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

partly in reaction to it, was adamant about civilian control over military
affairs.”
18
 Among the “glories of old China,” writes Fairbank, was a “reasoned
pacifism,” for one of the Confucian myths of the state was “government by
virtue.”
19
This pacifism, according to historians, is sometimes blamed for the
fact that just as China invaded the grasslands and plateau areas, the pastoral
nomads in turn invaded China. In 
A.D
. 763 Tibetan forces actually sacked the
Tang capital of Chang’an. More significantly, the Jin, Liao, and Yuan dynasties
—all products of the northern grasslands—would manifest Inner Asian military
aggression against China throughout the Middle Ages. This went along with the
failure of the indigenous Song and Ming dynasties, despite their revolutionary
military technology, to gain back the steppe-lands. Inner Asia, from Tibet and
East Turkestan across Mongolia to the Far Eastern borderland with Russia, was
only taken back by the Manchu Qing Dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. (It was during this period that the multiethnic territory controlled by
the Chinese state today was “staked out,” as well as envisioned: Taiwan was
acquired in 1683.)
20
In sum, China became a vast continent in and of itself by
virtue of its continual backwards and forwards interactions with an Inner Asian
steppe-land that stretched unto Mackinder’s Heartland, and this is what drives
the political reality of China today.
Indeed, the question now becomes whether the dominant Hans, who comprise
more than 90 percent of China’s population and live mainly in the arable cradle
of China, are able to permanently keep the Tibetans, Uighur Turks, and Inner
Mongolians who live on the periphery under control, with the minimum degree
of unrest. The ultimate fate of the Chinese state will hinge on this fact, especially
as China undergoes economic and social disruptions.
For the time being, China is at the peak of its continental power, even as the
wounds of its territorial rape by the nations of Europe, Russia, and Japan are
still, by China’s own historical standards, extremely fresh. For in the nineteenth
century, as the Qing Dynasty became the sick man of East Asia, China lost much
of its territory—the southern tributaries of Nepal and Burma to Great Britain;
Indochina to France; Taiwan and the tributaries of Korea and Sakhalin to Japan;

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and Mongolia, Amuria, and Ussuria to Russia.
21
In the twentieth century came
the Japanese takeovers of the Shandong Peninsula and Manchuria in the heart of
China. And this was all in addition to the humiliations forced on the Chinese by
the extraterritoriality agreements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
whereby Western nations got control of parts of Chinese cities. Now fast-
forward to the 1950s, when maps started appearing in Chinese secondary schools
of a Greater China that included all of these lost areas, as well as eastern
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Mao Zedong, who had consolidated continental
China for the first time since the High Qing, was clearly an irredentist who had
internalized the wounds of a once vast and imperial state surviving the centuries
only to be humiliated in the recent past.
22
Given these vicissitudes of China’s
history, this may be one flaw in Mao’s thinking that we might actually forgive.
While the rulers of China in the second decade of the twenty-first century may
not be so heartless in their outlook as Mao, China’s history can, however, never
be far from their minds. Though China’s current borders encompass Manchuria,
Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Tibet—all the surrounding plateaus and
grasslands, that is—the very economic and diplomatic strategies of China’s
rulers today demonstrate an 
idea
of China that reaches beyond the territorial
extent of even the China of the eighth-century Tang and the eighteenth-century
High Qing. China, a demographic behemoth with the world’s most energetic
economy for the past three decades, is, unlike Russia, extending its territorial
influence much more through commerce than coercion.
Geography indicates that while China’s path toward ever greater global power
may not be linear—its annual GDP growth rates of over 10 percent for the past
thirty years simply cannot continue—China, even in socioeconomic disarray,
will stand at the hub of geopolitics. And China is not likely to be in complete
disarray. China, echoing Mackinder, combines an extreme, Western-style
modernity with a hydraulic civilization of the kind common to the ancient Orient
and Near East: that is, it features central control, with a regime that builds great
water and other engineering works requiring the labor of millions.
23
 This makes
China relentless and dynamic in ways different from Western democracies.
Because China’s nominal communist rulers constitute the latest of some twenty-
five Chinese dynasties going back four thousand years, the absorption of
Western technology and practices takes place within the disciplined framework
of an elaborate cultural system: one that has unique experience in, among other
things, forming tributary relationships. “The Chinese,” a Singaporean official
told me, “charm you when they want to charm you, and squeeze you when they

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want to squeeze you, and they do it quite systematically.”
China’s internal dynamism, with all of its civil unrest and inefficiencies, to say
nothing of an economic slowdown, creates external ambitions. Empires are often
not sought consciously. Rather, as states become stronger, they develop needs
and—counterintuitively—a whole new set of insecurities that lead them to
expand in an organic fashion. Consider the American experience. Under the
stewardship of some of its more forgettable presidents—Rutherford B. Hayes,
James Garfield, Chester Alan Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and so on—the
American economy chugged quietly along with high annual growth rates
between the end of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Consequently, as America traded more with the outside world, it developed for

