The Revenge of Geography (29 page)

China is only somewhat less of a continent than the United States. The United States, bounded by two oceans and the Canadian Arctic, is threatened only by the specter of Mexican demography to its
south. The threat to China came mainly over the millennia from the Eurasian steppe-land to the north and northwest, the same steppe-land that threatened Russia from the opposite direction: so that the interplay between the indigenous Chinese and the Manchurians, Mongols, and Turkic peoples of the high desert has formed one of the central themes of Chinese history. That is why the capital cities of early Chinese dynasties were often built on the Wei River, upstream from its meeting with the Yellow, where there was enough rainfall for sedentary agriculture, yet safe from the nomadism of the Inner Mongolian plateau just to the north.

Whereas the “neat” sequence of forest, prairie, high desert, mountain, and coast—crossed in the middle by the north–south flowing Mississippi and Missouri rivers—defines American geography, in China the great rivers—the Wei, Han, Yellow, and Yangzi—run from west to east, from the high and dry uplands of the Eurasian interior to the moister agricultural lands closer to the Pacific coast.
⁴
These agricultural lands are, in turn, divided between the comparatively dry wheat-millet area of northern China, with its short growing season, akin to the northern Midwest of America, and the wet, double-cropping rice culture of China’s productive south. Thus, the building of the Grand Canal between 605 and 611, linking the Yellow and the Yangzi rivers—and China’s famine-prone north with its economically productive south, with its rice surpluses—had, according to British historian John Keay, “a similar effect to the building of the first transcontinental railroads in North America.”
⁵
The Grand Canal was the key to Chinese unity. For it eased the north’s conquest of the south during the medieval Tang and Song dynasties, which helped consolidate the core geography of agrarian China. Again, here we see how individual acts of men—the building of a canal—prove more historically crucial than the simple fact of geography. For given the grave differences between northern and southern China, in the early medieval era the split between the two Chinas which had lasted for two centuries might well have become permanent, like that between the eastern and western Roman empires.
⁶

But as the late Harvard professor John King Fairbank writes, “The
contrasts between North and South China are superficial compared with those between the pastoral nomadism of the plateaus of Inner Asia and the settled villages based on the intensive agriculture of China.” By Inner Asia, Fairbank means something quite comprehensive: “the wide arc running from Manchuria through Mongolia and Turkestan to Tibet.” China’s sense of itself, he goes on, is based on the cultural difference that obtains between this surrounding belt of desert and the sown of China proper, that is, between the pastoral and the arable.
⁷
China’s ethnic geography reflects this “core-periphery structure,” with the core being the arable “central plain” (
zhongyuan
) or “inner China” (
neidi
), and the periphery being the pastoral “frontiers” (
bianjiang
) or “outer China” (waidi).
⁸

This is what the building of the Great Wall was ultimately about. The Great Wall, writes political scientist Jakub Grygiel, “served to reinforce the ecological distinction that translated into political differences.”
⁹
Indeed, to the early Chinese, agriculture meant civilization itself: the Central or Middle Kingdom,
Zhongguo
, which owed nothing to the surrounding pastoral peoples. From this followed the kind of cultural certainty that China would share with Western Christendom.
¹⁰
From the late Zhou Dynasty in the third century
B.C
., arable China would begin to absorb barbarian and quasi-barbarian elements.
¹¹
And later, beginning with the Han Dynasty in the second century
B.C
., the Chinese would encounter other cultures—Roman, Byzantine, Persian, and Arab—and thus develop a comparative,
regional
sense of space.
¹²
The fact that the Chinese state today includes both desert and sown, on a continental scale no less, reflects the culmination of a long and thus far triumphant historical process which, in turn, provides the geographic basis for Chinese power—at least for the time being.

This process of enlargement began with the “cradle” area around the Wei and lower Yellow rivers in the northern part of the cultivable zone just south of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which flourished during the western Zhou Dynasty three thousand years ago.
¹³
Because pastoral Inner Asia had no crop agriculture, its sparse population, about one-sixteenth that of the cradle area, could not properly
survive without access to it.
¹⁴
Thus China grew outward from the Wei and lower Yellow rivers, though recent archaeological excavations do indicate civilizational development in southeastern China and northern Vietnam during this time.
¹⁵
During the Warring States period (403–221
B.C
.), which saw the number of polities shrink from 170 to 7, Chinese civilization moved further southward into rice- and tea-growing areas, to include the region of present-day Shanghai. Even so, political power remained in the north, which embraced the region of present-day Beijing.
¹⁶
It was the Qin that emerged victorious from the Warring States period—the dynasty from which, according to some etymologies, China got its name. By the first century
B.C
., under the Han Dynasty (which had supplanted the Qin), China included all of the cultivable heartland from the headwaters of the Yellow and Yangzi rivers to the Pacific coast, and from the Bohai Sea by the Korean Peninsula to the South China Sea. A combination of diplomatic overtures and military forays allowed Han emperors to establish feudatories among the Xiongnu, that is, the nomadic Huns, in Outer Mongolia and East Turkestan (Xinjiang), as well as in southern Manchuria and the northern part of Korea.

