(TibetanReview.net, May15’26) – To China, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is “Marco Lu” while he remain the top US diplomat, and during President Donald Trump’s state visit to the country over May 13-15. Rubio otherwise cannot enter China as he has been sanctioned twice by it for his “words and deeds” concerning its human rights record while serving as a senator.
Rubio accompanied Trump on his first trip to China after Beijing changed the transliteration of his name.
The Chinese government appeared to have used a diplomatic workaround to let the secretary of state in, transliterating the first syllable of his surname with a different Chinese character for “lu”.
The name change to “Marco Lu” enabled Beijing to welcome Rubio without lifting the sanctions, which could be enforced on another occasion, said aljazeera,com May 14.
In fact, The Chinese government and official media began transliterating Rubio’s surname with a different Chinese character shortly before he took office as secretary of state in Jan 2025.
And in March, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicated it was willing to relax those sanctions against Rubio if he were to travel with Trump for a summit in Beijing, the report noted.
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“China’s sanctions were aimed at Mr Rubio’s words and deeds concerning China during his tenure in the United States Senate,” Lin Jian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, was reported to have said on Mar 16.
The sanctions date back to when Rubio served as a US senator from Florida, from 2019 up to his nomination to join Trump’s administration.
The Chinese government sanctioned him twice in 2020 for speaking out against Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong, a former British colony that was demanding greater autonomy from China’s grip.
Rubio, a Cuban American and a stark critic of communism, also slammed China’s alleged abuse of the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority in East Turkestan (Xinjiang).
As senator, Rubio was one of the proponents of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a congressional bill approved in 2021 that required companies to prove that goods imported from China-ruled East Turkestan (Xinjiang) were not produced with forced labour.
“Many companies have already taken steps to clean up their supply chains,” Rubio said at the time. “For those who have not done that, they’ll no longer be able to continue to make Americans – every one of us, frankly – unwitting accomplices in the atrocities, in the genocide.”