Hello Everyone! I recorded this video a couple days ago and released it on my YouTube channel last night. The video has been well received and it shares some expert analysis from some rational minds that understand the unique situation we are looking at in US/China relations over Taiwan.
However I wanted to take a moment and share some follow up thoughts to this video. First is that I feel both the US and China are in a difficult position as neither country can back down without losing face.
Yesterday I spoke with many Chinese national friends and they were very upset that China’s army didn’t do more. Some went as far as saying the PLA should have shot down Pelosi’s plane 😱 others said they should have at least surrounded her plane and forced her to land in the Philippines are elsewhere.
Personally I’m glad neither of these things happened. China is too smart to make a decision like this as it could cause the breakout of war. Instead China will make Taiwan feel the pain for choosing to host Pelosi.
In the coming weeks I believe we are going to see the Chinese army carry out more military drills, flex their military muscles around the island, and certainly carry out more fighter jet flights through Taiwanese airspace.
Nancy Pelosi yesterday made a terrible diplomatic mistake and referred to Taiwan as a “country”. It’s these kind of mistakes that really add a tremendous amount of tension to the US/China relationship.
The US government can’t honor a “One China” policy and then send Pelosi, who is 2nd in line to the POTUS to Taiwan and allow her to say things like this.
In my opinion, there is going to be a lot of tension between US and China in the coming weeks/months and unfortunately all of this could have been avoided with smarter diplomacy.
As always I’ll keep reporting about it on my YouTube channel and thank you all for your amazing support! Let me know what you think about Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in the comment section.
Cyrus
Completely agree with you, Cyrus. Very pleased that China did not start a war, even though Pelosi provoked them so much. They will seek smarter ways to deal with this, I am sure. Hope very much for continued peace, although there will be repercussions for this reckless visit.
In the end China showed more restreint than most predicted. They did practically nothing the night when Pelosi landed. Their response came only after. With unprecedented level of military exercises. This crisis created the perfect and legitimate reason for China to scale up their military drills basically surrounding Taiwan and blocking all major Taiwanese ports. This is one crucial step forward in China's long term strategy of reunifying with Taiwan. You can't be more impressed by Chinese government's strategic planning and execution. The only thing they lost in this episode is face. They lost BIG in this department. China's "red line" will be a laughing stock and many western politicians will be tempted to follow Pelosi's example. But as an extremely pragmatic nation, China is willing to pay this price.
Honestly, as a Chinese I had expected Chinese military to do a bit more, like sending planes to fly over Taiwan, not to push Pelosi's fleet away, that would be too risky, any chance of skirmish must be avoided, but just flying over Taiwanese people's head for once to show our stance would be nice, as far as I saw it. Fortunately our government is way smarter than me and doesn't respond to our nationalist sentiments.