A pattern had developed. China’s settled agricultural civilization had to constantly strive to create a buffer against the nomadic peoples of the drier uplands bordering it on three sides, from Manchuria counterclockwise around to Tibet.
¹⁷
This historical dilemma was structurally similar to that of the Russians, who also required buffers. But while the Russians were spread across eleven time zones with a meager population, China was much more cohesive and relatively densely populated from antiquity. With less to fear, comparatively speaking, China became a less militarized society. Nevertheless, China produced dynasties of particular energy and aggressiveness. Under the Tang emperors of the eighth century, military prowess burgeoned along with literature and the arts. Tang armies threaded their way through the space between Mongolia and Tibet to establish protectorates all over Central Asia as far as Khorasan in northeastern Iran, further enabling the Silk Route. Concomitantly, the Tang emperors fought wars with the Tibetans to the southwest with help from the
Turkic Uighurs to the northwest. It was always a matter of maneuvering amid the peoples of the steppe-lands, rather than fighting them all at once. In fact, the soldiery constituted only one of the Tang state’s tools. “Confucian doctrine,” writes British historian John Keay, “formulated during the ‘Warring States’ era and partly in reaction to it, was adamant about civilian control over military affairs.”
¹⁸
Among the “glories of old China,” writes Fairbank, was a “reasoned pacifism,” for one of the Confucian myths of the state was “government by virtue.”
¹⁹
This pacifism, according to historians, is sometimes blamed for the fact that just as China invaded the grasslands and plateau areas, the pastoral nomads in turn invaded China. In
A.D
. 763 Tibetan forces actually sacked the Tang capital of Chang’an. More significantly, the Jin, Liao, and Yuan dynasties—all products of the northern grasslands—would manifest Inner Asian military aggression against China throughout the Middle Ages. This went along with the failure of the indigenous Song and Ming dynasties, despite their revolutionary military technology, to gain back the steppe-lands. Inner Asia, from Tibet and East Turkestan across Mongolia to the Far Eastern borderland with Russia, was only taken back by the Manchu Qing Dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (It was during this period that the multiethnic territory controlled by the Chinese state today was “staked out,” as well as envisioned: Taiwan was acquired in 1683.)
²⁰
In sum, China became a vast continent in and of itself by virtue of its continual backwards and forwards interactions with an Inner Asian steppe-land that stretched unto Mackinder’s Heartland, and this is what drives the political reality of China today.

Indeed, the question now becomes whether the dominant Hans, who comprise more than 90 percent of China’s population and live mainly in the arable cradle of China, are able to permanently keep the Tibetans, Uighur Turks, and Inner Mongolians who live on the periphery under control, with the minimum degree of unrest. The ultimate fate of the Chinese state will hinge on this fact, especially as China undergoes economic and social disruptions.

For the time being, China is at the peak of its continental power, even as the wounds of its territorial rape by the nations of Europe,
Russia, and Japan are still, by China’s own historical standards, extremely fresh. For in the nineteenth century, as the Qing Dynasty became the sick man of East Asia, China lost much of its territory—the southern tributaries of Nepal and Burma to Great Britain; Indochina to France; Taiwan and the tributaries of Korea and Sakhalin to Japan; and Mongolia, Amuria, and Ussuria to Russia.
²¹
In the twentieth century came the Japanese takeovers of the Shandong Peninsula and Manchuria in the heart of China. And this was all in addition to the humiliations forced on the Chinese by the extraterritoriality agreements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereby Western nations got control of parts of Chinese cities. Now fast-forward to the 1950s, when maps started appearing in Chinese secondary schools of a Greater China that included all of these lost areas, as well as eastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Mao Zedong, who had consolidated continental China for the first time since the High Qing, was clearly an irredentist who had internalized the wounds of a once vast and imperial state surviving the centuries only to be humiliated in the recent past.
²²
Given these vicissitudes of China’s history, this may be one flaw in Mao’s thinking that we might actually forgive. While the rulers of China in the second decade of the twenty-first century may not be so heartless in their outlook as Mao, China’s history can, however, never be far from their minds. Though China’s current borders encompass Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Tibet—all the surrounding plateaus and grasslands, that is—the very economic and diplomatic strategies of China’s rulers today demonstrate an
idea
of China that reaches beyond the territorial extent of even the China of the eighth-century Tang and the eighteenth-century High Qing. China, a demographic behemoth with the world’s most energetic economy for the past three decades, is, unlike Russia, extending its territorial influence much more through commerce than coercion.

Geography indicates that while China’s path toward ever greater global power may not be linear—its annual GDP growth rates of over
10 percent for the past thirty years simply cannot continue—China, even in socioeconomic disarray, will stand at the hub of geopolitics. And China is not likely to be in complete disarray. China, echoing Mackinder, combines an extreme, Western-style modernity with a hydraulic civilization of the kind common to the ancient Orient and Near East: that is, it features central control, with a regime that builds great water and other engineering works requiring the labor of millions.
²³
This makes China relentless and dynamic in ways different from Western democracies. Because China’s nominal communist rulers constitute the latest of some twenty-five Chinese dynasties going back four thousand years, the absorption of Western technology and practices takes place within the disciplined framework of an elaborate cultural system: one that has unique experience in, among other things, forming tributary relationships. “The Chinese,” a Singaporean official told me, “charm you when they want to charm you, and squeeze you when they want to squeeze you, and they do it quite systematically.”