[adventured]

Vietnam just had to expend a large amount of effort to placate and reassure China, so the US could dock an aircraft carrier in Danang.

For a country as powerful and on the rise as China is, it's remarkable how insecure the CPC are about every little thing. It's an overwhelming indication of the fragility of their power and their own sense of security about their control.

[bllguo]

this sounds like you're projecting something, honestly. I'd stray on the side of being wary of China, not dismissing them as "insecure" and "fragile." Just a dangerous mindset imo.

[adventured]

I don't think so. Trump for an example is very easy to see through in terms of his insecurity. People that behave a certain way while they're in extraordinary positions of power, reveal that fragility / insecurity.

China's behavior reeks of insecurity. Here they are, this massive, extremely powerful, rapidly growing economic juggernaut, and they behave like a scared mouse about the South China Sea (as though they really needed to steal that territory from their neighbors), about Vietnam & the US (as though Vietnam could ever threaten them), about the smallest slight from Japan or South Korea (who cares). It's incredibly revealing.

Besides the obviousness of China's reactions and behavior and what it reveals, authoritarian regimes are universally wildly insecure. The people that seek authoritarian positions of power are similarly universally insecure. Take Stalin, he was like a man-child in terms of insecurity, and most dictators you can name from the last century were likewise, that includes everyone from Saddam to Putin (look at his recent tantrum performance, putting on a visual display of Russia nuking the US at his state of the nation speech, trying his best to hide vast insecurity).