During an exclusive sit down interview with The Floridian in his Washington, D.C. office, Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) expressed the grave concern he has over the national security threat that China poses to American industries.
Sen. Rubio, who is one of a few Senators privy to top-secret intelligence briefings, warned that the Chinese threat is “beyond any threat this country has ever faced” because of how expansive it was.
Rubio believes that China feels cheated and humiliated out of its assumed rightful place at the top of the world economic food chain, and is actively trying to regain that top spot as the world’s most powerful country because they “view America as a power in decline.
Here is what Rubio stated about the Chinese threat:
“It’s beyond any threat this country has ever faced because its multi-faceted, it's not just your traditional government spying on government for secrets. It’s corporate. It’s stealing technology. It’s commercial espionage. It’s the most serious commercial espionage the country has ever faced, the serious technological espionage that we’ve ever faced, and among the most serious national security espionage that we’ve ever faced.
Embedded in that is the influence campaign designed to influence journalists, academics, and others to further China’s narrative about their role in the world and who they are.
Best way to understand it is look, China views the last 100 years as a historical aberration. For 3 thousand years they believe they were the center of the world.
They were the largest and powerful economy in the world, one of the most powerful countries, and they view the last 100 years as a century of humiliation that’s a historical aberration, and they seek to reclaim what they view as their rightful role as the worlds most powerful country, and they view America as a power in decline.
From my vantage point, we have allowed them to fool us into doing so at our expense, so we spent 25 years around here sort of believing that if once China got rich, they would be more like us.
We finally woke up to the reality that that’s not going to be the case. And so now we have two choices, we can allow the trend to continue, and we are going to wind up in a world which China dominates the top 10 percent industries of the 21st century and is increasingly able to infringe upon our freedoms here at home.
We saw recently with the NBA and other instances. So that’s one option. Or the other option is to seek to address these mistakes and achieve a balanced and sustainable relationship between great powers.
We should stop allowing to cheat, which is what we did. At its basic level, a Chinese company can to America and do any business they want. American companies cannot go to China and work, and if do allow you in, they force you to partner with a Chinese company that proceeds to steal your secrets, figures out what you do and then kicks you out, becomes your competitor and then puts you out of business at a cheaper price.
We can’t continue to have government policies that say, well because the most efficient market outcome is to send the job to China, that’s what we should do, yeah, because that may be great in the short term for the corporate profits of a company because their labor costs go down, but its disastrous in the long term."
