Joshua Wong 黃之鋒  😷Verified account

3. Chap. 7 is the most personal to me. It charts Pelosi's rise to national prominence after the #Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 as a second-term congresswoman from California. She'd support the protests from afar and now wanted to protect Chinese students in the US from retribution.

4. Her insistence to take a tough stance against #China irked President G. H. W. Bush, who was desperate not to sever diplomatic ties. He acknowledged her well intentions but dismissed her as naive on international affairs. She pressed on, and her bill gained 100+ co-sponsors.

5. After it passed, Bush vetoed it, and she decried the move as a "slap in the face to the forces of democracy." She lobbied hard for votes and overrode the White House by a 390-25 margin. But it narrowly missed the two-third supermajority threshold needed in the Senate.

8. Her fight was unmistakably bipartisan, as she allied with "conservative anti-Communists and evangelical Christians alongside liberal activists and Bush critics." She even broke with President Clinton in her own party after he decoupled China's MFN status from human rights.

9. In sharp contrast to Clinton, she never believed economic reforms would automatically lead to sociopolitical liberalization in China. She was a leading crusader against its entry to the WHO, and continued to speak up throughout the 2000s even as she rose through the ranks.