well as Chinese influence operations in the United States.

Pressley was one of the 65-member minority that voted against the committee, which will be run by Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI). All of the “no” votes came from the Democratic caucus, but 146 Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) joined the entirety of the Republican conference in voting to create the new panel.

Asked by Collins about her opposition, Pressley said that she “voted no because again, it’s another sham effort here.”

“It’s really clear that this is just a committee that would further embolden anti-Asian rhetoric and hate, and put lives at risk,” said the congresswoman.

When pressed by Collins to say whether the 146 Democrats were wrong to vote in favor of establishing a hate-mongering body, Pressley retreated to replying that “we just see it differently.”

Pressley and a collection of other House progressives released a statement further expanding on their opposition to the committee. While they acknowledged that “there is no doubt that China presents significant policy challenges to the United States,” they also contended that “America can and must work towards our economic and strategic competitiveness goals without ‘a new Cold War’” which they argue would entail “repression, discrimination, hate, fear, degeneration of our political institutions, and violations of civil rights.”

It’s difficult to imagine a starker demonstration of the need for such a committee. Gallagher isn’t intent on starting a new Cold War, he’s intent on winning the one that he believes to be in progress.

Is anyone under the impression that in meetings of CCP leadership, there are expressions of concern that talk of competition with the United States could “put lives at risk” by coarsening rhetoric? If so, I’d implore them to disabuse themselves of that notion.

Pressley’s concerns are the result of a myopic misapplication of American theories of race relations to foreign policy — the same kind that led American progressives to fret that the theory Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese lab was racist.

In the case of this committee, it’s an unthinking reaction that skips several logical steps to assume that the the words “Chinese” and “Competition” being in close proximity to each other is offensive.

Moreover, Pressley’s contention that an affront to the CCP is an affront to Asian-Americans is outright preposterous. After all, the regime in China is presently prosecuting a genocide against its own Muslim-minority citizens in the Xinjiang province and exercises complete control over its population, via mass-surveillance and violent repression of dissenters.

The Chinese regime is no stand-in for its own people, much less Americans of Chinese descent. The narrative being given voice to by Pressley is in actually one that’s been embraced by Chinese government, which in a report blamed “the incidents of Asian Americans being humiliated and even assaulted in public” on “American politicians.”

Weng Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, has blamed “the previous US [Trump] administration’s infamous ‘China Initiative'” and “anti-China political discourse” more generally for “racial discrimination against Asians, especially Chinese Americans.”

These pronouncements bear a striking resemblance to the progressives’ statement, which castigates “President Trump and Congressional Republicans” for “a rise in anti-Asian sentiment across the country and a 339 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021.”

In this insidious formulation — one Pressley and the CCP apparently agree on — any crime against Asian-Americans can be blamed on skepticism of the CCP.

What’s more, the committee’s architects have clearly put quite a bit of thought into making clear that the Chinese regime, not the Chinese people, are its subject. That’s why the committee takes pains to identify the CCP specifically in its name. That’s also why, in an op-ed, Gallagher and McCarthy stated “the Select Committee will take care to distinguish between the Chinese people and the regime that oppresses them.”

Hatred of and violence against Asian-Americans is something their countrymen abhor and denounce. It’s Congresswoman Pressley, not the supporters of the committee, who struggles to distinguish between Asian-Americans and the genocidal government in Beijing.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.