Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
will see, it is indirect. The challenge China poses at its most elemental level is geograph-
ic—notwithstanding critical issues such as debt, trade, and climate change. China's emer-
ging area of influence in Eurasia and Africa—in Mackinder's “World-Island”—is growing,
not in a nineteenth-century imperialistic sense, but in a more subtle manner better suited
to the era of globalization. Simply by securing its economic needs, China is shifting the
balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere, and that will substantially concern the United
States. On land and at sea, abetted by China's favorable location on the map, Beijing's in-
fluence is emanating from Central Asia to the Russian Far East, and from the South China
Sea to the Indian Ocean. China is a rising continental power, and as Napoleon famously
said, the policies of such states are inherent in their geography.
China's position on the map of Central-East Asia is, as I have indicated, advantageous. But
in other ways twenty-first-century China is dangerously incomplete. There is the example
of Mongolia (geographic “Outer Mongolia”) to the north: a giant blob of territory that looks
as though it has been bitten away from China, which borders Mongolia to the south, west,
and east. Mongolia, with one of the world's lowest population densities, is being threatened
by the latest of Eurasia's great historical migrations—that of an urban Chinese civilization
with a tendency to move north. China has already flooded its own Inner Mongolia with Han
Chinese immigrants, and Outer Mongolians worry that they are next to be demographic-
ally conquered. Having once conquered Outer Mongolia by moving the line of cultivation
northward, China may be poised to conquer Mongolia through globalization. China covets
the oil, coal, uranium, and other strategic minerals and rich, empty grasslands of its former
this light. With its unchecked industrialization and urbanization, China is the world's lead-
ing consumer of aluminum, copper, coal, lead, nickel, zinc, tin, and iron ore, all of which
Mongolia has in abundance. China's share of world metal consumption has jumped from 10
percent to 25 percent since the late 1990s. Consequently, Chinese mining companies have
been seeking large stakes in Mongolia's underground assets. Given that China has absorbed
Tibet, Macau, and Hong Kong on the mainland, Mongolia will be a trip wire for judging
future Chinese intentions. Indeed, the Mongolian-Chinese border in 2003 when I visited it
near the town of Zamyn-Uud was nothing but an artificial boundary on the flat and gradu-
ally descending Gobi Desert. The Chinese border post was a brightly lit, well-engineered
arc signifying the teeming and industrialized monolith to the south, encroaching on the
sparsely inhabited Mongolian steppe-land of felt tents and scrap iron huts. Keep in mind,
though, that such demographic and economic advantages can be a double-edged sword in
the event of ethnic unrest in Chinese Inner Mongolia. The very extent of Chinese influen-
ce, by encompassing so much of the pastoral periphery, can expose weaknesses peculiar to
multiethnic states. Moreover, another factor that could upend China's plans is Mongolia's
