Like any two political veterans, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Rodham Clinton have a history and there is enough there on the issue of China to suggest to some Washington observers that, if Pelosi is indeed a secret Obama admirer, it might have its roots in the 1990s.
One key piece of evidence for that theory can be found in Hillary Clinton's book, Living History. It turns out that back in 1995, as Clinton was preparing for a landmark trip to Beijing to deliver a speech to the United Nations Conference on Women, Pelosi called and implored her to stay home to protest China's human rights abuses.
"The presence of the first lady," Pelosi argued publicly at the time, "would give the Chinese regime an unprecedented propaganda victory."
Clinton made the trip anyway.
-snip
On a 1991 trip to China, as a junior member of Congress, Pelosi snuck out of her hotel with two other lawmakers and went to Tiananmen Square to unfurl a banner reading, "To those who died for democracy in China." When hostile police appeared, Pelosi and her colleagues, like the student protesters two years before, dropped all ceremony and ran.
She was profoundly disappointed when President Clinton told her in 1994 that he was ending a policy of tying trade with China to human rights progress. When Bill Clinton spoke in Beijing in 1998, Pelosi said his remarks downplayed human rights violations, putting them "in the past instead of a current nightmare for the Chinese people." She opposed extending most-favored nation status, a liberalized trade policy, to China.
"There were some real differences that the Clintons had with Pelosi on trade issues, particularly on status," said former House Majority Whip David Bonior (D-Mich.). "Pelosi really went head-to-head with the administration. Human rights is really a big concern for her."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9159.html
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