In December 2024, a slew of organizations with ties to the Chinese Communist Party signed a letter urging Congress not to reauthorize the House Select Committee on the CCP.
Issued by Asian Americans for Advancing Justice, the letter accuses the Committee of exacerbating racism and “perpetuating” an “adversarial framework” simply because its target is the Chinese party-state. Which is an enemy of the United States as well as of the Chinese people.
According to the AAAJ letter:
Instead of reauthorizing a committee that perpetuates a harmful, zero-sum and adversarial framework and pours more fuel on existing racial animus, the House should redirect much-needed resources elsewhere….
The downstream effects of reauthorization are clear for the AAPI community [Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders]: discrimination and racial profiling, particularly against Chinese immigrants or Chinese Americans, who will be unwittingly caught in the crossfire through no fault of their own. We must remain nuanced and deliberate in our tone and language, especially when discussing these complicated global affairs with severe domestic consequences.
The Committee opposes the party-state’s targeting of Chinese nationals who have escaped China, whom agents of the Party harass and kidnap. Is this opposition an instance of the baleful downstream effects of the Committee’s existence? Is the congressional platform that the Committee has provided to victims of the Party an example of the “crossfire”?
Too effective maybe
For AAAJ, opposing the ambitions and depredations of the Chinese Communist Party in itself perpetuates an “adversarial framework” and fosters racial discrimination. Of course, any job can be done well or badly. But the AAAJ desires that the Committee not do the job at all; that the Committee disappear.
As if sensing the inadequacy of its other laments, the letter also oddly objects that the Committee’s work overlaps with that of other congressional committees, suggesting that these other committees can certainly do whatever anti-CCP work may be justified (and which AAAJ pretends to support, as long as it is sufficiently “nuanced”).
But if the threat of China is real and the many ways that the Chinese Communist Party assaults the United States and other countries are real, complaining about duplication of effort in conducting the urgently necessary work of countering these assaults is silly at best. The members of different committees can cross the hall now and then to make sure that they are not sponsoring the testimony of the same victim of the Chinese state at the same hour of the same day. And suppose that a victim attends two separate hearings on two consecutive days held by two separate congressional committees investigating the CCP. What is the bad thing happening here? “Too much” exposure of CCP evil? “Too many” opportunities for lawmakers and the public to become better informed about it?
Notably absent from the AAAJ letter is any detailed criticism of any specific investigation, hearing, or report conducted or published by the Select Committee, which recently posted a video to commemorate its “Two-Year Battle to Protect America from the CCP.”
Funding and talking points
At Real Clear World, Jacqueline Deal and Michael Lucci, responding to the AAAJ letter, want to know “Who’s Afraid of the China Select Committee?” (March 24, 2025). The authors say that nobody fuels and exploits racial animosity better than the CCP itself.
Nor does any organization so viciously target Asian Americans, especially the Chinese diaspora community. The CCP deals in racist tropes, runs an ethnostate, and is conducting a genocide against Uyghurs. The Chinese people, tragically, are the CCP’s first and greatest victims, both within China and in diaspora communities. At least 45 million Chinese starved during the Great Leap Forward famine, and another 1.5-2 million were killed or starved during the Cultural Revolution. Thousands were mowed down during the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Party-State executes political prisoners by organ procurement for profit. Today’s Chinese citizen endures the most highly sophisticated surveillance state in world history. The CCP even exports its repression to America’s shores through systemic targeting of the Chinese diaspora.
The Select Committee helps expose all this, including contemporary Chinese operations to harass and kidnap Chinese nationals living overseas and including China’s “intelligence-adjacent” United Front Work Department, “which cultivates CCP allies and subverts CCP opponents within the United States.”
Who are Asian Americans for Advancing Justice and the other organizations that signed its fact-blurring letter? Close scrutiny reveals “what unites many of the ‘leading civil society organizations’ that oppose the Select Committee: shared funding sources along with CCP ties and talking points.”
After outlining how AAAJ and various signatories have worked with the Chinese Communist Party and often been funded by the same pro-CCP foundation, the authors conclude that the Select Committee’s detractors “turn out to be its validators. A seemingly organic crop of letter signatories is actually an astroturf campaign united by funding, hypocrisy, and CCP ties.”
Also see:
The Select Committee on the CCP: Video: “Defending America: The Select Committee’s Two-Year Battle to Protect America from the CCP”
Safeguard Defenders: Chasing Fox Hunt: Tracing the PRC’s Forced Return Operations around the Globe
Safeguard Defenders: “Involuntary Returns: China’s covert operation to force ‘fugitives’ overseas back home”
Safeguard Defenders: 110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild
Real Clear World: Asia
