What China - a superpower with a very confrontational and combative attitude - can get away with in its own back yard might be quite different from what modest little Norway can or would try to do in the Greenland Sea.
Also, talk to a few volcanologists and marine engineers about trying to build airfields on the tops of barely-above water active volcanoes. (Vs. China is building on shallow, solid, inactive atolls.)
I think we need to understand that China is not "confrontational and combative" in a negative way.
Think of it more like the kid who's been bullied for years and years and when puberty hits is finally able to stand his ground. That's China, and they're not the only ones who have been bullied over the last centuries and who may be able to stand their ground soon.
Disagree. The Spratly island shenanigans, in particular, are squarely aimed at Malaysia, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam, which in your analogy are the smaller, younger victims of the bullies.
China has been claiming the South China Sea since before the PRC, hence why the claims by the ROC/Taiwan are same: the PRC took over the ROC's claims. Of course this is not the 'correct' narrative to say that...
Every country has been acting the same. Look at what the US control and ask why that is. The difference is that China has been on the receiving end of the stick over the last centuries while the US (for instance) has been on the giving end. There is no right and wrong, just being weak or being strong.
So you're suggesting we should apply mid-1800s ethical standards to a global superpower in 2023?
Colonial attitudes have changed. Western powers gave up their territorial maximalist doctrine a long time ago. Basically all former colonies of the West are now independent.
Meanwhile China is engaging in neo-colonialism with Belt and Road. You can handwave about "might makes right" but the reality is that by the standards of our day, China is not proving to be a force for justice or equity either at home or on the world stage and we ought to frown on that.
Western powers didn't give up their doctrine easy. There was entire movement of anti-colonialism and non-alignment, sometimes followed by the wars for liberation - French Indochina, Vietnam, Algiers, just to mention few. If there were no wars, I doubt that western powers would give up on their colonies on their own.
I disagree, it simply would've taken longer. The West is democratic, and attitudes changed. In the mid-to-late 1800s, the prevailing philosophy justifying colonialism was rooted in racism, e.g. Kipling's "The White Man's Burden".
75 years after that was written, it was well outside the political mainstream.
I'm pretty sure that's just objectively untrue. Some nations are subject to public opinion and the ethical sensibility of their electorates, and some are not. That comes into stark relief when some nations chop up journalists inside their embassies.
It's not objective, only subjective through the lens of those who are writing the narrative, who are?...
Objectively, what China is doing is not worse than what the US have been doing, or than any Western powers have been doing because it's just how it goes.
So if certain western countries had done something back in the 19th or first half of the 20th century it's supposedly alright for China to behave the same way now?
Why? Your 'arguments' don't really make much sense. I mean whatever US was doing in the 19/20th centuries was no worse than what the other colonial powers did a hundred or two hundred years before that. Which was no worse than what the Mongols did during the middle ages. So according to this 'logic' everything everyone does is completely justifiable because someone did something worse at some point in the past? Absurd...
"Since you know as well as we do the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"
Some of the replies I get are childish and ridiculous. The US control land almost up to the Chinese coast bit China is the bully for finally being able to assert a few claims in the South China Sea... how far can hypocrisy go
As for the neighbours' input, we'll ask Mexico, Cuba, and South America...
> China has been claiming the South China Sea since before the PRC, hence why the claims by the ROC/Taiwan are same: the PRC took over the ROC's claims. Of course this is not the 'correct' narrative to say that...
This is ahistorical. The nine dash line is a creation of the CCP, not of the ROC. It was not claimed from the ROC's time. More importantly however, it's just a claim. China went and built military bases on objects that were in other countries' already existing territory before the nine dash line was created and then committed military attacks against civilian vessels who used to use the areas to force them away.
> Look at what the US control and ask why that is.
Much of it is former territories that were taken over after WW2 defeat of the Imperial Japan, and many of those territories have over time been either been given independence, given the option of independence, or given to other countries.
> The nine dash line is a creation of the CCP, not of the ROC. It was not claimed from the ROC's time.
That's factually incorrect. The ROC calls it the eleven dash line (PRC removed 2 dashes at the border with Vietnam) and they were the ones who created it before the PRC even existed [1]
Mainland China has taken possession because they are now strong enough to do it. It was only a claim before because they were too weak to assert their claim physically, which any large power would have done, or to make the others recognize that claim.
> other countries' already existing territory
The borders of all the countries in the areas were decided by Western colonial powers, and China was simply too weak to assert its interests and wasn't invited.
There is not right or wrong here. This is simply power and how things have always worked. It's naive to buy the "good guys bad guys" or "bully" narrative, which is only propaganda from one side against the other.
The point is not claim but action. Many other countries have water disputes but no one outright builds new military airbases in international territory and bullies others whenever they come close. Some sort of peaceful, lawful process is followed in all cases but one.
