Bill Hayton is an associate fellow with the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Previously, he was a journalist with the BBC World News in Vietnam and Myanmar. His research and journalism have focused on the South China Sea disputes and contemporary Southeast Asian politics. He is the author of Vietnam: Rising Dragon (2010), The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia (2014), and most recently, The Invention of China (2020). In this lightly edited interview, we discussed China’s national inventions, how bad mapmaking gave rise to the South China Sea dispute, and why some Sinologists were upset by his recent book.
Bill Hayton.Illustration by Kate Copeland
Q: What inspired you to write this book?
A: This book came out of my work on the South China Sea, which in turn came out of my work on Vietnam. The more I looked into the history of China’s claims in the South China Sea, the more I came to realize that in th
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