THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 150

was crisscrossed by “myriad rivers, canals, and irrigation streams that fed lush market gar-
dens and paddies”; here “the seasonal flooding … returned needed nutrients to the soil.” 29
Nowadays, Chinese territory simply overlaps not only this riverine heartland, but Turkic
Central Asia and historic Tibet besides, and that is Beijing's salient cartographic challenge,
even as it comports well with China's imperial history. In Beijing's eyes there is no altern-
ative to Chinese control over its contiguous tablelands. For as the mid-twentieth-century
American China hand Owen Lattimore reminds us: “The Yellow River derives its water
from the snows of Tibet,” and for “part of its course it flows near the Mongolian steppe.” 30
Tibet, with the headwaters of the Yellow, Yangzi, Mekong, Salween, Brahmaputra, Indus,
and Sutlej rivers, may constitute the world's most enormous storehouse of freshwater, even
as China by 2030 is expected to fall short of its water demands by 25 percent. 31 Securing
these areas, under whose soil also lie billions of tons of oil, natural gas, and copper, has
meant populating them over the decades with Han Chinese immigrants from the nation's
demographic heartland. It has also meant, in the case of Xinjiang, an aggressive courting
of the independent ethnic Turkic republics of Central Asia, so that the Uighurs will never
have a political and geographical rear base with which to contest Beijing's rule.
In Central Asia, as in eastern Siberia, China competes fiercely with Russia for a sphere
of influence. Trade between China and former Soviet Central Asia has risen from $527
million in 1992 to $25.9 billion in 2009. 32 But the means of Beijing's sway will for the
moment be two major pipelines, one carrying oil from the Caspian Sea across Kazakhstan
to Xinjiang, and the other transporting natural gas from the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan bor-
der, across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, to Xinjiang. Again, no troops will be necessary as
Greater China extends into Mackinder's Eurasian Heartland, the upshot of an insatiable de-
mand for energy and the internal danger posed by its own ethnic minorities.
In all of this, China is not risk-averse. Eyeing some of the world's last untapped deposits
of copper, iron, gold, uranium, and precious gems, China is already mining for copper
in war-torn Afghanistan, just south of Kabul. China has a vision of Afghanistan (and
of Pakistan) as a secure conduit for roads and energy pipelines that will bring natural
resources from Indian Ocean ports, linking up with Beijing's budding Central Asian
dominion-of-sorts. China has been “exceptionally active” building roads that will con-
nect Xinjiang with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Within Afghanistan itself, a
Chinese firm, the China Railway Shistiju Group, is “defying insecurity” by building a
roadway in Wardak Province. China is improving rail infrastructures that approach Afgh-
anistan from several directions. 33 Thus, as the United States moves to defeat al Qaeda and
irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, it is China's geopolitical position that will be en-
hanced. Military deployments are ephemeral: roads, rail links, and pipelines can be virtu-
ally forever.