Pelosi Stands Up to the Bully in Beijing

As of this writing, it appears House speaker Nancy Pelosi will travel to Taiwan, based on statements from unnamed U.S. and Taiwanese officials, but it is not confirmed.

Conservatives rarely applaud Pelosi, but her willingness to visit Taiwan — and to tell the Chinese government in Beijing to go pound sand if they don’t like her making the trip — is one of those rare times when they do.

With some of the more hyperactive Chinese state-media propagandists talking up the possibility of the Chinese military shooting down her flight and the Chinese military promising live-fire exercises near the coast, Pelosi is demonstrating courage and accepting a certain amount of risk to life and limb by making the trip. The chances of the Chinese military deliberately or accidentally shooting down her flight are not high . . . but they are not zero, either.

Pelosi sees herself as “a progressive hawk” on China; in recent days, people dug into the archives and found footage of her trip to China in 1991, two years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when students and protesters in Beijing were crushed by the Chinese government. Pelosi and other members of Congress visited Tiananmen Square and displayed a banner honoring the demonstrators — until Beijing police showed up, hassling them and the media traveling with them. Back in the day, Pelosi opposed giving China most favored-nation trade status, citing China’s status as “a nation that proliferates weapons of mass destruction, maintains trade barriers that bar U.S. products from its market, and continues to arrest, detain, exile or harass those who peacefully express their political or religious beliefs in China and Tibet.”