THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 144

decades, is, unlike Russia, extending its territorial influence much more through commerce
than coercion.
Geography indicates that while China's path toward ever greater global power may not be
linear—its annual GDP growth rates of over 10 percent for the past thirty years simply can-
not continue—China, even in socioeconomic disarray, will stand at the hub of geopolitics.
And China is not likely to be in complete disarray. China, echoing Mackinder, combines an
extreme, Western-style modernity with a hydraulic civilization of the kind common to the
ancient Orient and Near East: that is, it features central control, with a regime that builds
great water and other engineering works requiring the labor of millions. 23 This makes Ch-
ina relentless and dynamic in ways different from Western democracies. Because China's
nominal communist rulers constitute the latest of some twenty-five Chinese dynasties go-
ing back four thousand years, the absorption of Western technology and practices takes
place within the disciplined framework of an elaborate cultural system: one that has unique
experience in, among other things, forming tributary relationships. “The Chinese,” a Singa-
porean official told me, “charm you when they want to charm you, and squeeze you when
they want to squeeze you, and they do it quite systematically.”