China using ‘tentacles’ to erode US security, senator warns, urging passage of bill boosting scrutiny of deals
China has ‘weaponised investment to vacuum up our advanced technologies’, John Cornyn, the second-most senior Republican, tells the US Senate
A senior US senator said China is using its “tentacles” to undermine American security, a warning delivered to cajole lawmakers to pass legislation that would step up scrutiny of Chinese investments in the United States.
“Some of our adversaries, most notably China, have altered the strategic landscape and [are] not playing by the same set of rules,” Senator John Cornyn, the second-most senior Republican, said on the Senate floor.
“China has weaponised investment in an attempt to vacuum up our advanced technologies and simultaneously undermine our defence industrial base.”
Vulnerabilities caused by these efforts include stepped up Chinese stealth fighter patrols in the South China Sea, according to Cornyn’s office. The senator co-authored the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernisation Act (FIRRMA), with Dianne Feinstein, a senior Democrat, to halt such progress.
Cornyn said: “As [China] acquires US firms and technology and intellectual property, as well as the know-how to put it to use, the risk is that the Chinese government, which has its tentacles not just in state-owned Chinese companies, but also in so-called private Chinese firms, that it will get its hands on these capabilities and use them against us.”
If enacted, the legislation would expand foreign investment review procedures overseen by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is chaired by the US treasury secretary and seeks input from the departments of defence and homeland security, among other federal bodies.
