[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 40 (Thursday, March 2, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S627-S629]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 China

  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, no issue dominates our attention more these 
days than our growing rivalry with China, and rightly so. It is a 
historic challenge. It is one that I think we waited way too long to 
recognize, and now we are scrambling to make up for that.
  But I think, in all the attention that is being paid to this, it is 
important that we remember or at least recognize that the core, the 
essential issue here is not China, per se, by itself; the core issue 
here is a decades-old, bipartisan consensus that is entrenched in our 
economics and our politics--a consensus that said that economic 
globalization would deliver, well, freedom and peace. It was almost a 
religious faith in the power of the free flow of people and money and 
goods across borders as the answer to virtually every problem that 
faced the world. That is how we built our politics. That is how we 
built our foreign policy.
  You know what, for about 50 years after World War II, it generally 
worked. The reason why it generally worked is because we didn't 
actually have a global market. If you look at the economy we were 
engaged in, if you look at the free trade and the like during that 
period of time, it was primarily a market made up of democratic allies, 
of countries that shared common values and common priorities for the 
future.
  Even when the outcomes during that time were not always in our 
benefit, even when maybe some industry left for a country in Europe or 
maybe during the time that Japan challenged us in some sectors from 
Asia, at least the beneficiary--even though it may have harmed us in 
the short term, the beneficiary of that outcome was not the Soviet 
bloc, the Soviet Union, or some geopolitical competitor; the 
beneficiary was another democracy and an ally in our confrontation with 
communism during that period of time.
  The point is, it generally worked during that time because, by and 
large, the interests of the global market and the interests of our 
country never got out of balance too far.
  Then the Cold War ended, and our leaders--and I say ``our leaders'' 
because this was really a bipartisan thing--our leaders became 
intoxicated with hubris. I remember the lexicon was, it is the end of 
history, and the world will now be flatter, and every country is now 
going to naturally become a free-enterprise democracy, and economic 
liberalization will always result in political freedom. You flood a 
country with capitalism, and that country will not just get rich, but 
they are going to turn into us or some version of one of our democratic 
allies.
  So, in pursuit of that historic gamble, which had no historic 
precedent, we entered into all kinds of trade deals and treaties and 
rules and regulations on an international scale, and we invited into 
that all kinds of countries that, by the way, were not democracies, did 
not share our values, and did not have the same long-term goals for the 
world as we do. Their long-term goals, in fact, were incompatible. Of 
all of the deals that were made, none has had greater impact than the 
decision that was made in the first year of this century: to admit 
China into the World Trade Organization.
  They opened up our economy to the most populous nation on Earth, 
controlled by a communist regime. They did it not because anybody 
argued that it would be good for American workers. Remember, they made 
the argument that eventually it would be, but they weren't arguing that 
this was going to help us in the short term and that this would be good 
for our industries. The central argument behind doing this with China 
is that we think capitalism will change them. They are going to eat Big 
Macs and drink Coca Cola. They are going to literally ingest democracy, 
and it will transform them. They argued that capitalism was going to 
change China. Now we stand here 23 years later and realize that 
capitalism didn't change China. China changed capitalism.
  They opened up their doors and said: Come on in. They attracted 
industries with cheap labor. They said: We have cheap labor and cheap 
workers, and it flooded. Millions of American jobs, important 
industries, and factories flooded into China, and they did it with the 
promise of luring American investors and American money, which poured 
into China--all of it with the promise that you could make a lot of 
money in this huge market very quickly, with huge rates of return, and, 
obviously, for the companies, lower labor costs and therefore more 
profits for them.
  We lost jobs and factories closed and towns were gutted, but the 
leaders at that time said: Don't worry. They are only taking the bad 
jobs. The jobs that have left are not the good jobs. These bad jobs are 
going to be replaced by good jobs--better jobs. Americans are going to 
be able to have those jobs. Those Chinese workers who took your jobs 
are going to get richer now, and with that money they start to make, 
they are going to do two things: They are going to start buying 
American products and they are going to demand

