Senators Restart Talks On China Competitiveness Bill

Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee have moved to resuscitate the Strategic Competition Act, a bill that was omitted from last year’s CHIPS and Science Act.

• The CHIPS Act was initially designed with far broader ambitions to compete with China but the final legislation was streamlined to focus on domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
• The excised bill may be reintroduced to the Senate, during a period of unprecedented hawkishness amongst lawmakers, with additional objectives to restrict China’s influence on a range of areas, including military, tech, and education.
• Committee Chair Robert Menendez (D-NJ) said: “There are many, many different dimensions to the China challenge. While the Strategic Competition Act went a long way to identifying and dealing with many of them, it wasn’t totally exhaustive.”
• Semafor writes that China is a rare unifying issue of an acrimonious split Congress: "A Strategic Competition Act 2.0 seems like a natural place for the parties to start looking for common legislative ground," but some foreign policy analysts have, "expressed concern about the bill’s more hawkish measures...”
• Michael Swaine, at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, described the bill a “de facto declaration of a cold war with the People’s Republic of China.”