No one seemed to enjoy being in the Great Hall of the People more than Secretary of State Marco Rubio. There he was, walking around and pointing and marveling at the ceiling while his colleagues stood at a long wooden table getting ready for a summit meeting on Thursday with their Chinese counterparts.
Mr. Rubio remarked on a few things about the ceiling to President Trump’s other aides, though a video recording did not capture his words.
But there had been a chance Mr. Rubio might not have made it to Beijing at all.
Since he is both the top American diplomat and the White House national security adviser, it was obvious he would try to accompany Mr. Trump once the trip began coming together. However, it was less obvious whether Mr. Rubio would be allowed in: When he was a senator representing Florida, the Chinese government had imposed sanctions on him and several other American lawmakers and officials known for their outspoken criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.
That happened in 2020, as a tit-for-tat retaliation against sanctions the first Trump administration had imposed on Chinese officials. The State Department said those officials were involved in repression in the region of Xinjiang, home to Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims. That same summer, the Chinese government imposed additional sanctions on Mr. Rubio and other lawmakers to retaliate against U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong officials.
It turns out the Chinese government’s solution to overlooking those sanctions and allowing Mr. Rubio to enter China was simple: Officials said the sanctions had been imposed on Senator Rubio and not the man who is now a cabinet official.
“The sanctions are aimed at Mr. Rubio’s actions and rhetoric on China when he served as a U.S. senator,” Liu Pengyu, the Chinese embassy spokesman in Washington, said in a statement to The New York Times on Thursday, when asked about the inconsistency.
A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, Guo Jiakun, gave the same answer when asked about Mr. Rubio at a news conference in Beijing. Neither official answered a question about whether China had dropped the sanctions.
There has been rampant speculation online about whether the Chinese government came up with a new transliteration of Mr. Rubio’s name to rationalize allowing him to enter China. For years, his name appeared as 卢比奥 in Chinese reports. In the pinyin writing system, that is “lubiao,” or Rubio. But his name has also appeared as 鲁比奥, also “lubiao,” though the first word has a different meaning and a different tone (spoken Mandarin has four tones and a neutral tone).
However, the theory linking the multiple versions of his name to sanctions relief is wrong. Many non-Chinese people have varied Chinese transliterations for their names, even in official pronouncements or reports. It turns out that Xinhua, the state news agency, had already been referring to Rubio as both 卢比奥 and 鲁比奥 for about a decade. There might even have been other variations that have appeared in state news reports.
In January 2025, a foreign ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, was asked at a news conference whether the government had made a change to the transliteration of Mr. Rubio’s name so that it could say that sanctions no longer applied to him.
“I have not noticed the situation you mentioned,” Ms. Mao said. “I think, compared with the Chinese transliteration, his English name is more important. Regarding sanctions, my colleague already briefed China’s position yesterday. I can tell you that China’s sanctions target words and actions that harm China’s legitimate interests.”
Ruoxin Zhang contributed research.
