At the end of his famous article “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Mackinder has a disturbing reference to China. After elucidating why the interior of Eurasia forms the fulcrum of geostrategic world power, he posits that the Chinese “might constitute the yellow peril to the world’s freedom, just because they would add an oceanic frontage to the resources of the great continent, an advantage as yet denied to the Russian tenant of the pivot region.”1 Leave aside the inherent racist sentiment of the era, as well as the hysterics with which the rise of any non-Western power is greeted, and concentrate instead on Mackinder’s analysis: that whereas Russia is a land power whose only oceanic frontage is mainly blocked by Arctic ice, China is, too, a continental-sized power, but one whose virtual reach extends not only into the strategic Central Asian core of the former Soviet Union, with all of its mineral and hydrocarbon wealth, but also to the main shipping lanes of the Pacific three thousand miles away, where China enjoys a nine-thousand-mile coastline with many good natural harbors, most of which are ice-free. (Mackinder actually feared that China would one day conquer Russia.) Furthermore, as Mackinder wrote in 1919 in Democratic Ideals and Reality, if Eurasia conjoined with Africa forms the “World-Island”—the heart of the dry-land earth, four times the size of North America, with eight times the population—then China, as Eurasia’s largest continental nation with a coastline in both the tropics and the temperate zone, occupies the globe’s most advantageous position. Mackinder predicts at the conclusion of Democratic Ideals and Reality that, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, China would eventually guide the world by “building for a quarter of humanity a new civilization, neither quite Eastern nor quite Western.”2 A patriotic imperialist to the last, Mackinder naturally included Great Britain in this exalted category. Nevertheless, using only the criteria of geography and demography, his prediction about China has at least so far proved accurate.
The fact that China is blessed by geography is something so basic and obvious that it tends to be overlooked in all the discussions about its economic dynamism and national assertiveness over recent decades. Thus, a look at the map through the prism of Chinese history is in order.
While Russia lies to the north of 50 degrees north latitude, China lies to the south of it, in roughly the same range of temperate latitude as the United States, with all the variations in climate and the benefits which that entails.3 Harbin, the main city of Manchuria, lies at 45 degrees north latitude, the same as Maine. Beijing is near 40 degrees north latitude, the same as New York. Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangzi River, lies at 30 degrees north latitude, the same as New Orleans. The Tropic of Cancer runs through the southern extremity of China and also cuts just below the Florida Keys.
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.”
China’s internal dynamism, with all of its civil unrest and inefficiencies, to say nothing of an economic slowdown, creates external ambitions. Empires are often not sought consciously. Rather, as states become stronger, they develop needs and—counterintuitively—a whole new set of insecurities that lead them to expand in an organic fashion. Consider the American experience. Under the stewardship of some of its more forgettable presidents—Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Alan Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and so on—the American economy chugged quietly along with high annual growth rates between the end of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Consequently, as America traded more with the outside world, it developed for the first time complex economic and strategic interests in far-flung places that led to, among other military actions, Navy and Marine landings in South America and the Pacific. This was despite all of America’s social ills at the time, which were, in turn, products of this very dynamism. Another factor that caused America to focus outward was its consolidation of the interior continent. The last major battle of the Indian Wars was fought in 1890.
China is also consolidating its land borders and beginning to focus outward. Unlike America, China does not come armed with a missionary approach to world affairs. It has no ideology or system of government it seeks to spread. Moral progress in international politics is an American goal, not a Chinese one. And yet China is not a status quo power: for it is propelled abroad by the need to secure energy, metals, and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living standard of roughly a fifth of humanity. Indeed, China is able to feed 23 percent of the world’s population from 7 percent of the arable land—“by crowding some 2,000 human beings onto each square mile of cultivated earth in the valleys and flood plains,” as Fairbank points out.24 It now is under popular pressure to achieve something similar—that is, provide a middle-class lifestyle for much of its urban population.
