power vacuums on its vast frontiers without the backup of a truly expeditionary
ground force indicates how China is probably more secure on land than it has
been in decades, or centuries.
Chinese diplomats have been busy in recent years settling remaining border
disputes with the Central Asian republics and with its other neighbors (India
being a striking exception).
41
While the accords may not be on China’s terms,
the very fact of such a comprehensive approach from Beijing is an indication of
a strong strategic direction. China has signed military agreements with Russia,
Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. “The stabilization of China’s land
borders may be one of the most important geopolitical changes in Asia of the
past few decades,” writes Jakub Grygiel.
42
There is no longer a Soviet army
bearing down on Manchuria like during the Cold War, a time when under Mao
Zedong China concentrated its defense budget on its army, and pointedly
neglected the seas. The significance of this cannot be overstated. Since antiquity
China has been preoccupied with land invasions of one sort or another. The
Great Wall of China was built in the third century
B.C
. ostensibly to keep out
Turkic invaders. It was a Mongol invasion from the north that led to the end of
Ming forays in the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century. Relatedly, it is the
current
favorable situation on land, more than any other variable, that has
allowed China to start building a great navy and reestablish the Pacific and
maybe even Indian oceans as part of its geography. Whereas coastal city-states
and island nations, big and small, pursue sea power as a matter of course, a
continental and historically insular nation like China does so partly as a luxury:
the mark of a budding empire-of-sorts.
In the past, the Chinese, secure in their
fertile river valleys, were not forced by poverty to take to the sea like the
Norsemen who lived in a cold and sterile land. The Pacific Ocean offered the
Chinese little, and was in many respects a road to nowhere, unlike the
Mediterranean
and Aegean seas, populated as they were with islands in an
enclosed maritime space. It was the early-nineteenth-century German
philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who explained that the Chinese,
unlike the Europeans, lacked the boldness for sea exploration, tied as the
Chinese were to the agricultural cycles of their plains.
43
The Chinese probably
never heard of Formosa (Taiwan) until the thirteenth century, and didn’t settle it
until the seventeenth century, after Portuguese and Dutch traders had established
stations on the island.
44
Thus, merely by going to
sea in the manner that it is,
China demonstrates its favorable position on land in the heart of Asia.
East Asia now pits Chinese land power against American sea power, with
Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula as the main focal points. For decades, China
was preoccupied on land where America, particularly since its misadventure in
Vietnam, had no appetite to go. America still has no such appetite in Asia,
especially after its ordeals in Iraq and Afghanistan. But China is in the early
stages of becoming a sea power as well as a land power: that is the big change in
the region.
In terms of geography, China is as blessed by its seaboard and its proximity to
water as it is by its continental interior. China dominates the East Asian coastline
on the Pacific in the temperate and tropical zones, and on its southern border is
close enough to the Indian Ocean to contemplate being linked to it in years
ahead by roads and energy pipelines. But whereas China is in a generally
favorable position along its land borders, it faces a more hostile environment at
sea. The Chinese navy sees little but trouble and frustration in what it calls the
First Island Chain, which,
going from north to south, comprises Japan, the
Ryuku Islands, the so-called halfisland of the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, the
Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia. All of these places, save for Australia, are
potential flashpoints. Scenarios include the collapse of North Korea or an inter-
Korean war, a possible struggle with the United States over Taiwan, and acts of
piracy or terrorism that conceivably impede China’s merchant fleet access to the
Malacca and other Indonesian straits. There are, too, China’s territorial disputes
over the likely energy-rich ocean beds in the East and South China seas. In the
former, China and Japan have conflicting claims of sovereignty to the
Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands; in the latter, China has conflicting sovereignty claims
with Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam to some or all of the Spratly Islands,
and with Vietnam over the Paracel Islands. (China also has other serious
territorial conflicts in the South China Sea with Malaysia and Brunei.)
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