Nancy Pelosi Championed a Hong Kong Dissident. She May Have Doomed Him.

In one of the final speeches of her congressional career, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) rose last month “to call attention to what is happening in Hong Kong.” She was condemning the Chinese government for its prosecution of protester Joshua Wong. Yet it was exactly that attention from Congress that had helped doom Wong in the first place. Like Hmong militias and Kurdish resistance fighters in years past, leaders in the Hong Kong protest movement had a one-sided partnership with U.S. politicians that would not (and could not) be reciprocated, and that ultimately put a target on their backs. 

At the center of this history, culminating with Wong’s prosecution, is Pelosi herself. Pelosi has planted herself at the center of every major China debate since the end of the Cold War and, early on in her career, took risks to defend her hawkish positions toward Beijing. But brazenness does not necessarily mean bravery. Pelosi squandered political capital over the decades on inconsequential adventures, achieving no serious victories, while the price paid by people caught between Beijing and Washington may prove far more exorbitant than anything Pelosi risked.

This crusade began in 1991, when Pelosi traveled to Beijing as part of an official congressional trade delegation. Three days into her trip, Pelosi quietly snuck out of her hotel, without Chinese approval, trailed by a small posse. She was headed to Tiananmen Square, the site of the infamous 1989 crackdown that occurred two years earlier. 

When Pelosi arrived in the square with two of her House colleagues, they unfurled a banner that read, “To those who died for democracy in China.” The banner was written in English and Chinese, indicating that its intended audience was both their American constituents and their Chinese hosts. Upon discovering the ceremony, local police began to chase Pelosi and her fellow representatives out of the square, as onlookers and journalists were shoved, corralled, and forcefully detained for filming.

Her colleague John Miller (R–Wash.) revealed that this P.R. stunt was planned from the beginning—on a bipartisan basis. “We had one major purpose in going to Beijing,” Miller told reporters, “That was to deliver the strongest possible message to the Chinese government leaders that Americans and the American Congress have not forgotten Tiananmen Square.”

Pelosi herself would admit that nothing else was achieved. The trip failed “to see or gain the release of prominent imprisoned dissidents or get promises of human rights improvements from the officials,” she said. Relations between the two countries took a sharp downward turn. But Pelosi and Miller’s third colleague,  Rep. Ben Jones (D–Ga.), said at Tiananmen that the event was a “special moment for us.”  Indeed it was a special moment—for them. Pay no attention to the bystanders who were roughed up by police in the process.

A Progressive Hawk Flies to Taiwan

In mid-2022, Pelosi, now Speaker of the House but still a persona non grata in mainland China, would perform a stunt with more grievous potential consequences. She decided to become the first high-ranking American official in over 25 years to visit leaders in Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as part of its territory. 

Word of this trip generated major backlash among the American establishment. The New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman, hardly a pro-China commentator, called Pelosi’s planned trip “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible.” Members of the intelligence community warned that a purely symbolic visit “looks like a military operation” to the Chinese government, no matter how well-intentioned or void of substance.

The late Deng Xiaoping had once said that “the main obstacle to better relations between China and the United States” was the treatment of Taiwan “as a U.S. aircraft carrier.” Indeed, after Pelosi’s visit, the Chinese military began a live-fire exercise, lobbing missiles into the Taiwan Strait.

President Joe Biden publicly admonished Pelosi. Yet none of this seemed to matter to Pelosi, whom Politico dubbed a “progressive hawk.“ During one press conference, Pelosi nonchalantly mentioned that American military officials warned that she could be “shot down, or something like that.”

But as in her Tiananmen Square stunt, she enjoyed strong support from the Republican Party. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) offered his support to Pelosi, saying, “America should always speak with one voice.” From the Senate floor, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) said that Pelosi, independent of the White House’s concerns, has “every right” to visit Taiwan. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo enthusiastically supported Pelosi’s decision as well. “Nancy, I’ll go with you,” Pompeo wrote on Twitter, “I’m banned in China, but not freedom-loving Taiwan.”

And as in Tiananmen Square, Pelosi’s Taiwan “cheerleading“ accomplished nothing substantive. No deals were reached, no agreements were signed. As the Taiwan scholar Shelley Rigger told The New Yorker during Pelosi’s visit, the trip “does not benefit Taiwan, probably does harm to Taiwan’s security, and it has ensured that U.S.-China relations, which were already pretty bad, are worse than they were before.”

One month after Pelosi’s departure, Pompeo, who was then in Taiwan on a separate visit, complained to reporters that he’d seen local reports calling the speaker’s visit “provocative” and “threatening.” Pompeo dismissed this out of hand: “We should never forget who’s threatening. It is not the great people of Taiwan. It is not the United States of America. The only threat to this region, the people who desire to upend what we know is right, and decent and moral, is in fact the Chinese Communist Party.”

The nuclear option

Refusing to take responsibility for the ripple effects of American policy in East Asia is, of course, not new. But in Joshua Wong’s case, the result of American hubris is distinctly bitter. American politicians put Wong in danger while raising his hopes in a rescue that would not come.

Wong first gained international recognition in 2014 for his leading role in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, a series of anti-government protests that comprised both student organizations, including Wong’s Scholarism, and major civil society groups. As part of the 1997 handover agreement between the United Kingdom and China, Hong Kong was guaranteed 50 years of legislative, legal, and economic autonomy under China’s “one country, two systems” framework. Over time, however, this autonomy would be challenged and degraded. But on August 31, 2014, the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress declared that politicians running for office in Hong Kong’s upcoming elections must “love the country,” meaning China, “and love Hong Kong.” Candidates would have to be screened by Beijing and, if approved, only then could run in the region’s popular elections.

