Posted on 05/13/2026 1:20:47 PM PDT by Red Badger
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has technically been banned from visiting China by its communist government, but he accompanied President Donald Trump on his trip to Beijing on Tuesday using a bureaucratic loophole created by the Chinese to let him in.
Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles to Florida who was elected to the Senate in 2011, was one of several congressional representatives banned from traveling to China in July 2020 because they spoke out against China’s brutal oppression of the Uyghur Muslims of occupied East Turkistan. The U.S. had previously sanctioned four Chinese officials for herding the Uyghurs into massive concentration camps.
Rubio was sanctioned again by China in August 2020, in retaliation for U.S. sanctions against Chinese officials involved in oppressing the people of Hong Kong. Some of the same fellow senators and representatives were named in the second round of “tit-for-tat” sanctions along with Rubio.
[SNIP]
The Chinese government realized its travel ban on Rubio would become politically awkward after he became President Donald Trump’s secretary of state in January 2025. The regime hit on a novel solution to the problem: instead of rescinding sanctions against Rubio, they changed the spelling of his name and acted as though he became a different person when he left the Senate to work for the second Trump administration.
Rubio, who has been famously busy with numerous assignments since joining the administration, might not dispute the notion that he is a different person today than he was 18 months ago. The Chinese made that distinction by changing the character used for the first syllable of his name.
The new character is pronounced “lu,” so Senator Marco Rubio might still be banned from entering China, but Secretary of State Marco Lubio was welcome.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
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So the change happened as a result of the last erection.
Oh Come On! The infamous Chinese “R” - “L” swap?
This is the Babylon Bee, right?
Staged-I can dig it.
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