The marquee panel on U.S.-China “strategic competition” represents a rare area of convergence between Republicans and Democrats, who remain at odds over a number of other domestic issues. The vote was Kevin McCarthy’s first major win since being elected speaker on January 7.

“We spent decades passing policies that welcomed China into the global system. In return, China has exported oppression, aggression and anti-Americanism,” McCarthy said in a debate on the House floor. “There is bipartisan consensus that the era of trusting Communist China is over.”

The California Republican, who channeled Congress’s increased skepticism of Beijing’s intentions, encouraged Democratic counterparts to help ensure the committee remained a bipartisan effort to secure American interests.

“That is my hope, my desire, my wish that we speak with one voice, that we focus on the challenges that we have,” he said. “The threat is too great for us to bicker with ourselves.”

The panel is to be led by GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and has a sweeping mandate to examine the full scope of President Joe Biden’s approach toward China. It promises to advise the White House on everything from economic policy and high-tech export controls to the United States’ military posture in Asia.

As the next election cycle nears, the committee will test the president’s legislative agenda and his capacity to balance the executive’s cautious diplomatic outreach to China against the legislature’s hawkishness toward the long-ruling Communist Party. It comes as Chinese President Xi Jinping seeks to stabilize fraught ties with Washington after securing his own norm-breaking third term in office in October 2022.

China’s foreign ministry and the White House didn’t return separate requests for comment ahead of publications.

“It is time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in bipartisan fashion, and today’s overwhelming bipartisan vote to create the Select Committee on the CCP is an important first step in that direction. The next step is to populate the committee with serious members on both sides and get to work with a sense of urgency,” Gallagher said in a press release.

On the House floor earlier, the Republican lawmaker called for a “united front” in Congress. “In so doing, at every step along the way, we must make sure that we are drawing a distinction between the party and the Chinese people, with whom we have no quarrel, and who are often the primary victims of CCP aggression and repression.”

The language mirrored that of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whose attempt to distinguish China’s public from its ruling party sparked Beijing’s anxieties about regime change.

Tuesday’s vote—365 vs. 65—was backed by 146 Democrats, but all no votes also came from the House’s minority party. Among the main concerns was the potential for a flare-up in anti-Asian American sentiment that resembled the anti-Japanese sentiment of the 1980s, during another contest with a major economy.

Rep. Judy Chu, a California Democrat who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, urged the committee not to become “an open invitation to traffic in blatant xenophobic and anti-China rhetoric that we know results in physical violence against Asian Americans.”

New York Democrat Rep. Gregory Meeks, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was also among those who cast a no vote.

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