Pelosi in Taiwan: a historic opportunity for China

The Chinese response to Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan is in no way to sanction an 82-year-old leader who is stepping out of political life, but rather to establish a new “status quo” in US-China relations on the islandconsidering that the president of the House of Representatives and number 3 of the North American institutional system has irreversibly broken in all its terms the consensus in force since 1972, when the then president Richard Nixon and the leader of the People’s Republic Mao Tse Tung established in the ” Shanghai Communiqué “.

This historical document has two fundamental points, to which a corollary was added in 1978 (Carter administration) when the two countries established diplomatic relations. The first and essential is that “there is only one China in the world”; and the next statement is that “Taiwan is an inseparable part of it”.

After, in 1978 the third point was added which states that “the government of the People’s Republic of China is the only legal government in all of China”.

Now the government of the People’s Republic estimates that Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan – which took place on a US military plane – has irreversible bankruptcy this “status quo” emerged from the Shanghai communiqué.

The night of the same Tuesday that Pelosi arrived on the island, China has established 6 “military operational zones” located in front of the main ports of Taiwan; and that both north and south explicitly and deliberately covered their territorial waters.

All of these combined force exercises of the People’s Liberation Army (EPL) were carried out with war ammunition, and exercised both a probable blockade of the island and a general military intervention on all its territory.

More than 180 supersonic aircraft participated, including 35 “Stealth” superfighters (capable of evading all radars), as well as 68 state-of-the-art ships, including its two aircraft carriers: the “Liaoning” and the “Shandong” – , with the escort of nuclear submarines.

It should be added that two of the six “military zones” that surrounded the island, they lie entirely above Taiwan’s territorial waters.

In the last two days of the operation, which took place from Wednesday to Sunday, Chinese aviation planes crossed the island’s airspace several times, from north to south, and from east to west; and they acted after carefully informing the Taiwanese forces that if for any reason, even accidental, their forces received any type of missile or anti-aircraft attack, the response would be immediate and total, covering all military units on the island of Taiwan . No accidents occurred during these maneuvers..

It is clear that Nancy Pelosi it offered China an extraordinary historical opportunity to affirm its territorial integrity and accelerate the recovery process of the island, essential for this country with 5,000 years of history, and which in the last 200 years has had to undergo successive foreign invasions.

The most politically important of these events did not occur on the island, but in the United States. Biden and the Pentagon opposed Pelosi’s trip to Taiwanand she, instead, challenged them and prevailed.

Joe Biden, in his capacity as CEO of the United States, is solely responsible for the country’s foreign policy and holds all the security interests of the world’s leading superpower in his hands; Y what the whole episode reveals is the immense power vacuum that exists in Washington today, with a weak president, the weakest in American history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is the riskiest aspect of the current crisis and we must act on the premise that this situation will worsen over the next 2 years.

At the same time, China has severed all military, security and climate cooperation ties with the United States.

This means that the last remaining coordination and cooperation mechanisms between the two superpowers have ceased; and this aggravates the break produced in the integrated transnational productive system, which is the structural core of 21st century capitalism, and in which the two superpowers are its main protagonists; and that aggravates the rift produced by the war in Ukraine and the international sanctions imposed on Russia by the US, the direct cause of the three great crises of the time: food, energy and inflation.

This happens in the moment the world is immersed in a recession led by the US and Europe; and when all this indicates that the war in Ukraine has reached a turning point, with a Russia which, having consolidated the conquest of Donbas, and assumed a strategically defensive position, it seems to have won the conflict in military terms.

This is the context of Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, a extraordinary historical eventwhich will be recorded mainly in the annals of the People’s Republic.