Isegoria

The birthplace of Chinese civilization, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), is the region known as the North China Plain, which the Chinese refer to as the Central Plain:

A large, low-lying tract of nearly 160,000 square miles, it is situated below Inner Mongolia, south of Manchuria, in and around the Yellow River and down past the Yangtze River, which both run west to east. It is now one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

The Yellow River basin is subject to frequent and devastating floods, earning the river the unenviable sobriquet “scourge of the Sons of Han.” The industrialization of the region began in earnest in the 1950s and has been rapidly accelerating in the last three decades. The terribly polluted river is now so clogged with toxic waste that it sometimes struggles even to reach the sea. Nevertheless, the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt — the cradle of its civilization, where its people learned to farm, and to make paper and gunpowder.

To the north of this proto-China were the harsh lands of the Gobi Desert in what is now Mongolia. To the west the land gradually rises until it becomes the Tibetan Plateau, reaching to the Himalayas. To the southeast and the south lies the sea.

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The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic, and — crucially — the agricultural center of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite its being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 322 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions that surrounded them, especially Mongolia, with its nomadic bands of violent warriors.

China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defense, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers that — if the Han could reach them and establish control — would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, fully realized only with the annexation of Tibet six decades ago.

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Between 605 and 609 CE, the Grand Canal, centuries in the making and today the world’s longest man-made waterway, was extended and finally linked the Yellow River to the Yangtze.

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It took several million slaves five years to do the work, but the ancient problem of how to move supplies south to north had been solved — but not the problem that exists to this day, that of flooding.

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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. The prosperity engendered by trade has made coastal cities such as Shanghai wealthy, but that wealth has not been reaching the countryside. This has added to the massive influx of people into urban areas and accentuated regional differences.

In the eighteenth century, China reached into parts of Burma and Indochina to the south, and Xinjiang in the northwest was conquered, becoming the country’s biggest province.

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But, 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; but for the Han, the buffer was worth the trouble, even more so after the fate that befell the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the coming of the Europeans.

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A few outside observers thought the postwar years might bring liberal democracy to China. It was wishful thinking akin to the naive nonsense Westerners wrote during the early days of the recent Arab Spring, which, as with China, was based on a lack of understanding of the internal dynamics of the people, politics, and geography of the region.

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By the end of the 1990s it had recovered from the shock of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, regained Hong Kong and Macau from the British and Portuguese, respectively, and could look around its borders, assess its security, and plan for its great move out into the world.

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