This was a nonstarter for many in Hong Kong, including Wong, who had already gained the attention of his classmates and local authorities for his resistance to mainland interference. Wong had, in fact, led a successful student campaign against a 2012 curriculum change pushed by the Chinese government.

Although the 2014 protests were unsuccessful at stopping the new election law, Wong gained the attention of American supporters. He made it on the cover of TIME magazine as “The Face of Protest” and one of its 25 Most Influential Teens. Other outlets called Wong the “next tank man,” a reference to an iconic Associated Press photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. When the U.S. government announced its lukewarm support for the 2014 protests, The Wall Street Journal report used Wong to slam then-President Obama. “Hong Kong,” Wong explained, “needs more than a few words from Obama.”

Like Wong, many U.S. legislators wanted more than words from the White House. Rep. Christopher Smith (R–N.J.), co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, drafted the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. It would impose economic sanctions that Steve Tsang, director of the University of London’s SOAS China Institute,  dubbed “the nuclear option,” because they would destroy China’s main link to the global financial system. 

Meanwhile, Pelosi would meet with the now-famous Wong for the first time in 2015, and again in 2016 and 2019. That final meeting caught particular attention from the Chinese government, culminating in Wong’s most recent, and most serious, trial.

That year, the Chinese government put forward another piece of legislation that many in Hong Kong viewed as destructive to the “one country, two systems” framework: an amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance that would allow the extradition of suspects to mainland China, among other countries. 

Western human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, warned that “the proposed changes will put at risk anyone in the territory of Hong Kong who has carried out work related to the Mainland, including human rights defenders, journalists, NGO workers and social workers.” Smith resurrected his stalled 2014 sanctions bill.

To prevent the bill from losing steam, Wong and other activists were invited to speak before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. Having already spoken to the group in 2017 and having been freshly released from prison in June, Wong pressed forward with the same recommendation. “Beijing shouldn’t have it both ways, reaping all the economic benefits of Hong Kong’s standing in the world while eradicating our sociopolitical identity,” he said, claiming that the sanctions bill “enjoys the broad support of Hong Kong’s civil society, a point which I want every member of Congress to take note.”

The media parade continued at an event hosted by then-Speaker Pelosi, where the bill’s title was pasted on a large placard behind which Wong spoke. “We stand as one,” he told reporters. When Smith said that the bill “requires the President to identify and sanction persons, including the use of the Magnitsky Act, in Hong Kong and in Mainland China,” Wong can be seen next to the podium nodding his head. After four failed attempts, the bill finally passed.

Breaking an Egg Against an American Wall

The 22-year-old Wong was now more than a local student leader. In the words of the Chinese government, he was engaged in “collusion” with U.S. officials in economic warfare against his own country. That label and the infamy that came with it became a serious problem for Wong in 2020, when Chinese authorities pushed a new national security law on Hong Kong that imposed life in prison for collusion with foreign powers.

“If his renown was a vulnerability, Wong reasoned, it might also be his path out,” wrote Timothy McLaughlin and Shibani Mahtani, authors of Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, And Exile In The Battle For Hong Kong And The Future Of Global Democracy. Although the authorities had already confiscated Wong’s Hong Kong passport, he might be able to request U.S. asylum. He emailed Pompeo directly in a plea for help. “There is legitimate danger that I become a prime target of arrest and detention,” Wong wrote, according to McLaughlin and Mahtani. “I request U.S. protection so that I may apply for asylum, including as necessary traveling to the U.S. for the purpose of applying for asylum.”

There were options for the State Department to get Wong out of Hong Kong, including covert operations. President Donald Trump himself was reportedly a fan of rescuing Hong Kong dissidents through mass immigration. “They’re going to be industrious,” he told one adviser. “They’ll be great. They’ll make great Americans.”

But political adviser Stephen Miller quickly shut down the idea of mass immigration, and Pompeo decided that the State Department couldn’t get involved in Wong’s case, according to McLaughlin and Mahtani. “You’ve got national interest and personal interest, and in some ways you try to find a balance between the two[.] … In the end, you know, on the seventh floor of the State Department, national interest won out,” an official told McLaughlin and Mahtani.

It was in the U.S. government’s interest to get involved enough in Hong Kong’s affairs to put Wong in danger—by having him speak before Congress—but not to save him. Just as it was in the national interest to conscript the Hmong people into the Vietnam War, only to leave them to die in the jungle when it became too hard to rescue them. So too was it in the government’s interest to mobilize and encourage Kurdish resistance in Iraq, only to watch Saddam Hussein’s forces slaughter them, the only expected outcome.

As expected, Chinese authorities charged Wong with collusion in June 2025. Last month, he pleaded guilty to that charge. And how could he not? Congress handed over the evidence on a silver platter. “Wong was said to have conducted international lobbying for sanctions against the Special Administrative Region or central government, requesting that the U.S. introduce the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in 2019 and imploring other Western countries to impose Magnitsky-style sanction programs,” the Hong Kong Free Press reported.

Wong has not yet been sentenced.

During the height of Wong’s 2012 advocacy, he frequently quoted the Japanese author Haruki Murakami: “If there is a hard, high wall and an egg breaks against it,” Wong would say, “no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.” Indeed, Wong seems no less committed to that principle today than when he first began protesting in 2011. Whether the U.S. government supplied the final shove or not, history has shown that American hubris far too often pushes eggs, good and bad, into hard, high walls.

The post Nancy Pelosi Championed a Hong Kong Dissident. She May Have Doomed Him. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/09/30/nancy-pelosi-championed-a-hong-kong-dissident-she-may-have-doomed-him/