It wants to secure its “living space”, the area in its near abroad that assures the safety of its trade and supply lines.
I haven’t seen any claim that China wants more then just it’s historical boundaries which would be implied by the term “living space”. Ensuring safety of trade and supply lines is basically what the US military does around the world which is qualitatively very different from what used to be advocated under the banner of “living space” (or the German “Lebensraum”).
I haven’t seen any claim that China wants more then just it’s historical boundaries which would be implied by the term “living space”. Ensuring safety of trade and supply lines is basically what the US military does around the world which is qualitatively very different from what used to be advocated under the banner of “living space” (or the German “Lebensraum”).
One response is that China currently has a lot more than it’s historical boundaries, to the extent that those can even be properly defined, given that it hasn’t truly been a continuous country. See https://medium.com/@millwarj/we-need-a-new-approach-to-teaching-modern-chinese-history-we-have-lazily-repeated-false-d24983bd7ef2 for a recent article I read that discusses it.