[[Page S628]]

democracy and freedom and they are going to change China.
  Well, I don't think I am going to spend a lot of time today 
explaining that that did not work out. That is not how it played out. 
China allowed our companies in, but do you know what they did? They 
forced every one of these companies to partner with a Chinese company--
a small one at the time. They forced you to partner with them, and they 
stole your trade secrets. So they invited them in and learned how to do 
whatever it was you did. When they no longer needed you, they kicked 
you out; their company took over. In many cases, they put the company 
that taught them how to do it or that they stole the secrets from out 
of business. That is what they did. They used it to build up their own 
economy, their own companies.
  The Chinese middle class also grew at a historic rate, but ours 
collapsed--an almost inverse effect. The numbers are stunning. If you 
look at the destruction of these American working-class jobs and the 
rise of the middle class in China, they happened at the same time and 
on almost the same scale.
  China did get rich--they most certainly got rich--but they didn't use 
that money to buy our products. They used that money to buy the 
products that are made in China. They didn't become a democracy either. 
What was once a poor Chinese Communist Party is now a rich Chinese 
Communist Party that has tightened its grip on the country and has 
actually started going around the world to try to export their 
authoritarian model.
  They literally go around telling countries: Democracy cannot solve 
problems. Our system is so much better at solving problems. We can move 
quicker. We don't have to have a townhall meeting before we do 
everything. We can have strategic 20-year plans. We can solve your 
problems.
  For developing countries around the world, it potentially has some 
appeal.
  The fact is that we are now confronted with the consequences of this 
historic and catastrophic mistake, and it is important to understand 
what some of these are. They will be familiar to you because we see 
them every day. They play out not just on the floor of the Senate, but 
they play out in our society and in our politics and on television.
  First, we are a nation that is bitterly divided. It is easy and lazy 
to say: Oh, we are divided as Republicans and Democrats or as liberals 
and conservatives. Frankly, the biggest divisions between Americans are 
not even ideological per se. They seem to be attitudinal, and, largely, 
they seem to be along the lines of an affluent class of people who work 
in jobs and careers and in industries and live in places that have 
benefited from this rearrangement of a global economy. They do jobs 
that pay well and that work in a system like this. It is divided 
against the millions of working people who are left behind by all of 
these changes and who live in places that are literally hollowed out--
once vibrant communities that have been gutted.

  By the way, remember when they would say, ``Don't worry. Those people 
will move somewhere else in the country for those new jobs''? They 
didn't move because people don't like to leave their communities; they 
don't like to leave their extended families; they don't like to leave 
all of the things that they have ever known that have supported them. 
It didn't work that way. It has left us a country that is addicted. We 
are addicted to cheap exports from China, and we are dependent on 
Chinese supply chains for everything--from food to medicine, to 
advanced technology. We just had a pandemic that reminded us of this.
  And what does that mean, these long supply chains being dependent on 
a geopolitical competitor. It means we are vulnerable--vulnerable to 
blackmail, vulnerable to coercion.
  Do you know what else it left us with? An economy that is highly 
concentrated and fragile. Our economy is primarily based today on two 
sectors. What is all the news about? Turn on the financial networks, 
and you will see what all of the discussion is about. They are 
primarily two sectors: finance, meaning people who take your money and 
invest it somewhere else. They don't make anything, but they invest 
your money. That is fine. It is a legitimate business. But it is 
finance and Big Tech. Those two industries that are now the pillar of 
our economy are controlled by just a small number of giant 
multinational corporations--the same ones that, by the way, outsource 
their jobs. These multinational corporations have more power than the 
government. In many cases, they have more power than the government, 
and they have no loyalty to our people or to our country. Their 
interest is not the national interest. They are multinationals. In 
fact, they are owned by shareholders and investment funds from all over 
the world.
  This idea that globalizing our economy would prevent a great power 
competition between nations was always a delusion. I think the people 
of Hong Kong and Taiwan and Ukraine can tell you that this idea that 
free trade always and automatically leads to peace isn't true either.
  None of us have ever lived in a world where America was not the most 
powerful Nation on Earth. I was born into and grew up in a world where 
two superpowers were faced off in this long, cold, and dangerous Cold 
War between communism and freedom, between the free world and people 
who lived enslaved behind an Iron Curtain.
  Then I came of age--literally came of age in 1989-1991, 18 to 20 
years of age--my first years in college. I came of age, and, suddenly, 
I watched the Berlin Wall fall, and I saw the Soviet Union collapse. 
Let me tell you, if you had told me 10 years earlier--or told anybody--
that the Soviet Union was going to vanish off the face of the Earth, 
that it would be no more, I wouldn't have believed it. It was a time 
that was truly historic and unprecedented.
  Now, three decades later, we find ourselves once again in a rivalry 
with another great power, and this rivalry is far more dangerous and 
our rival is far more sophisticated than the Soviet Union ever was. The 
Soviet Union was never an industrial competitor. The Soviet Union was 
never a technological competitor. The Soviet Union was a geopolitical 
and a military competitor. As for the near-peer rival in China that we 
have now, they have leverage over our economy. They have influence over 
our society. They have an army of unpaid lobbyists here in Washington--
unpaid lobbyists because these are the companies and the individuals 
who are benefiting from doing business in China. They don't care if, 5 
years from now, they won't even be able to work here anymore as they 
are making so much money off of their investments, their factories, and 
their engagements there now that they lobby here for free on their 
behalf.
  By the way, this is a rival that has perfected the tactic of using 
our own media, our own universities, our own investment funds, and our 
own corporations against us. They have used it against us every day.
  With all of this focus on China--look, I have talked as much about 
China as anybody here, going back 5, 6 years now, but this is not the 
story of what China has done to us. What China has done is--they saw a 
system that we created. They took advantage of its benefits, and they 
didn't live up to its obligations. Do you know why? Because China was 
trying to build their country. They were making decisions that were in 
China's national interests, not in the interest of the global economy 
or some fantasy about how two nations are in business, and if there are 
McDonald's in both countries, they will never go to war.
  This is not the story of what China has done to us. This is the story 
of what we have done to ourselves because we have allowed this system 
of globalization to drive our economic policies and our politics, and 
it remains entrenched. Even now, people who agree that we have to do 
something about this will tell you: But we can't do that. We can't do 
that because it will hurt exports. They will put a tariff on some 
industry or China will kick us out.

