In 1991, Nancy Pelosi stood on the site where two years earlier the Chinese government violently cracked down on students defending democracy in Tiananmen Square and unfurled a banner in silent protest.
The next morning, in a Beijing hotel lobby, she was confronted by an agitated J. Stapleton Roy, then the US ambassador to China, in a conversation described as “dismissive” by Jeffrey Fiedler, the former secretary-treasurer at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations who witnessed it.
