“They are preparing for war, and there’s no other way to assess the situation.”
WASHINGTON, DC – Less than a month after returning from a bipartisan fact-finding mission to the South China Sea, U.S. Rep. Andy Barr (KY-06) appeared this past Tuesday night before a dinner meeting of The Ripon Society to discuss what he learned on the mission and the very real threat posed by China in the years ahead.
“Many of our senior intelligence officials and DOD personnel are very concerned that Xi Jinping and the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army and People’s Liberation Navy believe that there is a closing window within which they can unify Taiwan and mainland China by force,” Barr stated. “Some experts think it could be as soon as 2027.
“But when you look at the military activities in the Taiwan Strait and around the island of Taiwan over the last several weeks, there is no doubt that they’re making preparations for an invasion. You see a tempo that we have never seen before. On just one day last week, we saw 103 sorties in and around Taiwan airspace. Nearly half of those sorties involved incursions into the Taiwan air defense identification zone, crossing the midpoint line between China and Taiwan in the Strait.
“But what was very new and different about these military exercises was that they were unusually large and very extensive, [involving] a carrier group and many battleships from the PLN in and around Taiwan waters. Last week, we saw a number of Chinese military aircraft going to the southeast and the eastern side of the island with refueling capabilities. This is a clear signal that they are practicing for access denial. They want to train for an air, land, and sea embargo of the island and deny access to the U.S. military coming to the aid of Taiwan.”
First elected in 2012, Barr serves on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, which was established earlier this year to address the multifaceted threats that China poses to the United States. He is a member of the Financial Services Committee, where he Chairs the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Monetary Policy. He also serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and is a member of the Subcommittee on the Indo-Pacific.
A bipartisan delegation from the Subcommittee – including Barr and led by Subcommittee Chairwoman Young Kim (CA-40) – traveled to the South China Sea earlier this month to meet with key U.S. allies and assess the Chinese build-up in the region.
“There are at least seven submerged reefs or shoals within Philippine territorial waters that the Chinese have simply annexed and built artificial islands on top,” Barr stated, recounting some of the things the delegation saw. “On three of these islands, they’ve built 3000-meter runways that have military aircraft on them. They’ve built a very sophisticated runway infrastructure, including hangers, where they can deploy many of their military aircraft. They’ve got satellite communications and anti-aircraft capabilities. These are militarized islands designed for one thing only — and that is war.”
“They are preparing for war, and there’s no other way to assess the situation. So what should we do about the situation? Military deterrence for sure, but on the economic front we need to make sure that we don’t aid in the rise of the Chinese military capabilities. We certainly shouldn’t be funding the Chinese military civil fusion that assists the People’s Liberation Army or the People’s Liberation Navy, or their technological capabilities, which are frankly quite extensive and growing.”
“We need military deterrence, but we also need economic deterrence. China is not a 12-foot-tall adversary. They have their shortcomings. They have their liabilities. They’re in a debt crisis right now. They have a demographic challenge. They’re no longer the largest country in the world in terms of population. India has surpassed them because of their one-child policy. They’ve got a real estate crisis on their hands. The fact that they crack down on their own population makes them more afraid of their own people than of their adversary in the United States. They’ve got a lot of problems.
“But we don’t need to be unwittingly financing the rise of the Chinese military industrial complex. In 2020, the estimate was that U.S. investors held about $1.2 trillion in Chinese debt and equity securities. There is no doubt that there is a lot of Western capital that flows into China to fund their civil military fusion enterprise. Much of this access to our capital markets and to Western capital markets has funded their technological advances. So we’ve got to get smart about this.”
To that end, Barr touched on a number of steps Congress has taken in recent years to curb Chinese access to Western capital and Western technology. These steps included modernizing export controls and passing the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, which opened up more auditing transparency of Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges.
Barr noted that he has also authored legislation to stop the flow of American dollars to Chinese military and surveillance companies. Called the Chinese Military and Surveillance Company Sanctions Act, the bill – which was passed unanimously out of the House Financial Services Committee on September 20th — would require the President to sanction hostile Chinese entities that aid and abet China’s military-industrial complex and threaten our national security.
According to Barr, these focused and targeted sanctions, unlike other investment-restriction proposals, would outlaw virtually any economic transaction with a blacklisted company. Their impact would also resonate abroad, discouraging third countries from dealing with the firms to avoid losing access to prosperous free markets.
“When the U.S. sanctions a Chinese entity,” Barr said, “it sends a signal to our allies in Europe and Asia that they have a choice – they can either do business with this Chinese entity or they can do business with the United States. But they can’t do both.”
To view Barr’s complete remarks at Tuesday night’s discussion, please click the link below:
The Ripon Society is a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 – Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.