本集介紹
TUX uncles today discuss things that keep China up at night with our military analyst, Xiaowei. Given the recent headline news, we start out by asking her about China’s interest in Afghanistan.
Perceived from the outside, China has quickly risen and gained economic and military strength at a historically unprecedented rate ever since it initiated its economic reform (改革開放) championed by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. More than four decades later, China has regained its status as a regional power. While we don’t argue with its meteoric rise since 1987, we also believe that the trajectory going forward may not be a foregone conclusion.
Our speaker, Xiaowei, explore with us two major sources of security concern from Beijing’s perspective: geopolitical and structural.
First, external geopolitical challenges: China shares land borders with fourteen countries (https://cutt.ly/sWFZm5C). If you have fourteen neighbors with long histories, you are sure to not get along with some of them. And then there are the maritime disputes and overlapping claims in the East China Sea and South China Sea with Japan, Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries (the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei) (https://cutt.ly/XWFZu0y). For comparison, the US has only two relatively friendly neighboring countries, Canada to the north and Mexico to the South. It is also protected by two oceans, the Atlantic on the east coast and the Pacific on the west coast.
Secondly, internal structural challenges: the Constitution of China proclaims the leadership of the Chinese Communist Part to be the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. In other words, the Communist Party needs to do whatever it can to maintain its status as the sole ruling party. Whereas the US over time has developed into a mature two party political system in which two major parties take turn governing without major social or political upheavals.
So what else keeps China up at night? Let’s take a listen.
Image sources:
- Google Map (Afghanistan-China Border)
- Google Map (China and Her Neighbors)
- https://cutt.ly/OWJj3em (淺談美國兩大政黨歷史)
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