Prospect of a Nancy Pelosi trip to Taiwan jolts Washington as well as Beijing
- Pelosi’s reported plans to visit the island shine a light on the complex and volatile politics surrounding Washington’s relationship with Taipei
- A US president has little power to stop a speaker of the House from making such a trip, a point China’s one-party leadership may not understand
In 1995, at a heated moment in US-China relations, a junior member of Congress named Nancy Pelosi lashed out at Beijing for thinking it could stop a senior politician from travelling between Taiwan and the United States.
“Let us not let China violate human rights, trade and proliferation and then dictate to us whether the president of Taiwan can come into this country,” Pelosi said in a speech on the House floor, urging the White House to ignore Beijing’s demands and let Taiwanese leader Lee Teng-hui make a highly symbolic trip onto US soil.
Twenty-seven years later, Pelosi is now the speaker of the House of Representatives, and once again Beijing is trying to stop a symbolic trip between the US and Taiwan: hers.
The prospect of a Pelosi visit to Taiwan, widely reported but still unconfirmed, has jolted Washington.
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Xi warns Biden that US ‘playing with fire’ as tensions soar over Pelosi’s proposed Taiwan visit
It exposed a rare public rift between Pelosi and US President Joe Biden. It brought cheers from her fierce Republican rivals. It elicited Chinese threats about “playing with fire”, while it received the silent treatment from Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington, which refused to comment at all.
Most of all, it has brought to light the complex and volatile politics surrounding Washington’s relationship with Taipei – one that officially is described as “unofficial”, yet has also seen Biden say publicly three times as president that the US would defend it if mainland China attacked.
