THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 141

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 con-
solidate 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 geo-
graphy. 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 run-
ning 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 trans-
lated into political differences.” 9 Indeed, to the early Chinese, agriculture meant civiliz-
ation itself: the Central or Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo , which owed nothing to the sur-
rounding 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 en-
counter other cultures—Roman, Byzantine, Persian, and Arab—and thus develop a com-
parative, 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 Yel-
low 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