Analysis: China’s belligerence, Southeast Asia’s arms race, and 1914
International affairs columnist Jonathan Manthorpe examines the echoes of the first World War in the arms race underway in Southeast Asia. Excerpt: As China has become wealthy it has also become an expansionist power. Beijing portrays its territorial ambitions as merely the re-assertion of its sovereignty over lands that were stolen from it during the “century of humiliation” after its disastrous collision with the industrial powers starting in the 1840s. For the most part these claims are bunk. Beijing’s loud and often belligerent claims to ownership of the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, the island nation of