The Revenge of Geography (30 page)

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.
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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.

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.
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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 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
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 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.”
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There have been revolts and periods of independent 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.