Rubio warns of threat from China in Senate hearing

Marco Rubio, Donald Trump's pick to be the US Secretary of State, has said that if current trends continued, China would control the health, security, prosperity and lives of Americans in a decade.

- Prashant Jha

WASHINGTON: He also warned that the US will have to deal with China's president Xi Jinping invading Taiwan by the end of the decade unless Taiwan's defences were bolstered and China was forced to conclude that the costs of invading Taiwan would be higher than the benefits.

"The Chinese Communist Party is the most potent and near-peer adversary that this country has ever faced. It is a geopolitical, strategic, technological, military adversary...the bulk of the book about 21st century will be about US and China," Rubio said.

He said that the US had allowed China to pretend to be a developing country and engage in unfair practices; it had allowed China to engage in grotesque human rights violations and even slave labour; and China was now dominating the entire critical mineral supply chain. "If we stay on this road, in less than ten years, what matters to Americans will depend on whether China will allow us to have it," he warned underlining the critical need for America to invest in industrial capacity at home.

Rubio, a senator from Florida, was speaking at his confirmation hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC).