The Revenge of Geography (31 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 along 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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.”
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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.