Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi on bipartisan efforts to counter China
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I'm Andrew Schwartz, and you're listening to The Truth of the Matter, a podcast by CSIS where we break down the top policy issues of the day and talk with the people that can help us best understand what's really going on.

To get to the truth of the matter about all the latest in U.S. competition with China, we have with us none other than the ranking member on the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, Representative Rajak Krishnamoorthy, who is a Democrat from the 8th District of Illinois. Welcome, Congressman. Thank you so much, Andrew. Glad to be here.

So I want to ask you first, the House CCP Select Committee was created in 2023 with overwhelming bipartisan support at the start of the last Congress. I mean, if there's anything I think we can agree on, Republicans, Democrats, is that we are very concerned with competition with China, and that's what your committee's doing. So what did you learn from being the lead Democrat on that committee over the past several years? Gosh, maybe a couple things. One is,

Bipartisanship is essential for winning the strategic competition, not only with the CCP, but with countries around the world, whether it's from an economic, technological, or military standpoint, this is essential. So bipartisanship is kind of baked into everything that we do, and we can get into more details there. The second lesson that I learned is that Xi Jinping is a ruler unlike any other that we've seen in modern Chinese history.

And as a consequence, we have to take him and the approach of the CCP very seriously in terms of their very aggressive stance that they've taken, whether it's with regard to Taiwan and the South China Sea, or whether it's with regard to their plans for economic dominance and

and their playbook of exporting goods and dumping them on foreign markets to drive out their competitors, or even with regard to TikTok, which is in the news today, a law that Mike Gallagher and I co-authored and is now going to come before the Supreme Court in the next month. I think that we have to take all of these different challenges very seriously, and there's no choice but for the United States to win.

So TikTok this week filed for some relief from the Supreme Court. Can you tell us a little bit about that case and what you really think is going on here? Sure. So Mike and I co-authored this law, which basically requires ByteDance, which owns TikTok and is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to divest itself of TikTok USA or face a situation where TikTok USA will no longer be available to

for distribution and sale in the U.S. And the deadline is January 19th.

Immediately upon passage in the House, where it got 360 votes, by the way, and the Senate, and then it got signed into law by President Biden, TikTok USA and ByteDance sued. It then went up to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, which unanimously upheld the law just a couple weeks ago. Then at that point, TikTok appealed once again to the Supreme Court. What surprised everyone

is how the Supreme Court basically operated as a rocket docket and said, "Okay, we're going to decide this case. Let's tee it up for basically January 10th oral arguments ahead of the January 19th deadline." I've never seen a case go up so quickly in the Supreme Court.

But this is an issue that obviously the justices take very seriously. And so we're going to see very prompt action on this. It really is. The speed of it's incredible. And this is something that we've all in Washington been talking about for quite some time. President-elect Trump says he has a warm spot in his heart for TikTok. But he's not alone among politicians. Many politicians across the aisle have used it to campaign. They've used it to communicate with their constituents, particularly Republicans.

They're young constituents. There is mixed feelings in the expert community about TikTok. Where does the committee come out on this? I think a lot of people have a warm corner in their heart for TikTok. They enjoy TikTok. They enjoy the content on there. I myself hope that it continues to exist and it flourishes, just not under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. Here's the deal. Oh, it makes sense. Yeah. Here's the deal, which

And I discussed this with incoming National Security Advisor Mike Walz, who happens to be my house colleague and a friend of mine. And I think the Trump administration, incoming Trump administration, sees it in the same way, which is we want TikTok to survive, but for it to survive, it can't be under CCP control.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals pointed out that on at least three separate occasions, and probably more than that, the CCP has hacked our databases and stole millions and millions of records of Americans. And so it's not unreasonable for the US government to be concerned that the same thing is going to happen again with regard to TikTok, given the national security laws of China, and therefore they upheld the law.

Congressman, something else that was in the news this week, and we're talking just before Christmas here, it's pretty incredible, but the Wall Street Journal had a major exclusive this week that I think flew under the radar, which showed that Chinese-made internet routers, which dominate our market here in the United States, they're sold on Amazon, they're sold in lots of places, even the US Defense Department has them. These are routers that are made in China that

They cost about half what other routers would cost. And the Wall Street Journal reported that these could be or are useful to the Chinese for spying purposes. That on top of the recent hacks we know about into our telecom system. This is a really serious matter, obviously, and I know one that your committee is talking about. What are some of the thoughts, early thinking on this? So John Moulinar, the current chair of the China Select Committee and myself,

actually wrote a letter to the Biden administration about this particular issue. They mainly pertain to something called TP-Link routers, which basically dominate the market globally, I should say. And they flooded the market with these routers to, again, undercut their competition. And as a consequence, these routers are everywhere. The problem, as you point out, is that a

Again, with almost every major piece of telecom technology that the CCP or the PRC sells around the world, the CCP has required a backdoor to be able to access data through those routers. And so because of that fact, we basically say, "Look, the government can't buy these routers anymore."

