Takeaways

• China is the Han, which means the eastern part of the country.
• It is so because plate tectonics made that area flat, humid, and served by huge rivers which made land fertile and trade cheap.
• The rest of China is just buffers for them: the northern mountains, the trade and invasion corridor through Xinjiang, the Tibetan Plateau, the Vietnamese border, and the China and South China Seas.
• The one buffer that is not secure is the sea, which is also the main way that China has been invaded over the last 200 years. So China is most concerned about its sea now.
• To protect its seas, it wants to annex Taiwan and increase its maritime buffer, by enlarging the share of the South China Sea that it controls.
• But that protection will never be perfect, so it hedges its risks with the Belt and Road initiative.