Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Like the Taklamakan Desert of Xinjiang, the sprawling, mountainous Tibetan plateau,
rich in copper and iron ore, accounts for much of the territory of China, thus clarifying the
horror with which Beijing views Tibetan autonomy, let alone independence. Without Tibet
there is a much reduced China and a virtually expanded Indian Subcontinent: this explains
the pace of Chinese road and rail projects across the Tibetan massif.
If you accept Pakistan, with its own Chinese-built road and Indian Ocean port project,
as a future zone of Greater China, and put the relatively weak states of Southeast Asia
into the same category, then India, with its billion-plus population, is a blunt geographic
wedge puncturing this grand sphere of Chinese influence. A map of Greater China in Zbig-
ina—with their immense populations; rich, venerable, and very different cultural experien-
ces; geographic proximity; and fractious border disputes—are, despite their complement-
ary trading relationship, destined by geography to be rivals to a certain degree. And the
issue of Tibet only inflames this rivalry, even as it is a core function of it. India hosts the
Dalai Lama's government-in-exile in Dharamsala, which enables him to keep the cause of
Tibet alive in the court of global opinion. Dan Twining, a senior fellow for Asia at the Ger-
man Marshall Fund in Washington, has written that recent Indian-Chinese border tensions
“may be related to worries in Beijing over the Dalai Lama's succession,” given the pos-
sibility that the next Dalai Lama might be named outside China—in the Tibetan cultural
state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China also claims, as it is part of the Tibetan plateau and
thus outside the lowlands which geographically define the Indian Subcontinent. China has
also been expanding its military influence into the unstable, Maoist-dominated Himalayan
buffer state of Nepal, which India has countered with an Indian-Nepalese defense cooper-
ation agreement of its own. China and India will play a Great Game not only here, but in
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, too. China's pressure on India from the north, which helped
ignite a border war between India and China in 1962, must continue as a means to help
consolidate its hold on Tibet. This assumes that in an increasingly feverish world media
environment the romantic cause of Tibetan nationalism will not dissipate, and may even
intensify.
Of course, one might well argue that borders with so many troubled regions will con-
strain Chinese power, and thus geography is a hindrance to Chinese ambitions. China is
virtually surrounded, in other words. But given China's economic and demographic expan-
sion in recent decades, and its reasonable prospects for continued, albeit reduced, economic
growth—with serious bumps, mind you—into the foreseeable future, China's many land
borders can also work as a force multiplier: for it is China encroaching on these less dy-
namic and less populated areas, not the other way around. Some explain that the presence
of failed and semi-failed states on China's borders—namely Afghanistan and Pakistan—is
