Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
choice but to get along with it. China may still be in the early phases of its continental ex-
pansion, so its grasp of the periphery is nascent. The key story line of the next few decades
may be the manner in which China accomplishes this. And if it can accomplish this, what
kind of regional hegemon will China be?
Mongolia, the Russian Far East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia are all natural zones of
Chinese influence and expansion, even though no political borders will change. But China
is most incomplete on the Korean Peninsula, where political borders could well shift—if
one accepts the argument that in a world increasingly penetrated by information techno-
logy, the hermetic North Korean regime has few good prospects. This makes North Korea
the true pivot of East Asia, whose unraveling could affect the destiny of the whole region
for decades to come. Jutting out from Manchuria, of which it is a natural geographical ap-
pendage, the Korean Peninsula commands all maritime traffic in northeastern China and,
more particularly, traps in its armpit the Bohai Sea, home to China's largest offshore oil re-
serve. In antiquity, the kingdom of Goguryeo covered southern Manchuria and the northern
two-thirds of the Korean Peninsula. Goguryeo paid tribute to China's Wei Dynasty, even as
it later fought a war with it. Parts of Korea, especially in the north, came under the sway
of the Han Dynasty in antiquity and under the Qing Dynasty in early modern times. China
will never annex any part of Korea, yet it remains frustrated by Korean sovereignty. Ch-
ina has supported the late Kim Jong-il's and Kim Jong-un's Stalinist regime, but it covets
North Korea's geography—with its additional outlets to the Pacific close to Russia—far
more, and thus has plans for the peninsula beyond the reign of the deceased “Dear Lead-
er” and his son, who have caused Beijing no end of headaches. China would like eventu-
ally to dispatch its thousands of North Korean defectors to build a favorable political base
for Beijing's gradual economic takeover of the Tumen River region—where China, North
Korea, and the Russian Far East intersect, with good port facilities on the Pacific fronting
Japan. China's goal for North Korea must be a more modern, authoritarian, Gorbachevian
buffer state between it and the vibrant middle-class democracy of South Korea.
But not even China is in control of events in North Korea. In other divided country scen-
arios of the past decades—Vietnam, Germany, Yemen—the forces of unity have ultimately
triumphed. But in none of these cases was unification achieved through a deliberate pro-
cess. Rather, it happened in sudden, tumultuous fashion that did not respect the interests
of all the major parties concerned. Nevertheless, it is more likely than not that China, even
though it fears reunification, will eventually benefit from it. A unified Greater Korean state
could be more or less under Seoul's control, and China is South Korea's biggest trading
partner. A reunified Korea would be a nationalist Korea, with undercurrents of hostility
toward its larger neighbors, China and Japan, that have historically sought to control and
occupy it. But Korea's enmity toward Japan is significantly greater, as Japan occupied the
peninsula from 1910 to 1945. (There are still disputes between Seoul and Tokyo over the
Tokdo/Takeshima islets in what Koreans call the East Sea and Japanese the Sea of Japan.)