Saying that ROC and PRC have same claims doesn't say they would be same in their disregard for general order
China has not been "bullied for years". They have a imagined chip on their shoulders and a persecution complex. It reminds me a lot of how Russia describes it's invasion of Ukraine. The messaging to the public is in terms of "Russia has always been attacked" and how "the invasion is actually defensive in nature because NATO has always been planning on attacking Russia" (note: NATO is a defensive alliance and never even had plans for invading Russia).
What you're hearing is not truth, but is instead the internal propaganda that is used to defend against criticism of the national government by creating an external opponent for the populace to focus on. It's a time honored tradition of dictatorships the world over.
I'm not entirely understanding your position here. The series of "Unequal Treaties" [1] China regularly refers to are not imaginary. It started with the Opium Wars. These were a series of two wars in which the Brits insisted on selling opium in China, which had banned the trade. When China tried to stop opium ships, Britain invaded, plundered China, and forced them into a series of somewhat humiliating concessions.
Among these concessions was Britain claiming Hong Kong for themselves (which was only returned in 1997). Interestingly enough this happened twice! The legality of the opium was not completely clarified in the first war. After the second war the Brits forced China to legally accept their opium. And it just gets more sordid from there, with various "Unequal Treaties" continuing onward into the 20th century.
Those treaties and the end of them long pre-date the CCP. There is no one alive today that was around during that time period. That they are still talked about is part of the internal propaganda of the CCP to propagate the idea that the world is out to get them.
Also, if they were so important to the Chinese people then they would still be talked about strongly in Taiwan which has a shared history going back to then and, as far as I know, they don't care nearly as much about it as the people living under the CCP.
> Among these concessions was Britain claiming Hong Kong for themselves (which was only returned in 1997).
Much to the dislike of the people actually living in Hong Kong. They would have preferred to never go back to being part of being China. This is another great example of CCP/Chinese aggression and colonialism against the world as opposed to their supposed persecution complex.
To imagine history, and all of its consequences, dies with one generation is a view you obviously do not hold. And so I do not believe you are arguing in good faith. I'm not doing this to 'mic drop' because I'm more than happy to continue this discussion, but because I think you yourself might not even be thinking about what you're saying - rather than just shooting, somewhat wildly, from the hip.
The consequences have lasting effects of course, but to assume that current governments maintain those same policies from hundreds of years ago is ridiculous. China should take an example from the US, our former enemies are now some of our strongest allies (Japan and Germany), or at the minimum have strongly endorsed our culture (Vietnam). It happens by not holding grudges, as China is fond to do.
If you believe much has changed, I would encourage you to look to the Mideast. Millions of dead bodies and countless destroyed governments are testament to the fact that opposing Western interests is like to be met with the bombs wrapped in slogans of freedom, human rights, and democracy.
Of course the Mideast is largely unable to speak for itself because their culture, religion, and language leave them culturally isolated from the West. In many ways our treatment of the Mideast today, and their situation, is directly analogous to how we treated China in the past and the situation they were in. So I would argue what has changed has not been our behavior, but China's ability to defend itself.
And now we take the standard Chinese propaganist route of re-directing the argument away from Asia and to the middle east whenever a complicated issue of Asian geopolitics with regards to the US happens. It's become a good benchmark for when someone is arguing in bad faith when they start reciting CCP talking points with near identical wording every time certain subjects come up.
Also, China will repeat the same missteps of the US in the middle east as soon as their first major interruption of fossil fuels happens. China is not immune.
Your argument was that the West has changed, and China claiming we haven't is wrong. The Mideast rather strongly supports the Chinese view, and so far as I can tell - there's not really much to oppose it. As for propaganda, during the Cold War we engaged in extensive propaganda. That included things like imagery of stocked grocery store shelves. That those things were used as propaganda did not mean that they did not exist, or were somehow inherently false.
Opium wars, Japanese occupation, US Chinese exclusion act, etc. China was bullied. The extant generation of Chinese has not directly experienced most of it, but it's not just a chip on the shoulder.
I think claiming the whole south china sea is ridiculous because there's no principle behind it. A coastal EEZ is a principle, but if China can claim the south china sea why can't Vietnam?
I also struggle to formulate a strong argument against claiming and developing an uninhabited reef. China is by no means the only country participating in the spratly islands land grab, and to my knowledge no country has ever shied away from claiming uninhabited land. International Maritime law was not formulated to deal with this situation. I think China's neighbors will more likely than not be able to maintain their reasonable Maritime rights. If not, I think China will find wanton domination to be more trouble than it's worth.
Japan occupied many countries during WW2, it's only the CCP that still cares to the extent that they do about it. In fact in many of the countries that Japan occupied there is now strong pro-Japan sentiment, but not China.
The US Chinese exclusion act can not be termed "bullying of China" as it was explicitly about internal US politics rather than international politics. If that is termed bullying of a country then any anti-immigration law throughout history would be bullying of some country or another.
Also, talk to a few volcanologists and marine engineers about trying to build airfields on the tops of barely-above water active volcanoes. (Vs. China is building on shallow, solid, inactive atolls.)