Accomplishments
Delivering Results
China
leading the charge
Senator Marco Rubio is leading the charge to rebalance our relationship with Communist China. He was the first to raise the alarm on various venues for Chinese influence campaigns in the U.S., from the National Basketball Association to Confucius Institutes at public universities to TikTok. Meanwhile, in a time of intense partisan division on nearly every major political issue, he has worked in a bipartisan fashion to draft, champion, and ultimately pass major bills that significantly alter foreign policy.
defending human rights
At the top of the list is Senator Rubio’s Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was signed into law in 2021. This legislation bans goods sourced from the Chinese Communist Party’s concentration camps in Xinjiang — where Uyghurs and other Muslims suffer forced labor, indoctrination, sterilization, and systematic rape — from entering America. It represents the most consequential change in U.S.-China relations in two decades. Rubio is also responsible for the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which empowers the federal government to punish Beijing for undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom.
PROTECTING ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY
On the technology front, Rubio led the Senate in authorizing and passing the Secure Equipment Act. This law prevents the U.S. government from issuing new equipment licenses to Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, which allow Beijing to spy on American citizens. More recently, a key Senate committee adopted Rubio’s provision to ban taxpayer funds from supporting semiconductor chip producers in China. This would close a massive loophole in the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act and provide a major boost to the domestic chips industry, a source of good jobs and a critical component of 21st-century supply chains.
GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH
Being “tough on China” is now a popular stance, but Rubio led the way with groundbreaking research years earlier. In 2019, while chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, Rubio released “Made in China 2025 and the Future of American Industry,” which pushed economic thinkers and policymakers to reprioritize the national interest. And in 2021, he released a 328-page report investigating the origin of COVID-19. Rubio’s evidence that shows the virus came from a Chinese government-run lab in Wuhan has been called both “chilling” and “definitive.” When it comes to the conversation on China, Rubio truly is a national leader.