WASHINGTON (SBG) — A Senate banking panel examining threats to the American economy from China on Wednesday came to focus at one point on the conduct of a House lawmaker recently reported to have been targeted by Chinese intelligence operations inside the U.S.

Conducted virtually by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., chair of the Banking Committee's subcommittee on economic policy, the hearing featured lead-off testimony from Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, a member of the House intelligence committee who previous served as a clandestine officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hurd warned that Beijing wages espionage warfare against the U.S. in ways far different from those practiced by the American intelligence community. As an example, the lawmaker cited allegations, first reported by Axios last week, that Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., also a member of the intelligence committee, was forced to sever ties to a woman named Fang Fang in 2015, after U.S. agencies provided Swalwell with a "defensive briefing" that conveyed official findings that the Bay Area fundraiser and activist had been operating as a Chinese spy.

Asked by Cotton to assess the efficacy of Chinese intelligence operations directed specifically at elected officials in the United States, Hurd replied: "The fact that Fang Fang was focusing on folks at a lower level and then got close to a member of Congress that had access, and was ultimately serving on the House intelligence committee, should concern us all."

He added: "Chinese intelligence take the long-term approach to looking at what is a potential intelligence operation twenty or thirty years down the road. Our intelligence services aren't prepared to deal with that. We don't operate that way."

Swalwell, in a statement to Axios, acknowledged that he provided the FBI with information on Fang, with whom he had appeared in a number of photographs, but denied further comment, in part, he said, because he did not want to jeopardize information that may be classified. Swalwell has not been formally accused of any wrongdoing, though GOP lawmakers on the intelligence committee have called for his removal from the panel. Axios reported that Fang was not thought by U.S. intelligence to have accessed any classified information. 

Hurd, who is retiring from Congress in January after three terms, also said he is "investigating some reports in South Texas of how Chinese nationals have come across our Southern border illegally, in order to start working in some of these commercial space companies. This is absolutely crazy," he continued, "that [the Chinese government] would take an astrophysicist and try to get them to act like they're going to go paint a wall, or be a basic day laborer in order, for them to get access to some of these commercial space facilities."

Other witnesses provided a range of proposals on how to counter the mounting economic threat to the U.S. posed by China, challenges that derive both from its status as the world's second-largest economy and from its role in the spread of the coronavirus, which has devastated the global economy since March.

Among the many calls for stiffened U.S. penalties for Chinese transgressions, such as its abandonment of trade obligations and violations of intellectual property rights, there walso a call from a cnter-left think tank for greater U.S. infrastructure spending here at home.

"The United States would never send its military into today's battles with Cold War-era weaponry. But it forces its workers to fight the twenty-first century economic battles with twentieth-century infrastructure," said Melanie Hart, Ph.D., the China policy director at the Center for American Progress. "That is a gift to Beijing."

Hart aslo said that over the last two decades, when China surged economically amid the effects of globalization and the digital revolution, the U.S. did not maintain its previous leadership role in terms of investment in technological research and development.

Derek Scissors, an economist with the conservative think tank AEI, called for the Department of Commerce in the incoming Biden-Harris administration to take steps to enact export control measures against China that were passed by Congress in 2018 but never implemented. 

However, Scissors also cited some evidence to suggest that Chinese economic superiority over the United States is by no means foreordained, that the Communist Party rulers in Beijing face daunting economic challenges of their own. Among them, he cited low birth rates, high leveraging of Chinese debt, and mismanagement of human capital. "They're much less productive than us on a per capita basis," Scissors told the lawmakers. "They've wasted their opportunity to catch up in productivity. They've spent a lot of money for progressively less economic gain. That's going to be an anchor around [the neck of] their economy for years to come."