Nancy Pelosi’s lightning visit to Taiwan, the leader of the US House of Representatives, has created an unnecessary incident in the already tense relations between China and the United States. His decision to include the island in his tour of various Asian countries has been welcomed as a provocation by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who has overreacted as if it were a real military action.
The inappropriateness of the Democratic representative’s initiative, adopted in dissonance with the White House, does not justify Xi has ordered military exercises with live fire which will mean a military siege of several days for the island. After Joe Biden’s frustrated attempt to convince Xi himself that Pelosi’s decision did not involve his administration, the confirmation of his arrival in Taipei created unusual tension in the corridor that separates the East China Sea from the West that did not It is bad for the Chinese leader, who is due to be re-elected next fall for a third term.
“Whoever plays with fire will get burned,” Xi told Biden, during the two-hour phone conversation the two had last week. Aware of the Eastern tradition, Pelosi acted according to one of the maxims of the well-known strategist Sun Tzu, according to which “if your opponent has an angry temperament, he tries to irritate him.”
You may wonder the reason for this gesture and why Pelosi has carried it out at a time like the present, when your country is involved in an armed conflict with Russia in the Ukraine. The principles of politics and war Rather, they advise the opposite. that is, avoid adding sources of tension. It is surprising an initiative like his, which has raised reservations in many countries, while Biden is committed to seeking broad military and political support for the Ukrainian resistance. It is significant that even some of his allies in his fight with China have remained silent in the face of Pelosi’s arrival in Taiwan. Not because they do not agree with his words, in the sense of reiterating the commitment of the United States in the face of any Chinese aggression, but because they think that this is not the time to question the status quo, taking into account the problems facing the world economy and what a collapse of trade relations with China would now represent.
It is to be hoped that the Chinese government do not raise your reaction beyond what the nationalist narrative requires in which Xi has wrapped his country since the last congress of the communist party. To modulate her response, they must take into account the political personality of Nancy Pelosi, who has made the defense of democracy in China one of her hallmarks. Her support for the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown, her well-known pro-democracy pronouncements in Hong Kong, her boycott of the Beijing Olympics, and her closeness to the Dalai Lama attest to this. Attitudes that honor it politically, but that are not enough to determine an issue of such importance, for freedom in the world, economic stability and security, such as that of relations between the United States and China.
A large majority of Taiwanese do not want to live under the yoke of Beijing. But only a tiny minority supports adventures that suppose the rupture of a status quo that has allowed Taiwan to be the 23rd power in the world (and the country that produces more than 60% of the microchips on which our daily lives depend).