The problem with an autocracy is that they will not cease until any threat to their existence can be stamped out or controlled. Nations continued to hope Nazi Germany would just stop its expansion and placate Hitler until it was clear he had no intention of stopping.
Last week it was discovered that an additional half a million Tibetans [1] were sent to join the Uighurs in labor camps. When do the democracies of the world say enough is enough? These are vast numbers of human lives being cast into the inferno because they aren't Han Chinese.
China has subsumed Tibet wholly and condemned its people to reeducation and labor camps. If this doesn't sound like lebensraum I don't know what to tell you.
Predatory loans on ports in Africa and their subsequent control by the CCP are by proxy tools of dominion.
China marched into Tibet in 1950, immediately after the founding of the PRC. It was part of the Qing dynasty, and the Republic of China also considered Tibet to be part of China. It's hyperbolic to say that China is expansionist because 70 years ago, it invaded a territory that every successive Chinese government for hundreds of years has controlled or claimed.
That sounds exactly like lebensraum, which if you're not familiar was an effort to create a "Greater Germany" through the annexation of ethnically German neighbors.
There are more than a million people whose only crime was they were not Han Chinese who have been sent to camps. It is an ethical imperative to make a stand.
Lebensraum was not about annexing ethnically German neighbors. Lebensraum was about the "German race" needing space to thrive and, being superior, having a moral right and "biological necessity" to conquer that space and wipe out the "inferior races" currently inhabiting it.
You are correct; lebensraum did go hand-in-hand with Hitler's Grossdeutschland. I argue that the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria) was in Hitler's eyes a test of pavement for lebensraum: for an even greater Germany. China's reconstitution of half a century old territories is evidence of this same desire.
Define Democracy. If simply having a system of elections is enough, then China is also a Democracy. On the other hand, if you define a Democracy as a nation where every nation has an equal vote, then the US definitely is not a Democracy.
I'm more afraid of the guy holding a stick over my head than the guy a mile away, no matter what that dude is up to.