Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
a danger to Beijing. I have been to those borders. They are in the remotest terrain at ex-
ceedingly high elevations. Few live there. Pakistan could completely unravel and it would
barely be noticed on the Chinese side of the border. China's borders aren't the problem: the
problem is Chinese society, which, as it becomes more prosperous, and, as China's eco-
nomic growth rate slows, raises the specter of political upheaval of some sort. And serious
upheaval could make China suddenly vulnerable on its ethnic peripheries.
China's most advantageous outlet for its ambitions is in the direction of the relatively
weak states of Southeast Asia. Here, too, China's geography is incomplete. China dom-
inated Vietnam during the first millennium of the modern era. China's Yuan Dynasty (of
Mongol descent) invaded Burma, Siam, and Vietnam in the late thirteenth century. Chinese
migration to Thailand dates back many centuries. The lack of a Great Wall in China's
southeast was not only because of the rugged forests and steep mountain folds between Ch-
ina and Burma, but because Chinese expansion along this entire frontier from Burma in the
west to Vietnam in the east was more fluid than in the north of China, according to Lat-
from Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The likely capital of a Mekong River prosperity sphere,
linking all the countries of Indochina by road and river traffic, is Kunming in China's Yun-
nan Province, whose dams will provide the electricity consumed by Thais and others in
this demographic cockpit of the world. For it is here in Southeast Asia, with its 568 million
people, where China's 1.3 billion people converge with the Indian Subcontinent's 1.5 billi-
on people.
First and foremost among the states of Southeast Asia, with the largest, most sprawling
landmass in the region, is Burma. Burma, too, like Mongolia, the Russian Far East, and oth-
er territories on China's artificial land borders, is a feeble state abundant in the very metals,
hydrocarbons, and other natural resources that China desperately requires. The distance is
less than five hundred miles from Burma's Indian Ocean seaboard—where China and India
are competing for development rights—to China's Yunnan Province. Again, we are talking
about a future of pipelines, in this case gas from offshore fields in the Bay of Bengal, that
will extend China's reach beyond its legal borders to its natural geographical and historical
limits. This will occur in a Southeast Asia in which the formerly strong state of Thailand
can less and less play the role of a regional anchor and inherent balancer against China,
owing to deep structural problems in Thai politics: the royal family, with an ailing king, is
increasingly less of a stabilizing force; the Thai military is roiled by factionalism; and the
citizenry is ideologically split between an urban middle class and an up-and-coming rural
class. China, flush with cash, is developing bilateral military relationships with Thailand
and other Southeast Asian countries, even as America's own military presence, as exem-
plified by annual regional exercises like Cobra Gold, lessen in importance for the United
States, ever since America's energies have been diverted to its Middle Eastern wars. (Of
