It’s still unclear how the legislation, if it gets out of the U.S. Senate this time, would help discourage the People’s Republic of China from launching a full-scale attack on the Republic of China (Focus Taiwan, July 22, 2025).
The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday passed a bill that seeks to deter Chinese military action by exposing the corruption of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in the event of military action against Taiwan….
The bill authorizes the treasury secretary to prohibit CCP officials from accessing funds in U.S. financial institutions, and requires that an unclassified summary or portions of the report be made public on the Treasury Department’s website and social media accounts in Chinese and English.
The bill also requires the treasury secretary to prohibit financial institutions from conducting significant transactions with the immediate family members of the aforementioned officials.
That’s fine. But why not expose the corruption right now and prohibit Party officials and their families from accessing U.S. funds right now if these actions would do any good?
Whatever the arguments against imposing such sanctions immediately, the loss of a sure and significant deterrent is not one of them. The geographic features of Taiwan that would make it hard to defeat in war have been explained by James Roth and others. The ROC’s alliances, including its alliance with the United States, also deter.
The world already knows that the Chinese Communist Party are bad guys. The financial corruption may be indicative of their badness but is hardly the worst of their conduct.
Perhaps if U.S. intelligence agencies have managed to scare up facts about CCP corruption of a kind that would help Xi Jinping to fire or jail Party officials whom he wants to get rid of for other reasons, and Xi has no independent access to the info, and certain vulnerable CCP officials have reason to suspect all this, enactment of the legislation would provide a new motive for said officials to oppose an attack on Taiwan.
But the possibility that revealing the U.S. info would jeopardize a few apparatchiks would not tip the balance if war between PRC and ROC were really on the horizon.
Too optimistic
The Taipei Times argued last year that the “estimate of the bill’s impact” by U.S. lawmakers “is overly optimistic.” Chinese citizens already know about corruption in their government. Also, “Even outside of China, CCP members do not even attempt to hide illegal or questionable behavior….
“Financial restrictions could have more impact as a deterrent, but they need to be comprehensive and must target the CCP as a whole, which is outside the scope of the Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act.”
