Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said that relations between the US and China are hindered by a lack of “shared values” between leaders even if the world’s two largest economies must reach accommodations on behalf of a “shared planet.”
Pelosi, a long-time critic of the Chinese government, offered a harsh assessment of it and US-based multinationals that invest there a day after US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo completed a visit intended to bolster US ties with Beijing.
Pelosi said the Beijing government “violated almost every trade standard,” and criticized its treatment of ethnic and religious minorities, as well as its role contributing to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in a Bloomberg Television interview with Francine Lacqua for the Leaders With Lacqua program.
Photo: Bloomberg
Pelosi, one of the most prominent women in US politics, taped the interview on Thursday in Venice before she was to deliver remarks at the DVF Awards, established by Diane von Furstenberg to recognize extraordinary women.
Pelosi provoked a furious reaction from Beijing last year when she became the first US House speaker to visit Taiwan in nearly 30 years. Her trip was followed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army holding unprecedented military drills around Taiwan, including flying missiles overhead.
Pelosi’s remarks “are a distortion and miscalculation of China’s policy toward the US and are not aligned with the facts,” Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) told a regular press briefing in Beijing yesterday.
Beijing hoped Washington would “jointly steer China-US relations back on the track of stable development,” he added.
Amid signs of financial upheaval in China, Pelosi said she took no relish in a weakening economy there because of the human toll.
However, she condemned the US trade deficit with China as “an immorality” and the willingness of US companies to profit from doing business there despite the regime’s rights abuses.
“Money really has been a sad factor in all of this,” Pelosi said. “Corporate America has said mostly we don’t care about human rights.”
Pelosi, ever the partisan leader, brushed off a question on which Republican presidential candidate she might prefer.
“I’m not into Republican politics,” she said, but described her former nemesis, Donald Trump, as a cancerous influence on the Republican Party.
She said she often tells Republicans: “Take back your party. America needs a strong Republican Party.”
That can only happen when the Republican Party emerges from “the malignancy of Trump,” she said.
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