The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  • The areas that the Yangtze drains are as mountainous as its main course. The elevation means that many of the basin’s “nine thousand miles of navigability” are seasonal and/or shallow. If you eliminate any Yangtze River basin waterways that lack a channel of at least nine feet of depth for nine months of the year, that figure drops to seventeen hundred, and the number of navigable tributaries drops from over one hundred to just one. While it seems huge on a map—and the Yangtze is indeed navigable sixteen hundred miles inland from the coast—the area of usable territory it empowers is less than that of the Elbe.

  Is the Yangtze useful and worth having? Of course. Transport along it makes central China far and away the most capital-rich part of the country. But central China is neither integrated with the political core of the north, nor does its own fractured nature do anything but complicate northern China’s always vexing problem of internal disunity.

  The Southern Secessionists

  Then there is the south, which is a world apart.

  • South China is a riot of hills and mountains extending south from the same ranges that so hobble the Yangtze. Such rugged topography has the same impact on cultural and political unity—and wealth—as the rough terrain in Mexico or the Balkans. Very few coherent large powers have ever arisen in the south.

  • Aside from a short stretch of the Pearl River in the far south, none of the many southern Chinese rivers are navigable. Making matters worse, southern China is sufficiently far south that it has moved fully out of the temperate climate zone that dominates North America and Europe. Most of southern China is subtropical, with the southern coast being fully tropical. Just as the diseases native to the tropics of India or Brazil have hugely slowed their cultural unification, the same is true of China.

  • The northern Chinese coastline is flat, shallow, and plagued by sandbars. Natural ports are few and far between, and what few exist cannot support large vessels. Even in the rare instances when northern China was unified, it only rarely engaged in maritime commerce. The south is the opposite: Its coastline is both deep and severely indented, allowing easy maritime access and egress all the way to the earliest days of Chinese history. Southern China sports the majority of the natural harbors of all of mainland East and Southeast Asia.

  Mix the good port potential with a lack of rivers, a host of mountains, and the enervating impact of the tropics and you get a bizarre geopolitical mix.

  While the Han of northern China have always had problems penetrating the area, maritime-based foreigners have not. Southern China’s excellent harbors back directly into rugged highlands. Just as that rugged territory limits northern penetration or southern consolidation, it also limits the ability of any local southern power to look to the sea—they just can’t reach the coast easily. Instead of the excellent southern harbors serving the needs of Chinese (either northern or southern), they instead serve as the perfect perches for outsiders. The area has long been a foreigners’ playground, but one in which the locals welcomed the interference. Trapped in small inland pockets by their geography, the southern Chinese regularly collaborated with the foreigners to access the outside world. So yes, pirates and traders have long enriched themselves along the southern coast, but the locals often participated in empire as a sort of surrogate or sidekick, with Hong Kong being the most recognizable example. As early as the twelfth century, southern Chinese cities were importing over half their foodstuffs, largely via such collaborative links. Entrenching the sense of regional uniqueness is that the Han ethnic group just hasn’t been able to scour this part of China free of non-Han as they have in the north. This is the portion of the contemporary state that is home to most of China’s remaining minority and language groups.

  Southern willingness to work with outsiders and the region’s ethnic heterogeneity has not gone unnoticed—or unresented or unfeared—in northern halls of power.

  … And the Rest

  That’s a lot to take in, but the real surprise of China is that the north, center, and south account for but half of China’s 1.35 billion people. North, center, and south are China’s lowland and coastal regions. The rest of the Chinese actually live in the interior.

  That interior is a smorgasbord of geographic diversity. Sichuan sits on the Yangtze’s upper reaches and so is somewhat integrated with Shanghai and the outside world. Inner Mongolia is partially barren. The mountains of interior Yunnan are packed with poor minorities. The wide-open spaces of Tibet and Xinjang, also minority-dominated regions, have resisted central control for millennia. It is difficult to find many generalities to describe such a grab bag of variation, but this one is close: Transport is an absolute nightmare, and so the interior is extremely poor compared to the coastal provinces, with per capita income roughly half that of the coast. What images the world of 2014 holds of a bustling, growing China simply don’t apply to the interior. Like nearly all other interior, rugged regions of the planet, this portion of China seems stuck in another age.

  Unlike the three coastal regions, the interior does not often dominate the day-to-day affairs of the Chinese nation. Geography keeps the interior populations sequestered from the coast and one another, making it difficult for them to interact, much less set China’s agenda. Yet there are still some 650 million people living there. Combine such populations with such poverty, and on the rare occasions when some charismatic figure can unite the interior every part of China shakes. While Mao Zedong’s effort at consolidation may have hit critical mass in the north, it was his efforts to mobilize the interior that set him on the path to leadership.

