The WPI Conversation: ‘We can’t have China hold the world hostage’

Created in 2023 amid growing concern over China’s rise, and the threat it poses to the United States, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has quickly become Congress’s key venue for shaping and scrutinizing U.S. policy toward Beijing.

In January, Rep. Ro Khanna of California will become the committee’s ranking Democrat, replacing Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, who is running for Senate.

In an in-depth interview, Khanna laid out his vision for the year ahead, promising a sharper critique of the Trump administration and a greater focus on how China’s actions impact American workers and communities.

In Washington’s China-watching circles, Khanna is seen as neither a hawk nor a dove. He has shown a willingness to buck hawkish trends, including by joining Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) on legislation to repeal the committee’s most prominent achievement, a law requiring a divestiture of the social media app TikTok. With the Trump administration now signaling a partial sale of TikTok by parent company ByteDance, key details remain unresolved, so congressional oversight will be key.

As the lawmaker who represents most of Silicon Valley, Khanna has been accused of prioritizing tech firms’ allergy to regulation over national security. Yet he supports restrictions on selling advanced AI chips to China despite opposition from firms such as Nvidia (based in his district).

Khanna takes up his committee post fresh off a trip to China in September, as part of the first congressional delegation to visit China in years. He talked about this journey — and his larger journey to the forefront of the U.S.-China debate.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: You have taken on the job of top Democrat on the China committee at a crucial time. Why did you want this job, and what are your priorities as the ranking member?

A: We need a moonshot in this country for more industrial self-reliance. That is particularly true in the case of rare earths and magnets. We can’t have China hold the world hostage. So, I want to lead a Manhattan Project for rare earths and magnets in the United States. We can look to Japan as a model, which achieved some of that when they found they were too dependent on China. And it’s going to take both the production and processing in the United States in a way that is clean, but also in partnership with our allies — whether that is Australia, whether it’s Malaysia, whether it’s New Zealand [or] Japan — to have a concerted response. And it seems rare earths and magnets are front and center, but the Manhattan project can be broader than just rare earths and magnets. It can be any choke point in the United States [where] we don’t want China to have leverage.

And the second thing that we’re going to be doing is we’re going to have a tour through the country — focused on port workers, focused on farmers, focused on warehouse workers, focused on how we can rebuild communities that were hollowed out in America — and how we can make sure we’re not getting shafted by ill-thought-out trade policy in this country.

Q: Do you view your role as trying to find things the committee can work on in a bipartisan manner, or speaking out against some of the administration’s policies that you disagree with? Or both?

A: Both. If there’s common ground, we seek to find it. But I was very disappointed in the deal that the president struck with China. I mean, we’ve got higher tariffs on Japan and South Korea and India than we do currently on China — and they’re not buying as many of the soybeans as they were before the president intervened. And we only got a one-year extension on them supplying us with rare earths and magnets. That’s wholly inadequate. I mean, they’re basically saying, after a year, they get to hold us hostage again. I called it the art of the squeal, not the art of the deal.

So we are going to be tough, and one of the changes in tone on the committee is that we’re going to be tough in criticizing where the policy has failed and calling for a new direction. [And] critical of the idea that he’s basically giving compute power to China, which is the one place where the United States has an edge. And we shouldn’t be giving blanket compute power to China.

If there is a real commitment to an industrial policy on choke points in the industrial base, I’d look forward to working collaboratively on that. But, so far, the president hasn’t shown much willingness to do more than tariff policy. That means we need to finance new factories and processing. That means we need to work with our allies on developing a strategy so that the world isn’t dependent on this. And, so far, I haven’t seen what that clear plan looks like, though.

The broader thing, though, is that the president has abandoned the forgotten Americans that he campaigned saying that China shafted you, that our jobs went to China and overseas, that he was going to stand up for the farmers, that he was going to stand up for the truck drivers, that he was going to stand up for the steelworkers, that he was going to stand up for rural America and factory towns. And his policies have not paid dividends. And so we’re going to be on the road in April and May. And it’s going to be a look at why Trump has abandoned the abandoned Americans, why Trump has forgotten the forgotten Americans and what a real vision for the economic renewal of this country looks like.

Q: What do you think the committee has done well? And what do you think the committee can do better?

A: The committee has made it clear that China is the biggest foreign policy challenge that we face in the United States. We’ve been effective in criticizing [Beijing’s treatment of] Uyghurs and their human rights record. We’ve been effective in making it clear that they should not be engaged in any aggression toward Taiwan, that that is unacceptable. And effective in thinking through new technologies that we need, including growing technology and autonomous vehicles, in the Indo-Pacific to ensure that there is not any military threat to Taiwan.

But where I think the committee has not focused enough is the failures of Trump’s policies in China. I don’t support China getting a better deal than other countries around the world. I think the policy has been irrational in targeting our allies — like Japan and Canada and India and South Korea — more than China. We should be building alliances to take on China’s unfair trade practices.

Q: You represent Silicon Valley. A lot of Silicon Valley companies lobby for chip export rules to be loosened. So how are you going to navigate that?

