Needless alarm over Pelosi’s trip

A surprisingly large number of commentators have indulged in scare-mongering over US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s brief visit to Taiwan. She was there last Wednesday, in between a trip to Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan.

For several days earlier China, which claims Taiwan as a province awaiting “reunification” with it, issued multiple warnings against the high-profile visit. Numerous American and other journalists and scholars echoed the warnings, urging Pelosi to scrap her plan.

In Taipei, she met President Tsai Ying-wen, praising Taiwan as one of the “freest societies in the world”.

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“America’s determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and around the world remains iron-clad,” she declared.

China began several days of live-fire drills in six zones surrounding Taiwan, among the biggest such exercises it has carried out, firing missiles over the island, a few of which landed inside Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone. Cyberattacks against Taiwan’s defence forces and Taiwanese leaders’ offices have escalated manifold.

But these are not rare actions on China’s part. It has indulged in dangerous brinkmanship independent of external provocations, such as in October last when Chinese fighter aircraft carried out 150 sorties over the island. In 1996, when Taiwan held its first democratic presidential elections, which native-born Taiwanese Lee Teng-hui won, China had conducted military drills and missile tests.

Pelosi’s was not the first high profile Taiwan-US exchange. President Lee visited his alma mater, Cornell University, in 1995 and his presence in the US led China to threaten Taiwan with military action.

A predecessor of Pelosi as Speaker, Newt Gingrich, visited both Beijing and Taipei in 1997. China’s only condition then was that he should not fly directly between the two capitals and so he made a detour via Tokyo.

Pelosi’s visit had bipartisan support among members of the US Congress and any overreaction on Beijing’s part would only hurt its image among influential US lawmakers who could take a stronger line on supplying arms to Taiwan or in Sino-US trade negotiations.

Also Read: Military drills in 'our own waters' are open, transparent, professional: Chinese foreign ministry

If Pelosi is to be criticised, it should be on the grounds that she is most likely acting out of domestic interests and that instead of going to support Taiwanese democracy, she ought to focus on the current dangerous political situation in her own country: the January 6 insurrection at Capitol Hill and the real threat to herself, with her office invaded, revealed how close the US had come to a coup d’etat.

The Taiwanese themselves, being used to Chinese threats and sabre-rattling, have reacted calmly to the Chinese drills following Pelosi’s visit.

“Facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down,” President Tsai said last Wednesday in an appearance with Pelosi.

Some Chinese economic sanctions against Taiwan will hurt a number of Taiwanese businesses – which have a stake in preserving amicable cross-strait relations – but make hardly any dent on Taiwan’s economy as a whole.

Writer Clarissa Wei said in an opinion column for CNN: “There’s a jolting disconnect between how the outside world perceives Taiwan (as a potential flashpoint for a world war), and how we in Taiwan see Taiwan (our dear home where we live). And part of that disconnect is because the international conversation about Taiwan is filtered through a geopolitical lens and almost always in the context of China…But what’s most frustrating about the reaction to Pelosi’s visit is not the prophetic declaration of imminent doom, but the expectation of fear and the surprise that follows when people realise that we aren’t all panicking in Taiwan – as if the calm we exude in light of unprecedented threats is a symptom of our ignorance of the facts before us.”

Commentators warning of dire consequences for Taiwan ignore the fact that the Chinese leadership has preoccupations of its own that will most likely prevent it from undertaking a misadventure in the Taiwan Strait anytime soon.

President Xi Jinping is looking for a third term in office. The 20th congress of the Communist Party of China is due later this year. Xi and his aides will be busy picking members of the 200-odd Central Committee, the 20-odd Politburo, and a smaller all-powerful Standing Committee (which has had four to nine members in the past). He also has to choose leaders of State bodies ahead of the National People’s Congress session early next year.

All of which makes a shooting war over Taiwan unlikely in the near term.

US stocks, usually sensitive to adverse global developments, reacted insignificantly last week, entirely in response to domestic economic news, signalling that Pelosi’s trip and heightened Chinese military activity around Taiwan were not an issue for the markets.

(The writer is a senior journalist who reported from China and Hong Kong from 1988 to 2006)