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US-China relations
ChinaDiplomacy

Cold war is back: Steve Bannon helps revive US committee to target ‘aggressive totalitarian foe’ China

  • Former White House strategist among founders of a new version of group whose past incarnations focused on the Soviet Union
  • Members say China poses ‘existential and ideological threat to the United States and the idea of freedom’

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Steve Bannon is among the co-founders of a committee that first existed in the 1950s before reappearing in 1976. Photo: EPA-EFE
Wendy Wuin Beijing

A group of Washington policy advisers and former US government officials including Steve Bannon have revived a cold war-era advocacy organisation to take aim at China, which it called “an aggressive totalitarian foe”.

The Committee on the Present Danger: China, or CPDC, will be launched to facilitate “public education and advocacy against the full array of conventional and non-conventional dangers” posed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, the group said in an announcement on Monday.

The committee’s latest iteration underscores the growth of opposition to Beijing in Washington’s policymaking circles, which has helped to fuel a bilateral tariff war started by US President Donald Trump last year and a new law that will tighten oversight of Chinese investments in the United States.

The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) was first established in the early 1950s as a bulwark against the influence of communism in the US. The group disbanded after some leading members were drafted into the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, but in 1976 was reformed by US foreign policy hawks to counter the Soviet Union during the cold war.

The committee members warned at a press event in Washington on Monday that China had posed a broad range of threats to the US: expanding military power, strengthening strategic nuclear capability, stealing US technology, repressing religions, human rights and minority groups, initiating “chemical warfare” by being the prime source of fentanyl reaching the US and influencing US campuses and corporations.
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