Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan draws Beijing’s scorn but bipartisan support

Paul Mozur, Amy Chang Chien and Michael D. Shear
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan on Tuesday, casting aside private warnings from the Biden adminration about the risk that her high-profile diplomatic visit could stoke a new crisis in Asia and immediately prompting a sharp response from the Chinese government.
A U.S. military jet carrying Pelosi landed in Taipei late at night following weeks of speculation about her travel plans. Her decision to proceed with the trip — shrouded in official secrecy until the last moment — makes her the highest-ranking congressional official to come to the disputed island in a quarter-century and sets up a tense standoff with China that U.S. officials said could lead to more aggressive military posturing.

“America’s solidarity with the 23 million people of Taiwan is more important today than ever, as the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy,” she said in a statement issued as she was greeted Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s foreign miner, adding that the visit did not contradict U.S. policy on Taiwan.
China, which brles at any perceived challenge to its claims on self-ruled Taiwan, had repeatedly warned Pelosi not to make the visit. Soon after her arrival, Beijing announced plans for live-fire military drills, some in areas overlapping with the island’s territorial waters. In a separate statement, China’s People’s Liberation Army said that it would begin joint naval and air exercises that would include “long-range live firing in the Taiwan Strait.”
The exercises would effectively block access temporarily to some commercial shipping lanes and Taiwanese ports, but analysts said they seemed to be designed to project strength rather than to serve as a precursor to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
“They are not signaling that we are imminently about to go to war,” said Joe McReynolds, senior China analyst at the Washington-based Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. But he and others said the fast-moving situation could lead to an accidental encounter that could spiral out of control.

The Chinese have taken other countermeasures in response to Pelosi’s trip. On Tuesday, before she arrived, China banned shipments from more than 100 Taiwanese food exporters — an apparent attempt to ratchet up economic pressure. And Wednesday, the Chinese commerce minry said it would suspend exports of natural sand to Taiwan.
Before the visit, the United States had urged Beijing not to turn the moment into a crisis. After a telephone call last week between President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, the president of China, the Chinese Minry of Foreign Affairs condemned Pelosi’s expected visit, saying that “playing with fire will set yourself on fire.”
But Pelosi, a longtime China critic who visited Tiananmen Square two years after the Chinese military opened fire on student protesters there, was defiant. In her statement, she said her visit to the island 80 miles off China’s coast was a sign of America’s “unwavering commitment” to supporting Taiwan’s democracy.
“We must stand Taiwan, which is an island of resilience,” Pelosi said in an opinion article published on The Washington Post’s website after she landed. In the article, she called Taiwan “a leader in governance,” a “leader in peace, security and economic dynamism” and a “vibrant, robust democracy.”

In Taiwan’s central business drict, Taipei 101, once the world’s tallest building and a major landmark in the city’s skyline, was lit with messages welcoming Pelosi, the highest-level U.S. official to go to the island since 1997, when Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House, made a visit.
Pelosi’s refusal to be dissuaded from making the trip is in keeping with her decades-long efforts to hold China accountable for its actions. She has repeatedly pushed for legislation to benefit Hong Kong and Tibet; hosted the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader; and urged a diplomatic boycott of the Olympics in Beijing.
Her forceful stand Tuesday was echoed in a rare statement of bipartisan support issued moments after her arrival: More than two dozen Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, wrote that her travel was “consent with the United States’ One China policy to which we are committed.”
“She’s a high-ranking official in the U.S. government. But it is not unusual,” said Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I was there three months ago with five other senators. We have a longstanding hory of visiting Taiwan. And so we can’t let the Chinese say who can and cannot visit Taiwan.”