To accomplish this task, China has built advantageous power relationships both in contiguous territories and in distant locales rich in the very resources it requires to fuel its growth. Because what drives China beyond its official borders has to do with a core national interest—economic survival and growth—China can be defined as an über-realist power. It seeks to develop an eerie, colonial-like presence throughout the parts of sub-Saharan Africa that are well endowed with oil and minerals, and wants to secure port access throughout the South China Sea and adjacent Indian Ocean, which connect the hydrocarbon-rich Arab-Persian world to the Chinese seaboard. Having little choice in the matter, Beijing cares little about the type of regime with which it is engaged; it requires stability, not virtue as the West conceives of it. And because some of these regimes—such as those in Iran, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—are either benighted or authoritarian, or both, China’s worldwide scouring for resources brings it into conflict with the missionary-oriented United States, as well as with countries like India and Russia, against whose own spheres of influence China is bumping up. What frequently goes unnoticed is that these countries, and others in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, are places which came under the influence of one Chinese dynasty or another in the past. Even Sudan is not far from the area of the Red Sea visited by the Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He in the early fifteenth century. China is merely reestablishing, after a fashion, its imperial domain.
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 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.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
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 modernized 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.
China likely has no intention of ever attacking a U.S. aircraft carrier. China is not remotely capable of directly challenging the U.S. militarily. The aim here is dissuasion: to amass so much offensive and defensive capability along its seaboard that the U.S. Navy will in the future think twice and three times about getting between the First Island Chain and the Chinese coast. That, of course, is the essence of power: to affect your adversary’s behavior. Thus is Greater China realized in a maritime sense. The Chinese, by their naval, air, and missile acquisitions, are evincing a clear territoriality. The U.S.-China relationship, I believe, will not only be determined by such bilateral and global issues as trade, debt, climate change, and human rights, but more importantly by the specific geography of China’s potential sphere of influence in maritime Asia.
Pivotal to that sphere of influence is the future of Taiwan. Taiwan illustrates something basic in world politics: that moral questions are, just beneath the surface, often questions of power. Taiwan is often discussed in moral terms, even as its sovereignty or lack thereof carries pivotal geopolitical consequences. China talks about Taiwan in terms of consolidating the national patrimony, unifying China for the good of all ethnic Chinese. America talks about Taiwan in terms of preserving a model democracy. But Taiwan is something else: in Army general Douglas MacArthur’s words, it is “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” that dominates the center point of China’s convex seaboard, from which an outside power like the United States can “radiate” power along China’s coastal periphery, according to Holmes and Yoshihara.48 As such, nothing irritates Chinese naval planners as much as de facto Taiwanese independence. Of all the guard towers along the reverse maritime Great Wall, Taiwan is, metaphorically, the tallest and most centrally located. With Taiwan returned to the bosom of mainland China, suddenly the Great Wall and the maritime strait-jacket it represents would be severed. If China succeeds in consolidating Taiwan, not only will its navy suddenly be in an advantageous strategic position vis-à-vis the First Island Chain, but its national energies, especially its military ones, will be just as dramatically freed up to look outward in terms of power projection, to a degree that has so far been impossible. Though the adjective “multipolar” is thrown around liberally to describe the global situation, it will be the virtual fusing of Taiwan with the mainland that will mark in a military sense the real emergence of a multipolar world.
According to a 2009 RAND study, the United States will not be able to defend Taiwan from Chinese attack by 2020. China is ready with cyber-weapons, an air force replete with new fourth-generation fighter jets, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and thousands of missiles on the mainland targeting both Taiwan and Taiwan’s own fighter jets on the ground. The Chinese, according to the report, defeat the U.S. with or without F-22s, with or without the use of Kadena Air Base in Japan, and with or without the use of two carrier strike groups. The RAND report emphasizes the air battle. The Chinese would still have to land tens of thousands of troops by sea and would be susceptible to U.S. submarines. Yet the report, with all its caveats, does highlight a disturbing trend. China is just a hundred miles away, but the United States must project military power from half a world away in a Post Cold War environment in which it can less and less depend on the use of foreign bases. China’s anti-access naval strategy is not only designed to keep out U.S. forces in a general way, but to ease the conquest of Taiwan in a specific way. The Chinese military can focus more intensely on Taiwan than can America’s, given all of America’s global responsibilities. That is why the American quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan have been particularly devastating news for Taiwan.
