Greg Poling
speaker
344 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Greg Poling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I am so honored to have made the big time.
It's a real honor.
I think it is proportionally good to how much interest there is on Southeast Asia versus China here in Washington DC.
The same way most people in D C got to their careers, whether they will admit it or not, which is like dumb luck and happenstance.
That's that's right.
Yeah.
As an undergrad, I just happened to spend a summer well a month living in Beijing with my friend's grandparents in a Hutong in Beijing before they were all knocked down.
I came back and spent my last two years studying Chinese and went to Fudan for a semester, taught English in Shanghai for a while, and then when I came back to DC for grad school, I was gonna do Asia because you couldn't do China, but I thought I was gonna be a China guy at American.
Yeah.
And somehow through coursework I migrated into Southeast Asia and ended up doing
A weird combination of my master's thesis on Indonesia and my language exam in Mandarin, and I've been working on Southeast Asia here at CSIS really ever since the last fifteen years, and that included a nerdy interest in GIS and mapping work and satellite imagery, which paired with a nerdy interest in maritime law, and somehow that happened to coincide with the Chinese takeover of Scarborough Shoal in two thousand.
two thousand twelve and a huge bubble of interest in the South China Sea, and I was lucky enough to ride that interest through no particular talent or foresight of my own.
So it matters to different people in China for a whole lot of different reasons, depending on what their parochial self-interests are, but I think the reason it matters to party leadership and to Xi Jinping is the political salience, the national nationalist narrative that the party has really cooked up over the last couple of decades in particular.
And so it's got an vanishingly clear-
close to being one of China's core interests, whether or not it really is in the eye of the beholder, but it's certainly become hardwired into the China dream or the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
And she from his really his very first policy speeches as party leader has talked about the recovery of lost territories in the South China Sea, along with the mission of becoming a maritime power as core to his political mission.
That's right.
So if you're a Southeast Asian claimant, it matters because you should have the same right to the same maritime zones that all the other hundred and eighty-something member states of the United Nations have.
And China's effort to claim so-called historic rights across the South China Sea
at the end of the day means that China's saying that the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia are the only countries on earth that d are not entitled to the full rights of the exclusive economic zone and the continental shelf.
Showing 1–20 of 344 · page 1 of 18
Next →