The dragon’s new teeth
A rare look inside the world’s biggest military expansion
AT A meeting of South-East Asian nations in 2010, China's foreign minister Yang Jiechi, facing a barrage of complaints about his country's behaviour in the region, blurted out the sort of thing polite leaders usually prefer to leave unsaid. “China is a big country,” he pointed out, “and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact.” Indeed it is, and China is big not merely in terms of territory and population, but also military might. Its Communist Party is presiding over the world's largest military build-up. And that is just a fact, too—one which the rest of the world is having to come to terms with.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline “The dragon’s new teeth”
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