Even as China envelops Taiwan militarily, it does so economically and socially. Taiwan does 30 percent of its trade with China, with 40 percent of its exports going to the mainland. There are 270 commercial flights per week between Taiwan and the mainland. Two-thirds of Taiwanese companies, some ten thousand, have made investments in China in the last five years. There are direct postal links and common crime fighting, with half a million mainland tourists coming to the island annually, and 750,000 Taiwanese residing in China for half the year. In all there are five million cross-straits visits each year. There will be less and less of a need for an invasion when subtle economic warfare will achieve the same result. Thus, we have seen the demise of the Taiwan secessionist movement.49 But while a future of greater integration appears likely, the way it develops will be pivotal for great power politics. Were the United States simply to abandon Taiwan, that could undermine America’s bilateral relationships with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and other Pacific allies, let alone with India and even some states in Africa, which will begin to doubt America’s other bilateral commitments, thus encouraging them to move closer to China, allowing for a Greater China of truly hemispheric proportions to emerge. The United States and Taiwan must look at qualitative, asymmetric ways of their own to counter China militarily. The aim is not to be able to defeat China in a straits war, but to make a war too costly for China to seriously contemplate, and thus pry loose functional Taiwanese independence long enough for China to become a more liberal society, so that the United States can continue to maintain credibility with its allies. In this way, Taiwan’s layered missile defense and its three hundred antiaircraft shelters, coupled with a sale of $6.4 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, announced by the Obama administration in early 2010, is vital to America’s position in Eurasia overall. The goal of transforming China domestically is not a pipe dream. Remember that the millions of Chinese tourists who come to Taiwan watch its spirited political talk shows and shop in its bookstores with their subversive titles. A more open China is certainly more of a possibility than a repressive one. But a more democratic China could be an even more dynamic great power than a repressive China, in an economic, cultural, and hence in a military sense.
Beneath Taiwan on the map looms the South China Sea, framed by the demographic cockpit of mainland Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Indonesia, with Australia further afield. A third of all seaborne commercial goods worldwide and half of all the energy requirements for Northeast Asia pass through here. As the gateway to the Indian Ocean—the world’s hydrocarbon interstate, where China is involved in several port development projects—the South China Sea must in some future morrow be virtually dominated by the Chinese navy if Greater China is truly to be realized. Here we have the challenges of piracy, radical Islam, and the naval rise of India, coupled with the heavily congested geographic bottlenecks of the various Indonesian straits (Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Macassar), through which a large proportion of China’s oil tankers and merchant fleet must pass. There are also significant deposits of oil and gas that China hopes to exploit, making the South China Sea a “second Persian Gulf” in some estimations, write Naval War College professors Andrew Erickson and Lyle Goldstein.50 Spykman noted that throughout history states have engaged in “circumferential and transmarine expansion” to gain control of adjacent seas: Greece sought to control the Aegean, Rome the Mediterranean, the United States the Caribbean, and now, according to this logic, China the South China Sea.51 Indeed, the South China Sea with the Strait of Malacca unlocks the Indian Ocean for China the same way control over the Caribbean unlocked the Pacific for America at the time of the building of the Panama Canal.52 And just as Spykman called the Greater Caribbean—in order to underscore its importance—the “American Mediterranean,” we can call the South China Sea the Asian Mediterranean, since it will be at the heart of political geography in coming decades.53 China may seek to dominate the South China Sea in a similar way that the Americans dominated the Caribbean, while America, playing by different rules now, will seek along with allies like Vietnam and the Philippines to keep it a full-fledged international waterway. It is fear of China—not love of America—that is driving Hanoi into Washington’s arms. Given the history of the Vietnam War, it may seem disorienting to witness this emerging relationship between two erstwhile enemies; but consider the fact that precisely by defeating America in a war means Vietnam is a confident country with no chip on its shoulder, and thus psychologically free to enter into an undeclared alliance with the United States.
