THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER
At the end of his famous article “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Mackinder
has a disturbing reference to China. After elucidating why the interior of Eurasia
forms the fulcrum of geostrategic world power, he posits that the Chinese “might
constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom, just because they would add
an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet
denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.”
1
Leave aside the inherent racist
sentiment
of the era, as well as the hysterics with which the rise of any non-
Western power is greeted, and concentrate instead on Mackinder’s analysis: that
whereas Russia is a land power whose only oceanic frontage is mainly blocked
by Arctic ice, China is, too, a continental-sized power, but one whose virtual
reach extends not only into the strategic Central Asian core of the former Soviet
Union, with all of its
mineral and hydrocarbon wealth, but also to the main
shipping lanes of the Pacific three thousand miles away, where China enjoys a
nine-thousand-mile coastline with many good natural harbors, most of which are
ice-free. (Mackinder actually feared that China would one day conquer Russia.)
Furthermore, as Mackinder wrote in 1919 in
Democratic Ideals and Reality
, if
Eurasia conjoined with Africa forms the “World-Island”—the heart of the dry-
land earth, four times the size of North America, with eight times the population
—then China, as Eurasia’s largest continental nation with a coastline in both the
tropics and the temperate zone, occupies the globe’s most advantageous position.
Mackinder predicts
at the conclusion of
Democratic Ideals and Reality
that,
along with the United States and the United Kingdom, China would eventually
guide the world by “building for a quarter of humanity a new civilization, neither
quite Eastern nor quite Western.”
2
A patriotic imperialist to the last, Mackinder
naturally included Great Britain in this exalted category. Nevertheless, using
only the criteria of geography and demography, his prediction about China has at
least so far proved accurate.
The fact that China is blessed by geography is something so basic and obvious
that it tends to be overlooked in all the discussions about its economic dynamism
and national assertiveness over recent decades. Thus, a look at the map through
the prism of Chinese history is in order.
While Russia lies to the north of 50
degrees north latitude, China lies to the
south of it, in roughly the same range of temperate latitude as the United States,
with all the variations in climate and the benefits which that entails.
3
Harbin, the
main city of Manchuria, lies at 45 degrees north latitude, the same as Maine.
Beijing is near 40 degrees north latitude, the same as New York. Shanghai, at the
mouth of the Yangzi River, lies at 30 degrees north latitude, the same as New
Orleans. The Tropic of Cancer runs through the southern extremity of China and
also cuts just below the Florida Keys.
China is only somewhat less of a continent than the United States. The United
States, bounded by two oceans and the Canadian Arctic, is threatened only by
the specter of Mexican demography to its south.
The threat to China came
mainly over the millennia from the Eurasian steppe-land to the north and
northwest, the same steppe-land that threatened Russia from the opposite
direction: so that the interplay between the indigenous Chinese and the
Manchurians, Mongols, and Turkic peoples of the high desert has formed one of
the central themes of Chinese history. That is why the capital cities of early
Chinese dynasties were often built on the Wei River, upstream from its meeting
with the Yellow, where there was enough rainfall
for sedentary agriculture, yet
safe from the nomadism of the Inner Mongolian plateau just to the north.
Whereas the “neat” sequence of forest, prairie, high desert, mountain, and
coast—crossed in the middle by the north–south flowing Mississippi and
Missouri rivers—defines American geography, in China the great rivers—the
Wei, Han, Yellow, and Yangzi—run
from west to east, from the high and dry
uplands of the Eurasian interior to the moister agricultural lands closer to the
Pacific coast.
4
These agricultural lands are, in turn, divided between the
comparatively dry wheat-millet area of northern China,
with its short growing
season, akin to the northern Midwest of America, and the wet, double-cropping
rice culture of China’s productive south. Thus, the building of the Grand Canal
between 605 and 611, linking the Yellow and the Yangzi rivers—and China’s
famine-prone north with its economically productive south, with its rice
surpluses—had, according to British historian John Keay, “a similar effect to the
building of the first transcontinental railroads in North America.”
5
The Grand
Canal was the key to Chinese unity. For it eased the north’s conquest of the south
during the medieval Tang and Song dynasties, which helped consolidate the core
geography of agrarian China. Again, here we see how individual acts of men—
the building of a canal—prove more historically crucial than the simple fact of
geography. For given the grave differences between northern and southern
China, in the early medieval era the split between the two Chinas which had
lasted for two centuries might well have become permanent, like that between
the eastern and western Roman empires.
6
But as the late Harvard professor
John King Fairbank writes, “The contrasts
between North and South China are superficial compared with those between the
pastoral nomadism of the plateaus of Inner Asia and the settled villages based on
the intensive agriculture of China.” By Inner Asia, Fairbank means something
quite comprehensive: “the wide arc running from Manchuria through Mongolia
and Turkestan to Tibet.” China’s sense of itself, he goes on,
is based on the
cultural difference that obtains between this surrounding belt of desert and the
sown of China proper, that is, between the pastoral and the arable.
7
China’s
ethnic geography reflects this “core-periphery structure,” with the core being the
arable “central plain” (
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