CHINA: The Geography of Chinese Power

Published: April 19, 2010

By ROBERT D. KAPLAN, I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor

China’s blessed geography is so obvious a point that it tends to get overlooked in discussions of the country’s economic dynamism and national assertiveness.

Yet it is essential: It means that China will stand at the hub of geopolitics even if the country’s path toward global power is not necessarily linear.

Today China’s ambitions are as aggressive as those of the United States a century ago, but for completely different reasons. China does not take a missionary approach to world affairs, seeking to spread an ideology or a system of government. Instead, its actions are propelled by its need to secure energy, metals and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living standards of its immense population.

Within the Chinese state, Xinjiang and Tibet are the two principal areas whose inhabitants have resisted China’s pull. In order to secure Xinjiang — and the oil, natural gas, copper, and iron ore in its soil — Beijing has for decades been populating it with Han Chinese from the country’s heartland.

The mountainous Tibetan Plateau is rich in copper and iron ore and accounts for much of China’s territory. This is why Beijing views with horror the prospect of Tibetan autonomy and why it is frantically building roads and railroads across the area.

China’s northern border wraps around Mongolia, a giant territory that looks like it was once bitten out of China’s back. Mongolia has one of the world’s lowest population densities and is now being threatened demographically by an urban Chinese civilization next door.

Having once conquered Outer Mongolia to gain access to more cultivable land, Beijing is poised to conquer Mongolia again, albeit indirectly, through the acquisition of its natural resources.

North of Mongolia and of China’s three northeastern provinces lies Russia’s Far East region, a numbing vastness twice the size of Europe with a meager and shrinking population and large reserves of natural gas, oil, timber, diamonds and gold.

As with Mongolia, the fear is not that the Chinese army will one day invade or formally annex the Russian Far East. It is that Beijing’s demographic and corporate control over the region is steadily increasing.

China’s influence is also spreading southeast. In fact, it is with the relatively weak states of Southeast Asia that the emergence of a Greater China is meeting the least resistance.

There are relatively few geographic impediments separating China from Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, and China continues to develop profitable relationships with its southern neighbors. It uses Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) as a market for selling high-value Chinese manufactured goods while buying from it low-value agricultural produce.

Central Asia, Mongolia, the Russian Far East and Southeast Asia are natural zones of Chinese influence. But they are also zones whose political borders are not likely to change. The situation on the Korean Peninsula is different. No one really expects China to annex any part of the Korean Peninsula, of course, But although it supports Kim Jong-il’s Stalinist regime, it has plans for the peninsula beyond his reign.

Beijing would like to eventually dispatch there the thousands of North Korean defectors who now are in China so that they could build a favorable political base for Beijing’s gradual economic takeover of the region.

China is as blessed by its seaboard as by its continental interior, but it faces a far more hostile environment at sea than it does on land.

The Chinese Navy sees little but trouble in what it calls the “first island chain”: the Korean Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Japan (including the Ryukyu Islands), Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia.

China’s answer to feeling so boxed in has been aggressive at times — for example when, in March 2009, a handful of Chinese Navy ships harassed the U.S. surveillance ship Impeccable while it was openly conducting operations in the South China Sea.

Beijing is also preparing to envelop Taiwan not just militarily but economically and socially. How this comes about will be pivotal for the future of great-power politics in the region. If the United States simply abandons Taiwan to Beijing, then Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and other U.S. allies in the Pacific will begin to doubt the strength of Washington’s commitments. That could encourage those states to move closer to China and thus allow the emergence of a Greater China of truly hemispheric proportions.

So can the United States work to preserve stability in Asia, protect its allies there, and limit the emergence of a Greater China while avoiding a conflict with Beijing?

Strengthening the U.S. air and sea presence in Oceania would be a compromise approach between resisting a Greater China at all cost and assenting to a future in which the Chinese Navy policed the first island chain. This approach would ensure that China paid a steep price for any military aggression against Taiwan.

