Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) will commemorate on Tuesday the 35th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s historic speech at Shanghai’s Fudan University.
Rubio will discuss the significance of Reagan’s remarks as well as the current relationship between the U.S. and China as part of the Reagan Institute’s Great Communicators Series in Washington, D.C.
The senator’s remarks are set to begin at 1 p.m. Eastern.
Below is an excerpt of his prepared speech:
China is pursuing new arms and other capabilities — far too often by stealing American military technological secrets — so it can more aggressively menace Taiwan, Japan and other U.S. allies, and directly challenge American forces in the Indo-Pacific region.
It is also aligning geopolitically with Russia more and more to frustrate and block efforts by America and other democracies to advance stability, human dignity, and accountability in contested places like Syria, Ukraine and now Venezuela.
But we are only now belatedly grasping how China has emerged as a systemic rival to free-market democracies, a rival that is using our own free and open international order against us in so many ways.
Perhaps most significantly, Communist China has pulled off the greatest illegitimate transfer of wealth in human history.
It has done so by using forced technology transfer and a “whole-of-nation” approach to espionage to steal the crown jewels of American innovation and ingenuity from our companies, our centers of research, and our universities.