Marco Rubio wants to take a hard line on China. Will Trump let him?

It was Thanksgiving night 2019, and a jubilant crowd of tens of thousands of democracy activists rallied harborside on Hong Kong island. Singing and waving American flags above a sea of glittering cellphone lights, they celebrated a new U.S. law to sanction Chinese authorities for suppressing the basic freedoms of Hong Kong’s 7.4 million people.

A cheer arose as a video of the law’s author, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, appeared on a huge screen. “I hope the people of Hong Kong know that they have served as an inspiration to the world,” Mr. Rubio said. “Your cause,” he pledged, “will continue to be our cause.”

But behind the scenes, the U.S. government’s support for the protesters was less clear-cut. Until the last minute, then-President Donald Trump had wavered on signing the law. “I stand with freedom,” he explained. “But we’re also in the process of making the largest trade deal in history” with China.

Today this same tension – between ideology and pragmatism – promises to play out prominently in the incoming administration’s China policy. Now the nominee for secretary of state, Mr. Rubio is among several “hawks” Mr. Trump has selected for his Cabinet. Their stances toward Beijing have been consistently tougher than their boss’s. But he will also have allies for a more transactional approach, like entrepreneur Elon Musk, who will serve as an adviser to the new president.

Either way, Mr. Trump’s return to power is expected to bring heightened confrontation and increased volatility to the relationship between the world’s two superpowers, especially over trade.

“We watch all this very carefully, with suspicion, to be honest,” says Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing. “President Trump could be very hawkish toward China, or could be transactional – we don’t know.”

America’s “gravest threat”

Beijing, for its part, is hoping to establish informal channels to size up the Trump administration’s goals. It will do this by leveraging friendly relations with business executives such as Mr. Musk, who sees China as a vital market for his Tesla electric vehicle company and has cordial relations with top Chinese leaders, including Premier Li Qiang.

Meanwhile, the strategy Mr. Trump adopts toward the administration of leader Xi Jinping, whom Mr. Trump has called “a friend,” could determine whether the world’s two major powers deepen their conflict over key issues such as Taiwan, trade, and technology. It will also influence whether they continue key dialogues – including those aimed at preventing accidents between their two formidable militaries – as well as cooperation on critical issues such as global warming, analysts say.

Overall, Mr. Trump’s administration is likely to take “a more hawkish approach” towards Beijing than that of Joe Biden, including new tariffs and technology restrictions, says Scott Kennedy, senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an American think tank. “There is already a comprehensive rivalry underway. This would raise the temperature,” he says.

Mr. Rubio’s nomination in particular points to how the hawks may shape the two countries’ relationship going forward. As one of the most ideologically driven critics of China among U.S. leaders, he has championed human rights in China and repeatedly authored laws aimed at defending groups such as Hong Kong citizens and western China’s ethnic Uyghurs, a Muslim minority.

In a major speech at The Heritage Foundation in March 2022, Mr. Rubio laid out his stark view of China’s Communist Party as a threatening, power-hungry regime bent on weakening the United States and dominating the world.

China – not climate change or the pandemic – is “the gravest threat facing America today,” he said, raising his voice and waving a finger for emphasis. The U.S. must unify domestically, block Chinese espionage, revitalize American industry, and empower its allies to fight this danger, he warned. If China prevailed, he said, it would usher in “a new dark age of exploitation, conquest, and totalitarianism and all the worst aspects of human nature.”

Mr. Rubio attributes his staunch anti-communist views in part to his upbringing in the Cuban exile community and, in particular, to the profound influence of his late grandfather, Papá. Each morning on the family’s small front porch, the young Mr. Rubio would sit at his grandfather’s feet for hours to learn from the soft-spoken but proudly individualistic man, whom he now reveres as his closest boyhood friend.

“Papá ... believed the United States was destined to be the defender of human progress, the only power capable of preventing tyranny from dominating the world,” Mr. Rubio wrote in his 2012 autobiography, “An American Son.”

“Due to his family background, he knows that people suffer under communism,” says Sunny Cheung, an exiled Hong Kong democracy advocate and associate fellow for China Studies at The Jamestown Foundation in Washington.

Senator Rubio vs. Secretary Rubio

Mr. Cheung organized the 2019 Thanksgiving rally in Hong Kong, which he says drew tens of thousands eager to voice their gratitude to Mr. Rubio and other U.S. officials.

He also says “Beijing is not happy” with Mr. Trump’s choices of Mr. Rubio and other China hawks, such as his pick for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, a retired Army officer who has called for more U.S. defense spending to counter China’s aggression toward Taiwan.

Indeed, in 2020 China sanctioned Mr. Rubio for his human rights actions, with a Foreign Ministry spokesperson saying the U.S. senator “behaved egregiously on Hong Kong-related issues.” As a result, America’s next top diplomat could be barred from traveling to China at all.

Still, experts say Beijing is relieved that Mr. Rubio has not called for the U.S. to pursue a policy of regime change toward China, as did his predecessor Michael Pompeo.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump calls the shots, says Dr. Da of Tsinghua, and the incoming president’s pragmatic tendencies may rein in the hawks on his team. “Secretary Rubio could be, to some extent, different from Senator Rubio,” he says.