America’s “Lust For Profits” “Weaponized” By China, Says Rubio

Prominent Republican Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio had some inconvenient truths for Americans and some admirably hawkish rhetoric for China.

It was during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that Rubio didn’t mince words, stating that “China has “weaponized” the United States’ “corporate lust for profits,” adding that America’s reliance on the Chinese Communist Party is a national security threat.”.

In a direct quote from the hearing, Rubio stated “China is stealing between 300 and 600 billion dollars a year, three to six hundred billion dollars a year of American technology and intellectual property. They hack into networks and they take it. They use venture capital funds to buy promising technology startups. They hide their ownership, by the way. They partner with universities on research and then they steal that research — often research whose seed funding came from the U.S. taxpayer. They force American companies doing business in China to give the technology over to them. Rubio went on to roar that he “…think[s] the other thing most people don’t realize is that China already has tremendous influence and control over what Americans are allowed to say or hear about them or many of the other issues in the world. Hollywood is so desperate, for example, to have their movies shown in China that Hollywood won’t make a movie that China’s communist censors don’t approve”.

The Senator then gave a litany of offenses that Chinese has committed as part of their choke-hold on the United States’ way of life which includes forcing an American company to fire American employees for “writing something China doesn’t like” as well as “Marriott fired an employee that ran a social media account because he liked a Twitter post from a Twitter account applauding Marriott for listing Tibet as a country rather than as part of China, and he was fired after that”.

He went on to say that “Today, the Chinese Communist Party has more control over what Americans can say, what we can hear, what we can read, what we can watch, than any foreign government has ever had in our history. 
 
Finally, Rubio drove the point home by saying that “…they have weaponized our openness, they have weaponized our decency, and they have weaponized a corporate lust for profits against us”.