EXPLAINER

The state secretary, who is under Chinese sanctions, is on a state visit to Beijing under the name ‘Marco Lu’.

How did United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio enter China despite being under sanctions by Beijing?

Well, this became possible thanks to a linguistic workaround and diplomatic protocol by China, which had sanctioned Rubio twice when he was still a senator.

Rubio accompanied US President Donald Trump on his first trip to China after Beijing changed the transliteration of Rubio’s name.

“China has done that using a sleight of hand: His name is spelled different in official documents for this visit,” Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher said, reporting from the Chinese capital.

The Chinese government appeared to have used a diplomatic workaround to let the secretary of state in, transliterating the first syllable of his surname with a different Chinese character for “lu”.

The name change to “Marco Lu” enabled Beijing to welcome Rubio without lifting the sanctions, which could be enforced on another occasion.

The Chinese government and official media began transliterating Rubio’s surname with a different Chinese character shortly before he took office as secretary of state in January 2025.

In March, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicated it was willing to relax those sanctions against Rubio if he were to travel with Trump for a summit in Beijing.

“China’s sanctions were aimed at Mr Rubio’s words and deeds concerning China during his tenure in the United States Senate,” Lin Jian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said on March 16.

Why is Rubio under Chinese sanctions?

The sanctions date back to when Rubio served as a US senator in Florida, from 2019 up to his nomination to join Trump’s administration.

The Chinese government sanctioned him twice in 2020 for speaking out against Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong, a former British colony that is demanding greater autonomy from China’s grip.

Rubio, a Cuban American and a stark critic of communism, also slammed China’s alleged abuse of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang, an autonomous territory in northwest China.

As senator, Rubio was also one of the proponents of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a congressional bill approved in 2021 that required companies to prove that goods imported from China’s Xinjiang region were not produced with 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.”