China is using all forms of its national power—political, diplomatic, economic, commercial, military, and demographic—to expand virtually beyond its legal land and sea borders in order to encompass the borders of imperial China at its historical high points. Yet there is a contradiction here. Let me explain.
As I’ve indicated, China is intent on access denial in its coastal seas. In fact, scholars Andrew Erickson and David Yang suggest “the possibility that China may be closer than ever to mastering” the ability to hit a moving target at sea, such as a U.S. carrier, with a land-based missile, and may plan a “strategically publicized test sometime in the future.”54 But access denial without the ability to protect its own sea lines of communication makes an attack on an American surface combatant (let alone a naval war with the United States) futile, since the U.S. Navy would maintain the ability to cut off Chinese energy supplies by interdicting Chinese ships in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Of course, the Chinese seek to influence American behavior, rather than ever fight the United States outright. Still, why even bother with access denial if you never intend to carry it out? Jacqueline Newmyer, who heads a Cambridge, Massachusetts, defense consultancy, explains that Beijing has “the aim of creating a disposition of power so favorable to the PRC [People’s Republic of China] that it will not actually have to use force to secure its interests.”55 Therefore, just as Taiwan builds up its defenses without the intention of clashing with China, China does likewise with respect to the United States. All parties are seeking to alter the behavior of other parties while avoiding war. The very demonstrations of new weapons systems (if Erickson and Yang are right), let alone the building of port facilities and listening posts in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as well as the large amounts of military aid that Beijing is providing to littoral states that come between Chinese territory and the Indian Ocean, are all displays of power that by their very nature are not secret. Still, there is a hard, nasty edge to some of this: for example, the Chinese are constructing a major naval base on the southern tip of Hainan Island, smack in the heart of the South China Sea, featuring underground facilities for up to twenty nuclear and diesel-electric submarines. Such activity goes beyond influencing the other party’s behavior to being an assertion in its own right of Monroe Doctrine–style sovereignty over the surrounding waters. It would seem that the Chinese are constructing Greater China first, at the heart of which will be the South China Sea and Southeast Asia, even while they have a longer-term plan for a blue-water force, with which will come the ability to protect their own sea lines of communication to the Middle East across the Indian Ocean, and thus make a military conflict with the United States less unreasonable to contemplate from a Chinese perspective. (China has no motive to go to war with the United States. But motives can change over the years and decades, thus it is prudent to track air and naval capabilities instead.) In the meantime, as Taiwan slips closer into China’s embrace, the more likely it is that the Chinese military can divert its attention to the Indian Ocean and the protection of hemispheric sea lanes. The Chinese have more and more raw material equities to protect in sub-Saharan Africa at the Indian Ocean’s opposite end: oil markets in Sudan, Angola, and Nigeria; iron ore mines in Zambia and Gabon; and copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all to be connected by Chinese-built roads and railways, in turn linked to Atlantic and Indian ocean ports.56 To be sure, control and access to sea lines of communication are more important now than during Mahan’s years, and American preponderance over such routes may not be destined to continue forever.
This all means that America’s commitment to prolong the de facto independence of Taiwan has implications that go far beyond the defense of the island itself. For the future of Taiwan and North Korea constitute the hinges on which the balance of power in much of Eurasia rests.
The current security situation in Asia is fundamentally more complicated and, therefore, more unstable than the one that existed in the decades after World War II. As American unipolarity ebbs, with the relative decline in size of the U.S. Navy, and with the concomitant rise of the Chinese economy and military (even at slower rates than before), multipolarity becomes increasingly a feature of Asian power relationships. The Chinese are building underground submarine pens on Hainan Island and developing antiship missiles. The Americans are providing Taiwan with 114 Patriot air defense missiles and dozens of advanced military communications systems. The Japanese and South Koreans are engaged in across-the-board modernization of their fleets—with a particular emphasis on submarines. And India is building a great navy. These are all crude forms of seeking to adjust the balance of power in one’s favor. There is an arms race going on, and it is occurring in Asia. This is the world that awaits the United States when it completes its withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan. While no one state in Asia has any incentive to go to war, the risks of incidents at sea and fatal miscalculations about the balance of power—which everyone is seeking to constantly adjust—will have a tendency to increase with time and with the deepening complexity of the military standoff.
