Chairman Moolenaar’s Opening Statement: Protect American Supply Chains from China
Today, Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar delivered his opening statement at the Select Committee’s hearing titled Import Controls: Tools to Counter the CCP's Industrial Policy and Supply Chain Threats.
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Good morning.
Last October, China weaponized its chokehold over rare earths in a massive expansion of its export controls. The Chinese Communist Party’s escalation threatened commerce globally, and it represented an economic declaration of war against the United States.
Our critical industries, already facing a crisis from China’s initial restrictions, faced catastrophic risk under these expanded controls. Like other threats from China, we knew to expect it and we saw it coming.
China took a similar action against Japan in 2010. A decade later in 2020, Xi Jinping brazenly explained his plans to “tighten international production chains’ dependence on China.” We must ensure that he fails and eliminate dependencies on China. Our country’s sovereignty, national security, and freedom from economic coercion depend on it.
This task is urgent, because the CCP is aggressively working to dominate the technologies of the future. In 2025, Chinese drone maker DJI dominated 80 percent of the American commercial drone market. Unitree – designated recently by the Pentagon as a Chinese military company – is delivering heavily subsidized robots at costs that would bankrupt American robotics companies. Chinese automakers Geely and BYD are flooding roads around the world with subsidized connected vehicles that are rolling data collection devices for the CCP.
China subsidizes its companies with hundreds of billions of dollars every year and facilitates widespread intellectual property theft to steal American innovation.
Some industries in China rely on forced labor and then use global markets to subsidize the CCP’s human rights abuses. China is also continuing to double down on industrial overcapacity to capture a greater share of the global export market while bankrupting Western companies and deindustrializing the rest of the world.
We must stop China from cultivating more American supply chain dependencies.
Rare earths are far from the only sector that China can use to disrupt our economy. It is unrealistic and unfair to expect American industries to compete with Chinese state-subsidized companies that can afford to be unprofitable for decades.
We should expect intense economic warfare to persist for as long as Xi and the CCP are in power. So our national security toolkit must be equipped to address sector-wide threats as well as specific adversarial entities, and all other threats posed by Chinese imports.
Fortunately, there is a growing consensus in Congress – on a bipartisan basis – and in the Trump Administration that understands this. Over the past several months the Federal Communications Commission has added Chinese drones, power inverters, internet routers, and advanced robots to its Covered List, shutting adversary equipment out of American networks. This summer, the Administration carried out the largest expansion of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) Entity List in history. And President Trump has taken additional steps to eliminate foreign adversary products from our defense supply chains and critical infrastructure.
Every one of these actions mitigates a national security threat, reduces the CCP’s leverage, and creates opportunities for us and our allies to rebuild industries the CCP bankrupted.
Thankfully, these actions have been accompanied by an enduring shift in national security policy. Import controls hold broad bipartisan appeal in Congress and in the executive branch. For example, the Biden Administration implemented the ICTS Supply Chain Executive Order from President Trump’s first term to address adversary connected vehicles. More recently, Congress and the FCC have worked together to break China’s drone monopoly.
These are encouraging signs of a new consensus, and these actions are crucial to keeping adversary hardware out of our networks, protecting American jobs, helping rebuild crucial sectors of the American economy, and unleashing commercial innovation.
There is much more work to do.
Display screens and smart home devices are more examples of high-risk sectors the Commerce Department and the FCC could address with their import control authorities. Congress also has a central role in passing laws to codify and strengthen import control authorities to put them on firmer legal footing and ensure national security regulations translate into lasting investments that break free from dangerous dependencies on China. My bipartisan Connected Vehicle Security Act, as well as the GUARD Act addressing humanoid robots, are two of the bills we need to do that. Congress will also be essential in modernizing our national security authorities, including the codification of President Trump’s ICTS Supply Chain order.
Today’s hearing will put the spotlight on the need to advance those efforts. Xi Jinping is not hiding his plans to make our country even more reliant on China and to gain a veto over our country’s sovereignty. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses and working with all of you to make sure Xi fails.
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