Rubio: U.S. needs to mobilize 'whole society' against China

The U.S. Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act last year, which bans imports of Xinjiang products unless companies can prove that their products do not involve forced labor. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, one of the sponsors of the bill, said on Tuesday that a number of U.S. companies had previously tried to weaken the bill, showing that the United States cannot rely solely on the government to fight the CCP, but also requires the participation of the whole society.

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In recent years, a number of human rights organizations and research institutions have cited multiple sources to disclose that large-scale forced labor exists in Xinjiang. After being forced to undergo vocational training, thousands of local Muslims are transferred to work in factories around the world, and they have little choice. .

As early as two years ago, Republican Senator Rubio and other bipartisan lawmakers jointly proposed the "Prevention of Forced Uyghur Labor Act", which aims to ensure that US companies do not participate in or profit from forced labor in any way. But the "New York Times" previously quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that large companies such as Nike and Coca-Cola have invested heavily in lobbying Congress to try to weaken some of the provisions of the bill, claiming that it could disrupt their supply chains in China.

Rubio: To fight the CCP, we must mobilize "the whole society"

Rubio, vice chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, delivered a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in the US, on Tuesday, saying that the most serious threat the US is currently facing is China, which requires not only necessary countermeasures from Washington, but also the joint efforts of the whole society. response.

“We have to mobilize not only the government, but also the whole-of-society to fight against China. Conservatives and liberals must understand this, and small and medium-sized enterprises and big companies like Tesla and Amazon are also understand that."

However, Rubio is not the first American politician to make this claim. In early 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the United States needs to mobilize the power of the whole society to deal with the threat posed by China in order to protect its own economy and security.

At the U.S. government level, words about China are appearing more and more frequently in major strategy documents. The 2022 National Defense Strategy submitted by the US Department of Defense to Congress on Monday pointed out that China is the most important "strategic competitor" of the United States and a "pacing challenge".

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular press conference on Tuesday that the United States should not create "imaginary enemies" and provoke "group confrontation."

"The above-mentioned U.S. defense strategy report is full of Cold War and camp confrontation thinking. China and Russia are two major powers, and the U.S. attempt to contain and suppress China and Russia will not succeed."

In addition, U.S. President Biden mentioned China as many as a dozen times in his 2023 fiscal year budget submitted to Congress on Monday, proposing to allocate $773 billion to the U.S. Department of Defense to support and strengthen the U.S. military’s deterrence against China, and will provide The Countering PRC Malign Influence Fund has allocated $400 million to counter Beijing's global influence operations.

Also on Monday, the U.S. Senate passed the America COMPETES Act, which aims to boost U.S. competitiveness by investing in domestic industries to better compete with China. The bill will be sent to the House of Representatives for negotiation with the previous version passed by the House, and a new consolidated version will be voted on again in the Senate and House of Representatives.

In his speech on Tuesday, Rubio stressed that the United States must reduce its dependence on hostile countries like China or face huge security risks.

"We're going to revive American industrial capacity, A country that's reliant on a hostile regime won't last. Quite simply, if you're not an industrial powerhouse, you're not a powerhouse. You have to be productive."

Americans are increasingly wary of China

Not only in Washington, but the general American public is becoming more and more wary of China. A Gallup poll released on the eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine found that only one in five Americans had a positive view of China, behind Cuba (40%) and Saudi Arabia (33%). ). Among Republicans in particular, only 13 percent have a positive view of China.

The agency’s data also showed that the initial outbreak of the new coronavirus in Wuhan has shattered Americans’ perceptions of China. Nearly 80 percent of them had a negative view of China in the past two years. In February 2020, at the beginning of the outbreak, only two-thirds of Americans had a negative view of China.

More notably, nearly half (49%) of Americans in Gallup's poll this year see China as America's greatest enemy, a 27-point increase from two years ago. By contrast, less than a third of Americans believe that the United States' greatest enemy is Russia.

Rubio pointed out on Tuesday that the threat posed by China to the United States is unprecedented.

"I hope and believe that there is a gradual consensus in American politics that China is the most powerful and near-peer adversary the country has ever faced."

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Monday it would investigate allegations that Chinese solar makers circumvented tariffs by doing business in some Southeast Asian countries. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said a few days ago that the U.S. will no longer "stand idly by" and will be more aggressive in putting pressure on China to change what Washington sees as market-distorting trade practices.