By Andrew Thornebrooke
January 30, 2023 Updated: January 30, 2023
A bipartisan duo of
lawmakers is calling for greater efforts to curb the malign influence of China’s communist regime through protectionist
measures.
Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.)
appeared together for a joint interview on Jan. 29, where the two sounded the alarm
on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to undermine U.S. national
security, and said that the regime had unfairly manipulated the
international economy.
“The Communist Party, under
[CCP General Secretary] Xi’s leadership… basically changed the rules of the
road,” Warner said during the
interview with CBS.
“They made clear in
Chinese law that every company in China’s ultimate responsibility is to the
Communist Party, not to their customers, not to their shareholders.”
Warner said that U.S.
leadership had been “asleep at the switch for a long time” concerning how the
CCP manipulates and undermines international trade. As such, he said, the
United States was now playing a costly game of catch-up with expensive and
sweeping policies like the Chips and Science Act, which will provide $52
billion to shore up the domestic manufacturing of semiconductors.
To that end, Warner said
that the United States would need to broaden its understanding of what was
essential for national security, expanding its scope from mere military-related
domains such as the manufacture of ships and tanks to other industries like AI,
food production, and telecommunications.
Allowing the CCP to gain
or maintain the advantage in these domains should be a non-starter, he added.
“If there’s one issue
that still is extraordinarily bipartisan, it is a growing concern about China,
and a recognition that in this technology race, second place is not good enough
for us.”
‘China Changed Capitalism’
For his part, Rubio said
that the CCP’s simultaneous assault on the U.S. economy and national security
was a direct result of the regime’s stratagem of military-civil fusion, in
which all commercial technologies produced in the country are also expected to
be used to benefit its military.
Thus, by opening China to
foreign investments from capitalist nations and using the funds to supercharge
its own military, Rubio said, the CCP had effectively weaponized the United
States’ economic system against itself.
“The Chinese have found a
way to use capitalism against
us,” Rubio said. “What I mean by that is the ability to attract investment into
entities that are deeply linked to the state.”
“That military-commercial
fusion that exists in China is a concept that we don’t have in this country. We
have contractors that do defense work, but there is no distinction in China
between advancements in technology, biomedicine, whatever it might be, and the
interest of the state.”
Rubio added that the
typical viewpoint of policymakers in the liberal West had long been that access
to market economies and all the benefits of capitalist society would ultimately
transform China for the better. While the monies from such a policy have
certainly allowed China to advance technologically and militarily, however, the
CCP has become far more authoritarian, not less.
“Twenty years ago,
everybody thought capitalism was going to change China, and we woke up to the
realization that capitalism didn’t change China,” Rubio said. “China changed
capitalism.”
“They’ve used it to their
advantage and to our disadvantage … They’ve done so from a technological and
industrial perspective. And so you have seen the largest theft and transfer of
intellectual property in the history of humanity occur over the last 15 years,
some of it funded by American taxpayers. That has to stop.”
Rubio said that
government interference was necessary to secure the national interest from such
a threat, and that national security priorities would need to take precedence
over the ability of individual businesses to further enrich the CCP and
themselves at the expense of said security.
“What do you do when the
most efficient outcome is not in our national interest?” Rubio said. “Because
it’s more efficient to buy rare earth minerals from the Chinese. It’s more efficient
to have things built over there in many cases. But is it in our national
interest to depend on them for 80-something percent of the active ingredients
in our pharmaceuticals?”
“In those instances where
the market-efficient outcome is not in our national interest, it is my opinion
that we default to the national interest because, without our national interest
or our national security, the other things won’t matter. We are not a market.
We’re a nation.”
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