The Revenge of Geography (32 page)

Thus, with China making inroads into Mackinder’s Central Asian Heartland, it is also likely to have significant influence in Spykman’s Rimland, of which Southeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula are parts.

China’s land borders at this point in history seem to beckon with more opportunities than hazards. This brings to mind the University of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer’s comment in
The Tragedy of Great
Power Politics
that “the most dangerous states in the international system are continental powers with large armies.”
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Yet China only partially fits that description. True, China is in its own way an expanding land power and the People’s Liberation Army ground force numbers some 1.6 million troops, the largest in the world. But as I’ve indicated, with the exception of the Indian Subcontinent and the Korean Peninsula, China is merely filling vacuums more than it is ramming up against competing states. Moreover, as the events of 2008 and 2009 showed, the PLA ground force will not have an expeditionary capability for years to come. In those years, the PLA had to respond to an earthquake emergency in Sichuan, to ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, and to the security challenge of the Olympics in Beijing. What these “trans-regional mobility exercises” as the Chinese call them, indicated, according to Abraham Denmark of the Center for Naval Analysis, was an ability by the PLA to move troops from one end of continental China to another, but not an ability to move supplies and heavy equipment at the rate required. The only conceivable circumstances for the PLA to cross beyond China’s borders would be through a process of miscalculation, in the event of another land war with India, or to fill a void in the event of the collapse of the North Korean regime, which might also draw in American and South Korean troops in the mother of all humanitarian emergencies. (North Korea’s population is poorer than Iraq, with much less of a modern history of responsible self-government.) The very fact that China has the luxury to fill 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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 half-island 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.) Particularly in the case of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, the dispute does carry the benefit of providing Beijing with a lever to stoke nationalism, whenever it might need to. But otherwise it is a grim seascape for Chinese naval strategists. For looking out from its Pacific coast onto this First Island Chain, they behold a sort of “Great Wall in reverse,” in the words of Naval War College professors James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara: a well-organized line of American allies, with the equivalent
of guard towers stretching from Japan to Australia, all potentially blocking China’s access to the larger ocean. Chinese strategists see this map and bristle at its navy being so boxed in.
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China’s solution has been notably aggressive. This may be somewhat surprising: for in many circumstances, it can be argued that naval power is more benign than land power. The limiting factor of navies is that despite all of their precision-guided weapons, they cannot by themselves occupy significant territory, and thus it is said are no menace to liberty. Navies have multiple purposes beyond fighting, such as the protection of commerce. Sea power suits those nations intolerant of heavy casualties in fighting on land. China, which in the twenty-first century will project hard power primarily through its navy, should, therefore, be benevolent in the way of other maritime nations and empires in history, such as Venice, Great Britain, and the United States: that is, it should be concerned mainly with the free movement of trade and the preservation of a peaceful maritime system. But China has not reached that stage of self-confidence yet. When it comes to the sea, it still thinks territorially, like an insecure land power, trying to expand in concentric circles in a manner suggested by Spykman. The very terms it uses, “First Island Chain” and “Second Island Chain,” are territorial terms, which, in these cases, are seen as archipelagic extensions of the Chinese landmass. The Chinese have absorbed the aggressive philosophy of Alfred Thayer Mahan, without having graduated yet to the blue-water oceanic force that would make it possible for China to apply Mahanian theory. In November 2006, a Chinese submarine stalked the USS
Kitty Hawk
and provocatively surfaced within torpedo firing range. In November 2007, the Chinese refused entry to the
Kitty Hawk
Carrier Strike Group into Hong Kong harbor, despite building seas and deteriorating weather (the
Kitty Hawk
did make a visit to Hong Kong in early 2010). In March 2009, a handful of Chinese ships harassed the American surveillance ship the USNS
Impeccable
while it was openly conducting operations outside China’s twelve-mile territorial limit in the South China Sea. The Chinese ships blocked passage and pretended to ram the
Impeccable
, forcing the
Impeccable
to respond
with fire hoses. These are not the actions of a great power, serene in its position of dominance and recognizing a brotherhood of the sea with other world navies, but of a rising and still immature power, obsessed with the territorial humiliations it suffered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