A: Well, look, I’ve worked with Nvidia to help create jobs with historically Black colleges, and I have a great working relationship [with Nvidia], but I just disagree that we should be allowing for more exports of our compute power. I mean, look, China has one third of the AI talent. So what is it that is slowing them down? What is it that’s preventing them from leading the AI race? It’s that they don’t have anywhere near the compute power that we do. They don’t have that compute power, and they can’t get that compute power given the restrictions. It’s going to be very hard for them to get that compute power. I oppose the decision to allow us selling our advanced chips into China. We should not be giving them more compute power.

Q: What about the argument by Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang that we should sell China the advanced chips because we need to have them dependent on our tech stack — or otherwise we are going to force them to race toward independence faster?

A: They’re racing toward independence anyway. I mean, it’s unclear if they’re even going to use what we’re offering. I was just in China. I met with Premier Li Qiang. I met with the foreign minister. They are all saying that it’s their highest priority to have Huawei and other Chinese companies race to have chip independence. So, the idea that our providing them is going to deter them is just not true. They’re very all in on that anyway, and what we need to do is not accelerate their ability to do that.

Q: You introduced a bill to repeal the TikTok divestiture bill, which was the committee’s greatest achievement. Now you’re going to be the ranking Democrat on that committee. Do you just take a fundamentally different view of the influence and risk of data exposure that the app presents?

A: We need to make sure that young people aren’t being manipulated by social media, and that it’s age-appropriate, but I don’t think anyone wants to be banning this app. I think the politics of it have moved much more to my direction. Now, I understand that on our committee, there will be people who have different opinions than me. But it’s not going to be the focus of the committee, and I’m not going to push an agenda on the committee to reverse what already seems moot given that the president has basically said that TikTok can remain operational.

Q: What do you think about the TikTok deal and the details as we know them?

A: I want to make sure that regardless of who is controlling it in the United States, that it’s not biased and that it doesn’t have a political slant — and that it’s not changing the algorithm to skew it politically or to suppress American creators’ compensation and viewpoints. And so I will be looking at it from the perspective of the American creators, American influencers, Americans who are making their livelihoods — what do they want, and what do American users want — and making sure it’s fair.

Q: You were part of the first congressional delegation to mainland China in a long time. What did you learn there about China that you would not have known if you hadn’t gone?

A: I didn’t realize how much the “century of humiliation” still is front and center in China’s self-conception. Wang Yi, the foreign minister, said “China will not concede a single rock of what is our territory. We were humiliated for a century.” This sense of Chinese pride and Chinese nationalism, and making sure that they have every part of their sovereignty, I didn’t understand the emotional appeal of that until we had those meetings.

I also didn’t realize how advanced Shanghai is until I saw the city. I mean, it’s a technologically very impressive city, and a third of the AI talent in the world is in China. It’s one of the reasons we have to, in this country, be open to having human talent from around the world to win the AI race. I’m concerned about making sure the mathematicians and physicists and best computer scientists from around the world — including, by the way, from China — are coming to the United States.

Finally, the term I heard the most was “peaceful coexistence,” which I support. Ambassador [David] Perdue is doing a reasonable job. He was with us for almost every meeting. He’s of the view that we should have some engagement; we can’t just move toward a cold war. And it led me to believe that we need far more trips to China. One of the things I’m going to encourage my colleagues to do on the China committee is actually to go to China.

Q: Do you think that the United States should, in the case of a Chinese attack, come to Taiwan’s defense?

A: I believe in the one-China policy, which is that the United States believes that the future of Taiwan and China has to be discussed peacefully between China and Taiwan, and that China cannot militarily coerce Taiwan — and, if they do, the United States will provide assistance to Taiwan. Now in what form that is, we’ve never specified. But China should know that the United States and our allies will come to the support of Taiwan if they take any military action there. And what the specifics of that look like has always been ambiguous — but they should not under underestimate the world’s resolve.

Q: Do you agree with the Trump and Biden administrations’ legal conclusion that the Chinese government is committing a genocide against the Uyghur Muslims?

A: I do. I support the sanctions bills that we have passed, the McGovern bills and other sanctions bills, and I believe that they need to be enforced in terms of not having any exports from those regions — and holding people who were part of that genocide accountable.

Q: Do you think that there’s still a need to do more investigation into the origins of the covid-19 virus?

A: Look, I think we need more transparency. I mean, it’s obvious that there was not transparency there — that China was not forthcoming about what happened and why that virus spread. They’re not clear about that, or about what they’re going to do to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I don’t believe that should be done in any way of demonizing the Chinese people or feeding into a xenophobia, but I think that the world needs to know the facts so that we don’t have another pandemic like that again. Based on what I have read publicly, I think that there is some connection with the labs. What that connection is, I don’t have the details, but we should try to figure it out.

Q: What’s your message to U.S. businesses navigating the U.S.-China relationship in these troubled times?

A: Focus on investing in the United States. Focus on investing in rural America and factory towns and HBCUs. You know, obviously there should be engagement still with China. But you can’t be exporting the most sensitive things to China. And we do need to focus on developing our country.