Over the last 180 years, all the biggest threats to China’s security have come from the sea. It was from the sea that Britain and France successfully attacked China’s maritime defenses during the First and Second Opium Wars. It was from the sea that Japan launched a series of successful military campaigns against China between 1895 and 1945. And it is the sea—and the American naval forces that have dominated it for decades—that has so far prevented Communist China from reclaiming Taiwan. It is, therefore, unsurprising that China has long seen its maritime periphery to the east as particularly
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