Tensions at sea will be abetted by those on land, because as we have seen, China is filling vacuums that will in due course bring it into uneasy contact with Russia and India. Empty spaces on the map are becoming crowded with more people, strategic roads and pipelines, and ships in the water, to say nothing of overlapping concentric circles of missiles. Asia is becoming a closed geography, with a coming crisis of “room,” as Paul Bracken wrote back in 1999. That process has only continued, and it means increasing friction.
So how might the United States stay militarily engaged while working to preserve the stability of Asia? How does the United States protect its allies, limit the borders of Greater China, and at the same time avoid a conflict with China? For China, if its economy can keep growing, could constitute more embryonic power than any adversary the United States faced during the twentieth century. Being an offshore balancer as some suggest may not be completely sufficient. Major allies like Japan, India, South Korea, and Singapore require the U.S. Navy and Air Force to be in “concert” with their own forces, as one high-ranking Indian told me: an integral part of the landscape and seascape, rather than merely lurking over some distant horizon.
But what exactly does a concert of powers look like on the high seas and Spykmanesque Rimland of Eurasia? A plan that made the rounds in the Pentagon in 2010 sketches out an American naval cartography of the twenty-first century that seeks to “counter Chinese strategic power … without direct military confrontation.” It does so while envisioning a U.S. Navy down from the current 280 ships to 250, and a cut in defense spending by 15 percent. Drawn up by a retired Marine colonel, Pat Garrett, the plan is worth describing because it introduces into the Eurasian Rimland equation the strategic significance of Oceania, just at a time when the American military footprint is growing dramatically on the island of Guam.
Guam, Palau, and the Northern Mariana, Solomon, Marshall, and Caroline island groups are all either U.S. territories, commonwealths with defense agreements with the United States, or independent states that because of their poverty may well be open to such agreements. The U.S. position in Oceania exists courtesy of the spoils of the 1898 Spanish-American War and the blood of Marines in World War II, who liberated these islands from the Japanese. Oceania will grow in importance because it is sufficiently proximate to East Asia, while lying just outside the anti-access bubble in the process of being expanded by China’s DF-21 and more advanced antiship missiles. Future bases in Oceania are not unduly provocative, unlike bases on the “guard towers” of Japan, South Korea, and (until the 1990s) the Philippines. Guam is only four hours flying time from North Korea and only a two-day sail from Taiwan. Most significantly, as outright U.S. possessions, or functionally dependent on the United States for their local economies, the United States can make enormous defense investments in some of these places without fear of being evicted.
Already, Andersen Air Force Base on Guam is the most commanding platform in the world for the projection of U.S. hard power. With 100,000 bombs and missiles and 66 million gallons of jet fuel at any one time, it is the Air Force’s biggest strategic gas-and-go anywhere. Its runways are filled with long lines of C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and the like. Guam is also home to an American submarine squadron and an expanding naval base. Guam and the nearby Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. possessions both, are almost equidistant between Japan and the Strait of Malacca.
