The Revenge of Geography

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Further afield in Southeast Asia, both Malaysia and Singapore are heading into challenging democratic transitions of their own, as both of their adept, nation-building strongmen, Mahathir bin Mohammed and Lee Kuan Yew, pass from the scene. Because all ethnic Malays are Muslim, Islam is racialized in Malaysia, and the result is intercommunal divides between the Malay, Chinese, and Indian communities. Creeping Islamization has led to seventy thousand Chinese leaving Malaysia over the past two decades, even as the country falls further under the shadow of China economically, with most of Malaysia’s imports coming from there. Chinese themselves may be unpopular in Malaysia, but China “the state” is too big to resist. The quiet fear of China is most clearly revealed by the actions of Singapore, a city-state strategically located near the narrowest point of the Strait of Malacca. In Singapore, ethnic Chinese dominate ethnic Malays by a margin of 77 percent to 14 percent. Nevertheless, Singapore fears becoming a vassal state of China, and has consequently developed a long-standing military training relationship with Taiwan. Recently retired Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has publicly urged the United States to stay militarily and diplomatically engaged in the region. The degree to which Singapore can maintain its feisty independence will, like developments in Mongolia, be a gauge of Beijing’s regional clout. Indonesia, for its part, is caught between the need of a U.S. naval presence to hedge against China and the fear that if it looks too much like a U.S. ally, it will anger the rest of the Islamic world. The Free Trade Area inaugurated recently between China and ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) demonstrates the tributary relationship that is developing between China and its southern neighbors. China’s divide-and-conquer strategy has each ASEAN country negotiating separately with China, rather than as a unit. China uses ASEAN as a market for its high-value manufactured goods, while it imports low-value agricultural produce from Southeast Asia: a classic colonial-style relationship.38 This has led to Chinese trade surpluses, even as ASEAN countries are becoming a dumping ground for industrial goods produced by China’s relatively cheap urban labor. In fact, the trade gap between China and ASEAN has widened five-fold in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Look at recent history: from 1998 to 2001, Malaysian and Indonesian exports to China “nearly doubled,” as did Philippine exports to China from 2003 to 2004. From 2002 to 2003, combined exports from all of the ASEAN states to China grew by 51.7 percent, and by 2004 “China had become the region’s leading trade partner, surpassing the United States.”39 Yet China’s economic dominance is also benevolent, in that China is serving as an engine of modernization for all of Southeast Asia. The complicating factor in this scenario is Vietnam, a historic foe of China with a large army and strategically located naval bases that might serve as a potential hedge against China, along with India and Japan. But even Vietnam, with all of its fears regarding its much larger northern neighbor, has no choice but to get along with it. China may still be in the early phases of its continental expansion, so its grasp of the periphery is nascent. The key story line of the next few decades may be the manner in which China accomplishes this. And if it can accomplish this, what kind of regional hegemon will China be?

  Mongolia, the Russian Far East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia are all natural zones of Chinese influence and expansion, even though no political borders will change. But China is most incomplete on the Korean Peninsula, where political borders could well shift—if one accepts the argument that in a world increasingly penetrated by information technology, the hermetic North Korean regime has few good prospects. This makes North Korea the true pivot of East Asia, whose unraveling could affect the destiny of the whole region for decades to come. Jutting out from Manchuria, of which it is a natural geographical appendage, the Korean Peninsula commands all maritime traffic in northeastern China and, more particularly, traps in its armpit the Bohai Sea, home to China’s largest offshore oil reserve. In antiquity, the kingdom of Goguryeo covered southern Manchuria and the northern two-thirds of the Korean Peninsula. Goguryeo paid tribute to China’s Wei Dynasty, even as it later fought a war with it. Parts of Korea, especially in the north, came under the sway of the Han Dynasty in antiquity and under the Qing Dynasty in early modern times. China will never annex any part of Korea, yet it remains frustrated by Korean sovereignty. China has supported the late Kim Jong-il’s and Kim Jong-un’s Stalinist regime, but it covets North Korea’s geography—with its additional outlets to the Pacific close to Russia—far more, and thus has plans for the peninsula beyond the reign of the deceased “Dear Leader” and his son, who have caused Beijing no end of headaches. China would like eventually to dispatch its thousands of North Korean defectors to build a favorable political base for Beijing’s gradual economic takeover of the Tumen River region—where China, North Korea, and the Russian Far East intersect, with good port facilities on the Pacific fronting Japan. China’s goal for North Korea must be a more modern, authoritarian, Gorbachevian buffer state between it and the vibrant middle-class democracy of South Korea.

  But not even China is in control of events in North Korea. In other divided country scenarios of the past decades—Vietnam, Germany, Yemen—the forces of unity have ultimately triumphed. But in none of these cases was unification achieved through a deliberate process. Rather, it happened in sudden, tumultuous fashion that did not respect the interests of all the major parties concerned. Nevertheless, it is more likely than not that China, even though it fears reunification, will eventually benefit from it. A unified Greater Korean state could be more or less under Seoul’s control, and China is South Korea’s biggest trading partner. A reunified Korea would be a nationalist Korea, with undercurrents of hostility toward its larger neighbors, China and Japan, that have historically sought to control and occupy it. But Korea’s enmity toward Japan is significantly greater, as Japan occupied the peninsula from 1910 to 1945. (There are still disputes between Seoul and Tokyo over the Tokdo/Takeshima islets in what Koreans call the East Sea and Japanese the Sea of Japan.) Meanwhile, the economic pull from China will be stronger than from Japan. A reunified Korea tilting slightly toward China and away from Japan would be one with little or no basis for a continued U.S. troop presence, and that, in turn, would fuel Japanese rearmament. In other words, it is easy to conceive of a Korean future within a Greater China, even as there are fewer U.S. troops on the ground in Northeast Asia.

  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.”40 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).41 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.42 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.43 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.44 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.45

  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.46 Thus, while it has modernize
d 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-22.47 The strategic geography of the Western Pacific is changing thanks to Chinese arms purchases.