Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

by Tim Marshall

The Chinese leaders were against any sort of permanent European presence, but increasingly opened up the coastal regions to trade. It remains a feature of China to this day that when China opens up, the coastland regions prosper but the inland areas are neglected.

in adding to its size, China also added to its problems. Xinjiang, a region populated by Muslims, was a perennial source of instability, indeed insurrection, as were other regions;

The imperial powers arrived, the British among them, and carved the country up into spheres of influence. It was, and is, the greatest humiliation the Chinese suffered since the Mongol invasions. This is a narrative the Communist Party uses frequently; it is in part true, but it is also useful to cover up the Party’s own failures and repressive policies.

Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Americans at the end of the Second World War in 1945 led to the withdrawal of Japanese troops, although in Manchuria they were replaced by the advancing Soviet army, which then withdrew in 1946.

In the early 1980s the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping coined the term ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, which appears to translate as ‘Total control for the Communist Party in a Capitalist Economy’.

In China the points of the compass are always listed in the order east–south–west–north,

Indeed, the recent Western sanctions against Russia due to the crisis in Ukraine have driven Russia into massive economic deals with China on terms which help keep Russia afloat, but are favourable to the Chinese. Russia is the junior partner in this relationship.

Vietnam is an irritation for China. For centuries the two have squabbled over territory, and unfortunately for both this is the one area to the south which has a border an army can get across without too much trouble – which partially explains the 1,000-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979.

That both countries are nominally ideologically Communist has little to do with the state of their relationship: it is their shared geography that has defined relations. Viewed from Beijing, Vietnam is only a minor threat and a problem that can be managed.

Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course the border is really the Tibetan–Indian border – and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so.

It was long said to be impossible to build a railway through the permafrost, the mountains and the valleys of Tibet. Europe’s best engineers, who had cut through the Alps, said it could not be done. As late as 1988 the travel writer Paul Theroux wrote in his book Riding the Iron Rooster: ‘The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa.’

They bring tourists who support the local economy, they bring modernity to an ancient and impoverished land, a huge improvement in living standards and healthcare, and they bring the potential to carry Tibetan goods out to the wider world.

the Free Tibet movement claims that in the wider cultural Tibetan region Tibetans are now a minority, but the Chinese government says that in the official Tibetan Autonomous Region more than 90 per cent of people are Tibetan.

Finally the clock hand moves round past the borders with Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (all mountainous) before reaching the border with Kazakhstan, which leads back round north to Mongolia. This is the ancient Silk Route, the trade land bridge from the Middle Kingdom to the world. Theoretically it’s a weak spot in China’s defence, a gap between the mountains and desert; but it is far from the heartland, the Kazakhs are in no position to threaten China, and Russia is several hundred miles distant.

There was, is and always will be trouble in Xinjiang. The Uighurs have twice declared an independent state of ‘East Turkestan’, in the 1930s and 1940s.

‘One Belt, One Road’. The road is, oddly enough, a sea route – the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods; the belt is the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ – a land-based route formed from the old Silk Route, which goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southwards to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar, Pakistan.

Uighur separatists lack a Dalai Lama-type figure upon whom foreign media can fix, and until recently their cause was almost unknown around the world. China tries to keep it that way, ensuring it stays on good terms with as many border countries as possible in order to prevent any organised independence movement from having supply lines or somewhere to which it could fall back.

The Chinese look at society very differently from the West. Western thought is infused with the rights of the individual; Chinese thought prizes the collective above the individual. What the West thinks of as the rights of man, the Chinese leadership thinks of as dangerous theories endangering the majority, and much of the population accepts that, at the least, the extended family comes before the individual.

I was treated to a stern lecture about how the full imposition of ‘what you call human rights’ in China would lead to widespread violence and death and was then asked, ‘Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?’

labour costs are rising in China and it is being rivalled by Thailand and Indonesia, for price if not volume.

The Chinese were great sea voyagers, especially in the fifteenth century, when they roamed the Indian Ocean; Admiral Zheng He’s expedition ventured as far as Kenya. But these were money-making exercises, not power projections, and they were not designed to create forward bases that could be used to support military operations.

It will take another thirty years (assuming economic progression) for China to build naval capacity to seriously challenge the most powerful seaborne force the world has ever seen – the US navy. But in the medium to short term, as it builds, and trains, and learns, the Chinese navy will bump up against its rivals on the seas;

Free access to the Pacific is firstly hindered by Japan. Chinese vessels emerging from the Yellow Sea and rounding the Korean Peninsula would have to go through the Sea of Japan and up through La Perouse Strait above Hokkaido and into the Pacific. Much of this is Japanese or Russian territorial waters and at a time of great tension, or even hostilities, would be inaccessible to China.

Another potential flare-up with Japan centres on the East China Sea’s gas deposits. Beijing has declared an ‘Air Defence Identification Zone’ over most of the sea, requiring prior notice before anyone else flies through it. The Americans and Japanese are trying to ignore

Below Okinawa is Taiwan, which sits off the Chinese coast and separates the East China Sea from the South China Sea. China claims Taiwan as its twenty-third province, but it is currently an American ally with a navy and air force armed to the teeth by Washington. It came under Chinese control in the seventeenth century but has only been ruled by China for five years in the last century (from 1945 to 1949). Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC) to differentiate it from the People’s Republic of China,

During the 2014 student protests in Hong Kong, one of the reasons the authorities did not quickly batter them off the streets – as they would have done in, for example, Ürümqi – was that the world’s cameras were there and would have captured the violence. In China much of this footage would be blocked, but in Taiwan people would see what the rest of the world saw and ask themselves how close a relationship they wanted with such a power. Beijing hesitated; it is playing the long game.