---

the first time complex economic and strategic interests in far-flung places that
led to, among other military actions, Navy and Marine landings in South
America and the Pacific. This was despite all of America’s social ills at the time,
which were, in turn, products of this very dynamism. Another factor that caused
America to focus outward was its consolidation of the interior continent. The last
major battle of the Indian Wars was fought in 1890.
China is also consolidating its land borders and beginning to focus outward.
Unlike America, China does not come armed with a missionary approach to
world affairs. It has no ideology or system of government it seeks to spread.
Moral progress in international politics is an American goal, not a Chinese one.
And yet China is not a status quo power: for it is propelled abroad by the need to
secure energy, metals, and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living
standard of roughly a fifth of humanity. Indeed, China is able to feed 23 percent
of the world’s population from 7 percent of the arable land—“by crowding some
2,000 human beings onto each square mile of cultivated earth in the valleys and
flood plains,” as Fairbank points out.
24
It now is under popular pressure to
achieve something similar—that is, provide a middle-class lifestyle for much of
its urban population.
To accomplish this task, China has built advantageous power relationships
both in contiguous territories and in distant locales rich in the very resources it
requires to fuel its growth. Because what drives China beyond its official borders
has to do with a core national interest—economic survival and growth—China
can be defined as an über-realist power. It seeks to develop an eerie, colonial-like
presence throughout the parts of sub-Saharan Africa that are well endowed with
oil and minerals, and wants to secure port access throughout the South China Sea
and adjacent Indian Ocean, which connect the hydrocarbon-rich Arab-Persian
world to the Chinese seaboard. Having little choice in the matter, Beijing cares
little about the type of regime with which it is engaged; it requires stability, not
virtue as the West conceives of it. And because some of these regimes—such as
those in Iran, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—are either benighted or authoritarian, or
both, China’s worldwide scouring for resources brings it into conflict with the
missionary-oriented United States, as well as with countries like India and
Russia, against whose own spheres of influence China is bumping up. What
frequently goes unnoticed is that these countries, and others in Southeast Asia,
Central Asia, and the Middle East, are places which came under the influence of
one Chinese dynasty or another in the past. Even Sudan is not far from the area
of the Red Sea visited by the Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He in the early
fifteenth century. China is merely reestablishing, after a fashion, its imperial
domain.

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China does not pose an existential threat. The possibility of a war between the
United States and China is extremely remote. There is a military threat from
China, but as we will see, it is indirect. The challenge China poses at its most
elemental level is geographic—notwithstanding critical issues such as debt,
trade, and climate change. China’s emerging area of influence in Eurasia and
Africa—in Mackinder’s “World-Island”—is growing, not in a nineteenth-century
imperialistic sense, but in a more subtle manner better suited to the era of
globalization. Simply by securing its economic needs, China is shifting the
balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere, and that will substantially concern
the United States. On land and at sea, abetted by China’s favorable location on
the map, Beijing’s influence is emanating from Central Asia to the Russian Far
East, and from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean. China is a rising
continental power, and as Napoleon famously said, the policies of such states are
inherent in their geography.
China’s position on the map of Central-East Asia is, as I have indicated,
advantageous. But in other ways twenty-first-century China is dangerously
incomplete. There is the example of Mongolia (geographic “Outer Mongolia”) to
the north: a giant blob of territory that looks as though it has been bitten away
from China, which borders Mongolia to the south, west, and east. Mongolia,
with one of the world’s lowest population densities, is being threatened by the
latest of Eurasia’s great historical migrations—that of an urban Chinese
civilization with a tendency to move north. China has already flooded its own
Inner Mongolia with Han Chinese immigrants, and Outer Mongolians worry that
they are next to be demographically conquered. Having once conquered Outer
Mongolia by moving the line of cultivation northward, China may be poised to
conquer Mongolia through globalization. China covets the oil, coal, uranium,
and other strategic minerals and rich, empty grasslands of its former Qing-
Manchu possession.
25
Its building of access roads into Mongolia has to be seen
in this light. With its unchecked industrialization and urbanization, China is the
world’s leading consumer of aluminum, copper, coal, lead, nickel, zinc, tin, and
iron ore, all of which Mongolia has in abundance. China’s share of world metal
consumption has jumped from 10 percent to 25 percent since the late 1990s.
Consequently, Chinese mining companies have been seeking large stakes in
Mongolia’s underground assets. Given that China has absorbed Tibet, Macau,
and Hong Kong on the mainland, Mongolia will be a trip wire for judging future
Chinese intentions. Indeed, the Mongolian-Chinese border in 2003 when I
visited it near the town of Zamyn-Uud was nothing but an artificial boundary on

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the flat and gradually descending Gobi Desert. The Chinese border post was a
brightly lit, well-engineered arc signifying the teeming and industrialized
monolith to the south, encroaching on the sparsely inhabited Mongolian steppe-
land of felt tents and scrap iron huts. Keep in mind, though, that such
demographic and economic advantages can be a double-edged sword in the
event of ethnic unrest in Chinese Inner Mongolia. The very extent of Chinese
influence, by encompassing so much of the pastoral periphery, can expose
weaknesses peculiar to multiethnic states. Moreover, another factor that could
upend China’s plans is Mongolia’s own fast-track economic development of late,
which is drawing a plethora of business investors from the world over, thus
limiting Beijing’s influence.
North of Mongolia, as well as north of China’s three provinces of Manchuria,
lies the Russian Far East, an interminable stretch of birch forest lying between
Lake Baikal and Vladivostok. This numbing vastness, roughly twice the size of
Europe, has a meager population of 6.7 million that is in the process of falling
further to 4.5 million people. Russia, as we have seen, expanded into this area in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during a fit of nationalist
imperialism and at a time of Chinese weakness that is long past. In few other
areas is the Russian state so feeble as in its eastern third, and particularly that
part of it close to China. Yet on the other side of the frontier, inside Manchuria,
are 100 million Chinese, a population density sixty-two times greater than that in
eastern Siberia. Chinese migrants have been filtering across this border. For
example, the Siberian city of Chita, north of Mongolia, has a large and growing
population of ethnic Chinese. Resource acquisition is the principal goal of
Chinese foreign policy, and Russia’s demographically barren Far East is filled
with large reserves of natural gas, oil, timber, diamonds, and gold. “Russia and
China might operate a tactical alliance, but there is already tension between them
over the Far East,” writes David Blair, a correspondent of London’s