'This Is a Committed Enemy': Rep. Green Seeks to Block Exports of Critical Technology to China

Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), in an interview with the "American Thought Leaders" program at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla. on Feb. 28, 2021. (The Epoch Times)

The Chinese communist regime is the greatest threat to the United States, according to Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), who urged Congress to pass a bill barring the exports of critical technology to China.

"Our number one strategic threat to our sovereignty and security and prosperity is China," Green said during an April 6 talk at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

Green said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was engaged in an "overt campaign of stealing," and was systematically thieving national security and intellectual property (IP) secrets from the United States. When it could not steal outright, he said, the regime worked to coopt students and American universities in order to gain access to emerging research.

"This is a committed enemy, or committed competitor at a minimum," Green said.

The Department of Justice has unsealed several high-profile espionage cases in recent weeks against alleged agents of the Chinese Communist Party operating in the United States. In February, however, the Biden administration terminated the Trump-era China Initiative, an anti-espionage campaign amid criticisms of racism.

Green added that the threat posed by widespread IP theft was impacting both the U.S. economy and national security, and that the regime was exporting technologies to support authoritarian governments in South America and the Caribbean in order to undermine U.S. influence in the Western hemisphere.

To curb the damage, he urged his fellows in Congress to pass the China Technology Transfer Control Act, which he introduced in 2019.

The bipartisan legislation was designed to counter the Chinese regime's "Made in China 2025" plan, a strategic effort to transform China into the world's most dominant manufacturer in 10 strategic industries from pharmaceuticals to aviation.

The China Technology Transfer Control Act would place all the products listed by the Made in China 2025 plan on the U.S. export list, thereby requiring a license to export them overseas. The idea is that the United States would effectively cut off the flow of critical technologies to China, thereby preventing the communist government there from reverse engineering and ultimately manufacturing them.

"It's past time we address the CCP's efforts to exert control in our economy, our educational institutions, and our military-industrial base," Green said when he introduced the bill. "From stealing sensitive intellectual property to preying on vulnerable American companies, China's communist leaders have pursued their ambitions at a steep cost to the American people, their own people, and the world."

The bill would be the first piece of legislation, he said, that explicitly condemns the Chinese communist regime as an international thief of intellectual property.

The move, he said, would be vital to preventing the fulfillment of the regime's ambition to dislodge the United States as the world's leading power and recreate the international order in its own image.

"It's very well understood," Green said. "They want to replace the United States as the world leader and then bring in their own version of a rules-based, their rules-based, world order, and do away with the liberal rules-based world order."

"That is a threat to freedom and democracy. It is a threat to free speech. It's a threat to privacy. It's a threat to people's lives if the race that you particularly belong to is one that they want to target."