THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHINESE POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 156

bearing down on Manchuria like during the Cold War, a time when under Mao Zedong
China concentrated its defense budget on its army, and pointedly neglected the seas. The
significance of this cannot be overstated. Since antiquity China has been preoccupied with
land invasions of one sort or another. The Great Wall of China was built in the third century
B.C . ostensibly to keep out Turkic invaders. It was a Mongol invasion from the north that
led to the end of Ming forays in the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century. Relatedly, it is the
current favorable situation on land, more than any other variable, that has allowed China to
start building a great navy and reestablish the Pacific and maybe even Indian oceans as part
of its geography. Whereas coastal city-states and island nations, big and small, pursue sea
power as a matter of course, a continental and historically insular nation like China does so
partly as a luxury: the mark of a budding empire-of-sorts. In the past, the Chinese, secure
in their fertile river valleys, were not forced by poverty to take to the sea like the Norsemen
who lived in a cold and sterile land. The Pacific Ocean offered the Chinese little, and was
in many respects a road to nowhere, unlike the Mediterranean and Aegean seas, populated
as they were with islands in an enclosed maritime space. It was the early-nineteenth-cen-
tury German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who explained that the Chinese,
unlike the Europeans, lacked the boldness for sea exploration, tied as the Chinese were
to the agricultural cycles of their plains. 43 The Chinese probably never heard of Formosa
(Taiwan) until the thirteenth century, and didn't settle it until the seventeenth century, after
Portuguese and Dutch traders had established stations on the island. 44 Thus, merely by go-
ing to sea in the manner that it is, China demonstrates its favorable position on land in the
heart of Asia.
East Asia now pits Chinese land power against American sea power, with Taiwan and
the Korean Peninsula as the main focal points. For decades, China was preoccupied on
land where America, particularly since its misadventure in Vietnam, had no appetite to go.
America still has no such appetite in Asia, especially after its ordeals in Iraq and Afgh-
anistan. But China is in the early stages of becoming a sea power as well as a land power:
that is the big change in the region.
In terms of geography, China is as blessed by its seaboard and its proximity to water as
it is by its continental interior. China dominates the East Asian coastline on the Pacific in
the temperate and tropical zones, and on its southern border is close enough to the Indian
Ocean to contemplate being linked to it in years ahead by roads and energy pipelines. But
whereas China is in a generally favorable position along its land borders, it faces a more
hostile environment at sea. The Chinese navy sees little but trouble and frustration in what
it calls the First Island Chain, which, going from north to south, comprises Japan, the Ry-
uku Islands, the so-called half-island of the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, the Philippines, In-
donesia, and Australia. All of these places, save for Australia, are potential flashpoints.