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Nancy Pelosi is a political leader of historic consequence. She was the first woman elected Speaker of the House (2007 to 2011) and was elected again from 2019 to 2023. During her second tenure, she managed an unruly Democratic majority despite having only a few vote margin on votes. She remains a House member from California after giving up the speakership. China has played an important role in her career. She made her early reputation as a lawmaker, in part, by leading the fight for human rights in China and trying to pressure China to make progress on the issue or lose trade preferences with the U.S.. Near the end of her tenure as Speaker, she made a controversial visit to Taiwan, which Beijing used as a rationale to sharply increase military and political pressure on the island. This interview is part of Rules of Engagement, a series by Bob Davis, who covered the U.S.-China relationship at The Wall Street Journal starting in the 1990s. In these interviews, Davis asks current and former U.S. officials and policymakers what went right, what went wrong and what comes next.

Q: One of the first issues that brought you to national prominence was China. This has struck me as an unusual choice for a new congresswoman from San Francisco, where so much of the business is Pacific-oriented.

A: How can I say this? Anybody who was not moved by what happened in Tiananmen Square just would not be able to understand. We had all these young people in the square demonstrating for one thing and another. Some of it was anti-corruption. Some of it was being able to speak freely. There were a lot of different issues that brought people to the square and also to hundreds of other places in China. That the Chinese government rolled over them with tanks was just inconceivable to me, and also arrested some of them. I objected to our country possibly ignoring all of that. 

Now you have to remember, I’m a complete nobody and all of a sudden, I’m challenging the president of the United States. It just goes to show you what you don’t know.

My concern was that there were people in prison, and we wanted to try to free them. We couldn’t bring people back to life, but we wanted to free the prisoners arrested at the time of Tiananmen Square. One of the vehicles could have been conditioning — I’m not saying revoking — [China’s] most favored nation [status in return for] freeing the prisoners. [“Most favored nation” refers to the U.S. assessing Chinese goods at the U.S.’s lowest tariff rate. Congress voted on that annually.]

At the time, our trade deficit with China was $5 billion a year. I thought for $5 billion dollars — certainly they’ll free the prisoners, certainly they’ll give us market access, and certainly they’ll behave security-wise. 

You thought we had leverage?

That was our leverage. We had a big coalition [pressing for human rights in China]. And the fact that I, as such a junior person, was taking the lead — I guess it was ignorance was bliss or something, but I thought I should be doing it. That’s how it emerged. Trade was a big piece, and tying it to human rights.

The unions of course were very concerned about lack of market access, the use of prison labor competing with our labor, unfair competition. Violation of our intellectual property was of course a big trade issue with us too. And then the third piece was security. 

So really, when you ask what is the motivation…I had met His Holiness the Dalai Lama before Tiananmen Square when I was a brand-new member of Congress. [The Dalai Lama visited the U.S. capitol in 1987.] It was the most awesome honor I could ever imagine. He presented his view of autonomy for Tibet. He wasn’t talking about independence or anything like that. They would’ve hoped that they could achieve a rapport with the Chinese government and stop a lot of what was going on in Tibet.

But you must have gotten pushback from business interests in your area. They were so dependent on the Pacific.

In our area we have [people from] Taiwan, we have mainland people. There was complaining from some people who sold Chinese stuff on the street or in the shops in Chinatown. But who are you talking about? Big business?

Yeah. I mean, tech wasn’t the tech it is now in San Francisco, but it was always a big industry.

No, I didn’t hear from them at all. It wasn’t a question of my district; it was a question of nationally. You had big business. You had Hank Greenberg who was one of the worst, one of the worst. All they wanted to do is sell insurance. They didn’t care if people were getting rolled over by tanks or if small businesses and moderate-sized businesses had any access to the Chinese market. They didn’t care. [Maurice “Hank” Greenberg at the time was CEO of American Insurance Group, which was the dominant foreign insurance company in China.] 

Insurance and banks — financial institutions ruled. And the Chinese owned practically every lobbying firm and law firm in Washington DC. [Pelosi holds up a big sheaf of papers, waves it and says] if I gave you this many pages, single space, it would be the number of law firms they owned. And everybody [in lobbying] said to me, ‘Thank you for sending my kids to college,’ because it was the gravy train of all time. 

One other point was we had people helping us who were part of the U.S.-China trade relationship and who were getting treated terribly. Everybody had this mirage of this great China market that was going to be available to our products. [The Chinese said] You want to sell to our market? Well, first of all, if you want to do manufacturing and have access to our cheap labor, you have to give us your designs. And once we have your designs, we don’t need you anymore. And we’re probably using prison labor. They don’t say that, but they [U.S. companies] knew they were probably competing with not just low-cost labor, but prison labor on the part of the Chinese, which is again unfair competition.

