Ian Johnson highlights how China’s strategic blunders have painted it into a corner:
Just as [Pre WW I] Wilhelminian Germany should surely have seen that building a blue-water navy would cause Britain to form alliances against it, so too should China understand that demanding control over islands far from its shores but close to its neighbors’ would cause a backlash. (Here one thinks not so much of the Senkaku/Diaoyus but of the shoals, reefs, and islets in the South China Sea.) Even the battle for the Senkaku/Diaoyus seems to have no satisfactory endgame for China except a permanent state of tension with its most important neighbor.
……..today the country’s tactics have left it surrounded by suspicious and increasingly hostile countries; indeed, it’s probably no exaggeration to say that China has no real allies.
Read more at Will the Chinese Be Supreme? by Ian Johnson | The New York Review of Books.
Typical anglo rubbish. This line alone gives the game away. ‘demanding control over islands far from its shores but close to its neighbors’
Not too many anglos in ASEAN. They are all cultivating the US as a counter-balance to China.
Ok I was being simplistic but these disputed islands are hardly far from the Chinese mainland. And there is a certain denial of history in the article – forgetting for example the bloody US invasion of the Philippines in 1898 which was in many ways aimed at access to China. It suits American policy makers to seek and promote friction between China and its neighbours not only to advance future weapons sales but to also maintain some sort of relevance in the region for itself. Other comments such as in the final para on democracy are just laughable.
“It suits American policy makers to seek and promote friction between China and its neighbours”
It looks like China is playing right into their hands. Divide and conquer.
please American Policy is about as good as the hundreds of billions of dollars a year it is pumping into its own economy
and if disputes didn’t exist they would create them.