Why It Matters

A House Select Committee hearing on Chinese Communist Party economic espionage exposed deep tensions over how the U.S. should confront foreign threats without profiling Asian Americans. The committee met Thursday, June 25, as the Trump Administration pursues an aggressive strategy that civil rights advocates warn could repeat past discrimination. The hearing's most contentious moment came when Ranking Member Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) pressed a key witness about past social media posts calling for denaturalization of Chinese Americans, signaling Democratic resistance to policies that could target citizens based on ancestry.

The Big Picture

The House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) convened to examine how the CCP's economic espionage and malign influence operations have accelerated at the state and local level. The committee, chaired by Rep. John R. Moolenaar (R-MI-2), includes 24 members across both parties. The hearing brought together three witnesses with starkly different perspectives: a former intelligence official, a private security entrepreneur, and a civil rights leader.

Rep. Jason Smith, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, attended the hearing, calling for examination of tax-exempt organizations with close ties to the CCP. The Ways and Means Committee investigation found that several tax-exempt organizations have been "causing chaos and stoking violence in our communities, while also interfering in our political system." The committee demanded that CCP-linked nonprofits comply with document requests.

What They're Saying

  • David R. Shedd, former Acting Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency: "Taking advantage of America’s open academic environment and research institutions, it has collaborated with and recruited scientists, engineers, and software programmers. These experts later provided China with critical advantages in field such as AI, quantum computing, advanced light detection and ranging – LIDAR – remote sensing technology, electric vehicles, and green energy. These areas of emerging technology are the key battlegrounds in geopolitical rivalry and great power competition."
  • Michael Lucci, Founder and CEO of State Armor: "One of the most persistent and widely reported homeland threats is that of foreign adversaries like the CCP pre-positioning assets, entities and individuals near military bases and critical infrastructure. Such pre-positioning allows for intelligence collection and potentially sabotage." The hearing's most heated exchange centered on Lucci's past social media posts calling for the denaturalization of Chinese Americans who obtained U.S. citizenship. Ranking Member Khanna pressed Lucci on these statements, signaling Democratic concern that the witness's positions could blur legitimate counterintelligence with anti-Asian animus. Lucci's denaturalization controversy drew sharp Democratic scrutiny, though Republicans remained focused on the underlying threat assessment. The tension reflected a fundamental divide on the committee: how to address genuine Chinese economic espionage without replicating the profiling that characterized the DOJ's now-defunct China Initiative.
  • John Yang, President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice: "For nearly 25 million Asian Americans, the stakes of getting this right are immediate and personal. Every era in which U.S.-China tensions have escalated without corresponding care for civil rights, from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to Japanese American incarceration, to the China Initiative, has been followed by a period in which Asian Americans were treated as suspects in their own country."

The Bottom Line

The House Select Committee on CCP Strategic Competition is required to report its findings, policy recommendations, and legislative proposals to the House and relevant standing committees no later than Dec. 31, 2026. The committee's recommendations will likely shape how Congress approaches state-level CCP threats in the coming months.

Shedd recommended research security reform across university and national labs, as well as a White House–led Economic Security Council to limit investment in China's projects. On the side of social change, Yang recommended an evidence-base requirement for investigations, anti-bias safeguards in national security, and increase language access to reach Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) businesses.

The Trump Administration has signaled aggressive posture toward China, creating political space for the committee's work. The CCP economic espionage hearing exposed the challenge of addressing genuine national security threats without repeating the racial profiling that marked the China Initiative era.

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