Did you think you could actually win? Did you think you could deny China most favored nation, or was it kind of a protest? 

We thought we could condition it. We said [to business groups], you’re willing to have conditions on trade if the Chinese do not agree on intellectual property. Well, why don’t you do the same thing for intellectuals — meaning any human being with a brain. But there wasn’t that much interest in that.

Now President George Herbert Walker Bush I loved. He’s wonderful. Every time when I was talking to his son, President [George W.] Bush, he’d say, ‘Why do you keep saying he’s such a sweetheart? Why doesn’t anybody say that about me?’ I said, ‘Because he was sweeter.’

We had our differences. This awful thing had happened [in Tiananmen]. I can understand that he had been the representative in an earlier time in his career to China. [Bush had been the U.S. envoy in Beijing in the mid-1970s before the U.S. and China established diplomatic relations.] He was hopeful and optimistic. But he sent Eagleburger and Scowcroft whom I knew well — I tried to get them to stop smoking but I didn’t succeed with that — to China, where they’re toasting them. 

Our country decided to ride the dragon. It’s given opportunity to big money in our country. It’s so sad. They didn’t care at all. All they wanted to do is sell insurance and have banking relationships.

[A month after the Tiananmen crackdown, Bush dispatched National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to Beijing on what was then a secret mission to meet with Chinese leaders and try to keep relations from deteriorating. Afterwards, Congress passed legislation in 1991 and 1992 that would have placed conditions on China’s MFN status. Bush vetoed the measure, but the House overrode his vetoes. Bush prevailed in the Senate, which failed to override his veto, so the MFN-conditionality legislation ultimately failed.]

President Bush wrote handwritten notes to the senators or their wives, saying ‘Please don’t vote for the override.’ He said, ‘I will do an executive order.’ He wrote that and then he didn’t do it. They told us it was going to appear in the federal register. We waited and waited for it and it didn’t appear. So we called the White House and they said, you’re not getting that. What Bush meant was, ‘I’ll do something about them.’ But it ain’t happening. So we took his note [promising an executive order] to the Washington Post. Boom! And then he had to do it. 

It was most unfortunate. I think he was ill-advised by his staff. But nonetheless, we then got that executive order to protect the Chinese students in America and that was a very big deal. There were several pieces of legislation to protect Chinese students. It was a horrible time for them.

Let’s move on to [former President Bill] Clinton. You were pushing Clinton in the same way you pushed Bush because it was the same issue. I think it’s fair to say he tried to get China to agree to make changes in their human rights record in exchange for continuing trade. [In 1994, Clinton dispatched Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Beijing to press China to protect dissidents or face a cutoff of MFN trade preferences. Chinese leaders, especially Premier Li Peng, rejected his efforts.] 

They did not make it a priority. This is news to me that he even made an attempt — and I love President Clinton, I think he has been underappreciated as a great president of the United States. China was not an area in which I think he did what he should have done. Let me just tell you what happened.

During the campaign, they had the Chinese dissidents from Tiananmen Square at the [Democratic] convention. ‘We will not coddle dictators’…until they won the election. And then it was like, you ain’t getting nothing. 

[Senate Majority Leader] George Mitchell and I had legislation that said if we could prove that Chinese products were made by prison labor that they would have to act upon that. What we did, at the risk of lives of people who were prisoners, was get stuff out that was destined for the American market and easily identifiable as such. And then they [the Clinton administration] did nothing. They didn’t sign the bill and that was most disappointing. 

Shortly thereafter, the president went to China and he took a baton and he led the People’s Liberation Army Band in music. Don’t hand me that he tried to do anything. [President Clinton visited China for more than a week in 1998. At a banquet in the Great Hall of the People President Jiang Zemin and President Clinton took turns leading a PLA band.]

Do you think all your efforts made a difference? 

You asked an earlier question: Did we think we could beat all this money? My members [of Congress] understand that money always wins around here. And that’s one of the crosses I have to bear — whether it’s big oil, big pharma, big gun money.

We were trying to make sure people were aware of what was happening. Win or lose, you have to make the fight. You may not always succeed, but you must always fight. That’s the way it is.

I think the problems that we have with China are problems of our own that we helped to create. Not we, but our U.S. policy that I was fighting.