But the speaker’s arrival was greeted with scorn Chinese officials, who accused Pelosi of undermining China’s sovereignty. And her visit comes as Xi has made it clearer than any of his predecessors that he sees unifying Taiwan with China to be a primary goal of his rule.
Xi, who has led China since 2012, is expected to be confirmed to an unprecedented third term as leader at a Commun Party congress in the fall. Ahead of that all-important political meeting, Xi has been eager to project an image of strength at home and abroad, particularly on the question of Taiwan.
A statement issued the Chinese Commun Party’s Taiwan Affairs Office said any attempt to seek independence Taiwan would be “shattered the powerful force of the Chinese people.”
Long a sore issue in an increasingly fraught U.S.-China relationship, Taiwan — which has its own military and democratically elected government — has emerged as the front line in a geopolitical showdown over influence and power in Asia.
Under Xi, China’s most powerful leader in decades, Beijing has taken more aggressive military actions in the region and recently made strong claims over the strait separating Taiwan and China, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. Xi has called for unification with Taiwan as part of China’s national rejuvenation, even potentially force.
The United States has sent a steady stream of senior officials to show solidarity with Taiwan. Recently, Biden said he would act to defend Taiwan in the event of a conflict. It was not the first time he had done so, but White House officials have repeatedly walked back those statements, saying a longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity” on the defense of Taiwan remains in place.
Publicly, senior White House officials have said that Pelosi’s visit does not indicate any change in official policy. But privately, adminration officials made it clear to Pelosi that her visit to Taiwan appeared likely to provoke China at a time when tensions between the nations are high.
Pelosi’s visit has been awkward for Biden. The speaker and her staff insed that, as the leader of a separate but coequal branch of the U.S. government, she has the right to go anywhere she desires. And Biden’s aides stressed that he did not want to be seen as dictating where she can travel. Officials said Biden never told Pelosi not to go, but officials made it clear that her trip could significantly escalate tensions,.
As the plane carrying Pelosi approached Taiwan, several Chinese state media outlets reported that Chinese Su-35 fighter jets were crossing the strait, a claim Taiwan’s defense minry called “fake news.” China last sent planes over the median line that runs down the strait in 2020, when Alex Azar, then the U.S. secretary of health and human services, visited Taiwan.
China claims Taiwan as its territory and has vowed to take it back, force if necessary. In his call with Biden on Thursday, Xi warned the United States against intervening in the dispute.
In June, Beijing raised the stakes when the foreign minry declared that China had jurisdiction over the Taiwan Strait and that it could not be considered an international waterway. And in the past year, Chinese military planes have increasingly probed the airspace near Taiwan, prompting Taiwanese fighter jets to scramble.
Huang Chao-yuan, a 53-year-old business owner, staked out the area near Songshan Airport to watch as Pelosi’s plane landed. She said the speaker’s visit was a “horic moment” that “demonstrates Taiwan’s independence.”
But outside the Grand Hyatt Taipei, where Pelosi was expected to spend the night, several dozen people supporting unification with China protested against Pelosi’s visit: Some clamored for her to “get out of Taiwan,” and some held banners denouncing her.
In Beijing, she is viewed as hostile to the regime and its goals.
As a two-term congresswoman from California, Pelosi visited Beijing in 1991, two years after Chinese troops opened fire on student protesters around Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds if not thousands. Accompanied to the square several congressional colleagues and a small group of reporters, Pelosi unfurled a banner commemorating the dead students.
Pelosi is a strong supporter of the Dalai Lama and the rights of Tibetans. In 2015, with official permission from the Chinese government, she visited Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, on a tightly controlled trip. The region is usually off limits to foreign officials and journals.
From student demonstrators in Beijing in 1989 to anti-government protests in Hong Kong 30 years later, Pelosi has consently supported social movements that critiqued China’s ruling Commun Party. She has also urged China’s leaders to temper their authoritarian policies, criticism that has elicited tart ripostes from Chinese officials.
The Chinese community in San Francisco, which Pelosi represents, was outwardly very supportive of Taiwan from the 1950s until the early 1990s. Today, it is much more connected to the mainland, partly because of immigration trends and the rise of China’s power and influence in the world, Lee said.
Dozens of people gathered in San Francisco on Monday to protest the trip, arguing that it could inflame potential war with China. The demonstration included members of the city’s Chinese American community; Code Pink: Women for Peace, an anti-war group; and the U.S.-China Peoples Friendship Association.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.