Chinese Air Force shoots down drone

It also seems that we are ignoring China's issues with Vietnam and Phillipines over oil and gas fields.
 
Henning said:
It also seems that we are ignoring China's issues with Vietnam and Phillipines over oil and gas fields.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say we are ignoring them, but it may be a challenge to know just how to engage them. We have had some 7th Fleet deployments that some say are designed to send messages. Theoretically we recently came to an agreement on aggressive intercepts.

A large part of this is tied up in the laws of the sea and so forth. See the long standing but more recently publicized questions of who has what rights in the Arctic Ocean. Denmark has recently put forth some claims that compete with Russia, Canada and others.

There is no question but the Middle Kingdom is interested in power projection.
 
jnmeade said:
I wouldn't say we are ignoring them, but it may be a challenge to know just how to engage them. We have had some 7th Fleet deployments that some say are designed to send messages. Theoretically we recently came to an agreement on aggressive intercepts.

A large part of this is tied up in the laws of the sea and so forth. See the long standing but more recently publicized questions of who has what rights in the Arctic Ocean. Denmark has recently put forth some claims that compete with Russia, Canada and others.

There is no question but the Middle Kingdom is interested in power projection.
Click to expand...

See the activities of Japan pre WWII, the aim is the same.
 
Henning said:
See the activities of Japan pre WWII, the aim is the same.
Click to expand...
Hmm, I'm not sure about that. Japan before WWII was a nationalistic, resource-poor country that had aspirations to regional hegemony and great power equality. Meiji Japan made a profound about face from being an insular society to one that emulated Germany (military) and Britain (navy) and thought expansion it's manifest destiny. Forays into the mainland and then the Russo-Japanese War were the outward manifestations of that.
China has from it's earliest recorded history considered itself the Middle Kingdom and expected to dominate it's neighbors, who were expected to pay homage. With the exception of the Mongol empires, who were not really Chinese, and the Ming naval expeditions, and some fooling around in Vietnam, I'm not sure I'd say China was an expansionist country so much as it was one that expected to be the center such that others came to it.
It could be that China is applying that mindset to a bigger set of boundaries, but I guess my sense is the basic rationale is not quite the same as Japan pre-WWII.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top