Why Nancy Pelosi is visiting Taiwan despite China's threats and pleas from Biden

As a junior House member from California, Nancy Pelosi gained an early reputation for speaking out on two controversial issues of particular importance to constituents in her San Francisco district: addressing HIV/AIDS and pressing human rights in China. Since then, she has stood up to both Republican President George H.W. Bush and Democratic President Bill Clinton on issues involving Beijing – and now to President Joe Biden with her decision to visit Taiwan.

Biden's top national security and military advisers have warned that a visit by Pelosi during her Asia tour would escalate tensions between the United States and China, even risking a military response. On Taiwan, "those who play with fire will eventually get burned," Chinese President Xi Jinping told Biden last week in a phone call.

But Pelosi has a long history of standing up to China, despite the cautions of U.S. administrations. Indeed, she has been more willing than any other modern congressional leader to defy presidents – the highest-ranking official to oppose George W. Bush on the Iraq War from the start, and the House speaker who twice proceeded on impeachment charges against Donald Trump.

That reflects lessons she learned from her father, three-term Baltimore Mayor Tommy D'Alesandro Jr.

Pelosi in Taiwan: Speaker Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan, flouting Chinese threats and Biden's concerns

Below are excerpts from "Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power," a biography published last year by Twelve and written by Susan Page, Washington Bureau chief  for USA TODAY.

The roots of her willingness to defy presidents on China 

Tommy D’Alesandro Jr. (Pelosi's father) was such an ardent fan of FDR that he named his third son Franklin Delano Roosevelt D’Alesandro. But he broke ranks with the president during World War II over FDR’s decision to rebuff pleas for the United States to admit more Jews fleeing the Nazis. D’Alesandro, then a young congressman from Baltimore, publicly endorsed the Bergson Group, a maverick Jewish political action committee that challenged Roosevelt’s refugee policy and later pressed President Harry Truman to recognize Israel’s independence.

The open anti-Semitism Jews were facing may have reminded D’Alesandro of the sting of discrimination against Italians when they were the new immigrants seeking entry to America. One of the tools used to deny entry to desperate Jewish refugees, among them thousands of children, was the Johnson-Reed Act – the 1924 quota law that had been designed in part to slash the number of Italians allowed to immigrate.

What’s more, Tommy D’Alesandro had long had friendships and alliances with Jewish residents of Baltimore. As a boy, he had earned spare change by working as a Shabbos goy, doing routine household tasks for observant Jews on the Sabbath. As a politician, he counted on Jewish voters as part of the coalition he built to win election to Congress and as mayor.

“He would get up – and he spoke Yiddish and he was a great orator – and he'd go around part of the group to have parades, rallies and all the rest to talk about what was happening in Europe, so that he would raise awareness of it and the need for the Jewish State in Palestine,” Nancy Pelosi said in an emotional speech in Jerusalem in 2020, commemorating seventy-five years since the liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz.

Her father had delivered an impassioned appeal on the House floor nearly eight decades earlier, in 1943. “Daily, hourly, the greatest crime of all time is being committed,” D’Alesandro had declared. “A defenseless and innocent people is being slaughtered in a wholesale massacre of millions.”

Years later, Nancy Pelosi would cite the influence that her father’s support of the Bergson Group had on her. It was a factor when she decided to break with another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, on the issue of China and human rights. She was Clinton’s ally on most issues but a thorn in his side on this one. She had been a little girl when World War II ended, but she remembered with pride the example her father had set. “His enthusiasm came from doing what he believed was right,” she said.

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Pushing Bush and protesting in Tiananmen Square

Pelosi asked to be assigned to the Intelligence Committee. ... She wanted to bolster her credentials on national security affairs, advice she would share with new female members of Congress who followed. Later, she would boast that she had logged the longest continuous service on the panel of any member in its history. At the beginning, terrorism wasn’t among the committee’s leading concerns. “When I first went on, in the early 1990s, it was obviously about force protection; it was about disarmament, and it was about how we balance security and privacy and civil liberties,” she told me. “That was a big interest of mine.”

Civil liberties in China had been a cause for Pelosi since the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, soon after she was elected to Congress. She had pushed a proposal to waive visa requirements that required Chinese students in the United States to return home as soon as their studies were done, citing concerns about how they would be treated there. (The legislation passed Congress, but President George H.W. Bush vetoed it, and the Senate couldn’t muster the two-thirds majority needed to override his veto. She would later force his hand to issue an Executive Order.) In 1991, she and two others in a congressional delegation visiting Beijing surreptitiously unfurled a banner in the square, reading in both Chinese and English, “To Those Who Died for Democracy in China.” Chinese guards roughed up and briefly detained camera crews from three U.S. TV networks that had recorded the protest. It caused an international incident, as she knew it would.

A disagreement with Hillary Clinton 

After Bill Clinton was elected President, [Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi] had occasionally clashed, notably over Hillary Clinton’s decision to address the United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. “She was really against my going,” Clinton told me; Pelosi argued it sent the wrong signal at a time Chinese-American human rights activist Harry Wu had been arrested. 

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pelosi in Taiwan: Why she is defying China, Joe Biden to visit