Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit is over. Now come the aftershocks — Chinese fury, trade bans and military drills.

Pelosi went ahead nonetheless, and the details of her visit were a close-held secret almost until she landed in Taiwan. The trip itself went smoothly enough; there was no intervention by the Chinese air force or other overt action to disrupt her visit.

Pelosi was welcomed warmly by the Taiwanese leadership. During their televised meeting on Wednesday, President Tsai Ing-wen called the House speaker “one of Taiwan’s most devoted friends”; for her part, Pelosi said that the United States’ support for Taiwan was “ironclad,” while reasserting that U.S. policy toward Taiwan has not changed.

But China had a different interpretation of the visit. The Chinese slapped bans on Taiwanese imports and announced a series of military exercises in the waters surrounding Taiwan, which experts say will amount to a stronger response than China has made following previous official U.S. visits to Taiwan. Among other things, the exercises are planned in areas that are unusually close to Taiwan; some may take place in waters that the Taiwanese claim as theirs (see map below).

As Pelosi left Taipei, Grid hosted a Twitter Spaces conversation with Shelley Rigger, professor of East Asian politics at Davidson College and one of the country’s leading Taiwan experts, to understand the impact of the speaker’s visit for U.S.-China relations and for the future of Taiwan.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Shelley Rigger: I don’t think there’s going to be a war tomorrow, but I think we have seen a significant deterioration in U.S.-China relations as a consequence of the Pelosi visit, and that will be very hard to come back from. It looks like the U.S. doesn’t have a policy, or can’t control its own policy, and it has become totally unpredictable and out of control in terms of the signals that get sent from voices that, at least in the People’s Republic of China [PRC], are understood to be authoritative. There might actually be some pretty scary fallout for Taiwan. But the biggest fallout is likely to be the deterioration in U.S.-China relations, which inevitably will create problems for Taiwan.

But I think what the Beijing leadership was trying to do in the run-up to this visit was to prevent it. It was about deterring the U.S. from pushing forward with a trend that the PRC leadership perceives — and I don’t think they’re totally justified — I think they’re seeing it through worst-case scenario lenses, but they perceive a trend in which the U.S. is increasingly supportive of Taiwan, taking actions that lengthen the political distance between Taiwan and the mainland.

If the Beijing leadership decided that this visit by Nancy Pelosi was a big step forward in that trend, they wanted to draw a line here. So, they did a lot of things — they said a lot of things that were aimed at deterring the visit, and they failed to deter the visit. Now they have got to show that they really meant it, that this is not just posturing in the hope of maybe influencing something around the margins.

I think it’s unlikely that it goes beyond a show of force and a demonstration of resolve and capability on the PRC’s part, because I don’t think the timing is right for them to go farther than that.

I read something yesterday that I thought was really interesting, that this whole Taiwan brouhaha that has been front and center in the U.S. for several days has not really been front-page news in the PRC domestic media. There’s a lot of other stuff going on. And the really big thing that’s going on, of course, is the 20th Party Congress in the fall, where everyone expects Xi Jinping is going to seek a third term. And Xi Jinping just needs things to be calm, he needs the situation to stabilize so that the Party Congress can go forward without interruption or challenge from some kind of external emergency. It’s understandable that the Chinese Communist Party leadership is nervous about how things are going to be when they are undertaking this big process, that is a critical part of their political calendar.

I think part of what was going on here is the PRC leadership just thinking, “We cannot deal with another crisis. We can’t have the Taiwan Strait blowing up when we’re still fighting covid, we’ve got mortgage strikes around the country, the economy is flagging, and we have this huge political process that we got to do in the fall.”

I think they really thought there might be the possibility of preventing the visit. Now, the visit goes through; they definitely ratcheted it up way too high. They can’t back down; they have got a lot of face invested in winning here. Now, everybody’s propelled along by the logic of the situation, which was not what anyone intended but which is now kind of impossible to reverse.

I think it’s not three-level chess. I think it’s domestic politics. The whole thing really feels to me, at this point, like domestic politics — on the U.S. side with Pelosi showing how tough she can be, and on the PRC side with Xi Jinping trying to distract everybody from the mortgage strikes and the empty buildings and all the other stuff.

I think that would be hard to believe for people from many political backgrounds in a parliamentary system; it’s inconceivable that there would be that kind of daylight between the executive and legislative functions in government; but from the PRC perspective, it’s just laughable. Nobody in the Communist Party does anything that is not approved by the Politburo Standing Committee and probably by the party head himself. I think they think this is the U.S. using all its little levers to do sneaky things that add up to a policy of creeping support toward Taiwan, permanent separation from the mainland.

I think it is always possible for decisions to change. Pelosi’s office never publicly announced it. They could have said the leak was a mistake. A million ways that you don’t have to do something that you know is a bad idea. I think what’s driving that kind of thinking is this anti-China sentiment that seems to have no ceiling on it. Anything we can do that will tweak the PRC, why would we not do it? And I just think there’s a lot of good reasons not to gratuitously undermine Taiwan’s security and the relationship between the PRC and the United States.

She did read the catechism that affirms long-standing U.S. policy, and that long-standing U.S. policy was also affirmed in the White House statement. I think these officials are trying to say, “Look, this is not part of a campaign to move Taiwan incrementally toward a point where it is comfortable saying we’re going to bust a move and declare independence.” But I don’t think it’s enough for Beijing because Beijing sees that as just words, ”Your actions are speaking much louder, and your actions seem to be headed in that other direction.”

I don’t think the Beijing government wants a war with anybody at this moment — for precisely the reasons that were laid out earlier in this conversation. I think they are worried that the U.S. does, and I am worried not that the U.S. government or the Biden administration wants a war with China, but I hear people talking in the media and in some of the more hawkish corners of the think tank world, talking as if they think this is something that maybe the U.S. needs to get ahead of, in terms of the rise of China, in a really strong way.

I don’t think the PRC wants that conflict. I think they want the stability that will enable them to continue moving forward and continue solving or at least addressing these domestic problems. I think there is potential. What really troubles me is there’s so little political will for that on the U.S. side and instead enormous pressure on leaders like President Biden and also Speaker Pelosi to make political gains by tweaking China.

On the other hand, the last few years in Taiwan, especially under President Tsai Ing-wen, have been characterized by a lot more military intimidation and coercive pressure, both actual military and cyber and other sorts of information attacks. The Taiwanese have woken up a bit. The Ukraine War woke them up even more. I think there’s more attention now to the possibility of a serious confrontation with the PRC than was the case in earlier episodes of a similar sort. But still, most people in Taiwan do not think the war is starting tomorrow either. I think they view the Pelosi visit through the lens that Pelosi has put forward. This is a gesture of support for Taiwan. This is us saying, “We believe in you; we believe in your democracy. We want you to continue to thrive. I’m coming over here and standing with you for that.”

At the same time, though, I think there is a lot of controversy in Taiwan over whether this is good timing, whether this is actually beneficial to Taiwan or just kind of a symbolic gesture. And certainly, some people have pointed out that any amount of military intimidation is not good and becoming accustomed to living under that sword is not necessarily healthy for Taiwan in the long run.