The Revenge of Geography by Robert D. Kaplan

Author:Robert D. Kaplan [Kaplan, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-60483-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter XI

THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER

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.

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