The White House likes to speak of its China policy as a small yard with a high fence, where critical technologies are protected even as the world’s two biggest economies continue to do business together. In the view of one US lawmaker, that yard needs to be much bigger.

Representative Mike Gallagher has emerged as one of the most vocal China critics on Capitol Hill, with ambitions that include curbing the flow of American investor money into China. In January, the Wisconsin Republican assumed the leadership of the newly formed Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.