  Dispelling Myths

  One of the most unexpected results of this mélange of geographic factors is that the Chinese are remarkably non-naval. Northern China was largely incapable of going to the sea right up until the technologies of industrialization allowed for the brute-force fashioning of artificial ports. Southern China may have the harbors, but it is so rugged that it lacks much in the way of hinterlands to turn them into ports without extreme amounts of resources—resources that didn’t exist in large enough local concentrations until industrialization could stitch the area’s various population centers together. That just leaves central China, where Shanghai is a world-class city and world-class port in any era. However, the territory that Shanghai “controls” is very small: Upriver Yangtze cities are well beyond Shanghai’s reach courtesy of rugged ridges, while Shanghai itself often falls prey to the power and interests of the North China Plain entities that tend to view international trade as more of a threat than an opportunity.

  This tripartite system—northern China as the stable-as-glass political core, central China as the nationally disinterested economic core, and southern China as the potentially secessionist territory (and the interior being largely ignored)—holds to the present day. Even contemporary China’s political system reflects it: All of the critical military branches of government are headquartered in the north, the north and central regions trade off the premiership every decade in order to balance security and trade interests, while the south is not even represented on the Politburo.

  Such a geographic look at the country lays bare the greatest myth about China: that it is united. I’m not talking here about the concept of the mainland versus Taiwan (Red China versus White China), but rather the idea that the mainland itself can ever truly be a unified entity. Taking a closer look at history indicates that China’s past periods of “unity” are anything but.

  The Han and Tang dynasties are often held up as the exemplars of Chinese unity, but the Han were typically split among regional power centers. At times the Han bloodline held together while the actual territories it controlled shifted, while the Tang spent the first third of their era engaged in military activities to expand their empire and the last half in (failed) efforts to maintain it. The two other major “unified” periods—the Yuan and the Qing—were actually spearheaded by non-Han ethnicities that managed to achieve what the Han Chinese couldn’t do for themselves,1 which was to
conquer and hold all of China.

  So that’s the problem. China does not naturally hold together, even within its “core” regions. Its different regions want different things and access the world on different terms, if they want access to the world at all. Making matters worse, the outside world accesses different parts of China in different ways. Guangdong and southern China are often de facto colonies. Shanghai and central China are accessed as peers. Northern China tends to be avoided—unless it is being occupied. And just as maritime powers can choose the time and place of their invasions and interactions, the Chinese have almost never been able to defend themselves from ship-based outsiders.

  The outsider who has always mattered the most was very close to home.

  Japan: China’s Bogeyman

  The Japanese islands are incredibly mountainous; 90 percent of the population lives in a series of small coastal enclaves. As soon as an enterprising Japanese figured out how to float a boat large enough to transport a few soldiers, the Japanese people unified in terms of culture, identity, and even government—very early compared to most of the world’s other peoples. The islands’ ruggedness also meant that Japan’s maritime nature became infused into Japanese culture; boats of all sizes played the part of roads and tunnels right up until the third century of the industrial era. This mix of factors makes Japan a strategic extrovert. If your country has loads of ships as part of its basic operation, it is very easy for you to reach out and touch others. Due to proximity, Japan touched the Koreans the most, exploiting Korean resources and labor and ultimately generating a visceral enmity between the two cultures that will long outlast the present day. China was the next most touched, and understanding the Japanese impact upon China requires a bit of a diversion into the geopolitics of Japan.

  By the time deepwater navigation technologies reached the Orient in the eighteenth century, the Japanese had already been pirates without peer for over two hundred years. While the East Asian coast was far harsher than the Mediterranean, there are strings of islands that roughly parallel the coastline from the southern tip of Japan all the way to contemporary Indonesia. Getting lost was hard to do. As with most naval powers, over time raiding turned into brokering and the Japanese became the trading middlemen across the East Asian rim. But when the industrial age reached Japan in the 1800s, the Japanese discovered that they brought almost nothing to the table; the home islands possessed next to nothing in terms of material resources, at best a mediocre market, and one segmented by their islands’ rugged topography at that. So the Japanese used the one tool they did have—their navy—and took what they needed from their Asian neighbors, whether resources or markets. In the case of China, they took both. A lot of both.

  The degree of Japanese action on the Chinese mainland ebbed and flowed over time, but Japanese expansionism typically marched to the drum of Japanese internal politics rather than Chinese resistance. By the early twentieth century, the Japanese had repeatedly pressed home to the Chinese—and the Koreans and the Russians2—just how potent a competent naval power could be. In a strategic sense, it was a purely one-way relationship. Throughout the long reach of Chinese history, Chinese culture may have wielded rich influence throughout East Asia and even in Japan, but it was almost unheard of for the land-bound Chinese to exercise physical control over their own borderlands, much less the maritime zones that dominated the entirety of the Chinese offshore, much less the wider world.

