China Threatened Pelosi

Commentary

Nancy Pelosi is the woman of the hour. She visited Taiwan, met with President Tsai Ing-wen, and said a simple truth before the flashing lights: We stand with Taiwan.

The proof will be in the pudding if, as U.S. speaker of the House, she pushes through the necessary legislation, including increased security assistance and official recognition of Taiwan as an ally.

Pelosi certainly has game.

“America’s determination to preserve democracy, here in Taiwan and around the world, remains ironclad,” the speaker said on Aug. 3.

During the visit, and as second in line to the American presidency, she referred to Taiwan as a country, saying America could learn “how you address the COVID crisis, how we advance respect for all of the people in our countries as we go forward.”

Pelosi previously displayed such heroism. Just two years after the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing, she visited the square and unfurled a pro-democracy banner, only to be questioned by Chinese police.

Pelosi has for years challenged the quicksand of illusions upon which the power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rests. For example, the One China policy does not, as CCP leader Xi Jinping seems to think, mean that Beijing can “reunify” with Taiwan through invasion. That would be one more nail in freedom’s coffin.

Pelosi therefore just helped a slumbering America, especially on the left, wake up from what could have been its last sleep. She dramatically challenged the idea of CCP omniscience. In particular, she refused to comply with Beijing’s threats against the Taiwan visit, which included, remarkably, a backhanded one to down her U.S. Air Force plane.

In response to such defiance, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi menaced, “Those who play with fire will come to no good end, and those who offend China must be penalized.”

To prove the point, Beijing mobilized a four-day “series of joint military operations around the Taiwan Island,” according to its state media, along with live-fire drills that impeded shipping and flights.

The drills included the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), navy, and air force, as well as conventional and strategic missiles.

On the day of Pelosi’s visit, 22 Chinese military planes flew across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, a rare provocation.

The map of the six PLA maritime exclusion zones that surrounded Taiwan between Wednesday and Thursday, including infringement of Taiwan’s territorial waters, make the “military operations” into a “blockade,” according to Taiwan authorities.

Xi Jinping has in the past threatened to “reunify” the island through invasion, but China’s ambassador to France threatened not only “reunification” with Taiwan, but “reeducation.” In China, “reeducation” is synonymous with concentration camps.

Beijing also restricted the import of Taiwanese citrus, seafood, construction material, and cookies. These sanctions all impose economic penalties on areas and industries that support President Tsai. Approximately 44 percent of Taiwan’s exports go to the mainland, making Taipei particularly vulnerable to Beijing’s economic pressure tactics.

But the world is waking up, and came out in support of Pelosi.

Foreign ministers of all G-7 countries issued a statement affirming the right of G-7 politicians to visit Taiwan, saying there was no change in the status quo, and urging calm. “There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait,” according to the ministers.

Dimon Liu, a U.S.-based China expert and human rights activist, wrote in an email that Xi lost face “big time in this round.”

Pelosi’s visit provided space for “Xi’s opponents within the CCP elite to push back against Xi,” she wrote.

“If Pelosi were to abort the trip, as insisted by the Biden [National Security Council] and the majority of the China watchers, an invasion of Taiwan would have been far more likely” because Beijing would have proved that the United States could be bullied, she said.

Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, supported Pelosi’s trip and Taiwan more broadly. He introduced a bipartisan bill in June with Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022. It would replace strategic ambiguity over whether America will defend the island, with a clear, “robust and credible deterrence to preserve peace … across the Taiwan Strait.”

The bill provides $4.5 billion in security assistance and promotes Taiwan to the status of a major non-NATO ally. This is in U.S. interests as Taiwan upholds the global economy as the “foundry of the world” for advanced computer chips, according to Menendez.

There is a “window of opportunity” to act, the senator wrote, before China invades. Reversing an invasion would be somewhere between catastrophic and impossible.

Therefore Congress must act, and act now.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.