Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Meanwhile, the economic pull from China will be stronger than from Japan. A reunified
Korea tilting slightly toward China and away from Japan would be one with little or no
basis for a continued U.S. troop presence, and that, in turn, would fuel Japanese rearma-
ment. In other words, it is easy to conceive of a Korean future within a Greater China, even
as there are fewer U.S. troops on the ground in Northeast Asia.
Thus, with China making inroads into Mackinder's Central Asian Heartland, it is also
likely to have significant influence in Spykman's Rimland, of which Southeast Asia and
the Korean Peninsula are parts.
China's land borders at this point in history seem to beckon with more opportunities
than hazards. This brings to mind the University of Chicago's John J. Mearsheimer's com-
ment in
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
that “the most dangerous states in the inter-
that description. True, China is in its own way an expanding land power and the People's
Liberation Army ground force numbers some 1.6 million troops, the largest in the world.
But as I've indicated, with the exception of the Indian Subcontinent and the Korean Penin-
sula, China is merely filling vacuums more than it is ramming up against competing states.
Moreover, as the events of 2008 and 2009 showed, the PLA ground force will not have an
expeditionary capability for years to come. In those years, the PLA had to respond to an
earthquake emergency in Sichuan, to ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, and to the secur-
ity challenge of the Olympics in Beijing. What these “trans-regional mobility exercises” as
the Chinese call them, indicated, according to Abraham Denmark of the Center for Nav-
al Analysis, was an ability by the PLA to move troops from one end of continental China
to another, but not an ability to move supplies and heavy equipment at the rate required.
The only conceivable circumstances for the PLA to cross beyond China's borders would be
through a process of miscalculation, in the event of another land war with India, or to fill
a void in the event of the collapse of the North Korean regime, which might also draw in
American and South Korean troops in the mother of all humanitarian emergencies. (North
Korea's population is poorer than Iraq, with much less of a modern history of responsible
self-government.) The very fact that China has the luxury to fill power vacuums on its vast
frontiers without the backup of a truly expeditionary ground force indicates how China is
probably more secure on land than it has been in decades, or centuries.
Chinese diplomats have been busy in recent years settling remaining border disputes
with the Central Asian republics and with its other neighbors (India being a striking excep-
hensive approach from Beijing is an indication of a strong strategic direction. China has
signed military agreements with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. “The sta-
bilization of China's land borders may be one of the most important geopolitical changes
