The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

zhongyuan
) or “inner China” (
neidi
), and the periphery
being the pastoral “frontiers” (
bianjiang
) or “outer China” (waidi).
8
This is what the building of the Great Wall was ultimately about. The Great
Wall, writes political scientist Jakub Grygiel, “served to reinforce the ecological
distinction that translated into political differences.”
9
Indeed, to the early
Chinese, agriculture meant civilization itself: the Central or Middle Kingdom,
Zhongguo
, which owed nothing to the surrounding pastoral peoples. From this
followed the kind of cultural certainty that China would share with Western
Christendom.
10
From the late Zhou Dynasty in the third century 
B.C
., arable
China would begin to absorb barbarian and quasi-barbarian elements.
11
And
later, beginning with the Han Dynasty in the second century 
B.C
., the Chinese
would encounter other cultures—Roman, Byzantine, Persian, and Arab—and

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thus develop a comparative, 
regional
sense of space.
12
 The fact that the Chinese
state today includes both desert and sown, on a continental scale no less, reflects
the culmination of a long and thus far triumphant historical process which, in
turn, provides the geographic basis for Chinese power—at least for the time
being.
This process of enlargement began with the “cradle” area around the Wei and
lower Yellow rivers in the northern part of the cultivable zone just south of
Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which flourished during the western Zhou
Dynasty three thousand years ago.
13
Because pastoral Inner Asia had no crop
agriculture, its sparse population, about one-sixteenth that of the cradle area,
could not properly survive without access to it.
14
 Thus China grew outward from
the Wei and lower Yellow rivers, though recent archaeological excavations do
indicate civilizational development in southeastern China and northern Vietnam
during this time.
15
 During the Warring States period (403–221 
B.C
.), which saw
the number of polities shrink from 170 to 7, Chinese civilization moved further
southward into rice-and tea-growing areas, to include the region of present-day
Shanghai. Even so, political power remained in the north, which embraced the
region of present-day Beijing.
16
It was the Qin that emerged victorious from the
Warring States period—the dynasty from which, according to some etymologies,
China got its name. By the first century 
B.C
., under the Han Dynasty (which had
supplanted the Qin), China included all of the cultivable heartland from the
headwaters of the Yellow and Yangzi rivers to the Pacific coast, and from the
Bohai Sea by the Korean Peninsula to the South China Sea. A combination of
diplomatic overtures and military forays allowed Han emperors to establish
feudatories among the Xiongnu, that is, the nomadic Huns, in Outer Mongolia
and East Turkestan (Xinjiang), as well as in southern Manchuria and the
northern part of Korea.
A pattern had developed. China’s settled agricultural civilization had to
constantly strive to create a buffer against the nomadic peoples of the drier
uplands bordering it on three sides, from Manchuria counterclockwise around to
Tibet.
17
This historical dilemma was structurally similar to that of the Russians,
who also required buffers. But while the Russians were spread across eleven
time zones with a meager population, China was much more cohesive and
relatively densely populated from antiquity. With less to fear, comparatively
speaking, China became a less militarized society. Nevertheless, China produced
dynasties of particular energy and aggressiveness. Under the Tang emperors of
the eighth century, military prowess burgeoned along with literature and the arts.
Tang armies threaded their way through the space between Mongolia and Tibet

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to establish protectorates all over Central Asia as far as Khorasan in northeastern
Iran, further enabling the Silk Route. Concomitantly, the Tang emperors fought
wars with the Tibetans to the southwest with help from the Turkic Uighurs to the
northwest. It was always a matter of maneuvering amid the peoples of the
steppe-lands, rather than fighting them all at once. In fact, the soldiery
constituted only one of the Tang state’s tools. “Confucian doctrine,” writes
British historian John Keay, “formulated during the ‘Warring States’ era and