Opinion | Beijing unlikely to back down over South China Sea despite growing international pushback
- Despite growing resistance from rival nations, Xi Jinping’s tough stance is unlikely to change in the year ahead
- Two former rivals – the US and Vietnam – are becoming increasingly close in their opposition to China’s claims
“[We] do not need to chase [after other countries] – we are the road,” declared Chinese President Xi Jinping during a fateful visit to the southern island of Hainan in 2018.
Speaking before the country’s most accomplished engineers and scientists, he appealed to their patriotic drive for the “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation.
Never lacking ambition, the Chinese strongman nodded through a surreal, futuristic effort to build an Atlantis-style submarine centre deep in the waters of the South China Sea. The billion-dollar project is expected to be the first artificial intelligence-operated colony on earth.
Just over a year later, Xi formally inaugurated the country’s first domestically built aircraft carrier, Shandong, on the same island, Hainan. It marked another huge step in Beijing’s attempts to reassume its place of pride in the global technological hierarchy.
Despite its considerable strides in military technology, however, China faces a tough and challenging path ahead. Perturbed by an ascendant Beijing, the Donald Trump administration and like-minded powers in the region are mobilising a concerted pushback against what they see as Chinese revanchism at the expense of peace and stability in Asia’s maritime heartland.