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

Chapter XI: The Geography of Chinese Power
1.
H. J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” 
The
Geographical Journal
, London, April 1904.
2.
 Halford J. Mackinder, 
Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in
the Politics of Reconstruction
(Washington, DC: National Defense
University, 1919, 1942), pp. 46–48, 203.
3.
China, located in the temperate zone, has a population of 1.32
billion and its GDP totaled $4,326 billion in 2008, whereas Russia,
located between the Arctic and the temperate zone, has a population of
141 million and its GDP totaled $1,601 billion in 2008. Simon
Saradzhyan, “Russia’s Red Herring,” ISN Security Watch, Zurich,
May 25, 2010.
4.
John Keay, 
China: A History
(London: HarperCollins, 2008), p.
13.
5.
 Ibid., p. 231.
6.
Patricia Buckley Ebrey, 
China: The Cambridge Illustrated History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 108.
7.
John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, 
China: A New History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, 2006), p. 23.
8.
 M. Taylor Fravel, 
Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and
Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes
(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008), pp. 41–42.
9.
Jakub J. Grygiel, 
Great Powers and Geopolitical Change
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 133.
Additionally, Owen Lattimore writes: “Obviously a line of cleavage
existed somewhere between the territories and peoples that could
advantageously be included in the Chinese Empire and those that
could not. This was the line that the Great Wall was intended to
define.” Owen Lattimore, “Origins of the Great Wall,” 
Geographical
Review
, vol. 27, 1937.

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10.
 Fairbank and Goldman, 
China: A New History
, pp. 23, 25, 45.
11.
 Ebrey, 
China
, p. 57.
12.
 Saul B. Cohen, 
Geography and Politics in a World Divided
(New
York: Random House, 1963), pp. 238–39.
13.
 Keay, 
China
, maps pp. 8–9, 53.
14.
 Ebrey, 
China
, p. 164.
15.
 Fairbank and Goldman, 
China: A New History
, pp. 41–42.
16.
Beijing’s position, writes geographer T. R. Tregear, served the
needs of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties into the modern era by its
sufficiently central location enabling it to govern China, even as it was
close enough to guard the steppe-lands to the north and west. T. R.
Tregear, 
A Geography of China
(London: Transaction, 1965, 2008),
pp. 94–95.
17.
The threat of “barbarian” invasions is a theme in the work of the
late China hand Owen Lattimore. Owen Lattimore, “China and the
Barbarians,” in 
Empire in the East
, edited by Joseph Barnes (New
York: Doubleday, 1934).
18.
 Keay, 
China
, p. 259.
19.
 Fairbank and Goldman, 
China: A New History
, p. 109.
20.
 Ebrey, 
China
, p. 227.
21.
 
“Map 
of 
Nineteenth 
Century 
China 
and 
Conflicts,”
www.fordham.edu/halsall
, 
reprinted 
in 
Reshaping 
Economic
Geography
(Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2009), p. 195.
22.
 G. Patrick March, 
Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North
Pacific
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), pp. 234–35.
23.
The theory of hydraulic societies was promulgated by twentieth-
century German American historian and Sinologist Karl Wittfogel,
who explained that they originally developed in ancient river valley
civilizations, where vast pools of corviable labor existed to build great
irrigation works.
24.
 Fairbank and Goldman,