The Myth of China as a Non Agressor
Vietnam and the Philippines have called on the US and other nations to help resolve escalating territorial disputes in the resource-rich South China Sea. China claims the entire South China Sea, including West Philippine Sea, the oil-rich Spratly Archipelago and fishing resources off of the coast of Vietnam.
A look at the map is frightening. China’s concept of the “South China Sea” extends a thousand miles from its shore .. perhaps wherever Beijing sees its national interests.
Vietnam calls this sea “The East Sea.” President Benigno Aquino of the Philippines has called on the Filipinos to rename the coastal water bordered by his country and by Vietnam as as the West Philippine Sea. As a channel between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Basin, rights can be and are claimed by Taiwan, Maylasia and Singapore … all of whose land borders what China now wants to cliam are its territorial waters. As a major sea rout from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, all the world’s trading powers have a vested interest in this body of water and the United Nationals Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which mandates that a country has a claim on territories within 200 nautical miles.
From the time of Mao, China has claimed to be the antonym of the imperialists. The new China is behaving in the manner of its imperial predecessors … not the behavior of the inward directed “Middle Kingdom” of the Qing Dynasty but the imperialist behavior of England, the USSR, the USA and Japan. Self righteous Chinese leaders distinguished their government from the self serving imperialism of Europe, the US, WWII Japan and the USSR. Forays into India, Korea, Tibet, and Korea were defense of the nation, not attacks on others.
Apologists for the Peoples Republic of China, went along with this image, often cloaking Chinese foreign policy with the image of mysticalel oriental wisdom we, mere hiers of the too brief history of Europe, caouls not appreciate.
Of course, what choice did Mao have? A 1 ton weakling faced with real and perceived threats from the USSR, the USA and Japan, , the Helmsman blustered that China’s weapon was its size. Why be an aggressor when you could absorb any invader in a miasma of 1 billion people? Why colonize others when your own tribe was already 1/3 of the world’s population? Nuclear war, Mao insisted, was ineffective against a people that could afford 100s of millions of sacrificial deaths to defend their homeland.
Tibet, China claims, was always part of its territory. Uigars, Mongols and ethnic Koreans are not vassal peoples because they have always been part of a natural Han dominated empire. Korea, India, Mongolia .. all these have the respect owed to them by the Empire, as long as they respect the divine rights of the government in power in Beijing.
Now that 1 ton weakling is emerging as a muscular giant claiming that the sea a thousand of miles from its sown shores is “Chinese.” Vietnam, the Philippines, the Chinese claim, must recognize the hegemony of the current dynasty in Beijing.
From the Financial Times:
“China is running an information campaign to blind people,” said Pham Gia Minh, a 55-year-old investment consultant who attended a protest outside the Chinese embassy in Hanoi. “We have to let people understand that we want peace but when the aggressor comes we will stand up to them.”
In addition to China and Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan claim some or all of the territory in the contested area of the South China Sea, which is believed to contain vast oil and gas reserves and incorporates key trade routes and abundant fish stocks.
The Vietnamese government has ratcheted up its rhetoric in recent weeks amid growing public disquiet over perceived maritime bullying by China, which dominated Vietnam for 1000 years and fought a brief but bloody border war against it in 1979. At the weekend Vietnam’s foreign ministry said that it would “welcome” efforts by the US and other nations to help resolve the South China Sea dispute and maintain peace and stability.
Vietnam’s efforts to explore for oil in territory off of its shores, are described as provacative by Beijing. Now the US is, as the Chinese see it, interfering in an internal Chinese affair. Hillary Clinton has offended Beijing by claiming that the South China Sea was of strategic importance to the US and offered to act as a mediator.
Tags: China, Japan, World
Posted 13 Jun 2011 by theaveeditor
in America, China, Politics