Well, easy way to get the South China new islands and surrounding sea would be to agree to take care of the DPRK as a trade off.

The down side to this is the whole give them an inch philosophy. They'd be just as likely to set up a replacement government which will pick back up the whole nuclear thing in a couple of years so they can go in and save the day again, if we just let them take Taiwan back.

 

The former Soviet's great national pass time was chess, I note. It implied : "We are sophisticated, we make a game out of thinking farther ahead than other people..."

People in the USA are avid POKER and BLACKJACK PLAYERS however - and Economics were proven by the Japanese to be the most serious game of them all.

What the Chinese philosophy might be is unclear. I remember always being warned in "Port Briefs" to never play MAHJONG with the natives because they were high stakes games (everything that you've got, anyway) and our guys did not understand the rules of that game...

So what I see is that the Chinese like to play their OWN game, and don't necessarily care what other peoples rules are - so long as they can get away with whatever THEY want to do. China is also notorious for what might be called "Inertia". If they don't get what they want, or can't get what they want, they have an infuriating past history of just waiting until things happen by osmosis if no other way - stubbornly waiting until things just apparently happen on their own.

Thus the island thing, they keep on building these islands while everyone argues about it until the day comes when the islands themselves are THERE, a "Fait Accompli" and then they can say "There would BE no islands if not for us!" and so on - even though they built them by somehow tresspassing in what are international waters (although the waters in question are the territorial waters of other nations, I think)


So having made the islands, and being in sole occupation of the new islands, a new part of China is created which NOW presents the requirement of re-negotiating what nation owns the waters around it/them...

It's completely transparent, and all of the players see what is going on. But once the islands are built what are the nations involved going to do? Destroy the islands so that they cannot be used? Oh - but that would be an act of war against a Chinese sovereign territory...


And so on.

China plays a very deep game, but one based on pushing into any gray area they can find and treating everyone else as if they are not intelligent enough to realize what is going on -

Like a con artist that expects a mark to buy into each and every swindle


To summarize in "Game Terms" I see Kim Jong as a spoiled fat kid who likes to cheat at video games, but China is an organized and very old version of the classic "Flim Flam Man"

As far as China's general philosophy goes, I think that expresses rather a lot...
If you want to understand a group of people, study what is popular with them

 

I don't think we're too far apart on this Dutch. I also don't think China wants Kim to launch against the US. China has too much money riding on the US consumer that might be stopped by a nuke.

I just think now that they are a legitimate super power, they're ready to leverage situations to their advantage instead of just waiting for it to be accepted.

 

"Legitimate Super Power" is kind of questionable to my mind - what I think is that China chose them as a sort of "PET" regime, and handed them a lot of what they have.

~But it is looking like if that is so - China is beginning to regret it...

Mainland China itself has been a major power for a long time, but their technology has been massively "GAPPED" until recently

 

I was referring to China as the superpower. Pet might be a good description for the DPRK. I would have gone with red headed step child.