China also intends to become a two-ocean power (Pacific and Indian). To achieve this China is investing in deep-water ports in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – an investment which buys it good relations, the potential for its future navy to have friendly bases to visit or reside in, and trade links back home.

when the Burmese Junta began to slowly open up to the outside world in 2010, it wasn’t just the Chinese who beat a path to their door. The Americans and Japanese were quick to establish better relations, with both President Obama and Prime Minister Abe of Japan going to pay their respects in person.

China will struggle to become agile over the next decade. It could barely manoeuvre the People’s Army’s equipment to help in the aftermath of the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. It mobilised the army, but not their materiel; moving abroad at speed would be an even greater challenge.

A great depression like that of the 1930s could set it back decades. China has locked itself into the global economy. If we don’t buy, they don’t make. And if they don’t make there will be mass unemployment. If there is mass and long-term unemployment, in an age when the Chinese are a people packed into urban areas, the inevitable social unrest could be – like everything else in modern China – on a scale hitherto unseen.

you broke this living space up into numerous sections it would considerably lower its value – especially if the tenants did not all speak the same language and paid the rent in different currencies – but as one home, for one family, it can’t be bettered.

Most of the EU states have a national identity far stronger, more defined, than any American state. It is easy to find a French person who is French first, European second, or one who pays little allegiance to the idea of Europe, but an American identifies with their Union in a way few Europeans do theirs. This is explained by geography, and by the history of the unification of the USA.

Geography had determined that if a political entity could get to and then control the land ‘from sea to shining sea’, it would be a great power, the greatest history has known. Once that power was achieved, the Union would become almost impossible to invade. As we saw with Russia, there is ‘strategic depth’ for a defending force to fall back to. The size of Canada, (and to a lesser extent Mexico) is also an asset, as any hostile power attempting to invade by going through these countries would have incredibly long supply lines.

When the Europeans first began to land and stay in the early seventeenth century, they quickly realised that the east coast of this ‘virgin’ territory was packed with natural harbours and fertile soil. Here was a place where they could live and, unlike their home countries, a place where they hoped they could live freely. Their descendants would go on to deny the native inhabitants their freedom, but that was not the intention of the first settlers. Geography pulled them across the Atlantic in ever greater numbers.

It goes on to outline at some length those causes, and to state (with no hint of slave-owning irony) that it was self-evident that all men were created equal.

In the early 1800s this new country’s leadership still had little idea that it was thousands of miles from the ‘South Sea’ or Pacific.

Its citizens already had access to the Ohio River, just west of the Appalachians, but that led to the Mississippi, whose western bank was controlled by the French all the way down to the city of New Orleans. This gave the French command of American trade heading out to the Old World from the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the vast territory to the west in what is now the American heartland.

France was the possessor and the problem; but the solution, unusually, was not warfare. In 1803 the United States simply bought control of the entire Louisiana Territory from France.

the rivers were the natural conduit for ever-increasing trade, leading to a great port and all using waterborne craft which was, and is, many times cheaper than road travel.

By 1814 the British had gone, and the French had given up on Louisiana. The trick now was to get the Spanish to go. It wasn’t too difficult. The Spanish were exhausted by the war in Europe against Napoleon; the Americans were pushing the Seminole Indian nation into Spanish Florida, and Madrid knew that waves of settlers would be following. In 1819 the Spanish ceded Florida to the USA and with it a massive amount of territory.

Because the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the USA, when Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821 its border was just 200 miles from the port of New Orleans.

Mexico’s population at the time was 6.2 million, the USA’s 9.6 million.

Mexico is not blessed in the American way. It has poor-quality agricultural land, no river system to use for transport, and was wholly undemocratic,

While the infiltration of Texas was going on, Washington issued the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ (named after President James Monroe) in 1823. This boiled down to warning the European powers that they could no longer seek land in the Western Hemisphere, and that if they lost any parts of their existing territory they could not reclaim them. Or else.

The Texas Revolution of 1835–6 drove the Mexicans out, but it was a close-run thing, and had the settlers lost then the Mexican army would have been in a position to march on New Orleans and control the southern end of the Mississippi. It is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of modern history.

In 1867 Alaska was bought from Russia. At the time it was known as ‘Seward’s folly’ after the Secretary of State, William Seward, who agreed the deal. He paid $7.2 million, or 2 cents an acre. The press accused him of purchasing snow, but minds were changed with the discovery of major gold deposits in 1896. Decades later huge reserves of oil were also found.

In 1898 the USA declared war on Spain, routed its military and gained control of Cuba, with Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines thrown in for good measure. They would all come in useful, but Guam in particular is a vital strategic asset and Cuba a strategic threat if controlled by a major power. In 1898 that threat was removed by war with Spain. In 1962 it was removed by the threat of war with the Soviet Union after they blinked first. Today no great power sponsors Cuba and it appears destined to come under the cultural, and probably political, influence of the USA again.

President Theodore Roosevelt was speaking relatively softly – but in essence he sailed a large stick around the world. Sixteen navy battleships from the Atlantic force set out from the USA in December 1907. Their hulls were painted white, the Navy’s peacetime colour, and this impressive example of diplomatic signalling became known as ‘the Great White Fleet’. Over the following fourteen months the fleet called in on twenty ports, including ones in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, China, Italy and Egypt.

America now needed to control the world’s sea lanes, to keep the peace and get the goods to market. They were the ‘last man standing’. The Europeans had exhausted themselves, and their economies, like their towns and cities, were in ruins. The Japanese were crushed, the Chinese devastated and at war with each other, the Russians weren’t even in the capitalist game.

The price was right. In the autumn of 1940 the British had desperately needed more warships. The Americans had fifty spare and so, with what was called the ‘Destroyers for Bases Agreement’, the British swapped their ability to be a global power for help in remaining in the war. Almost every British naval base in the Western Hemisphere was handed over.