Sens. Rubio and Warner Sound Alarm on CCP’s Economic Threat

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers calls for greater efforts to limit the harmful 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 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 claimed that U.S. leadership has been “asleep at the switch for a long time” Concerning how the CCP manipulates or undermines international trade. According to him, the United States is now playing a costly and difficult game of catch-up by adopting expensive and broad policies, such as the Chips and Science Act that will provide $52 Billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

Warner indicated that the United States needed to expand its understanding about what is essential for national security. It would do this by expanding its reach beyond just military-related fields like the manufacturing of ships and tanks, to include other industries, such as AI, food processing, and telecommunications.

He said that allowing the CCP to have or keep an advantage in these areas should not be allowed.

“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 said that policymakers in liberal West have long believed that China would benefit from access to capitalist economies and all its benefits. Although China has made significant technological and military advancements thanks to this policy, the CCP has grown far more authoritarian than ever before.

“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 stated that government interference was necessary in order to protect the national interest from such threats, and that national security priorities should be prioritized over the ability of individuals to enrich the CCP or themselves at the cost of national 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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