Will China Turn the Moon Into Its Next South China Sea?
Beijing’s playbook for sovereignty is as bold as it is simple: claim big, build fast, dare the world to stop it. Now it means to take that strategy lunar — and lock America out of the future.
by Rod D. Martin
December 23, 2025
China didn’t just “build a few outposts” in the South China Sea. It asserted a sweeping claim over the sea itself — then poured concrete until the claim started to look like fact.
First came the maximal map. Then the talk of “historic rights.” Then the dredgers. Then the airstrips, radar, missiles, and maritime militia. And through it all, the same gaslighting refrain: anyone who objects is “provoking” China…inside the international waters China has unilaterally decided are its own.
That is the Chinese Communist Party’s signature move in any commons it thinks it can dominate: claim big, build fast, enforce selectively, normalize the new status quo — and dare everyone else to reverse it. Most won’t. Obama wouldn’t. He complained. He convened meetings. He issued statements. He did nothing. And Beijing kept building.
So what happens when that playbook goes to the Moon?
The Moon is no longer a photo-op. It’s the first island base of the Space Age — not the Spanish Caribbean, but the Canaries, Azores, and Madeira: the forward ports that make everything beyond them reachable, routine, and profitable. Mars, the asteroids, and beyond are the new New World.
But without the Moon, everything gets harder, if not downright impossible.
There’s a lot of important real estate in play on and near the Moon. But the lunar south pole may matter most (as For All Mankind fans will understand). Not for flags. Not for feel-good “international cooperation.” For one thing: water.
Water is life support, oxygen, shielding — and, perhaps most important of all, fuel. Split it into hydrogen and oxygen and you have propellant. Propellant means mobility. Mobility means power.
Control the gas stations, and you control who travels where and who has access to what. This is no different from controlling 19th-century coaling stations or establishing ports and settlements at Havana, New Orleans, and New York. Once done, the future takes on a life of its own.
China knows this all too well.
