By Katrina Northrop

The GOP takes over the House soon, bringing heightened rhetoric and hawkish proposals.

When the Republican Party takes over the House of Representatives in January, the new group of lawmakers will bring a wide-ranging — and decidedly hawkish — China agenda with them.

Republican House members have vowed to take action on issues like critical supply chains, Chinese influence campaigns, and U.S.-China tech competition. And to coordinate those efforts, the House will set up a special Select Committee on China, led by Representative Michael Gallagher from Wisconsin.

In a recent op-ed about the new Committee penned by Gallagher and Representative Kevin McCarthy, who is running to be House speaker, the pair argued that “The greatest threat to the United States is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)…To win the new Cold War, we must respond to Chinese aggression with tough policies.”

The Biden administration hasn’t shied away from confronting China, with measures like stringent chip export controls and human rights sanctions. But the heightened rhetoric and legislative proposals coming out of the House could constrain President Joe Biden at a moment when the administration is taking tentative steps towards putting a floor under the U.S.-China relationship’s deterioration. Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in Bali in November, their first in-person encounter since Biden became president, while Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to visit China early this year.

“[The administration] is trying to walk a fine line between engaging with Beijing but also enacting tough restrictions and coordinating with allies,” says Craig Kafura, assistant director for public opinion and foreign policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “They are doing that really at the same time. A Republican house will add another element of complication.”

Democrats still control the Senate, so House Republicans won’t be able to pass China-related legislation without Democrat support. But the House does have important oversight powers, and various China-related investigations are already on the Republican agenda — including into the origins of Covid-19 and the business dealings of the President’s son, Hunter Biden, in China.

Taiwan will also be a hot topic. Following outgoing House Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this summer, which spurred unprecedented Chinese military exercises around the island, McCarthy has said he will lead a congressional visit to Taiwan if he becomes Speaker.

On technology, a focal point of U.S.-China competition, Republican lawmakers have indicated a desire to strengthen the export control system which both the Biden and Trump administrations have used expansively.

Texas Representative Michael McCaul, incoming chair of the House of Foreign Affairs Committee, says one of his first actions will be to conduct a 90-day review of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which is responsible for much of the China-related export controls.

“For years, the U.S. export control regime has failed to keep useful technology from the Chinese Communist Party’s military — look no further than its hypersonic missile,” McCaul told The Wire in a statement. “Business as usual is over, and my committee will scrutinize BIS and mandate reforms where necessary.”

Some Republican-led initiatives will likely receive bipartisan support. For example, prominent Republicans, Democrats, and White House officials have all expressed support for outbound investment screening, which would put in place a review process for U.S. investment into critical sectors overseas.

“Despite the partisan rancor that often characterizes Congressional debate,” California Democrat Ami Bera said in a statement to The Wire, “there is significant bipartisan consensus on the challenges posed by an increasingly authoritarian and aggressive People’s Republic of China.”

But Republicans will also be looking for ways to use China policy to score politically against the Democrats, especially in the run up to the 2024 presidential election. This will make it harder for the administration to continue walking that fine line between engaging with Chinese counterparts while enacting tough policies.

In recent years, the Republican base has become far more anti-China as compared to Democrats, according to polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Three quarters of Republicans believe that China’s development as a world power threatens the U.S., compared to 57 percent of Democrats. And 72 percent of Republicans polled in 2021 believed that U.S.-China trade does more to weaken American national security, up from 49 percent in 2019.

“Americans overall are still divided on what they want the U.S.-China relationship to look like,” says Kafura. “[The] Republican decline [in public opinion on China] has been more dramatic, further, and faster.”

Any condemnation from House Republicans may lead to Chinese retaliation. “It is certainly a thing that hardliners in China will use as an excuse,” says Matthew Duss, a former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Hardliners in every country tend to reinforce the belief that the other can’t be reasoned with.”

Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, believes that a hawkish House actually may make the Chinese more eager to interact with the White House. “The Chinese may be more willing to engage now because they appreciate that the only group they can interact with is the administration. They will not be able to interact with Republicans and Democrats on the Hill,” he says. “It may give the administration more leverage.”

Beyond the tough rhetoric, analysts say that the Republican Party has struggled with formulating an overarching China policy. A similar problem has plagued the Democrats – Secretary of State Blinken’s May speech outlining the tenets of “invest, align, compete” has been billed as the most detailed expression of the administration’s China policy, but criticism persists that the Biden team has yet to put forward a clear goal for what the U.S.-China relationship should look like.

For now, Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center, says, “No one really expects positive moves for China [coming out of the House]. It is going to be bad no matter what, the only question is how bad?”