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

Daily
Telegraph
. “Moscow is wary of large numbers of Chinese settlers moving into
this region, bringing timber and mining companies in their wake.”
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 Here, as in
Mongolia, it is not a question of an invading army or of formal annexation, but
of creeping Chinese demographic and corporate control over a region, large parts
of which used to be held by China during both the Ming and Qing dynasties.
During the Cold War, border disputes between the Soviet Union and China
ignited into military clashes in which hundreds of thousands of troops were
massed in this Siberian back-of-beyond—fifty-three Soviet army divisions by
1969 on the Russian side of the Amur and Ussuri rivers. Mao’s China responded
by deploying one million troops on its side of the border, and building bomb
shelters in major cities. To help relieve pressure on his western flank, so as to

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concentrate on the Far East, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev launched the policy
of détente with the United States. For its part, China saw itself as virtually
surrounded by the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellite state of Mongolia, a pro-
Soviet North Vietnam and its own Laotian client, and pro-Soviet India. All these
tensions led to the Sino-Soviet split, which the Nixon administration was able to
take advantage of in its opening to China in 1971–1972.
Could geography once again drive apart Russia and China, whose current
alliance is mainly tactical? And could the beneficiary be, as in the past, the
United States? Though this time, with China the greater power, the United States
might conceivably partner with Russia in a strategic alliance to balance against
the Middle Kingdom, so as to force China’s attention away from the First Island
Chain in the Pacific and toward its land borders. Indeed, the ability to hamper
the growth of a Chinese naval presence close to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan
will require American pressure from bases in Central Asia close to China, as
well as a particularly friendly relationship with Russia. Pressure on land can help
the United States thwart China at sea.
However, another scenario might play out, far more optimistic and beneficial
to the inhabitants of northern Manchuria and the Russian Far East themselves. In
this version, which harks back to the period before 1917, Chinese trade and
demographic infiltration of Amuria and Ussuria lead to an economic renaissance
in the Russian Far East that is embraced by a more liberal government in
Moscow, which uses the development to better position the port of Vladivostok
as a global hub of northeast Asia. Pushing the scenario further, I would posit the
emergence of a better regime in North Korea, leading to a dynamic Northeast
Asian region of open borders centered around the Sea of Japan.
China’s frontier with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia is not so
much incomplete as arbitrary, and, therefore, to a degree ahistorical. China
stretches too far into the heart of Eurasia, and yet doesn’t stretch far enough.
Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, means “New Dominion,” and what is
dominated by the Chinese is East Turkestan, an area made even more remote
from China’s demographic heartland by the intervention of the Gobi Desert.
Though China has been a state in some form or other for three thousand years,
Xinjiang only became part of China in the middle of the eighteenth century,
when the Qing (Manchu) emperor Qianlong conquered huge areas of western
territory, consequently doubling the size of China and fixing a “firm western
border” with Russia.
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Since then, writes the late British diplomat and travel
writer Sir Fitzroy Maclean, the history of the province “has been one of
sustained turbulence.”
28
There have been revolts and periods of independent

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Turkic rule right up to the 1940s. In 1949, Mao Zedong’s communists marched
into Xinjiang and forcibly integrated it with the rest of China. But as recently as
1990, and again in 2009, there have been riots and bloodshed against Chinese
rule by the ethnic Turkic Uighurs, a subdivision of Turks who ruled Mongolia
from 745 to 840, when the Kyrgyz drove them into East Turkestan. The Uighurs,
numbering some eight million, are less than one percent of China’s population,
but they comprise 45 percent of Xinjiang’s, which is China’s largest province—
twice the size of Texas.
Indeed, China’s population is heavily concentrated in the coastal areas near
the Pacific and in the riverine lowlands and alluvial valleys in the center of the
country, with the drier plateaus, often at altitudes of twelve thousand feet, in the
vast west and southwest relatively empty, even as they are the homes of the anti-
Chinese Uighur and Tibetan minorities. The original China, as noted, emerged
out of the Yellow and particularly the Wei river valleys, where humankind
probably existed in prehistory, and from where China as a civilizational concept
began to organically spread along great rivers, which to the Chinese served the
purpose that roads did for the Romans. Here in this hearth of Chinese
civilization, the land was crisscrossed by “myriad rivers, canals, and irrigation
streams that fed lush market gardens and paddies”; here “the seasonal
flooding … returned needed nutrients to the soil.”
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 Nowadays, Chinese territory
simply overlaps not only this riverine heartland, but Turkic Central Asia and
historic Tibet besides, and that is Beijing’s salient cartographic challenge, even
as it comports well with China’s imperial history. In Beijing’s eyes there is no
alternative to Chinese control over its contiguous tablelands. For as the mid-
twentieth-century American China hand Owen Lattimore reminds us: “The
Yellow River derives its water from the snows of Tibet,” and for “part of its
course it flows near the Mongolian steppe.”
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Tibet, with the headwaters of the
Yellow, Yangzi, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Indus, and Sutlej rivers, may
constitute the world’s most enormous storehouse of freshwater, even as China by
2030 is expected to fall short of its water demands by 25 percent.
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Securing
these areas, under whose soil also lie billions of tons of oil, natural gas, and
copper, has meant populating them over the decades with Han Chinese
immigrants from the nation’s demographic heartland. It has also meant, in the
case of Xinjiang, an aggressive courting of the independent ethnic Turkic
republics of Central Asia, so that the Uighurs will never have a political and
geographical rear base with which to contest Beijing’s rule.
In Central Asia, as in eastern Siberia, China competes fiercely with Russia for
a sphere of influence. Trade between China and former Soviet Central Asia has

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risen from $527 million in 1992 to $25.9 billion in 2009.
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But the means of
Beijing’s sway will for the moment be two major pipelines, one carrying oil
from the Caspian Sea across Kazakhstan to Xinjiang, and the other transporting
natural gas from the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan border, across Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan, to Xinjiang. Again, no troops will be necessary as Greater China
extends into Mackinder’s Eurasian Heartland, the upshot of an insatiable demand
for energy and the internal danger posed by its own ethnic minorities.
In all of this, China is not risk-averse. Eyeing some of the world’s last
untapped deposits of copper, iron, gold, uranium, and precious gems, China is
already mining for copper in war-torn Afghanistan, just south of Kabul. China
has a vision of Afghanistan (and of Pakistan) as a secure conduit for roads and
energy pipelines that will bring natural resources from Indian Ocean ports,
linking up with Beijing’s budding Central Asian dominion-of-sorts. China has
been “exceptionally active” building roads that will connect Xinjiang with
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Within Afghanistan itself, a Chinese
firm, the China Railway Shistiju Group, is “defying insecurity” by building a
roadway in Wardak Province. China is improving rail infrastructures that
approach Afghanistan from several directions.
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Thus, as the United States
moves to defeat al Qaeda and irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, it is China’s
geopolitical position that will be enhanced. Military deployments are ephemeral:
roads, rail links, and pipelines can be virtually forever.
Like the Taklamakan Desert of Xinjiang, the sprawling, mountainous Tibetan
plateau, rich in copper and iron ore, accounts for much of the territory of China,
thus clarifying the horror with which Beijing views Tibetan autonomy, let alone
independence. Without Tibet there is a much reduced China and a virtually
expanded Indian Subcontinent: this explains the pace of Chinese road and rail
projects across the Tibetan massif.
If you accept Pakistan, with its own Chinese-built road and Indian Ocean port
project, as a future zone of Greater China, and put the relatively weak states of
Southeast Asia into the same category, then India, with its billion-plus
population, is a blunt geographic wedge puncturing this grand sphere of Chinese
influence. A map of Greater China in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s