Earlier this month, the US federal government questioned the University of California, Berkeley, about its collaboration with Chinese research institutes, suspecting Berkeley researchers of sharing technology with the government of the People’s Republic of China. This initiative was led by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party — one of the most powerful bodies advancing the aims of the US establishment’s worst hawks. Since late last year, the committee has been gathering legislators on both sides of the aisle for a coordinated approach to countering Chinese influence in the world.

Belligerence against China has become a rare point of bipartisan consensus. The Select Committee — less than a year old — is symptomatic of how the renewed industrial nationalism of the Biden administration has been taking shape through growing rivalry with China.

Although we should be clear-eyed about the authoritarian nature of China’s government and its own dangerous geopolitical ambitions, we also have to understand that the Select Committee, along with the whole host of anti-China initiatives being promoted by the US government, is a direct threat to peace and to the civil liberties of ordinary people in the United States. Rather than safeguarding everyday people and the political refugees that the committee purports to defend, these bodies simply represent a further restriction of people’s freedoms domestically and encourage further saber-rattling by China.