It’s a level of absurdity George Orwell might laugh at.
The political prophet who penned the ultimate picture of tyranny with the dystopian novel “1984” envisioned a world where an almighty Party puts its ideology above reality itself in service of maintaining power.
And for President Donald Trump’s summit in China this week, the Chinese Communist Party is putting on a demonstration that would be comical if it weren’t deadly serious.
It changed the Chinese spelling of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s surname as a way to get around its own prohibition on Rubio entering the country with Trump’s entourage.
The problem for the Beijing autocrats goesback to 2020, when they included Rubio among Americans placed under sanction, as CNBC reported at the time. It was part of a tit-for-tat battle with the first Trump administration over Chinese human rights abuses in Hong Kong, its treatment of its Uyghur minority, and the then-burgeoningCOVID-19 crisis.
Rubio was a U.S. senator from Florida at the time. Other Americans sanctioned by Beijing included Rubio’s fellow GOP senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
The sanctions included prohibitions on the targets’ visiting China — which probably didn’t matter much to Rubio or his fellow conservatives. (China trips are more material forTim Walz types.)
If the goal of the sanctions was intimidation, events of recent years show what a mistake they were.
And with Rubio now in charge of the U.S. State Department and one of the most influential men in American politics, the Chinese were faced with the dilemma of how to comply with their own sanctions without upsetting the apple cart of a Sino-American summit.
The answer, apparently, was to pretend the Rubio sanctioned in 2020 wasn’t the Rubio entering China in 2026 — and the way to do that was by changing his name.
Source: VidNews » Feed
