Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER
At the end of his famous article “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Mackinder has a dis-
turbing 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 Arc-
tic 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 Eur-
asia 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, occu-
pies the globe's most advantageous position. Mackinder predicts at the conclusion of
Demo-
cratic 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,
urally 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 assertive-
ness 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
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 Ch-
ina and also cuts just below the Florida Keys.
