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Dewey Sim

Orange Wang

Zhuang Pinghui

When Marco Rubio was nominated by US president-elect Donald Trump last month to be the next US secretary of state, one obvious question loomed: how would the Florida senator, who has been sanctioned by China twice, engage with Washington’s biggest rival?
Rubio – known for his hawkish stance towards China – could move to stifle high-level exchanges between Washington and Beijing and throw up road blocks to any meaningful negotiation, according to observers.
However, Beijing could consider several options to counter confrontational US moves, and sanctioned high-level diplomats from either side could still meet face-to-face in a neutral, third-party location, analysts said.
As Yuan Zheng, deputy director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), put it: “We could follow the American formula. The US has set an example for us, and this is reciprocity.”
This was the case with Li Shangfu, the former Chinese defence chief who was sanctioned by the US after being accused of helping to transfer combat aircraft and air defence missile systems from China to Russia.
Li, who was ousted a few months after being named defence minister, never held formal talks with his American counterpart Lloyd Austin, but they did have a brief exchange at a regional security conference in Singapore in 2023. They “shook hands but did not have a substantive exchange”, according to the Pentagon.
Rubio would be the first sitting secretary of state to be sanctioned by Beijing.


He was twice sanctioned in 2020 – first, in retaliation for US measures against senior Chinese officials over the treatment of the Uygur ethnic minority group, and later after mainland and Hong Kong officials were sanctioned following the Hong Kong protests in 2019.
While a sanctioned US secretary of state would pose challenges for exchanges with China at the ministerial level, Dominic Chiu, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group, said symbolic contacts, such as a handshake between Rubio and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, could still happen.
“Rubio and Wang can do the same but it will be difficult for them to sit down for more substantive discussions. A way to work around that challenge would be ideal,” Chiu said.
Yuan, from CASS, said having a Chinese-sanctioned US official handling relations would be a “problem” but added that Beijing would likely wait and see how best to approach the situation.
Noting that Washington did not lift sanctions on Li despite calls from Chinese officials, Yuan expected Beijing would likewise not rush to act on Rubio, adding that China “is also a major country [and] not your little brother”.
“We do not rule out contact, but we will not unilaterally lift sanctions on him for the sake of contact,” he said.
China’s decision to lift sanctions it earlier imposed on Rubio would also hinge on how the Florida congressman acted after he assumed the new role, including whether he continued to “bad-mouth” Beijing, Yuan said.
“It depends on his performance … If the overall atmosphere of China-US relations is better than we expected, and the other side also shows goodwill, it is feasible for us to consider lifting the sanctions on Rubio.”
Otherwise, lifting sanctions would be “simply impossible”, Yuan said, adding that China would be “looked down upon by others”.
“China will not be in a hurry to … take the initiative to offer something [to the US] immediately. I think it is unlikely because Rubio is just so anti-China,” Yuan added.

Among other things, Rubio has pushed for taking a harder line against China and has previously targeted social media platform TikTok, whose parent company is Chinese.
“What [the US] did to Li Shangfu, we can do the same,” added another expert at CASS, who did not wish to be named.
Resolving the dilemma in which Rubio is responsible for handling US ties with China required political wisdom, said another Chinese analyst who asked that his name not be used, adding that the Chinese sanctions were unlikely to be waived. “It is not child’s play,” he said.
Separately, in a commentary published last week about the impact of Trump’s likely cabinet on China, Luo Zhiheng, a prominent Chinese macroeconomics scholar, said Rubio and other Trump picks were “extremely hawkish” on China, and that it would be “difficult for them to change their tough attitudes towards China in the short term”.
Aside from US-China communication channels being impacted by Chinese sanctions, he said that Rubio still acted as the anti-China “vanguard”, and that it would be unlikely that Beijing would take the initiative to lift sanctions in the short term.
According to Yuan, if the top US and Chinese diplomats were unable to hold talks in either country, it would be possible to meet in a third location, such as somewhere in Southeast Asia or the Middle East.
He gave the example of meetings held between US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in other countries. They met in Vienna and Malta last year and in Bangkok earlier this year.
Chiu, from Eurasia Group, said that if sanctions prevented Rubio and Wang from meeting in person, other channels of communication would be available.
“It is important to remember that the secretary of state is not the only diplomatic channel that Trump and [Chinese President Xi Jinping] could deploy,” he said, adding that the national security adviser could play a key role.


The channel between Sullivan and Wang during the Biden administration has been “arguably the most effective one” between the two countries, due in large part to how Sullivan positioned himself as trusted interlocutor with the Chinese, Chiu said.
Exchanges could still happen at the deputy level, Chiu added, while suggesting that another method of establishing trusted contact is through backchannels, which would require both sides to find a go-between that could be trusted.
“The bigger challenge with regards to US-China communication under Trump 2.0 is not the technicality of sanctioned officials – important as they may be – but the broader hawkish posturing of the Trump cabinet nominees,” he added.
Trump has so far appeared to have recruited China hawks for his second foreign policy team. Florida congressman Mike Waltz, considered to be among the most hardline members of Congress, who even called for the US to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics hosted by Beijing, is Trump’s pick for national security adviser.
“They all view China as a systemic rival at best and an existential threat to the US at worst,” Chiu said.
“That makes progress from dialogue, as well as trust-building exercises, much more difficult to materialise, regardless of whether an individual is legally restrained from visits or talks.”


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China has choices to counter confrontation from Trump’s pick for secretary of state, but experts say broader challenge is next cabinet’s hardline posturing


China has choices to counter confrontation from Trump’s pick for secretary of state, but experts say broader challenge is next cabinet’s hardline posturing.


Beijing mulls US engagement options as China-sanctioned Rubio awaits top diplomat post

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}China has choices to counter confrontation from Trump’s pick for secretary of state, but experts say broader challenge is next cabinet’s hardline posturing

China has choices to counter confrontation from Trump’s pick for secretary of state, but experts say broader challenge is next cabinet’s hardline posturing