and the main role of the People’s Liberation Army Navy appears to be building islands, daring the Phillipines, Vietnam Malaysia, Japan and Taiwan to object as a certain country’s EEZ expands.
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Their motivation in doing so appears to be more defensive than economic; fleets, not fish. Establishing the boundaries to exclude the foreign warships.
They are some deep-seated reasons behind why they don’t like foreign fleets there.
Uh huh. Right… The Japanese CoProsperity sphere was so much more palatable when it was phrased in terms of military imperialism, rather than economic hegemony.
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Yeah, just like the U.S. zone of the Caribbean? Take a look at a map of the South “China” Sea and try to tell anyone that it isn’t the same colonialist power politics bullshit.
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Also, those islands’ waters also control the trade routes for hard drives and memory favoring the continued shipment into southern China. Korea has the higher educated corporate atmosphere for those products, but the nuts and bolts are made Thailand and the brim of the South China Sea.
China lost out in the actual construction of core CPU parts, but almost all of the manufacturing those components are made for runs through China.
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I’ll get back to this, but just a note: I referenced the Opium Wars to support the “deep-seated” part. The Boxer Rebellion would’ve worked, too.
But for more recent history, see the role of the US Navy during the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War.
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But yeah, it isn’t just about defence; economic hegemony comes into play as well.
I’ve posted this a million times before, but it is particularly relevant here:
American hegemony in the Western Pacific is fading, and China is moving to replace it. I would prefer a world in which hegemonic dominance was not a factor, but that is not the world we live in. Whenever small and large countries meet, the larger countries tend to dominate.
Given that point, the comparison is not “Chinese hegemony vs hypothetical perfect world”. It’s “Chinese hegemony vs American hegemony”.
I see no reason to view American dominance as superior to Chinese dominance, particularly in the context of east Asia. All landlords suck, but absentee landlords are the worst.
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Look at the South “China” sea on a map and the Caribbean on a map and tell me that absentee doesn’t apply to both.
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China’s relationship to the South China Sea is in some ways comparable to the US’s relationship to the Caribbean, yes. But the US Navy controlling the western Pacific is akin to China hypothetically dominating the Caribbean.
There are degrees of absenteeism. The British were bastards in Ireland, but they were worse in India and Africa. In geographic, ethnic and cultural terms, increasing the distance between dominator and dominated tends to amplify the abuse.
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That fits for Taiwan, perhaps. China has not been a real threat to Japan or the Philippines in recent history (whereas the US has been; the Marcos dictatorship was built upon American support, and the history of the US-Philippines War is horrific).
OTOH, regarding Taiwan…imagine that Britain had decided to support the Confederacy, and although this support did not change the overall outcome of the war, it did greatly extend the length and brutality of it. At the end of the conflict, the last bastion of the Confederacy is on a large Caribbean island, and the Royal Navy maintains a fleet (and continues to provide massive military aid) to ensure that this remnant persists.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but the point I’m trying to get across is: you need to get out of the American-centred perspective to understand the motivations of the Chinese state. Particularly if that perspective is paired with an unjustified assumption of American benevolence.
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