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China is exploiting U.S. capital markets and workers. Here’s what Biden should do.
By U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)
January 28, 2021
The Washington Post
 
For decades, establishment elites in our nation’s two major political parties ignored — and oftentimes furthered — the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to undermine our national security, industrial capacity and the well-being of American workers.
 
The greatest example of this is China’s exploitation of U.S. capital markets and Wall Street’s role in facilitating the transactions that transfer American investment to malicious Chinese companies.
 
Thankfully, a growing bipartisan consensus has emerged that recognizes we must address the clear risk to U.S. economic and national security this poses. Congress and the Trump administration made considerable progress over the past four years in laying a marker that future U.S. policy must correct profound imbalances in the U.S.-China relationship.
 
The foremost policy choice facing President Biden is whether his administration will continue those efforts in ending this exploitation or return to the naive consensus that allowed China’s rise at America’s expense.
 
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I urge Biden to build upon — not undo — the critical work the previous administration took to address China’s exploitation of U.S. capital markets.
 
For starters, Biden should keep or improve Trump’s executive order to prohibit U.S. investments in Chinese firms on the Defense Department list of Communist Chinese military companies. The decision of whether to side with American workers, service members and mom-and-pop investors or Beijing and payouts for Wall Street investment bankers should be easy.
 
Leaving the executive order in place would make Biden the second president in history to convey to the CCP that it will no longer be able to exploit our financial system. It would also put Wall Street on notice — campaign donations do not buy a free pass to sell out U.S. workers and industry.
 
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Where the Trump administration erred, Biden’s administration should correct course.
 
One glaring example is the financial services section of the so-called Phase 1 agreement then-Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin negotiated with China. Instead of holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable for exploiting U.S. investors and our markets and addressing Wall Street’s role as the facilitator, the agreement ensures U.S. capital will continue to directly fund China’s state-run economy. For the first time ever, American financial companies are authorized to purchase Chinese nonperforming loans, the overwhelming majority of which go to state-owned enterprises controlled by the CCP.
 
In other words, China can finance its industrial ambitions with the deepest, most liquid capital markets in the world — our own.
 
In Congress, we must continue our bipartisan efforts to stop China’s exploitation of U.S. finance. I will soon be reintroducing my American Financial Markets Integrity and Security Act, which would ban malicious Chinese companies from operating in U.S. capital markets.
 
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Biden will have to make many tough choices. But when it comes to China’s exploitation of U.S. capital markets, the choice facing him is simple: support American workers and our national security, or side with Wall Street and the CCP.
 
Read the rest here.