Rubio calls on Wall Street to stop ‘enabling Communist China’

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the Senate’s top China hawks, called on Wall Street banks and financial organizations to stop “enabling Communist China” in an op-ed published Wednesday.

Writing in The American Prospect, Rubio hammered top firms for investing in Chinese companies and argued that many Americans were unwittingly tied financially to companies tied to China’s ruling Communist Party.

“It’s the height of hypocrisy. U.S. corporations with lucrative business ties to the Chinese Communist Party will boycott states here over anti-abortion laws, while Beijing systematically sterilizes Uyghur women. They routinely inflame divisive race issues within the U.S. while marginalizing African American actors or erasing Tibetan characters to keep Chinese audiences happy,” Rubio argued.

“As China has ‘opened’ its market to American financial companies and sought the listing of its businesses on American stock exchanges, the portfolios of American investors have been increasingly invested in Chinese companies. Many well-meaning Americans may inadvertently be propping up a genocidal regime because Wall Street does it for them,” he continued.

Rubio went on in the piece to argue for cutting Chinese companies out of U.S. stock exchanges and capital markets.

“We can also require increased scrutiny of activist investors in companies tied to national-security work or supply chains—particularly ones related to China—through my Shareholder National Security Awareness Act,” he continued.

His remarks are the latest salvo of Republican criticism aimed at various targets over how tough the U.S. stance against China should be; GOP figures have battled various U.S. companies, media figures and other entities such as the NBA and most recently actor John Cena over concessions to China’s government on a wide range of issues.

Tension between Washington and Beijing remains high due to continued pressure from Beijing for the U.S. to recognize its sovereignty claim over Taiwan, despite the island’s decades of self-governance, as well as other issues ranging from trade to China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang province, which the Trump administration labeled a genocide in a decision that is now under review by the Biden administration.

President Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, said in April that the U.S. maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” regarding support of Taiwan and is hesitant to explicitly vow military support for the contested island country.