The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  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 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.”26 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.27 Since then, writes the late British diplomat and travel writer Sir Fitzroy Maclean, the history of the province “has been one of sustained turbulence.”28 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.”29 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.”30 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.31 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.

  In Central Asia, as in eastern Siberia, China competes fiercely with Russia for a sphere of influence. Trade between China and former Soviet Central Asia has risen from $527 million in 1992 to $25.9 billion in 2009.32 But the means of Beijing’s sway will for the moment be two major pipelines, one carrying oil from the Caspian Sea across Kazakhstan to Xinjiang, and the other transporting natural gas from the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan border, across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, to Xinjiang. Again, no troops will be necessary as Greater China extends into Mackinder’s Eurasian Heartland, the upshot of an insatiable demand for energy and the internal danger posed by its own ethnic minorities.

  In all of this, China is not risk-averse. Eyeing some of the world’s last untapped deposits of copper, iron, gold, uranium, and precious gems, China is already mining for copper in war-torn Afghanistan, just south of Kabul. China has a vision of Afghanistan (and of Pakistan) as a secure conduit for roads and energy pipelines that will bring natural resources from Indian Ocean ports, linking up with Beijing’s budding Central Asian dominion-of-sorts. China has been “exceptionally active” building roads that will connect Xinjiang with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Within Afghanistan itself, a Chinese firm, the China Railway Shistiju Group, is “defying insecurity” by building a roadway in Wardak Province. China is improving rail infrastructures that approach Afghanistan from several directions.33 Thus, as the United States moves to defeat al Qaeda and irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, it is China’s geopolitical position that will be enhanced. Military deployments are ephemeral: roads, rail links, and pipelines can be virtually forever.

  Like the Taklamakan Desert of Xinjiang, the sprawling, mountainous Tibetan plateau, rich in copper and iron ore, accounts for much of the territory of China, thus clarifying the horror with which Beijing views Tibetan autonomy, let alone independence. Without Tibet there is a much reduced China and a virtually expanded Indian Subcontinent: this explains the pace of Chinese road and rail projects across the Tibetan massif.

  If you accept Pakistan, with its own Chinese-built road and Indian Ocean port project, as a future zone of Greater China, and put the relatively weak states of Southeast Asia into the same category, then India, with its billion-plus population, is a blunt geographic wedge puncturing this grand sphere of Chinese influence. A map of Greater China in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard makes this point vividly.34 Indeed, India and China—with their immense populations; rich, venerable, and very different cultural experiences; geographic proximity; and fractious border disputes—are, despite their complementary trading relationship, destined by geography to be rivals to a certain degree. And the issue of Tibet only inflames this rivalry, even as it is a core function of it. India hosts the Dalai Lama’s government-in-exile in Dharamsala, which enables him to keep the cause of Tibet alive in the court of global opinion. Dan Twining, a senior fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, has written that recent Indian-Chinese border tensions “may be related to worries in Beijing over the Dalai Lama’s succession,” given the possibility that the next Dalai Lama might be named outside China—in the Tibetan cultural belt that stretches across northern India, Nepal, and Bhutan.35 This belt includes the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China also claims, as it is part of the Tibetan plateau and thus outside the lowlands which geographically define the Indian Subcontinent. China has also been expanding its military influence into the unstable, Maoist-dominated Himalayan buffer state of Nepal, which India has countered with an Indian-Nepalese defense cooperation agreement of its own. China and India will play a Great Game not only here, but in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, too. China’s pressure on India from the north, which helped ignite a border war between India and China in 1962, must continue as a means to help consolidate its hold on Tibet. This assumes that in an increasingly feverish world media environment the romantic cause of Tibetan nationalism will not dissipate, and may even intensify.

  Of course, one might well argue that borders with so many troubled regions will constrain Chinese power, and thus geography is a hindrance to Chinese ambitions. China is virtually surrounded, in other words. But given China’s economic and demographic expansion in recent decades, and its reasonable prospects for continued, albeit reduced, economic growth—with serious bumps, mind you—into the foreseeable future, China’s many land borders can also work as a force multiplier: for it is China encroaching on these less dynamic and less populated areas, not the other way around. Some explain that the presence of failed and semi-failed states on China’s borders—namely Afghanistan and Pakistan—is a danger to Beijing. I have been to those borders. They are in the remotest terrain at exceedingly high elevations. Few live there. Pakistan could completely unravel and it would barely be noticed on the Chinese side of the border. China’s borders aren’t the problem: the problem is Chinese society, which, as it becomes more prosperous, and, as China’s economic growth rate slows, raises the specter of political upheaval of some sort. And serious upheaval could make China suddenly vulnerable on its ethnic peripheries.

  China’s most advantageous outlet for its ambitions is in the direction of the relatively weak states of Southeast Asia. Here, too, China’s geography is incomplete. China dominated Vietnam during the first millennium of the modern era. China’s Yuan Dynasty (of Mongol descent) invaded Burma, Siam, and Vietnam in the late thirteenth century. Chinese migration to Thailand dates back many centuries. The lack of a Great Wall in China’s southeast was not only because of the rugged forests and steep mountain folds between China and Burma, but because Chinese expansion a
long this entire frontier from Burma in the west to Vietnam in the east was more fluid than in the north of China, according to Lattimore.36 There are few natural impediments separating China from parts of Burma, and from Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The likely capital of a Mekong River prosperity sphere, linking all the countries of Indochina by road and river traffic, is Kunming in China’s Yunnan Province, whose dams will provide the electricity consumed by Thais and others in this demographic cockpit of the world. For it is here in Southeast Asia, with its 568 million people, where China’s 1.3 billion people converge with the Indian Subcontinent’s 1.5 billion people.

  First and foremost among the states of Southeast Asia, with the largest, most sprawling landmass in the region, is Burma. Burma, too, like Mongolia, the Russian Far East, and other territories on China’s artificial land borders, is a feeble state abundant in the very metals, hydrocarbons, and other natural resources that China desperately requires. The distance is less than five hundred miles from Burma’s Indian Ocean seaboard—where China and India are competing for development rights—to China’s Yunnan Province. Again, we are talking about a future of pipelines, in this case gas from offshore fields in the Bay of Bengal, that will extend China’s reach beyond its legal borders to its natural geographical and historical limits. This will occur in a Southeast Asia in which the formerly strong state of Thailand can less and less play the role of a regional anchor and inherent balancer against China, owing to deep structural problems in Thai politics: the royal family, with an ailing king, is increasingly less of a stabilizing force; the Thai military is roiled by factionalism; and the citizenry is ideologically split between an urban middle class and an up-and-coming rural class. China, flush with cash, is developing bilateral military relationships with Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, even as America’s own military presence, as exemplified by annual regional exercises like Cobra Gold, lessen in importance for the United States, ever since America’s energies have been diverted to its Middle Eastern wars. (Of course, this is now changing: as the Obama administration vows a pivot toward Asia and away from the Middle East, in order to confront a militarily more powerful China.)37