The Republican chair of the House of Representatives’ select committee on China said on Wednesday that the panel’s top priority is legislation restricting US investment in China to stop investors from “funding our own demise.”
“We have to have an outbound investment regime that basically says ‘No investment in these businesses that are on some kind of a list,’ that says ‘We shouldn’t be helping the Chinese military, we shouldn’t be supporting genocide,’” Representative John Moolenaar said, speaking on a panel at the American Enterprise Institute.
“That’s probably our number one priority right now,” he added. “We are actually funding our demise.”
Moolenaar’s comments indicate that Congress may reconsider long-desired restrictions on U.S. investments in China, a topic that has encountered challenges in Washington. A measure to limit outbound investments was removed from the Chips Act before its passage in 2022. However, in August 2023, President Joe Biden signed an executive order giving the Treasury Department the authority to restrict U.S. investments in Chinese companies within three critical sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and certain artificial intelligence systems.