  The China We Know

  So what changed? If the concept of a unified China, much less a globally significant China, is an aberration, then something drastic must have happened to overcome the many traps of the Chinese geography.

  Well, it comes back to those damned Americans. They did three things that not only preserved China, but made the contemporary colossus we currently know as modern China possible.

  First, it was the Americans who removed Japan as a threat. Japan and China had been locked in a bilateral war for nearly five years before the Americans joined World War II. Historians and theorists can of course debate how the Japanese-Chinese war would have ended if not for its folding into World War II, but the simple fact remains that at the time of Pearl Harbor the Chinese had already lost the conventional war and were pouring all of their efforts into guerrilla tactics. Even when the Japanese started fighting—and losing to—the Americans in the Southeast Asian and Pacific theaters, they were still making steady progress across China where their foes represented a not yet industrialized civilization. And as the Japanese vividly demonstrated in the execution of some 250,000 Chinese in Nanking, they would not be leaving without exacting a heavy toll.

  By the time the mushroom clouds rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese had—for years—held every part of Chinese territory that made China economically and politically viable, including the entirety of the North China Plain, all of the lower Yangtze including Shanghai, and all of the major southern port cities across Fujian and Guangdong, including Xiapu, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Shantou, and Hong Kong. If it was worth taking, the Japanese took it. “Independent” China was left with the interior scraps, and China only regained its sovereignty because Japan’s surrender to the Americans in 1945 stipulated the recall of all Japanese forces from all theaters.

  Japan’s subsequent folding into the growing Bretton Woods network in 1955 ended Japan’s imperial interest in China. Under the Bretton Woods system, the Japanese had full access to resources and markets on a global scale, far more than the relatively piddling Chinese resources and markets that Japan had waged war to secure only two decades previously. In a stroke, the Americans had not so much ended Japanese imperialism as removed any rationale Japan might have had to be imperialist in the first place. An East Asia without Japanese aggression was one in which China could potentially unify. In the five years after World War II, China finally finished its civil war—an internal conflict that was fought alongside the Sino-Japanese War and World War II—and became truly unified.

  Second, World War II’s conclusion radically changed the region’s naval balance of power. By war’s end, the Americans had wiped the Pacific clean of Japanese forces, but that was only one piece of the puzzle. The European navies were also gone, in part due to the Japanese themselves, but mostly due to American actions in Europe. While Japan was certainly the country guiltiest of suppressing the Chinese, they were far from the only one. In the century leading up to World War II, all the Europeans had carved out pieces of the globe for their respective empires, and China was hardly exempt. Most European countries cut economic and military deals with individual Chinese cities—some willingly, some at the end of a gun—in order to access Chinese labor and markets, often integrating them into imperial supply chains. In the most infamous cases, the Europeans forced addictive narcotics onto the Chinese populations, generating robust market demand and security dependency at the same time. With good reason, the Chinese look back on the Opium Wars of the “spheres of influence” period as one of the darkest moments of their history.

  What is often overlooked is what made China such an easy target for the Europeans (and Japanese and Americans): deepwater navigation and industrialization. Without their long-reach navies and advanced military technologies the Europeans would have never been able to reach China in the first place, much less subjugate it more or less at their whim. At the end of World War II, the European navies were simply gone, so any thought that the spheres-of-influence period could continue evaporated. Moreover, the Americans’ imposition of Bretton Woods upon Europe meant that the Europeans no longer had an interest in even trying. For the first time in four centuries, with the notable exception of the British in Hong Kong and the Portuguese in Macau, there was no European footprint in China. The American defeat of Japan may have ended the war on the mainland, but it was the American presence in Europe that actually gave China its economy back.

  Third, Bretton Woods turned out to not just be for America’s Western European allies and the defeated Axis. As part of American Cold War
strategic maneuvering, the Chinese themselves were eased into the system starting in the early 1970s. Suddenly, instead of being the target market, China could access the global market. Instead of being raided for raw materials, China was guaranteed access to global supplies. The endless supplies of cheap labor that the Europeans and Japanese ruthlessly tapped now allowed China to generate its own goods for export, this time with the revenues flowing to the Chinese instead of overseas interests.

  The American-crafted strategic environment, most notably the Bretton Woods element of it, created the best of all worlds for the Chinese. It eliminated the only significant military and economic rival in East Asia. It all but banned European influence east of India. And it provided both the strategic freedom and the economic means to attempt true Chinese unification.