: Deterring China is a top priority in Congress for the House’s number four Republican.
Michigan Rep. Lisa McClain, GOP conference chairwoman, is putting forth legislation that would expose the assets of top CCP officials and bar them from using U.S. banking systems if China chooses to invade Taiwan.
Her bill would require the Treasury secretary to unleash details about illegal assets held by Chinese officials and ‘expose all the players’ to show where their money is coming from to the public.
The U.S. has for decades operated under a deliberately vague ‘One China’ policy that supports Taiwan with military aid but refuses to say whether America would defend Taiwan if China were to invade.
‘This is deterrence. The U.S. can’t risk an invasion of Taiwan that would interrupt our critical supply chains,’ McClain, a member of the Financial Services Committee, told Fox News Digital. ‘We need to keep the pressure up, we need to remember that China is not our friend.’
McClain’s legislation dropped just as President Donald Trump announced another 10% in tariffs he intends to place on Chinese goods – the latest shot in an escalating trade war. Canada and Mexico will also face another 10% in tariffs.
The president imposed minimum 10% tariffs on Chinese imports last month. He had also proposed 25% tariffs for Mexico and Canada, but those were delayed amid promises that the two countries would do more to step up border enforcement. However, Trump said Thursday the nations were still not doing enough to combat drug trafficking.
‘Drugs are still pouring into our country from Mexico and Canada at very high and unacceptable levels. A large percentage of these drugs, much of them in the form of fentanyl, are made in, and supplied by, China,’ Trump said.
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China, meanwhile, has warned the U.S. there are ‘no winners’ in a trade war and insisted it has been aggressively targeting fentanyl as a favor to the U.S.
‘Out of kindness and sympathy to U.S. people and the responsibility as a big country, although fentanyl is not a problem in China, China has put into a lot of human, material and financial resources to assist U.S. to address the fentanyl crisis. It is fair to say that China is genuine and unselfish in this respect,’ Yang Pang, second secretary for fentanyl and law enforcement, told U.S. journalists last week.
She added that China has handed over more than 10,000 ‘pieces of information’ to its U.S. counterpart related to online platforms conducting fentanyl trade.
U.S. intelligence officials have pegged 2027 as the year when China will have the capability to launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan.
China in recent years has increasingly crept into Taiwanese waters with threatening displays of force.
Taiwan dispatched its naval, land and air forces on Wednesday after China launched a live-fire exercise zone just 40 nautical miles off its coast.
As part of the drill, Taiwan says it detected 32 Chinese military aircraft carrying out joint exercises with warships. Chinese officials have so far not acknowledged Taiwan’s complaints.
And days ago, the CCP’s fourth-ranked leader, Wang Huning, called for greater ‘reunification’ efforts. China has long maintained that Taiwan is a rebel territory belonging to Beijing.
China must ‘firmly grasp the right to dominate and take the initiative in cross-strait relations, and unswervingly push forward the cause of reunification of the motherland,’ Huning said, according to a translation by Chinese state media.
On Tuesday, Taiwan’s Coast Guard detained the Chinese crew of a Togolese-registered vessel suspected of severing an undersea fiber optic cable connecting the islands of Taiwan and Penghu.
Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.