By James Pach
“The USS Lassen’s sail-by at Subi Reef was too late in coming.”
Victor Robert Lee writes on the Asia-Pacific region and is the author of the well-received espionage novel Performance Anomalies. He is perhaps best known to readers of The Diplomat for his very popular series of articles built around satellite imagery showing China’s island building program. His writing on the region has been widely cited in major news outlets. He recently spoke with The Diplomat’s editor James Pach about the tensions in the South China Sea.
In January 2013, your article “The Last Empire Expands” was published in Medium.com. In the article, you called Beijing’s “territory grab” in the South China Sea an imperial move. Do you still hold the view that China is the last empire?
Yes, and the closing sentence of that article is unfortunately pertinent today: “It is time to see the Beijing Empire for what it is: A hegemon that has been emboldened by America’s folly and is expanding.” Beijing’s ongoing annexation (no other word for it) of the South China Sea is the largest territorial grab since the expansion of the Soviet and Japanese empires. And Beijing has tightened its grip on restive Xinjiang and the Tibetan regions, flooding them with Han migrants and turning them into virtual police states. It is also pushing against India on its Himalayan borders. So “empire” is appropriate. China even has a self-anointed emperor, Xi Jinping, who holds absolute power and is assiduously building his own cult of personality. I think kowtowers like David Cameron and Mark Zuckerberg will come to regret their fawning.
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