Breitbart: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi softened her previous criticisms of China’s communist regime as her husband and son scored big business deals in China, Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer’s new book reveals.

The bombshell revelations about Pelosi in Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win also come as the Democrat stalwart is under fire for stock trading returns made by her and her husband that regularly outperform the market. Now, it appears as though her family’s business opportunities in China have influenced her policy views on America’s chief adversary, something sure to fuel the fire to rein in corruption in Congress.

Pelosi’s family, Schweizer reveals, has had millions of dollars on the line when it comes to China, and the Speaker seems to have altered her positions on China’s communist regime from a policy perspective as these investments grew and took shape.

Pelosi began her career as tough on China and still occasionally rips the Chinese Communist Party for human rights abuses.

“The longtime member of Congress and Speaker of the House was, early in her career, a particularly harsh critic of China’s human rights practices,” Schweizer writes. “She continues to be vocal about some issues, but her positions have softened as her family has sought and received lucrative commercial opportunities in mainland China.”

In the early 1990s, Schweizer recounts how she even pulled off a protest in Tiananmen Square that infuriated Chinese officials:

In 1991, as a junior member of Congress, Pelosi found herself in Tiananmen Square. She was part of a congressional delegation visiting Beijing barely two years after the horrific events had un- folded. Pelosi had been in meetings with Chinese officials, but with a couple of colleagues, she covertly carried a banner into the middle of the square and unfurled it in front of a small crowd and the media. 

“To those who died for Democracy in China,” it read. The Chinese police were furious. They pushed through the crowd to seize the banner. “I started running,” Pelosi recalled. “And my colleagues, some of them, got a little roughed up. The press got treated worse because they had cameras, and they were detained.” The Foreign Ministry denounced the event as a “premeditated farce.

This move was not an isolated incident; Pelosi actually was tough on China for years.

But, Schweizer writes, Pelosi’s “views began to moderate.” A March 2009 Politico story quotes people close to Pelosi noticing a “subtle shift” in her approach to China. Then-Politico reporter reporter Glenn Thrush wrote that while Pelosi “won’t back down on her core commitment to democratization in the country,” according to people close to her “she’s also not looking to pick new fights with China’s leaders— or with the Obama Administration as it seeks to strengthen U.S.- China relations.”

The Wall Street Journal reported two months after that Politico story in May 2009 that Pelosi told the U.S.-China Clean Energy Forum in Beijing that the reason for her “shift” on China was, as Schweizer writes, “a result, in part, of issues like climate change that the two countries needed to tackle together.”

“I think this climate crisis is game changing for the U.S.-China relationship,” Pelosi said at the event. “It is an opportunity we cannot miss.”

While the “climate crisis” is Pelosi’s stated reason for softening on China, Schweizer argues in Red-Handed that “there were perhaps other factors at work,” noting that Pelosi’s “husband and son started seeking and securing deals on mainland China.”