  None of this is going to matter in 5 or 6 years. They won't need the 
tariff on farm goods from the United States. They will own the farm. 
They are already buying up farmland. You won't have to worry about the 
investment funds not being able to make a return on an investment in 5 
years. They won't need their money anymore.
  So this system was a disaster, and the result of the system was not 
global peace and global prosperity. The result

[[Page S629]]

was not a world without walls in which we were all part of one big, 
happy human family. The reality is that people live in nations, and 
nations have interests, and, by and large, for almost all of human 
history, nations have acted in the interests of their nations. Now we 
see what happens when one side does that and the other does not. The 
result has been the rise of China and Big Business--the two big 
winners. All of this is the consolidation of corporate power in the 
hands of a handful of companies and key industries and the rapid and 
historic rise of China at our expense.
  China is a populous country. They were always going to be a 
superpower--they were always going to be one--but they did it faster 
because they did it at our expense. They didn't create these jobs; they 
moved them. They didn't create these industries; they took them.
  We buy solar panels from China. Who invented solar panels? We did.
  They lead the world now in battery production for these electric 
vehicles. We invented it. They make them; they have perfected them; and 
they now lead in the technology. I can go on and on.
  They are building more coal-fired plants than any country on Earth. 
Today, China has more surplus refining capacity for oil than any nation 
on the planet.
  This era has to end now. It is not about just taking on China; it is 
about changing the way we think. It is not 2000 anymore. It is not 1999 
anymore. This is a different world.
  In a series of speeches over the next few weeks, I am going to 
attempt to outline a coherent alternative moving forward in the hopes 
that we don't just sit around here all day and try to outdo each other 
about who is going to ban ``this'' and who is going to block ``that'' 
from going to China. This is about a lot more than just banning 
``this'' and stopping ``that.'' It is about having a coherent approach 
to a difficult and historic challenge. Look, it is a complicated one, 
and complicated problems rarely, if ever, have simple solutions.
  The simplest way I can describe how I think we should move forward--
and I will have to describe it, obviously, in more detail--is that we 
need to fundamentally realign the assumptions and the ideas behind our 
economic and foreign policies. We need a new system of global economics 
where we enter into global trade agreements not with the goal of doing 
what is good for the global economy but what is good for us. If a trade 
deal creates American jobs or strengthens a key American industry, we 
do that deal. If it undermines us, we don't do the deal just because it 
would be good for the global economy or because, in the free market lab 
experiment, it is the right thing to do. We don't live in a lab. We are 
human beings of flesh and blood. We live in the real world.
  In economic theory, when a factory leaves and a job is lost, it is 
just a number on a spreadsheet. Realize, when a factory leaves and a 
job is lost, a dad loses his job or a single mom, for example, loses 
her ability to support her family, and a community is gutted. So we 
will need to enter into the world of trade agreements. We are not 
talking about isolationism here, but the criteria for every agreement 
needs to be, Is it good for our industries and workers or is it bad? It 
sounds pretty simplistic. I don't know how anyone could disagree that 
we should not enter into trade agreements that are bad for American 
workers and bad for key industries.
  We also, by the way, need to enter into foreign policy alliances that 
reward our allies and strengthen those who share our values and our 
principles. That also, by the way, helps to create American jobs and 
strengthen American industry, and if it can't be here, then have it 
strengthen the ability of an ally to be the source of our supplies.
  But I will tell you this at the outset: It will not be easy because 
those who have prospered and flourished under the status quo, they 
still have a lot of power, and they will use it to protect that status 
quo. But we have no choice but to change direction because our success 
or our failure is going to define the 21st century.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Booker). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CASSIDY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.