EXCLUSIVE — Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) is pushing for Congress to use a decades-old strategy from the Cold War that was used against the former Soviet Union to tackle one of America’s biggest modern-day foreign threats: China.
The senator has asked the leaders of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, which he sits on, to conduct annual unclassified reports and hold hearings about the Chinese economy and economic policy decisions, a tactic the panel used with the Soviet economy before its downfall in the early 1990s.
In a letter first seen by the Washington Examiner to Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Joint Economic Committee chairman, and Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ), vice chairman, Schmitt noted that the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission made a similar recommendation to use open-source and classified data and analysis.
“This analysis and the subsequent reports were especially important, as the Soviet Union stood to gain from lying about its economic condition,” Schmitt wrote.
He cited China’s “currency manipulation, malicious trade practices, and theft of intellectual property” as ways the communist country “has harmed the American economy and the American worker.”
The committee did not respond to a request for comment.
The Soviet-era studies also included public hearings, which Schmitt said should accompany the China reports. He recommended focusing on three policy areas: Economic factors causing Chinese nationals to leave the country, the effects of state-driven market-fixing policies on the Chinese economy, and the country’s housing market.
The committee publishes a yearly bipartisan report on the U.S. economy, in addition to other periodical partisan reports and research conducted separately by each party. The panel’s primary task is to “review economic conditions and recommend improvements in economic policy.”
Lawmakers have increasingly viewed China as the greatest non-domestic economic threat to the United States, and the GOP-led House last year established the bipartisan Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan became the first person from his post to visit China since 2016 when he traveled to Beijing last week to meet with the Chinese foreign minister and other high-level officials.
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As the former Missouri attorney general, Schmitt in 2020 sued China over the COVID-19 pandemic for misleading the public about the disease’s origin, which drew the ire of the Chinese government. Schmitt’s 2022 Senate primary also centered heavily on China, which he and his GOP opponents said presented military, economic, and public health threats.
“The [Joint Economic Committee] should be critical in shaping a whole-of-government approach to the challenges that China’s revanchist economic activities present,” Schmitt wrote in his letter.
