{"id":99619,"date":"2025-12-12T03:00:04","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T08:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=99619"},"modified":"2025-12-13T10:34:49","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T15:34:49","slug":"re-orient-your-map-to-understand-chinas-view-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/12\/12\/re-orient-your-map-to-understand-chinas-view-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-orient your map to understand China’s view of the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

CDR Salamander<\/a> provides a helpful guide to seeing the world, specifically their Pacific front, by turning your map sideways. I hope you won’t look back on this from a slightly later date when the maps get all flaggy and arrow-y:<\/p>\n

I first saw this map three years ago<\/a>, and it recently resurfaced in my thoughts.<\/p>\n

I remain convinced that a lot of the problem with trying to get everyone to fully understand the challenge in the Western Pacific is that to a large part, we think in a “north-up” orientation.<\/p>\n

I don’t think that is all that helpful.<\/p>\n

Just a few days ago, we had another Pearl Harbor Day anniversary and we’ve all seen the maps, usually centered on Hawaii, where the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Kid\u014d Butai<\/em> comes at the Pacific Fleet from stage left off the map. Then we fought battles in the Coral Sea, Midway, and so on.<\/p>\n

To the lay eye \u2014 or to those who don’t have time to dig into the reasons \u2014 a traditional north-up map looks disjointed; things seem all over the place.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

No, not really. Let’s bring back that first map.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

[Click to embiggenate]<\/p><\/div>\n

For both Imperial Japan in the early-mid 20th century and Communist China today, the most important part of this map is the access to the resources in or going through the bottom-right hand corner.<\/p>\n

Today’s greatest bone of contention \u2014 not unrelated to the most important part of the map mentioned above \u2014 is Taiwan, right at the mouth of the funnel.<\/p>\n

If we need to bring a fight there, that is one hell of a fight to get there if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to prepare a proper welcome for us.<\/p>\n

For the PRC, the primary military threat to plan for comes across the Pacific into a funnel that terminates at its most important SLOC. It’s the United States of America, and the US has a series of islands leading right into the heart of the PRC’s. It starts in Hawaii \u2014 Midway, Wake, Guam \u2014 and then to U.S. allies: the Philippines, Japan, and Australia.<\/p>\n

They’re planning a layered defensive fight. Their actions make that clear.<\/p>\n

Make no mistake, we may say we are going to “defend Taiwan”, but to do that we will have to fight an aggressive war across the Pacific, into the enemy’s prepared funnel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update, 13 December<\/strong>: Welcome, Instapundit<\/em> readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack<\/em> \u2013 https:\/\/substack.com\/@nicholasrusson<\/a> that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CDR Salamander provides a helpful guide to seeing the world, specifically their Pacific front, by turning your map sideways. I hope you won’t look back on this from a slightly later date when the maps get all flaggy and arrow-y: I first saw this map three years ago, and it recently resurfaced in my thoughts. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22,7,24,5,683,13,230],"tags":[1381,624,1575,144],"class_list":["post-99619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-history","category-japan","category-military","category-pacific","category-usa","category-ww2","tag-coldwar2","tag-maps","tag-strategy","tag-taiwan"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-pUL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99619"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99642,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99619\/revisions\/99642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}