And if you're a private citizen, I wouldn't buy them either. And by the way, I think that some of these routers were part of the Volt typhoon hack that the FBI and CISA and DHS talked about last year. It's one of the biggest hacks of our utilities that has occurred. And the CCP has basically pre-positioned malware in those utilities.

not just for potential surveillance, but for disruption in the potential case of conflict. So you mentioned incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, somebody who's worked across the aisle, somebody who was recently spoke at CSIS. It's terrific that you have these allies coming into this administration because these are really, really challenging times with China. With all the hacking they've done with some of the damage that it's caused,

What is the committee recommending that the incoming Trump administration, the posture that they should take? This is tough business. And what everybody talks about in Washington in terms of national security, this competition with China. I think that what they should do is they should continue with the policies that the Biden administration put in place.

on any number of axes with regard to this type of technology. It's not just routers, it's also drones, which are, by the way, in the news if you haven't noticed. But DJI dominates the market, just like TP-Link dominates the router market. DJI is the Chinese company that...

that I think takes up more than 60% of the US market. And again, whether it's drones, whether it's routers, whether it's Huawei telecom equipment, whether it's TikTok,

Because of the national security laws of China, which require that every private entity essentially act as an instrument of surveillance or data gathering upon request by the CCP, we have to be very, very vigilant. We have to protect ourselves. Not only that, but as I've mentioned before, because of the way that they have used this playbook of exporting various goods around the world to

to undercut their competition, we also have to be concerned about these products from an economic perspective too. Well, Americans love our cheap goods. And this is a conflict that comes up when you talk about some of these issues is we want routers that are half price. We want phones that are cheap. We want all kinds of goods that are cheap and they come from China. How do we balance that with some of these very real national security implications?

Look, we can't sacrifice our national security in the name of cheap stuff. And that's really the central issue here. I think that we have to also incentivize the establishment of a domestic industry, a trusted partner industry in some of these items. Because if we don't, we're going to be left with this dilemma all the time, which is, do we have to always pay more in order for safe stuff?

And if we could create economies of scale working with our trusted partners, then we may not have to make that sacrifice. But it's going to take some time. We're going to have to be intentional about that.

So China, for its part, is now saying this week that U.S. citizens can travel visa-free in China for 10 days. Is that sort of a weak attempt of trying to make nice with the United States, or is it just an attempt to reel more tourists in? Maybe both. I think that COVID really chilled a lot of the travel that we saw pre-pandemic.

Then the security situation has further given a lot of people the willies, so to speak, about going to China, especially if you're a business person. I can't tell you how many business people have told me, "I don't think I'm going to be traveling to China," given the recent exit bans that they've placed on people, even employees of American companies.

I'm glad that my Chinese American constituents and others can travel to China with a little bit less hassle to visit their family or to do some business there. But I think the underlying situation needs to change for the people-to-people and travel ties to really flourish. I hope that they do because I think when we have those types of ties,

we gain greater understanding and hopefully we see some change as well. So Congressman, coming into this next session of Congress, the makeup of the committee is still bipartisan, of course. What are some of the big gaps that you see the committee still has to address? I think that we need to focus as much on upping our own game as a country in various ways, even at the same time that we're kind of practicing defensive

tactics with regard to the CCP, whether it's on the military, technological, or economic front. What do I mean by that? I think we have to fix our legal immigration system, which is completely messed up, which really hobbles our ability to, for instance, improve our defense industrial base. I was up in New London, Connecticut at the submarine base at Groton, and it is growing like gangbusters, which it should. But the number one issue that they're facing is workforce issues.

They can't get enough people to fill all the vacancies that they need to fill for us to maintain our edge as a submarine power. So we have to fix our legal immigration system and improve our workforce training pipeline and work on things like career technical education, which is a passion of mine. Secondly, we need to invest in basic research and development in this country in a much, much bigger way. This is an area that if we don't engage

intentionally focus on, then we're going to potentially see leadership in quantum, in fusion energy, in AI, in so many different areas where we naturally should be the leaders. And so those are some of the areas where I think we have to kind of continue to focus. Another area where there's a gap is just our defense industrial base, which I mentioned before. We have to be intentional about

Closing some of the gaps, whether it's with regard to shipbuilding or whether it's with regard to ground-based intermediate range missiles, which is a big issue now in the Indo-Pacific theater.

If we don't, then we're going to invite aggression and potentially hostilities. Congressman, we're short on time. I have one final question for you, and this is a big one. Taiwan, this is circulating around every discussion we have with China, and sometimes it's hyped up just a little too much. How serious is this? And what is the committee doing right now to de-escalate tensions?

It's very serious. And I think that what I'm always concerned about is given China's economic troubles right now, given its demographic decline, given all the problems that it has, especially now and into the foreseeable future, and given the fact that we as a country, as the United States, along with our partners are ramping up our ability to deter conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, will Xi Jinping use this

this time after 2027, which is when he said the PLA needs to be ready to successfully invade Taiwan to then strike. And so we have to do everything in our power to kind of hustle and make sure we deter conflict. We have to close some of those gaps that I talked about earlier in the Indo-Pacific Theater. I mentioned shipbuilding. I mentioned intermediate range missiles.

but we also have gaps with regard to drones. We have gaps with regard to submarines. Our big edge, by the way, is in undersea deterrence. The CCP does not have the capability that we have with regard to submarines. And so we have to press on that advantage, but that means we have to fix the defense industrial base and hustle. Finally, I would say we have to continue to maintain dialogue, okay?

We have to maintain dialogue at the highest levels. I'm glad that Donald Trump has already initiated communications with Xi Jinping to some degree. I think that's good. I think it's good for them to talk to each other, for him to tell Xi Jinping, "Look, instead of using coercive tactics to try to get your way, let's come to the negotiating table and let's talk through our differences." That's always better than open hostilities.

And so let's hope that Xi Jinping does that. Let's prepare for the worst and do what I was talking about before, which is increase our deterrence. Congressman, can't thank you enough for your time today. This is all the stuff that we really want to know about. And our listeners are really grateful. We're grateful for your service. Happy holidays to you and your family. Thank you, Andrew. And same to you.

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