When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in China alongside President Donald Trump this week, he did so under a cloud of sanctions that Beijing had placed on him twice over, sanctions that, technically speaking, are still in force. The question of how a sanctioned official walks into the country that sanctioned him has a rather inventive answer — China quietly changed how it spells his name.
In the weeks before Trump’s Beijing visit, the Chinese government and state media began transliterating the first syllable of Rubio’s surname using a different Chinese character, switching to a version that reads as “Lu” rather than the original rendering. The result was that Rubio arrived in Beijing not as Marco Rubio but, in the eyes of Chinese officialdom, as Marco Lu. The sanctions against Marco Rubio remained intact. Marco Lu, however, was perfectly welcome.
It is the kind of linguistic sleight of hand that would be almost comical if it were not so revealing about how diplomacy actually functions when political face-saving is on the line.
Why Rubio Was Sanctioned In First Place
The sanctions against Rubio date back to 2020, when he was still serving as a Republican senator for Florida. Beijing sanctioned him twice that year, first for speaking out against China’s crackdown on Hong Kong, where pro-democracy protesters had been demanding greater autonomy from Beijing’s tightening grip.
Rubio, a Cuban American with a long record of criticising communist governments, also took direct aim at China’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang. He was one of the key proponents of the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, a piece of legislation passed by Congress in 2021 that required companies to demonstrate that goods imported from Xinjiang were not produced using 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.”
Those were not the words Beijing forgot. Nor did it forget the legislation that followed them.
The Diplomatic Workaround
When Rubio was nominated as Secretary of State in late 2024, the question of his sanctions immediately became a practical problem for anyone planning a US-China summit. In March, the Chinese Foreign Ministry signalled it was prepared to find a way around the issue if Rubio were travelling with Trump.
Spokesman Lin Jian put it with characteristic diplomatic care, “China’s sanctions were aimed at Mr Rubio’s words and deeds concerning China during his tenure in the United States Senate.” The implication was that the man who arrived as Secretary of State was, in Beijing’s reading, a different enough figure from the senator who had been sanctioned to warrant a different approach.
The name change formalised that reading. By switching the Chinese character used to transliterate the first syllable of his surname, Beijing created just enough distance between the sanctioned senator and the visiting diplomat to allow the visit to proceed without anyone having to admit that the sanctions had been lifted, relaxed or ignored.
The sanctions, in other words, remain on the books. They are simply attached to a name that the Secretary of State no longer answers to, at least not in Mandarin.
