A bill to curb US investment in China will be reintroduced to Congress, the chairman of the House of Representatives Select Committee on China said on Tuesday, adding that the bill’s failure to pass into law last year was not due to opposition from billionaire Elon Musk.
Large US investment mutual funds that track stock indexes have criticized lawmakers from both parties for funneling billions of US dollars from investors into shares of Chinese companies that the United States believes are facilitating China’s military development.
In December, some Democratic lawmakers accused some Republicans of protecting Musk’s business interests in China by removing provisions in the U.S. funding bill that would have barred Americans from making such investments in strategic sectors like certain AI systems and semiconductors.
Musk, a close ally of President Donald Trump and CEO of electric carmaker Tesla, which has extensive operations in China, helped lead an online protest last year against the government funding bill, which included investment restrictions. The investment measures were ultimately removed from the bill, but it was not clear whether Musk specifically opposed them.
Representative John Moolenaar, a Republican on the select committee who has called passing restrictions on outbound investment to China a top priority, said at an event in Washington that the legislation would require “a lot of political will” to become law.
“We came very close to passing the outbound investment rules in the last few weeks of the last Congress. It’s going to be reintroduced, and we’re going to work very hard to move it forward,” Moolenaar said at the Institute of World Politics.
“I would like to believe that most Americans, when they understand the threat they face, will want to do the right thing for our country,” he said.
China, the United States’ top geopolitical and technological rival, has said it opposes such legislation, calling it an unfair attempt to target Chinese products and companies in the name of national security.
Musk, who has been appointed by Trump to lead an effort to reduce the size of the U.S. federal workforce, said Moolenaar was “not convinced” that he should be responsible for oversight.
“I don’t believe that’s the reason it wasn’t allowed to go forward,” he said.
“We had different judiciary committees with different perspectives, and we were trying to do one thing, and the Senate was trying to do another,” he said.