Then there is the strategic potential of the southwestern tip of Oceania, signified by the offshore anchorages of the Australian-owned Ashmore and Cartier Islands, and the adjacent seaboard of western Australia itself, from Darwin to Perth: all looking out from below the Indonesian archipelago to the Indian Ocean, which is emerging as the vascular center of the world economy, with oil and natural gas transported across its width from the Middle East to the burgeoning middle classes of East Asia. The U.S. Navy and Air Force, according to Garrett’s plan, would take advantage of Oceania’s geography in order to constitute a “regional presence in being” located “just over the horizon” from the virtual borders of Greater China and the main shipping lanes of Eurasia.57 A “regional presence in being” is a variant of the British naval strategist Julian Corbett’s “fleet in being” of a hundred years ago, a dispersed collection of ships that can quickly coalesce into a unified fleet when necessary; whereas “just over the horizon” reflects a confluence of offshore balancing and participation in a concert of powers.58
The concept of strengthening the U.S. air and sea presence on Oceania reflects a compromise between resisting Greater China at all costs and acceding somewhat to a future Chinese navy role in policing the First Island Chain, while at the same time making China pay a steep price for military aggression on Taiwan. Without ever saying so, this vision allows one to contemplate a world in which American “legacy” bases would be scaled back somewhat on the First Island Chain, even as American ships and planes continue to patrol it, in and out of China’s anti-access bubble. Meanwhile, the plan envisages a dramatic expansion of American naval activity in the Indian Ocean. To achieve this, the United States would not have hardened bases, but rather austere “operating locations” and defense agreements in Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia; and on island nations scattered about the Indian Ocean, such as the Comoros, Seychelles, Mauritius, Reunion, Maldives, and Andamans, a number of which are managed directly or indirectly by France and India, both U.S. allies. This sustains the freedom of navigation in Eurasia along with unimpeded energy flows. The plan deemphasizes existing American bases in Japan and South Korea, and diversifies the U.S. footprint around Oceania to replace the overwhelming stress on Guam, thus moving away from easily targeted “master” bases. For in an age of prickly sovereignty, defended by volatile mass medias, hardening foreign bases make them politically indigestible to local populations. Guam, as a U.S. territory, is the exception that proves the rule. The United States experienced such difficulty with the use of its bases in Turkey prior to the Iraq War in 2003, and for a short time with the use of bases in Japan in 2010. The American Army presence in South Korea is now less embattled mainly because the number of troops stationed there has dropped from 38,000 to 25,000 in recent years, while downtown Seoul has largely been abandoned by the U.S. military.
In any case, the American hold on the First Island Chain is beginning to be pried loose. Local populations are less agreeable to foreign bases, even as a rising China serves as both an intimidator and attractor that can complicate America’s bilateral relations with its Pacific allies. It is about time that this is happening. To wit, the 2009–2010 crisis in American-Japanese relations, with an inexperienced new Japanese government wanting to rewrite the rules of the bilateral relationship in Tokyo’s favor, even as it talked of developing deeper ties with China, should have occurred years before. The paramount American position in the Pacific is an outdated legacy of World War II, which left China, Japan, and the Philippines devastated: nor can the division of Korea, a product of fighting that ended six decades ago, and left the U.S. military with a dominant position on the peninsula, last forever.
Meanwhile, a Greater China is emerging politically and economically in Central-East Asia and in the Western Pacific, with a significant naval dimension in the East and South China seas, while at the same time Beijing is involved in port-building projects and arms transfers on the Indian Ocean littoral. Only substantial political and economic turmoil inside China could alter this trend. But just outside the borders of this new power realm will likely be a stream of American warships, perhaps headquartered in many cases in Oceania, and partnered with warships from India, Japan, and other democracies, all of whom cannot resist the Chinese embrace, but at the same time are forced to balance against it. Given time, a Chinese blue-water force could become less territorial as it grows in confidence, and thus be drawn into this very alliance structure. Moreover, as political scientist Robert S. Ross points out in a 1999 article that is as relevant now as it was then, because of the particular geography of East Asia, the struggle between China and the United States will remain more stable than that between the Soviet Union and the United States. That is because American maritime power during the Cold War was not enough to contain the Soviet Union; a significant land force in Europe was also required. But even given a faintly pro-Chinese Greater Korea, no such land force will ever be required around the Rimland of Eurasia, in which the U.S. Navy will be pitted against a weaker Chinese one.59 (The size of the U.S. land force in Japan is diminishing, and is in any case directed not at China, but at North Korea.)
Still, the very fact of Chinese economic power—increasingly accompanied by military power—will lead to a pivotal degree of tension in the years ahead. To paraphrase Mearsheimer’s argument from The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, the United States, as the regional hegemon in the Western Hemisphere, will seek to prevent China from becoming the regional hegemon over much of the Eastern Hemisphere.60 This could be the signal drama of the age. Mackinder and Spykman would not be surprised.
