This month it was revealed that China has been telling US officials that the Taiwan Strait is not an international waterway, but China’s territorial waters. “China has sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the Taiwan Straits,” the Global Times thundered last week. The slow, inexorable expansion of China’s territorial claims by land and sea signals that once Taiwan is annexed, this problem of Chinese expansionism will only become more dire. As a solid explainer from The Interpreter observed last year, China treats “territorial waters” as sovereign waters: “China’s interpretation of the territorial sea is that the state has the exclusive