OPINION:
Elements of the People’s Liberation Army of China pressed Chinese President Xi Xinping for a stronger, military response to the ruling of The Hague tribunal on the South China Sea which said that China’s claims to the islands were baseless.
“Some elements within China’s increasingly confident military are pushing for a stronger - potentially armed - response aimed at the United States and its regional allies,” according to interviews with four sources with close military and leadership ties. “The People’s Liberation Army is ready. We should go in and give them a bloody nose like Deng Xiaoping did to Vietnam in 1979,” a source said, referring to China’s brief invasion of Vietnam to punish Hanoi for forcing Beijing’s ally the Khmer Rouge from power in Cambodia,” reports Reuters.
“The United States will do what it has to do. We will do what we have to do,” the source said. “The entire military side has been hardened. It was a huge loss of face,” he said, declining further comment.
“The Chinese military will step up and fight hard and China will never submit to any country on matters of sovereignty, Liang Fang, a professor at the military-run National Defence University, wrote on his Weibo microblog about the ruling.
It seems the last six months of the Obama presidency will be very dangerous indeed as elements within dictatorships worldwide will see the opportunity to take advantage of American weakness slipping away with the arrival of a new administration.
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