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There’s never an ideal time to antagonize the world’s largest army. But this week — when China is seething over perceived American aggression — is a particularly bad moment to rile up Beijing.
Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. Republican Party is doing. At its ongoing convention in Cleveland, led by nominee Donald Trump, the party is doubling down on China bashing.
According to the new Republican platform, China is guilty of “cultural genocide,” “barbaric population control” and a state-backed “hostile takeover” of American businesses.
Worse yet, China’s military is growing more intimidating thanks to — you guessed it — the “complacency of the Obama regime.”
This bluster comes at an extremely tense moment in US-China relations.
Last week, an international tribunal at The Hague sided with the United States and eviscerated one of China’s most contentious claims of sovereignty.
For years, Beijing has insisted that practically all of the South China Sea — a vital waterway that supports one-third of the world’s shipping trade — is the “blue national soil” of China.
Unsurprisingly, other nations who look upon the sea from their shores (namely Vietnam and the Philippines) have never agreed.
The U.S. has urged both Vietnam and the Philippines to stand tall against China. All the while, the U.S. military has deployed its superior fleet of drones and warships into the sea to scare China into submission.
China’s response? Transforming minuscule islands into remote military bases armed with powerful missiles. Once little specks of rock, these islands have swelled as Chinese barges dump mountains of sand around their edges.
Beijing has always paired its military maneuvers in the sea with rhetorical bombast printed in state-run media, which offers a window into the Communist Party’s thinking.
But in the wake of the Hague tribunal’s verdict, the government’s mouthpiece media have spoken more forcefully about the prospects for war.
One op-ed from a state-run outlet asks, “Is there any chance of war in the South China Sea?” The same piece suggests that, if the United States did battle China over the sea, America may be vanquished: “The 21st century has witnessed a series of failures of U.S. military actions.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/07/21/china-gop-convention/87380604
Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. Republican Party is doing. At its ongoing convention in Cleveland, led by nominee Donald Trump, the party is doubling down on China bashing.
According to the new Republican platform, China is guilty of “cultural genocide,” “barbaric population control” and a state-backed “hostile takeover” of American businesses.
Worse yet, China’s military is growing more intimidating thanks to — you guessed it — the “complacency of the Obama regime.”
This bluster comes at an extremely tense moment in US-China relations.
Last week, an international tribunal at The Hague sided with the United States and eviscerated one of China’s most contentious claims of sovereignty.
For years, Beijing has insisted that practically all of the South China Sea — a vital waterway that supports one-third of the world’s shipping trade — is the “blue national soil” of China.
Unsurprisingly, other nations who look upon the sea from their shores (namely Vietnam and the Philippines) have never agreed.
The U.S. has urged both Vietnam and the Philippines to stand tall against China. All the while, the U.S. military has deployed its superior fleet of drones and warships into the sea to scare China into submission.
China’s response? Transforming minuscule islands into remote military bases armed with powerful missiles. Once little specks of rock, these islands have swelled as Chinese barges dump mountains of sand around their edges.
Beijing has always paired its military maneuvers in the sea with rhetorical bombast printed in state-run media, which offers a window into the Communist Party’s thinking.
But in the wake of the Hague tribunal’s verdict, the government’s mouthpiece media have spoken more forcefully about the prospects for war.
One op-ed from a state-run outlet asks, “Is there any chance of war in the South China Sea?” The same piece suggests that, if the United States did battle China over the sea, America may be vanquished: “The 21st century has witnessed a series of failures of U.S. military actions.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/07/21/china-gop-convention/87380604
