This is John Batchelor, speaking with colleagues Steve Yates of the Heritage Foundation about the threats coming from Beijing against the new Prime Minister of Tokyo,

about the fact that Wang Yi, the Wolf Feuer No. 1 of Beijing, traveled to Moscow to sit with Lavarov and ask for help from these

threatening to Beijing, Japanese warlords, some fantastic version of the past in 2025.

I ask Steve, is there something to this, or is it rhetoric, more propaganda for the hometown crowd,

for consumption in China only?

Steve answers in a vast way, not just about Tokyo, not just about Beijing or Moscow,

about the whole of East Asia and the global trade system.

Here's Steve to explain.

More of this later.

Of course, there's no shortage of wolf warrior political warfare in what Beijing has been

doing quite a lot of in recent times.

But it's actually more than that because they have the actual material threat of civilian and military craft,

which really are what we'd say, gray zone because it's blended capabilities,

that have challenged the sovereign rights of Japan, the Philippines, and of course, Taiwan.

So this is increasingly seen as linked.

It's not just internal Chinese politics.

This is global security, and not least of which has been emphasized that 50% of global

container traffic transits these strategic waterways.

And so it's not simply a matter of Chinese people's feelings or the

CCP's ideology. This is something that is pressing economic and national security, national

interests, not just for that island chain, but for a lot of the rest of us.