Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Indeed, the ability to hamper the growth of a Chinese naval presence close to Japan, South
Korea, and Taiwan will require American pressure from bases in Central Asia close to Ch-
ina, as well as a particularly friendly relationship with Russia. Pressure on land can help
the United States thwart China at sea.
However, another scenario might play out, far more optimistic and beneficial to the
inhabitants of northern Manchuria and the Russian Far East themselves. In this version,
which harks back to the period before 1917, Chinese trade and demographic infiltration of
Amuria and Ussuria lead to an economic renaissance in the Russian Far East that is em-
braced by a more liberal government in Moscow, which uses the development to better po-
sition the port of Vladivostok as a global hub of northeast Asia. Pushing the scenario fur-
ther, I would posit the emergence of a better regime in North Korea, leading to a dynamic
Northeast Asian region of open borders centered around the Sea of Japan.
China's frontier with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia is not so much in-
complete as arbitrary, and, therefore, to a degree ahistorical. China stretches too far into
the heart of Eurasia, and yet doesn't stretch far enough. Xinjiang, China's westernmost
province, means “New Dominion,” and what is dominated by the Chinese is East Turkest-
an, an area made even more remote from China's demographic heartland by the interven-
tion of the Gobi Desert. Though China has been a state in some form or other for three
thousand years, Xinjiang only became part of China in the middle of the eighteenth cen-
tury, when the Qing (Manchu) emperor Qianlong conquered huge areas of western territory,
consequently doubling the size of China and fixing a “firm western border” with Russia.
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Since then, writes the late British diplomat and travel writer Sir Fitzroy Maclean, the his-
periods of independent Turkic rule right up to the 1940s. In 1949, Mao Zedong's commun-
ists marched into Xinjiang and forcibly integrated it with the rest of China. But as recently
as 1990, and again in 2009, there have been riots and bloodshed against Chinese rule by the
ethnic Turkic Uighurs, a subdivision of Turks who ruled Mongolia from 745 to 840, when
the Kyrgyz drove them into East Turkestan. The Uighurs, numbering some eight million,
are less than one percent of China's population, but they comprise 45 percent of Xinjiang's,
which is China's largest province—twice the size of Texas.
Indeed, China's population is heavily concentrated in the coastal areas near the Pacific
and in the riverine lowlands and alluvial valleys in the center of the country, with the drier
plateaus, often at altitudes of twelve thousand feet, in the vast west and southwest relatively
empty, even as they are the homes of the anti-Chinese Uighur and Tibetan minorities. The
original China, as noted, emerged out of the Yellow and particularly the Wei river valleys,
where humankind probably existed in prehistory, and from where China as a civilization-
al concept began to organically spread along great rivers, which to the Chinese served the
purpose that roads did for the Romans. Here in this hearth of Chinese civilization, the land
