CDR Salamander - China's Goal: Control & Take

Start the week with a short video and a French map to set your thinking in the right direction.

Issue-1: The People’s Republic of China (PRC), having drained as much as she can from nearby seas, has decided to strip-mine life from the most remote corners of our shared oceans. All I can think about is how reckless and unsustainable this is. It all comes from a mix of greed and worries about internal security from a poor and malnourished population—a not uncommon historical Chinese problem

Issue-2: China, even as she has grown powerful, remains an incredibly insecure nation against the rest of the world. Creating land around your sea lines of communication so you can claim waters that used to belong to everyone? Not all that subtle.

Let’s go back to Issue-1.

So scared of your own population and your inability to keep them fed and employed ashore—today—that you will knowingly strip mine life from the world’s oceans, regardless of its impact on everyone—tomorrow.

Once an ecosystem is ripped out from its foundation, there is no guarantee it can recover. They don’t care. That will be someone else’s problem. No one will do anything, as they either lack the will, or they have been bought off.

How remote and how far down the food chain is the PRC willing to go? The wholesale harvest of krill in the Antartic is as difficult to imagine as it is to see, and as such is hard to get people’s attention. It is a foundation species. If you harvest it below a certain level, the entire ecosystem will collapse.

What they are doing in South American, though?

Here’s your video.

The red are Chinese fishing boats crossing to the other side of the Pacific, rushing right up to Peru's EEZ, before switching off their AIS and entering Peru’s territorial waters. They are doing the same off the Galapagos and Argentina.

They will simply take from those who are too weak to do anything, or are simply part of the global commons that no one on the globe will stop them from taking all they can.

Returning to Issue-2. The next is a map, in French from Legendes Cartographie, but done well enough that you don’t need to read anything.

Again, nothing new—we talk about the South China Sea and shipping lanes to Japan, and the centrality of Taiwan to the unseen and unappreciated arteries of commerce that sustain the developed world and feed the undeveloped.

Further commentary is not really needed.

Control. To secure their own approaches and to threaten their rival’s and enemies’ approaches. Simple, cold, hard strategy.

As I like to say, they are not hiding the ball.

None of this insecurity—internal or external—is going to end up in a happy place.

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