Competing to be tougher on China seems to be the latest fad in the US Congress. A bill to intervene in the Xinjiang affairs passed the Senate on Thursday, and another to intervene in Tibet is in the works. Before that, dozens of proposals had been drafted to shift the blame for the COVID-19 outbreak to China.

Republicans in the House of Representatives recently formed a China task force whose objective seems nothing but brought more troubles for the US-China relations. China has been the focus of congressional foreign policy in recent years, but the current frenzy to attack China is closely linked to the COVID-19 outbreak. In the US, the pandemic has brought not only a health crisis but also unprecedented economic and social challenges. For Congress, hypersensitive to social sentiments, there seems to be no more natural way to distract voters than to blame China. 

Attacking China will not solve the US' problems. The US is now the hardest-hit nation by the coronavirus, and the outbreak is far from being contained. As most of its scientists and foreign policy experts point out, China and the US need to strengthen communication and coordination on everything from vaccine and treatment research to economic policy coordination to avoid a global recession.

Congress has chosen to ignore these needs. They are more concerned with the short-term effects on the ballot box. In the face of a crisis, putting the onus on others and projecting an image of an adversary or even an enemy can give politicians a close look, which in American politics is often more important than solving real problems. This is precisely the underlying reasoning of the recently-publicized 57-page Republican memo -- party candidates were taught to attack China to make voters forget Trump's mistakes. Their unspoken subtext is that people can be manipulated.

Many stress that the current US discontentment with China is bipartisan. However, the pitfalls here should not be overlooked. To a large degree, either party approaches the China issue with the other in mind, distorting the policy-making process with an out-hawking game. The recent exchanges between the Trump and Biden campaigns speak volumes. Yet, as a recent New York Times opinion piece reminded, a bipartisan addiction to fear-mongering has once failed the country in the war on terrorism. As things stand, the mistake of history seems to be returning. 

Some Congressmen are keen to create a new cold war with China. They see China through an ideological prism. The former US ambassador to China and long-time Senator from Montana Max Baucus recently told me that he was stunned by the fact that so many Congress members, especially those so-called China hawks, have never been to China. As Baucus puts it, ignorance creates fear. 

Apart from ideological bias, there's also political opportunism. Just take a look at the anti-China contests between Senators Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley. Many analysts believe they are competing for the GOP foreign policy leadership role left by John McCain. What they don't realize is that their political games are hurting America and making the world more dangerous, which in the end only demonstrates a weak foreign policy judgment. 

Henry Kissinger has noted that the United States has entered all its major military engagements since 1945 with great enthusiasm and bipartisan support. "And then, as the war developed," Kissinger said, "the domestic support for it began to come apart." 

Today, as members of Congress vie to be China hawks during a global crisis, lessons from the nation's history are becoming more important -- a bipartisan fanaticism can prove to be nothing but a short cut to a quagmire.