This op-ed was originally published by The Hill on October 2, 2023.

By USCIRF Vice Chair Frederick A. Davie and Commissioner Frank Wolf

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engages in nefarious transnational repression activities such as relentlessly pursuing, harassing, and intimidating diaspora religious communities and others with ties to China. In response, the U.S. government has taken significant and consequential actions by prosecuting individuals who engage in these illegal activities on behalf of the Chinese government. For example, in May 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Wang Shunjun and four of China’s Ministry of State Security agents for transnational repression activities targeting Uyghurs and Tibetans in the United States. However, the CCP’s malign political influence campaigns in the United States, too, warrant our attention and tangible policy response.  

China’s lobbying efforts in the U.S. Congress represent a particularly insidious form of influence, aimed at shaping federal policymaking for the furtherance of the CCP’s interests and goals. China’s state-owned and private companies with ties to its government hire American lobbyists to represent the CCP’s interest on Capitol Hill—including former members of Congress and other U.S. government officials, from both Democratic and Republican parties. For example, former members of Congress lobbied on behalf of Chinese government owned surveillance company Hikvision, which the U.S. government has sanctioned for its complicity in human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang concentration camps.  

Indeed, realizing the severity of this challenge, members of Congress from both parties have begun to come together to introduce legislation that would address this alarming trend. In 2023, a bipartisan group of senators and members of Congress reintroduced the Disclosing Foreign Influence in Lobbying Act (H.R.1190) to close existing loopholes in the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) and the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA). It requires registered lobbyists to disclose their foreign sources of influence, which includes “any foreign countries or political parties that are involved in the direction, planning, supervision, or control of the lobbyist’s activities.” 

More stringent disclosure requirements alone may not deter American lobbyists—including former members of Congress—from representing the interests of their CCP clients while, of course, getting handily paid for such work. The Stop Helping Adversaries Manipulate Everything Act (also known as the Shame Act; H.R.9140), introduced in 2022, would further ban registered agents or lobbyists of foreign adversaries from receiving compensation for their services

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is gravely concerned about the CCP’s political interference through lobbying in the U.S. Congress. Such malign activity undermines religious freedom and broader human rights, and it threatens our nation’s security and sovereignty. USCIRF held a hearing in December 2022 to shine a light on this issue and to explore possible solutions. We believe it is in our nation’s core interest to increase transparency on foreign lobbying and to ultimately and specifically ban lobbying by agents acting on behalf of foreign adversaries, like the CCP.  

As USCIRF commissioners, we urge members of Congress from both sides of the aisle to consolidate relevant legislation and to push forward all possible and consequential legislation to curb the CCP’s political influencing operations on Capitol Hill and beyond.