THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 143

manifest Inner Asian military aggression against China throughout the Middle Ages. This
went along with the failure of the indigenous Song and Ming dynasties, despite their re-
volutionary military technology, to gain back the steppe-lands. Inner Asia, from Tibet and
East Turkestan across Mongolia to the Far Eastern borderland with Russia, was only taken
back by the Manchu Qing Dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (It was
during this period that the multiethnic territory controlled by the Chinese state today was
“staked out,” as well as envisioned: Taiwan was acquired in 1683.) 20 In sum, China became
a vast continent in and of itself by virtue of its continual backwards and forwards interac-
tions with an Inner Asian steppe-land that stretched unto Mackinder's Heartland, and this
is what drives the political reality of China today.
Indeed, the question now becomes whether the dominant Hans, who comprise more than
90 percent of China's population and live mainly in the arable cradle of China, are able to
permanently keep the Tibetans, Uighur Turks, and Inner Mongolians who live on the peri-
phery under control, with the minimum degree of unrest. The ultimate fate of the Chinese
state will hinge on this fact, especially as China undergoes economic and social disruptions.
For the time being, China is at the peak of its continental power, even as the wounds
of its territorial rape by the nations of Europe, Russia, and Japan are still, by China's own
historical standards, extremely fresh. For in the nineteenth century, as the Qing Dynasty
became the sick man of East Asia, China lost much of its territory—the southern tributaries
of Nepal and Burma to Great Britain; Indochina to France; Taiwan and the tributaries of
Korea and Sakhalin to Japan; and Mongolia, Amuria, and Ussuria to Russia. 21 In the twen-
tieth century came the Japanese takeovers of the Shandong Peninsula and Manchuria in the
heart of China. And this was all in addition to the humiliations forced on the Chinese by
the extraterritoriality agreements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereby
Western nations got control of parts of Chinese cities. Now fast-forward to the 1950s, when
maps started appearing in Chinese secondary schools of a Greater China that included all of
these lost areas, as well as eastern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Mao Zedong, who had con-
solidated continental China for the first time since the High Qing, was clearly an irredentist
who had internalized the wounds of a once vast and imperial state surviving the centur-
ies only to be humiliated in the recent past. 22 Given these vicissitudes of China's history,
this may be one flaw in Mao's thinking that we might actually forgive. While the rulers of
China in the second decade of the twenty-first century may not be so heartless in their out-
look as Mao, China's history can, however, never be far from their minds. Though China's
current borders encompass Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, East Turkestan, and Tibet—all the
surrounding plateaus and grasslands, that is—the very economic and diplomatic strategies
of China's rulers today demonstrate an idea of China that reaches beyond the territorial ex-
tent of even the China of the eighth-century Tang and the eighteenth-century High Qing.
China, a demographic behemoth with the world's most energetic economy for the past three