Nancy Pelosi’s arrival in Taiwan has inflamed US-China relations anew, with China’s military announcing it will conduct live-fire exercises around the island and state media condemning the visit as “stupid, reckless and dangerous”. Meanwhile, US commentators across the ideological spectrum, from Thomas Friedman to Tucker Carlson to Code Pink, have called Pelosi’s trip a reckless provocation to war.
But to Taiwanese Americans who have spent a lifetime grappling with the island’s strange geopolitical status, the hyperbolic tenor of the debate over Pelosi’s visit is indicative of how little most Americans know or care about the people of Taiwan.
