Is China copying US near-abroad policy?

The US claimed the Caribbean/Panama as its imperial "near abroad" more than a century ago with the threat of gunboat diplomacy to awe its banana republic vassals. Tsarist/Soviet Russia enslaved the Caucasus, Poland and Siberia for centuries. So China now stakes its geopolitical claim on the South China Sea, the gateway to the energy choke points in the Straits of Malacca and its maritime umbilical cord to the wider Pacific.

The Chinese have fought every major neighbour in Asia - India, South Korea, Vietnam, Japan and the USSR. The Chinese communists have crushed Tibet, the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. They have financed ports and naval facilities across the Indian Ocean (Beijing's String of Pearls). They have armed such odious regimes as the mullah's Iran, the North Korean Kim McDuck dynastic horror show, Pakistan's corrupt military dictatorships, Pol Pot’s genocidal Khmer Rouge and Myanmar's sinister Praetorian kleptocrats.

For all its stellar economic miracle since Deng, the PRC is still an autocratic surveillance state with no respect for human rights or even human decency. Hopefully, the Chinese people will transition into a democratic future and shed the horrible legacies of their Marxist/Leninist/Maoist past.

Matein Khalid is the Chief Investment Officer of Asas Capital Management. He has 25 years of experience in international capital markets as an advisor to family offices and fund managers. He has worked for investment banks/hedge funds in New York, Chicago, London, and Geneva. In addition, he has been the CIO of a technology fund in San Francisco, a royal investment office in Dubai and a public insurance company listed on the DFM.