The China deficit right now is more like $5 billion a week — it was a year back then. [In 1989 the U.S. trade deficit with China was $6.2 billion. Last year it was $279.4 billion.] You decide to ride the dragon, the dragon will decide when you get off. 

The money they made off of our trade enabled them to build up their security, to buy political support, geopolitical support in the global south, to our detriment. So again, we made a mistake then as a country; we could have done something better. But corporate America ran the show, and the Bush and Clinton administrations just were beholden to them for some reason — not beholden to them, but did what they wanted. 

But we persist. The worst thing is for Chinese repressors to tell a prisoner that, ‘Nobody even knows about you anymore. They’ve forgotten all about you. They don’t even know why you’re here. Why don’t you just admit to fake charges.’ And we keep saying, ‘Don’t admit it.’

On the floor of the House, at rallies and all the rest, in letters or visits to China, we will always be putting forth those things. I want to keep making the fight. I think that the record will show that we were right.

But as to whether we have improved the situation? No, because money won.

When I became speaker, they [the Chinese] wanted to rearrange our relationship. So they invited me to bring a delegation, to be treated as a head-of State visit. They closed down the streets. They closed down the Forbidden City so that we could have it all to ourselves in 2009.

In 2007 I became speaker. I wanted to go to India to visit the Dalai Lama in ’08 before I went to China in ’09. The whole purpose of the China trip was climate. I had been reading about how in Tianjin, they were making electric cars and all that stuff. And so I said, that’s one place I would like to visit. They took me on high-speed rail because they wanted to show off their high-speed rail. We [also] had a good visit to Shanghai. I praised them for what they had been doing to rehab their buildings, build high-speed rail — all the kinds of things to reduce emissions. 

Left: Nancy Pelosi visiting Tianjin Qingyuan Electric Vehicle Co. Ltd.’s EV factory in Tianjin, May 28, 2009. Right: Then Railway Minister Liu Zhijun with Nancy Pelosi and Edward Markey, alongside the Beijing–Tianjin intercity high-speed rail line, May 28, 2009. Credit: Nancy Pelosi via Flickr

And I just note in that regard, when President Trump became president, I thought there could be an opportunity for us to join with the EU as the biggest market ever anybody could conceive and use our leverage with China on the trade with human rights. I’ve lost my innocence on human rights. I don’t see that many people caring that much about genocide — ‘Never again,’ except if you’re Muslim in China.

But I thought what the president did — I hate to call him President Trump; I usually don’t even use his name — but what what’s-his-name did during the campaign was not constructive in terms of China. [Trump attacked China for “raping” the U.S. economically during the 2016 election campaign].

Let’s talk about Taiwan because obviously it was such a controversial visit.

Well, to whom is it controversial? Your friend Kurt Campbell? [Campbell was the National Security Council’s China chief at the time and is now Deputy Secretary of State]. Who is it controversial to? 

It’d be controversial to Kurt Campbell, controversial to the Chinese. I think President Biden was pretty clearly trying to convince you not to go.

No. He wasn’t. No, he wasn’t. What are you basing that on? 

He said the military thinks it’ll be a problem. I thought that was a wimpy way of trying to convince you not to go.

But he never said anything to me about it. Let’s stipulate the facts.

So, here’s the thing. We were going to have a trip to support President Biden. I’m a big fan of President Biden’s initiatives for the Asia-Pacific. We were going to Singapore, Malaysia. At the time we might have gone to Indonesia depending on the schedule, and Korea, Japan. In light of that, we got an invitation to go to Taiwan. It wasn’t something we sought out. It was a trip where we were talking about our focus on the Asia-Pacific. And being a Californian, of course, that was very important.

Then I got Covid and I couldn’t go, so we put it off. When Taiwan came up, I had not even mentioned it to the members because we wanted to see what the possibilities were, security-wise and the rest. Somebody in the White House, who you know well, put it in the Financial Times that I was going to Taiwan. 

My members were like, ‘What is this? We never even heard about this.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s because there’s trouble at the White House. They’re trying to have an impact on where the Speaker of the House travels.’ Per Article One [of the Constitution], we’re the first branch of government. 

Win or lose, you have to make the fight. You may not always succeed, but you must always fight. That’s the way it is.

So then they were like, ‘We want to go.’ And I said, ‘Well, I haven’t brought it up with you because we had not fully vetted what the possibilities are. But now we will.’ And that’s what started the, ‘Oh, they shouldn’t go; they will go’ business. We hadn’t even discussed it ourselves. So we were not happy with them [the White House]. But before we went, the president said, ‘if China attacks Taiwan, we will be there to protect them.’

