Matthew Brooker :
Bloomberg
Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan may have been poorly timed, an unnecessary provocation, a reckless gamble, a grandstanding act or a combination of them all, depending on who’s talking. But there’s little doubt that the House speaker has done a good job so far of communicating the fundamental issues behind her trip, and why the island’s fate should matter to the world.
As Pelosi’s plane touched down in Taipei on Tuesday night, the Washington Post published an op-ed in which she laid out her rationale for making the journey, portraying the self-governed territory as a model democracy and free society that is increasingly menaced by its giant authoritarian neighbor. She recalled the origins of the US legislative commitment to support Taiwan’s defense, which from the start 43 years ago designated any attempt to change the island’s status by force as a threat to peace and security in the Western Pacific, and to American interests.
Pelosi’s insistence that her visit doesn’t contradict the one-China policy and that the US continues to oppose unilateral efforts to change the status quo will meet with cynicism in Beijing. In a statement issued shortly after her arrival, the foreign ministry said the trip was a “serious violation” of the two countries’ 1979 joint communique, which stated that the US would have only unofficial relations with Taiwan, an area China regards as its own. Nevertheless, Pelosi’s framing of the visit as a matter of shared interests and international solidarity amid a worldwide struggle between autocracy and democracy will resonate in a year marked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The optics of the speaker’s meeting with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen were loaded with symbolism. Pelosi paid tribute to Tsai, saying, “We are so proud of your leadership, a woman president in one of the freest societies in the world.” The unspoken contrast was with the all-male leadership of the People’s Republic of China, where no woman has ascended to the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest political body, since its foundation in 1949. The understated presence and language of Taiwan’s popularly elected leader also stand in sharp relief to the bellicose rhetoric emanating from Beijing, which again repeated its warning that those who play with fire “will perish by it.”
The symbolism extended to the rest of Pelosi’s itinerary. The speaker also met Wu’er Kaixi, the exiled Tiananmen student leader,and Lee Ming-che, a Taiwan pro-democracy activist who spent five years in prison in China on subversion charges, as well as Lam Wing-kee, a Hong Kong bookseller who was detained in the mainland after selling works critical of the Communist Party elite, and subsequently fled to Taiwan.
These engagements ensure that almost any pictures or discussion of Pelosi’s visit will keep the focus indirectly on China – never mentioned, necessarily, but always there in the implied disparity between the freedoms of the island’s progressive and tolerant democracy, and the Communist system 100 miles across the Taiwan Strait. Even the anti-Pelosi demonstrators who gathered at her hotel chanting, “Yankee go home,” served to reinforce this message; their presence only underlines the fact that they enjoy a freedom proscribed in China. After all, no pro-Taiwan demonstration would be allowed to take place in the mainland.
In that light, Pelosi’s trip can already be considered something of a public relations success. For sure, there will be a price to pay, and it may be too early yet to say whether that price is worth it. Several days of high tensions lie ahead. China’s planned military drills are more threatening than those it undertook in 1995 and 1996 in protest at former President Lee Teng-hui’s visit to the US, and the strength of its armed forces is far greater than then. China also has an array of other potential tactics to squeeze the island, including cyberattacks and trade bans. Still, on balance, it’s unlikely that Beijing wishes to see a wider conflict at this point. An accident that triggers unavoidable escalation is probably the biggest threat.
Meanwhile, in publicity terms, Beijing looks the loser. It may have stirred some patriotic fervor on domestic social media, but the rest of the world is more likely to recoil from the tactics of a government that seeks to gain by intimidation what it has failed to achieve through persuasion. If anything, that’s likely to buttress international support for Taiwan’s threatened democracy. Pelosi’s visit may prove a clarifying moment.
(Matthew Brooker is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance
and politics in Asia).
