Full steam

WITH all respect to the endearing Fu Yuanhui, the Olympic swimmer whose goofy post-race interviews have made her a global star, the Chinese are creatures of the land, not the water. On the beaches of Sanya on the southern island of Hainan, China’s new Hawaii, crowds of holidaymakers in tropical shirts dabble awkwardly at the water’s edge; few actually plunge into the sea. In the Sanya market a fishmonger explains a national aversion to deep water more bluntly: the Chinese, she says, simply don’t have sea legs. Refusing to go afloat herself, she buys her fish from the boat people living in the harbour, an ethnic subgroup whose generations have come into the world afloat and gone out the same way. Tanka, as these people are called in southern China, have historically faced discrimination. Even the name, “egg people”, has the force of an insult in Chinese (they call themselves “on-the-water people”).

So it is striking how large water now looms in China’s diplomatic calculations and in the region’s geopolitics, nowhere more so than in the South China Sea that Sanya looks out on. It is there that the gunboat diplomacy which China has employed in recent years to back expansive maritime claims has stirred nervousness among South-East Asian neighbours—and created fears of a collision with America.