Now, we were not in any way changing our one-China policy per the Taiwan Relations Act. We weren’t going there to make any change in that. We were just going there to accept their invitation and not to have them be ignored. And not to have President Xi Jinping decide where I, a Speaker of the House, could go. But that’s a different story. 

But that’s a big part of the story, right? 

A few weeks before we went, a bipartisan delegation of senators had gone there. Did you hear about it? 

No, but you’re the Speaker of the House.

But it was the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States Senate. [Sen. Robert Menendez, who was then chairman of the committee, and five other lawmakers visited Taiwan in April 2022, about four months before Pelosi.]

Not the Speaker of the House with a history of being strong on human rights.

The history was the point.

[The Chinese] would not even mention a bipartisan group going, and some others went too. So many more people have gone. Even some countries have said, our legislators decided to go because you went. I’m glad of that. But, yeah, everything to do with China is controversial.

You knew China was going to go crazy. They said it 20 times and then they sent jets [into Taiwanese airspace]. Do you think Taiwan is more secure now after your trip compared to if you hadn’t gone? 

We don’t know how much more secure somebody is or not. It depends on the attitude of President Xi. It doesn’t have to do with where I travel or where members are going.

But you just said before, Xi Jinping doesn’t get to tell the Speaker of the House where to go. How much of that was [a reason for going?]

No, it was only accepting an invitation. It had nothing to do with Xi. It had everything to do with the fact that they extended an invitation. 

I think if the White House had just been calm — not the White House, but a certain person in the State Department — had just laid low, but they [the administration] challenged China. In other words, it was ‘We’re going. Now, what are you going to do about it, China?’

So we go, and we land at night. You have to wait at the airport to get tested [for Covid] before you can go in. When we leave the airport, it’s close to midnight. Thousands of people in the streets. American flags, Taiwan flags, all the rest of it. Buildings lit up with welcoming lights. Shining hearts for America. It was really a remarkable thing. Security said there might have been fewer than 100 mainland people with signs near the hotel [who were protesting].

I asked you whether Taiwan was more secure or not. Let me ask you a different way. Do you think Taiwanese democracy has been strengthened because you went? 

You’re giving me too much credit for all this. Taiwan has just had a very vibrant election [in January]. The people who are in support of the status quo won. The other party, [the Kuomintang] when they visit, they say, ‘We’re not for joining up with China.’ I don’t know; that may have been their message for me. But the fact is that the President’s party won [the Democratic Progressive Party], and that was about the status quo. And that’s what we were about — the status quo . We were not about independence or changing the one-China policy or anything like that.

As you said, Biden has said we will come to the defense of Taiwan. He has said it four times now. Do you think, and the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity — not to say exactly what we’re going to do in case of a Chinese invasion — should be changed?

We have always just said we would help them defend themselves. That’s what the Taiwan legislation was about. And beyond that, the president was making a bigger statement, and it quite frankly was fanning the flames of my visit. [The Taiwan Relations Act requires the United States to provide Taiwan arms ‘of a defensive character’ and to assure the U.S. has the capability to resist any Chinese use of force or coercion.]

But do you think a change of policy, so it would be clear that the U.S. would come to the aid of Taiwan, would be a good thing?

I’m not advocating [for that]. I’m one-China policy, status quo and leave them alone. Our policy is that there should be no change in status, unless it’s peacefully agreed to, and not by use of force by any party.

Let’s switch topics to China joining the WTO. As you remember, Congress had to pass what was called then permanent normal trade relations. You opposed that at the time. When you think back, do you think you were right? [Congress voted to end annual votes extending trade preferences for China. At the suggestion of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, lawmakers began to use the term permanent normal trade relations, or PNTR, rather than most favored nation because “normal trade relations” didn’t sound like a special deal for China.]

Yes. Let me tell you why.

Having gone to China [in May 2009], they rolled out the red carpet. It was so wonderful. Then we reciprocated [in September 2009]. The chairman of the [National] People’s Congress brought an array of chairs of committees [to Washington]. We could never do the hospitality that they do because we don’t have 14-course meals and the rest of that. But nonetheless, we did nice things. We tried to make it warm and friendly.

I said, I hate to begin the meeting this way, but we learned last night that you are dumping rubber tires into the U.S.. And I can’t have this meeting take place without calling that to your attention, and the concern that we have in our country about your dumping. And I said, what you’re doing is in violation of the rules of the WTO. And they said, ‘When we joined the WTO, we did not have to obey those rules.’ They said that to me right there in that room. Can you imagine?

