> I will be pleasantly amused if China's imperial aspirations actually stop at Taiwan
For a Western person, with the implicit cultural and historical ethos, and the actual modern history, it's natural to apply aggressive stance to a rising power.
For a Chinese who had the same kind of knowledge from the Chinese heritage, it's laughable to expand. China in the Han dynasty, already figured out that expansion just results into stretch of power and evetual breakdown, which is natural for any complex system. So that's what happened after Wu Di the second great emperor after Shi Huang, he realized his military expansion in the end does not achieve it's strategic goal, I.e., extinguish the roaming noamd tribes from the earth. He even wrote a self criticizing official doc to confess. And changed the policy to use economic and royal marriage to manage the nomad tribes.
You can equate the cultural and economic management as expansion, just like what US did in 20 century. But that's inevitable anyway. I.e., culturally and economically advanced nations are mimicked by others even if they are not doing anything...
Those were under Chinese sphere since Tang dynasty. But not a formal sovereign subject. That's find at the old time, since the outsphere does not have the influence to encroach to the Chinese sphere.
In 19 & 20 century, things changed. Those strategic areas have to be under China's control for national security, which was under siege from Russia (the most expansionism nation on earth).
Like USSR inherited Russia's imperial territory, and India inherited great Britain's, CCP conveniently inherited Qing empire's as well (indirectly through KMT, the nine dashed line was a KMT invention...).
For a Western person, with the implicit cultural and historical ethos, and the actual modern history, it's natural to apply aggressive stance to a rising power.
For a Chinese who had the same kind of knowledge from the Chinese heritage, it's laughable to expand. China in the Han dynasty, already figured out that expansion just results into stretch of power and evetual breakdown, which is natural for any complex system. So that's what happened after Wu Di the second great emperor after Shi Huang, he realized his military expansion in the end does not achieve it's strategic goal, I.e., extinguish the roaming noamd tribes from the earth. He even wrote a self criticizing official doc to confess. And changed the policy to use economic and royal marriage to manage the nomad tribes.
You can equate the cultural and economic management as expansion, just like what US did in 20 century. But that's inevitable anyway. I.e., culturally and economically advanced nations are mimicked by others even if they are not doing anything...
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