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.

View article...

SHANGHAI, CHINA: Shanghai's Expo Is Chance For World To Court China

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE STORY ON NPR

April 2, 2010

NPR

The World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904 gave the world X-rays and ice cream cones. In 1939, the New York World's fair unveiled television broadcasts, the tape recorder and nylon stockings.

On May 1, the modern-day equivalent, the World Expo, will open in Shanghai, China. Given China's rising international profile, the Shanghai Expo seems to be less about inventions and more about geopolitics.

Countries are thinking up ever more inventive ways to tout the national brand to the expo's expected 70 million visitors, most of whom will be Chinese.

As the official World Expo song is unveiled to mark the one-month countdown, frenzied preparations are under way. Denmark is bringing its Little Mermaid statue; a real chairlift tops the Swiss exhibit, and Belgium is even giving away free diamonds to a chosen few.

It's a sign of China's political importance that the millions being spent are seen as a small price to pay.

The World's Most Expensive Vanity Project?

Shanghai is in a multibillion-dollar frenzy of self-transformation as the clock ticks down to opening day. Roads are being widened, boulevards built and temporary pavilions erected at warp speed on a huge tract of riverside land set aside for the expo.

The half-year-long exposition will end up costing more than the Beijing Olympics. Critics say it is a chance for countries to cozy up to China and kowtow visibly by building costly national pavilions, which will be torn down in six months' time after the expo is over.

But those responsible for the pavilions disagree about their political role.

Peter Sams, director of the Australian pavilion, says that ties with China are important to Australia. "We [very much see] the expo and a substantial presence — us helping China have a successful expo — as a very important part of our bilateral relationship," he says.

The country's pavilion is one of the most expensive per capita, at $76 million. Its rust-red steel exterior hints at the massive business of exporting natural resources from Canberra to Beijing. This trade indirectly led to one of the lowest points in the bilateral relationship, the sentencing earlier this week of Australian citizen Stern Hu to 10 years in prison for bribery and stealing commercial secrets about China's steel needs.

Earlier this year, Chinese President Hu Jintao toured Australia's pavilion, which is almost finished. Expo officials admit that about 10 percent of the 91 national pavilions are not expected to be ready in time for the opening, but the Australian staffers were cocky with delight as they showed off Aboriginal art in the form of painted poles and the auditorium where a nine-minute show will be performed.

Not A Political Event?

Others disagree about the expo's political function, including Rajesh Kumar, director of the India pavilion's organizing team. Dressed in a bejeweled Indian shirt, he beams with pride as he gestures at the gigantic bamboo dome housing India's offerings.

India is spending a total of $50 million, he says, but its motivation isn't political.

"This is the World Expo, not a political forum," Kumar says. "This is not at all to do with any kind of politics or any kind of diplomacy. Nothing."

That, however, may be disingenuous, given that India is actually bringing 2,000 artists to tour 40 cities across China. That includes 50 Bollywood stars, who will strut their stuff in a one-time special show in Shanghai. Funded by the Ministry of Commerce, this Festival of India certainly sounds like an act of dance diplomacy.

U.S.: 'Rising To The Challenge'

When it comes to the U.S., Consul General Beatrice Camp says the expo is "a bright spot" in bilateral relations.

But the $61 million pavilion very nearly didn't get built after funding difficulties. It is still under construction, and on a visit to the expo site, journalists weren't taken to the building.

It's the only privately funded national pavilion, and with just a month to go, it's still short of millions of dollars. Jose Villarreal, the U.S. commissioner general to the Shanghai Expo, has pledged that it will be ready for opening day.

Fittingly, the U.S. pavilion's theme is "Rising to the Challenge." Private sponsors may be footing the bill, but Mark Germyn, chief operating officer of the pavilion, says it won't simply be a corporate advertisement.

"We are not a trade show format by any means. Our sponsor partners are ... participating because they believe ... that this is a very worthwhile opportunity to support America and America's presence in expressing, in a very positive way, American culture and society to Chinese here," Germyn says.

Japan: Mending Ties

For its part, Japan is spending big time: $140 million, almost as much as the biggest spender of all, Saudi Arabia, which is shelling out $146 million. For that price tag, Japan has built a lilac cocoon from high-tech breathable material, populated by violin-playing robots.

Noriyoshi Ehara, Japan's pavilion director, is so protective of it that he asked foreign journalists to remove their shoes before entry. Relations between Tokyo and Beijing have been haunted by Japan's wartime atrocities. But Ehara is confident that the pavilion will remake ties anew.

"We have historical issues, but now we are going to create new relations. This is it," he says, gesturing around the pavilion. "Japan's pavilion expresses the new relation with China. This is the main motif."

Click here for A Sneak Peek Of The Shanghai World Expo Exhibits