Press Release

Representative Ami Bera, M.D. (CA-07), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, Central Asia, and Nonproliferation, today chaired a Subcommittee hearing on countering gray zone coercion in the Indo-Pacific.

"For years, our adversaries have used gray zone tactics to incrementally advance their objectives," said Chairman Bera. "In the Indo-Pacific, the People's Republic of China Government increasingly uses nefarious and coercive economic practices to punish countries and private entities for pursuing policies that Beijing deems counter to its interests. It's critical that we work with our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific to adapt our tools of statecraft to better detect, attribute, and respond to the types of non-transparent coercion employed by the PRC. At the same time must also improve our ability to build redundancy in our supply chains, increase awareness of disinformation, and harden cyber networks against attacks."

Gray zone operations draw from a range of geopolitical, economic, military, and cyber and information operation tools while staying below the threshold for kinetic military conflict and are deliberately tailored to complicate the United States' response by operating in the murky space between war and peace.

Thursday's hearing focused on improving the interagency coordinated response to these tactics, how the United States should prioritize counter activities, how the United States should define intolerable behavior including how that is communicated to adversaries, and other related topics.

Witnesses at today's hearing included:

• Dr. David Shullman - Senior Director of the Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council, where he leads the council's work on China.
• Ms. Elisabeth Braw - Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on defense against emerging national security challenges, such as hybrid and gray-zone threats.
• The Honorable Matt Armstrong served as a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors from 2013 to 2017. He is an author, lecturer, and strategist on public diplomacy and international media, and serves on several organizational boards, including the Public Diplomacy Council. He has served as the Executive Director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy and was an adjunct professor of public diplomacy at the Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Southern California.

Bera previously introduced the bipartisan Countering China Economic Coercion Act to establish the first-ever interagency task force to respond to the People's Republic of China's growing coercion against governments, businesses, organizations, and individuals.