Nancy Pelosi: From Tibet to Taiwan, US closing in on China
Photo credit Twitter Nancy Pelosi
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, August 2: China had gone into a shell after the corona virus, leaked from its Wuhan province, plunged the world into the worst humanitarian tragedy of the century in 2020 and afterwards.
China, after waking up in 2022, finds that the world has changed, and the US has developed visible and assertive interests in Indo-Pacific, Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Nepal and indeed India.
On Tuesday evening, the US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a democracy advocate, landed in Taiwan, with a fleet of the warships guarding her.
No amount of rhetoric on the parts of the Chinese President Xi Jinping, its Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and scores of spokespersons worked even while they advised Washington not to play with fire.
“Not going to Taiwan was not an option for Pelosi. Not only would it have sent the wrong messages to the entire region and undermined the entire pivot to the Indo-Pacific..it would have also told Beijing that bullying works,” Ramananda Sengupta, strategic affairs expert, told The Raisina Hills.
But Pelosi’s Taiwan visit wasn’t sudden, for the Americans had begun feting the exiled Tibetans, meeting them in Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh, India, while some of them were invited to meet the leadership in Washington.
For decades, Americans have been camping in McLeodganj, the seat of power of Dalai Lama, for his spiritual guidance, with Hollywood stars being his loyal followers.
The US issued recently a stern warning over the human rights violation in the Xinjiang province against ethnic Muslims, who are allegedly treated as lunatics for following their religion.
Despite dogged attempts of the Chinese political agents in Kathmandu, the Nepalese Parliament ratified the USD 500 million Compact which the Himalayan nation had signed with the US in 2017.
For the past two and a half years, the Nepalese traders saw their borders with China blocked for their trucks to go into its large neighbour, debilitating its economy. The experience dawned on Nepal’s political leadership to mend relations with India and open up to the US.
At the Quad Summit in Tokyo, the US unveiled the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, besides a USD 50 billion fund to finance the infrastructure projects in the developing countries to seemingly counter the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) of China.
The G7 Summit in Germany firmed up the resolve of the western countries to make their bid to counter China large, and seek to alter the global supply chain’s key connection with China.
China’s might lies in its export-driven economy. The US-led western powers seemingly seek to check that heft of China to manipulate the global economy.
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