You forgot to add “who has built artificial islands in the West Philippine sea and militarized them so that they could block shipping lanes from Europe/the Middle East to Korea, Japan and eastern Russia?
not to mention destroy the environment for Philippine fishermen and steal all the natural gas resources there (these islands are illegal by international law according to one court case, and within the Philippine Economic zone).
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It is true that if China could control the Strait of Malacca they could interdict oil and liquified natural gas from U.S. allies as you say.
But it is probably a bigger deal that the U.S. could interdict oil shipments from the MidEast to China.
China is very poor in energy and other natural resources including the raw materials for their manufacturing economy.
They are acutely aware of this. It is their dominant strategic priority to negate this potentially fatal weakness. Almost all of their global and military buildup can be interpreted as trying to break out of this strategic stranglehold.
In the meantime they are trying to assert a provision of maritime law which, in their interpretation, gives them control of a 200 mile band around each "island" if it becomes populated.
The U.S. of course opposes all of this. Our grand strategy SHOULD be (and may in fact be, under Trump) to disengage completely from China economically, thereby allowing their parasitical communist system to implode as did the USSR.