Still, the very fact of China’s rising economic and military power will exacerbate U.S.-Chinese tensions in the years ahead. To paraphrase the political scientist John Mearsheimer, the United States, the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, will try to prevent China from becoming the hegemon of much of the Eastern Hemisphere. This could be the signal drama of the age.

Robert D. Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic. A fuller version of this article appears in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.

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CHINA: China in Central Asia: Riches in the near abroad

Jan 28th 2010

From The Economist

The West’s recession spurs China’s hunt for energy supplies in its own backyard

DURING his first visit to Kazakhstan in 1996, Jiang Zemin was reportedly amused to learn that his Central Asian neighbour, the ninth-largest country in the world by land mass, had a population of only around 15m. “You probably all know each other,” China’s then president is said to have quipped to his hosts. With its population of 1.3 billion, China naturally thinks on a grand scale. This is what the five countries of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan—both admire and fear. Like Russia, looking to its own far east, they worry about Chinese expansionism.

But for most of the 18 years since the Soviet Union’s break-up, China has taken a back seat in the fierce competition between Russia and America for influence in this resource-rich region. In 2009, with the energy needs of its burgeoning economy continually growing, it woke up to new opportunities in its western backyard.

Booming China had not exactly been neglecting Central Asia, but its priorities had lain elsewhere. Since the global financial crisis left Russia and America struggling with their budgets, China has loosened its purse strings to offer Central Asia a helping hand. Its money has been welcome. From a Central Asian point-of-view, Chinese credit offers an additional advantage over the Western kind: it comes with no annoying political strictures.

In June, for example, China agreed to lend Turkmenistan $4 billion to develop its largest gasfield, South Yolotan, close to the Afghan border. This was part of a 30-year deal that should eventually bring China 40 billion cubic metres of gas each year. The same month Hu Jintao, Jiang Zemin’s successor, announced a loan of $10 billion loan to the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a security forum grouping China, Russia and four Central Asian countries, to shore up members faltering in the global downturn. In November China’s largest oil-and-gas provider, jointly with Kazakhstan’s oil-and-gas firm, bought MangistauMunaiGas, a big oil producer in Kazakhstan. In exchange, China had lent the country $10 billion earlier last year.

In December Mr Hu and the leaders of three Central Asian countries gathered at the Saman-Depe gasfield in eastern Turkmenistan for a moment of crowning symbolism. The four men turned a tap to inaugurate a 1,833km (1,139-mile) gas pipeline, running through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan into China’s far-western region of Xinjiang. For China, the new line forms part of a global effort to secure energy supplies for its rapidly growing economy. For Turkmenistan, it is a chance to reduce dependence on Russian demand.

A few days before the event, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, said that Russia could be comfortable with Turkmenistan’s gas flowing eastward. But many Russian commentators bemoaned the loss of strategic ground to China.

Views about China are divided in Kazakhstan too. Late last year the president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, announced that China wanted to lease 1m hectares (2.5m acres) of farmland in Kazakhstan. In Almaty, Kazakh nationalists marched in protest at encroaching Chinese influence. Even the weak opposition briefly sprang to life. Similarly, last July China’s suppression of Xinjiang’s rioting Uighurs, whom Kazakhs consider brethren, raised tempers.

Dossym Satpayev, a political analyst, says that many protesters believe China’s vast population makes it inevitable immigrants will start moving to places such as Kazakhstan. Had dwindling Russia made the request for a land-lease, he says, the reaction would not have been so strong.

China may have taken its time before beginning to pursue its interests in Central Asia, but it seems determined to do so with vigour and for the long term. Mr Satpayev believes that within the next ten years it will come to dominate Central Asia’s political, economic and military spheres, mainly through the SCO. Its main rival will be less affluent Russia, whose historic dominance has left it with the habit of trying to boss former Soviet republics. America, Europe and other powers will become less important. China’s leaders have managed to advance far beyond the largely ceremonial co-operation of “friendship treaties”, without resorting to Russian tactics. As Mr Satpayev has it, “China doesn’t only buy loyalty with documents, but with money given at a low percentage.”

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