Pelosi’s role as a crusader against the CCP began in 1991,two years after the Tiananmen Square massacre and four years after she entered Congress as a Democrat from California. While visiting Beijing on a delegation,she and two fellow Congress members broke away from their escorts and visited Tiananmen Square without permission. While there,they held up a hand-painted banner saying:“To those who died for democracy in China”. Pelosi and her colleagues fled the scene,but several journalists covering the event were detained by Chinese police.
One of the detained reporters,Mike Chenoy,then CNN’s China bureau chief,recently described it as his “first experience with Pelosi’s penchant for high-profile gestures designed to poke China’s communist rulers in the eye - regardless of the consequences”.
She has since led congressional delegations to Dharamshala,home of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile,to meet with the Dalai Lama and speak out against China’s persecution of Tibet.
In the 1990s,Pelosi held firm as Democratic president Bill Clinton pursued closer relations with Beijing.
After Clinton met Chinese president Jiang Zemin in 1998,Pelosi issued a blistering statement,saying Clinton “was wrong in trying to relegate the Tiananmen Square tragedy to the realm of ‘past action’” and had “missed an opportunity to associate himself with China’s reformers”.