House indulges in Mad Hatter's tea party: China Daily editorial

The US House of Representatives seems to have got lost down the rabbit hole of its anti-China campaign. In what has been dubbed China Week, the House is voting intensively on about 22 bills targeting China.

These bills, which have been proposed since last year, cover a wide range of areas, from export controls and port cranes, to biosecurity and agriculture, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Confucius Institutes.

Most of the bills had been passed as of Thursday, with a majority of them having received support from both sides of the House, showing the anti-China cause has become arguably the sole common ground for the Republicans and Democrats.

While the United States' top legislative body has spent a whole week effectively shouting "off with its head", giving the US people an unmistakable impression that the US can enforce losses on China from which the US will gain, the US government has repeatedly stated to its Chinese counterpart that it will handle relations with China responsibly, and it does not seek to contain China's development.

Any of these bills, if signed into law, will deal a heavy blow to Sino-US exchanges and practical cooperation, despite the two sides' efforts to keep bilateral communication and collaboration on the right track.

Given the House's China Week coincides with the first televised presidential election debate between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, the House Republicans are actually trying to canvass votes for Trump, while trying to sabotage the Democratic Joe Biden administration's ongoing efforts to repair ties with China, which seemed to have been boosted by White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's productive visit to China last month.

For more than 40 years, Sino-US relations have been largely of a mutually beneficial and cooperative nature. The efforts of some US politicians to redefine the relations as a zero-sum game, without being able to change the close economic, trade and cultural exchanges between the two countries, will inevitably boomerang, harming US interests in different ways.

The content of the bills and their potential damage only serve to show how divorced from reality these US lawmakers are, if not their hysterical state of mind when it comes to China. If simply bashing China is enough to handle what the US side claims to be the most consequential and complicated bilateral ties in the world, why the great lengths the US has gone to these years to prevent their competition from veering into conflict?

The Biden administration has been constantly urging Beijing not to misunderstand US policy toward China. But what would it think were Chinese lawmakers to spend a whole week passing more than 20 bills targeting the US?

If the separation of legislative and administrative powers in the US has become a shield for the country's politicians to say one thing and do another to other countries, randomly trampling on the basic norms of international relations, the key foundation of the US' political system that it has long taken pride in will have collapsed.

In fact, all the signs show that there has never been any true separation of powers in the US, only a power game of overt and covert interest exchanges between the two parties for their own narrow ends.