Where will China go the next century? By Publius
Where will China go in the next century?
Sometimes it is entertaining and educational to consider the long sweep of history and look beyond the next two decades. In this article I suggest that China’s future lies in North-East Asia.
Currently, China aims to dominate its near abroad in the Indo-Pacific. Its immediate aim is to recover the lost island of Taiwan, to assert its ownership of almost the entire South China Sea, against the wishes of her neighbours there, and also to assert ownership of the Senkaku Islands (currently controlled by Japan) between Taiwan and Okinawa. With these areas under her control, she has unchecked access to the Pacific, currently dominated by the USA.
Why? Taiwan is easy: ancient ties of family and emotion bind the island to the mainland in Chinese minds, a matter of intense emotion for most mainland Chinese. Taiwan is the one province of old China to have held out against Communist takeover, now that Hong Kong is under Beijing’s control again. And Taiwan is a giant, fixed aircraft carrier on the Pacific Ocean, without which China cannot easily access the Pacific in strength.
For the other areas, older territorial claims dating back at least to the Ming dynasty are China’s basis, however shaky in international law. Self-defence is probably not a strong reason. None of China’s neighbours to the South or East are in a serious position to threaten it these days, any more than Mexico can threaten the USA. (It’s nearly two centuries since the USA and Mexico fought a major war, and over a century since Germany proposed they fight another one. There is no evidence that even then, the Mexicans took the idea seriously. The Americans certainly didn’t: President Wilson regarded the notorious Zimmerman telegram as an artful British fake until Zimmerman himself foolishly admitted its authenticity.) Granted, Japan only quit China’s territory in the 1940s and Vietnam defeated China in a border war, in Vietnam, in the late 1970s, but it seems unthinkable that either country would consider attacking China today.
China, however, needs resources, notably food, energy and metals. Although huge, China’s vast population, as its living standard improves, requires even more of these things than China’s existing territory can readily supply. Even water may run short in the coming decades. She can trade for these things in global markets, but these days everybody realizes that that plan may not be strategically reliable. Thus the metal-rich island of Australia, the abundant rice production of the Philippines, Indonesia and Indochina, and beyond the Pacific the vast fields of South America must look tempting.
But China’s attempts to expand her control in these areas have been checked. These neighbours have started to form alliances with the USA, and Japan, in particular, has spearheaded an alliance against China in this region. Informal as yet, each month brings more news of its coalescence.
Above all, this strategy is highly unlikely to be successful without control of Taiwan, and for reasons my colleague John Hulsman has discussed in his podcast, this seems more doubtful, although it’s very difficult to be certain, than ever before. Above all, the risks to China of an attempt to conquer Taiwan by force grow every day.
Now cast your mind back to well over a century ago. In those days, the rising power in China’s region was not China but Japan. Newly industrialized Japan conquered the Korean peninsula, then North-Eastern China, and then extended her invasion southwards...and Northwards. At the time, the Japanese army dominated foreign and overseas policy, and the aim of Japan’s rulers was to create a new Japan on the North-East Asian mainland, from which all of resource-poor Japan’s resource needs would be met. This new country had a name, Manchukuo, and a capital at Harbin, today in China’s far North-Eastern province of Heilongjiang. I have been told that the Chinese of the North-East regard their former Japanese occupiers with far less rancour than those further south, even today, Chinese memories being long.
As everybody remembers, Japan’s expansion in that direction was decisively stopped at Nomonhan in 1939 by the former Czarist officer Zhukov, who was subsequently recalled from exile and who stopped the Germans outside Moscow a few years later. The effect on Japanese policy was decisive and extreme: the Navy replaced the Army as controllers of Japan’s Imperialist policy, and the result was Pearl Harbour…and Hiroshima, Nagasaki and American Occupation. The Japanese, in effect, abandoned their north-western strategy and turned south. Had they attacked Australia in force instead of Hawaii they might even have been successful.
What about today? China’s southern strategy appears checked. By a combination of blunders, China seems to have united her southern and eastern neighbours against her, from Japan to India, even if some neighbours are too polite to say so. Without a catalyst, say a failed invasion of Taiwan, the inertial forces that drive these matters, so hard to understand even at long distance, will take a long time to ebb. But suppose they do, in the next few decades, indeed ebb?
China has a vast region to its North which, by Asian standards, is simply empty. That region is today part of Russia, but Russia has been retreating from that part of the world for over a century and a half, since the sale of Alaska to the USA in 1867 (for $7.2 million). (It’s worth recalling that at one point California formed part of Russia’s furthest east.) Russia has a population of 143 million, about one tenth of China’s, the vast majority of whom live in Central or Western Russia.
If defending Ukraine is a hard sell to today’s American Republicans, defending North-Eastern Siberia, on behalf of Russia, is an impossible sale to any American voter. Therefore, since neither Russia could nor America would resist such a move, the region can be occupied by China at any time. There just isn’t anyone else around. Given China’s no-limits friendship with Russia, such a move could easily be termed a friendly 99-year lease.
In the very long-term history is like physics: Forces find the path of least resistance and go there. Hence the barbarian invasions of Rome and China; the Islamic conquests; the European conquest of the Americas; and the Russian conquest of North-Eastern Asia. In an exact reversal of Japan’s imperial expansion, China may well end up obtaining its vital strategic resources from its north.
Look at a map of the Qing Empire at its height, under the Qianlong Emperor, as claimed by the Qing. Yes, it includes Taiwan, the Senkaku and the entire South China Sea (as well as Tibet, Xinjiang and quite a lot more of Central Asia), but it also includes Sakhalin and what later became Vladivostok. If you want to predict the future, look at old maps.