China is developing asymmetric and anti-access niche capabilities, designed to deny the U.S. Navy easy entry to the East China Sea and other coastal waters. Analysts are divided over the significance of this. Robert S. Ross of Boston College believes that “until China develops situational awareness capability and can degrade U.S. counter-surveillance technologies, it possesses only a limited credible access-denial operations.” Andrew F. Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments believes that whatever technical difficulties China may momentarily be encountering, it is on the way to “Finlandizing” East Asia.
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Thus, while it has modernized its destroyer fleet, and has plans for an aircraft carrier or two, China is not buying naval platforms across the board. Rather, China has been building four new classes of nuclear- and conventional-powered attack and ballistic missile submarines. According to Seth Cropsey, former deputy undersecretary of the Navy, China could field a submarine force larger than the U.S. Navy’s within the foreseeable future. The Chinese navy, he goes on, plans to use over-the-horizon radars, satellites, seabed sonar networks, and cyberwarfare in the service of antiship ballistic missiles with maneuverable reentry vehicles, which, along with its burgeoning submarine fleet, will be part of its effort to rebuff U.S. naval access to large portions of the Western Pacific. This is not to mention China’s improving mine warfare capability, the aquisition of Russian Su-27 and Su-30 fourth-generation jet fighters, and 1,500 Russian surface-to-air missiles deployed along China’s coast. Moreover, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range—all the while developing an offensive strategy designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power: the aircraft carrier. China will field a fifth-generation fighter between 2018 and 2020, even as the United States slows or stops production
of the F-22.
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The strategic geography of the Western Pacific is changing thanks to Chinese arms purchases.

China likely has no intention of ever attacking a U.S. aircraft carrier. China is not remotely capable of directly challenging the U.S. militarily. The aim here is dissuasion: to amass so much offensive and defensive capability along its seaboard that the U.S. Navy will in the future think twice and three times about getting between the First Island Chain and the Chinese coast. That, of course, is the essence of power: to affect your adversary’s behavior. Thus is Greater China realized in a maritime sense. The Chinese, by their naval, air, and missile acquisitions, are evincing a clear territoriality. The U.S.-China relationship, I believe, will not only be determined by such bilateral and global issues as trade, debt, climate change, and human rights, but more importantly by the specific geography of China’s potential sphere of influence in maritime Asia.

Pivotal to that sphere of influence is the future of Taiwan. Taiwan illustrates something basic in world politics: that moral questions are, just beneath the surface, often questions of power. Taiwan is often discussed in moral terms, even as its sovereignty or lack thereof carries pivotal geopolitical consequences. China talks about Taiwan in terms of consolidating the national patrimony, unifying China for the good of all ethnic Chinese. America talks about Taiwan in terms of preserving a model democracy. But Taiwan is something else: in Army general Douglas MacArthur’s words, it is “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” that dominates the center point of China’s convex seaboard, from which an outside power like the United States can “radiate” power along China’s coastal periphery, according to Holmes and Yoshihara.
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As such, nothing irritates Chinese naval planners as much as de facto Taiwanese independence. Of all the guard towers along the reverse maritime Great Wall, Taiwan is, metaphorically, the tallest and most centrally located. With Taiwan returned to the bosom of mainland China, suddenly the Great Wall and the maritime strait-jacket it represents would be severed. If China succeeds in consolidating Taiwan, not only will its navy suddenly be in an advantageous strategic position vis-à-vis the First Island Chain, but its national energies,
especially its military ones, will be just as dramatically freed up to look outward in terms of power projection, to a degree that has so far been impossible. Though the adjective “multipolar” is thrown around liberally to describe the global situation, it will be the virtual fusing of Taiwan with the mainland that will mark in a military sense the real emergence of a multipolar world.