[The push for China’s entry] was started by the Clinton administration and finished in the Bush administration. They were falling for it again. They weren’t ever going to hold China accountable for anything.

The point is you let them in under the terms that everybody else is in, that you obey the rules. You don’t let them in so they can violate the rules. They’ve always given China a pass, whether it’s prison labor, whether it’s making hamburger meat out of people in the square, whether it’s violation of intellectual property, lack of market access, transfer of technologies to what could be rogue countries. 

There’s talk now in Congress of ending PNTR for China. Do you think that would be a good idea?

It’s done. I think that there are other things that we can do.

Do you think TikTok should be banned? 

No. I don’t think they should ban it. I think it should be disassociated from the Chinese having access to our data. I think that’s very, very dangerous. [Shortly after the conversation, the House passed a bill that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless its Chinese owners sold the company.]

I went along with President Trump to the Munich security conference when he was still president. They expected me, when I made my presentation, to be very different from [Vice President] Pence who was representing them. [But] we had the same speech. It was about Huawei. We were trying to say to our allies, you cannot allow them to have access to your data.

You have met so many world leaders. What’s your assessment of Xi Jinping as a leader? 

We met with him [in the Capitol in September 2015]. It was a small meeting. Some of the leadership and Senator [Diane] Feinstein were there too. And we brought up the subject of Tibet, and how we were concerned about the brutal treatment of people in Tibet. And he said, ‘Oh, we’ve done so many good things in Tibet, you’ve gotta go see for yourself.’ And I said, ‘well, that would be lovely, because I’ve been trying for 25 years to get a visa to go to Tibet. So, I assume this is a visa to go to Tibet.’

We did go [in November 2015]. And, of course, it was a Potemkin village. 

But what’s your assessment of him?

I think that anybody who’s engaged in the genocide of a million Uyghurs is an evil person. It’s interesting to me to see how the Chinese have enabled him to acquire so much power and so much longevity. 

Having said that, we still have to work [together] on the climate issue. I support what the president and he agreed to in San Francisco at APEC. Hopefully they will honor it. That’s the question. Do they ever honor any of these things? 

And again, I think he’s evil: No, I won’t say he’s an evil person. I think he’s doing evil things in the genocide, and crashing democratic freedoms in Hong Kong. And I’m heartbroken about what they’re doing to the culture of Tibet.

How do you look at him as a politician? 

An autocrat assuming total power.

I think that anybody who’s engaged in the genocide of a million Uyghurs is an evil person.

What does Trump say? ‘Oh, he is great, look what he is doing.’ I’ll tell you one little anecdote. President Trump was calling me about something. I couldn’t take the call. So he said, ‘I’ll call you when I get off the plane. I’m going to Japan for the G-20’ [in 2019]. So he calls when he gets to Japan and he says, ‘I’m here’ and he told me what he was calling about. 

And I said, ‘You see what’s happening in Hong Kong, there are millions of people in the street.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, you see the size of that crowd?’ More than your swearing in [she says in an aside.] But anyway I said, ‘Yeah, when you consider that it’s 25 percent of the people who live in Hong Kong who are in the streets, speaking out for freedom of expression.’

And I said, ‘I don’t expect you to say anything to President Xi about that. But I wish you would tell him this — that in the House and in the Senate, on both sides of the aisle, there is grave concern about China’s genocide of the Uyghurs. That is something you could say to him. That’s a fact.’

So, he calls me the next day. He said, ‘I spoke to him about what you asked about and he said those people like being in those prisons.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what autocrats say.’

When Trump says something like that to you, do you think he believes it? 

I hope not. Well, that’s a whole other story. That’s a whole other day.

Our country decided to ride the dragon. It’s given opportunity to big money in our country. It’s so sad. They didn’t care at all. All they wanted to do is sell insurance and have banking relationships. 

They didn’t care if small and moderate size businesses had to give away their designs so they would have access to the Chinese market. From a strictly economic standpoint, it was a bad deal for American workers. From a value standpoint, it was terrible. And from a security standpoint, if you go to Iran, a lot of the capabilities of Iran were not indigenous to Iran, but much of it began in China. Not even that long ago, they were making ring magnets for the enrichment of uranium to Iran.

So how would you get them to change?

It’s about how do you change the role of big money in the policy of America? It’s a sad thing, but it’s not hopeless. We keep fighting the fight, keep calling attention to it.

I wish we could have lived up to our values when it came to human rights, and our practicality when it came to our trade and our security.

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