US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a long history of standing up to China. It all began 31 years ago, in 1991, when as a young Congresswoman she visited Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to pay a tribute to pro-democracy student activists massacred there
United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went ahead with her visit to Taiwan, defying threats from a furious China. The 82-year-old Democratic politician paid little heed to “private warnings from the Biden administration” that her trip could escalate tension in the region.
While there was speculation about the visit, it remained almost a secret until the plane that Pelosi was travelling on entered the Taiwan airspace. The House Speaker is the highest-ranking US official to visit the disputed island – that China considers its territory – in 25 years. With it, the already-fraught ties between Washington and Beijing have hit a new low.
In response, China flew 20 military planes into Taiwan’s air defence zone and rolled out tanks to the coast of Fujian, the closest point on the mainland to the self-ruled island. However, the military posturing and continued threats by Beijing are not going to intimidate Pelosi, one of the strongest critics of the Communist nation.
During her three decades in Congress, she has not hesitated to take on China. Not even when she was a fairly new politician. Here’s a look at Pelosi’s long defiance of the Asian superpower.
The 1991 visit to Tiananmen Square
Thirty-one years ago, in 1991, the Congresswoman from California, took Chinese authorities by surprise when she unfurled a banner in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to honour pro-democracy student activists massacred there.
In June 2019, Pelosi tweeted an old video from the visit, where she can be seen laying white flowers at the monument, even as police moved in ordering her and other Congress members to stop the ceremony and the press to put down their cameras. The lawmakers were questioned and the journalists roughed up, as can be seen in the video. Some were even arrested.
Former CNN Beijing bureau chief Mike Chinoy wrote in an op-ed in Foreign Policy that he was arrested because of Pelosi as he was not aware of her plans at the square.
“It was my first experience with Pelosi’s penchant for high-profile gestures designed to poke China’s communist rulers in the eye – regardless of the consequences,” he wrote, according to BBC.
Since then, Pelosi has not backed down, even leading a resolution slamming China’s move to crush the protests in 1989.
On the 33rd anniversary of the massacre, this year, she said, “As the world honors the courage of students, workers and ordinary citizens who peacefully defied the Chinese Communist Party’s oppressive regime, let us renew our vow to keep alive the flame of freedom that burned in their hearts.”
Opposing China’s bid to host the Olympics
Citing human rights abuse, Pelosi has opposed several bids by China to host the Olympic Games.
In 2008, she urged then-US president George W Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics but was not successful. “The Olympic Charter states that the Olympics should seek to foster ‘respect for universal and fundamental ethical principles’. Sadly, the Chinese government has not lived up to its commitments to improve the human rights situation in China and Tibet,” she had said in the statement.
The Congresswoman said that while she had sponsored a resolution to boycott the Olympics, she realised that it would “unfairly harm” American athletes.
In May 2021, she called for a “diplomatic boycott” of the Winter Olympics hosted by Beijing, saying that while athletes should participate, heads of state should give it a skip.
“Let’s not honour the Chinese government by having heads of state go to China,” she said.
“For heads of state to go to China in light of a genocide that is ongoing – while you’re sitting there in your seat – really begs the question, what moral authority do you have to speak again about human rights any place in the world,” Pelosi asked, referring to the atrocities committed against Uyghurs and other Muslims in north-western China’s Xinjiang.
Visiting the Dalai Lama
The US Democrat has met the Dalai Lama on several occasions and has criticised China for its policies in Tibet, a region it annexed in 1950.
During a visit to India in 2008, Pelosi visited the Dalai Lama in Dharmshala in Himachal Pradesh, where he has been in exile since he fled Tibet in 1950.
Beijing considers the Tibetan leader an enemy, even calling him a “wolf in monk’s robes” and a dangerous “splittist”.
Nancy Pelosi and The Dalai Lama during a New York City visit to celebrate the spiritual leader’s 80th birthday on 10 July 2015. The Dalai Lama’s birthday is on 6 June. AFP
Pelosi after visiting the Dalai Lama said that there should be an international investigation into the situation in Tibet. She called on the global community to denounce China, calling the crisis “a challenge to the conscience of the world”.
“If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world,” she had said.
Her visit came amid violent protests in Tibet against China.
Letters to Hu Jintao
In 2002, at a meeting with then-Chinese vice president Hu Jintao, Pelosi tried to give him four letters, which spoke about the imprisonment of Chinese and Tibetan activists, calling for the release of political prisoners. However, he refused to accept them.
Pelosi is not the one to give up. She visited China in 2009 and by now Hu was elevated to president. She reportedly hand-delivered another letter to him, once again calling for the release of imprisoned activists including prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Liu won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize and died of cancer in 2017 in Chinese custody.
Nancy Pelosi and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen meet in Taipei, Taiwan. The US House Speaker meeting top officials in Taiwan despite warnings from China, said Wednesday that she and other Congressional leaders in a visiting delegation are showing they will not abandon their commitment to the self-governing island. Taiwan Presidential Office/AP
Welcoming Hong Kong dissidents
In June 2019, when protests intensified in Hong Kong against plans to allow extradition to mainland China, Pelosi praised demonstrators as “courageous”. She said the bill “chillingly showcases Beijing’s brazen willingness to trample over the law to silence, dissent and stifle” freedom in the former British colony, reports The New York Times.
She might high-profile Hong Kong activists in Washington, irking China.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, had said that Pelosi was partly to blame for the civil unrest gripping Hong Kong. “It is precisely because of the naked cover-up and connivance of external forces such as Pelosi that the violent anti-law forces are even more fearless,” Hua said, according to NYT.
Now Pelosi’s Taiwan visit is likely to have a fallout of its own. But the Democrat’s defiance is infectious.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen struck a courageous tone as she hosted Pelosi, saying, “Taiwan will not back down. We will… continue to hold the line of defence for democracy.”
With inputs from agencies
Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.