The population of Manchuria is 100 million and growing; in contrast, the Russian Far East has only seven million people and no indications of population growth.
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Indeed, the recent Western sanctions against Russia due to the crisis in Ukraine have driven Russia into massive economic deals with China on terms that help keep Russia afloat, but are favorable to the Chinese. Russia is the junior partner in this relationship.
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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 that has a border an army can get across without too much trouble—which partially explains the thousand-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979. However, as China’s military prowess grows, Vietnam will be less inclined to get drawn into a shooting match and will either cozy up even closer to the Americans for protection or quietly begin shifting diplomatically to become friends with Beijing.
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The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese-Indian border before descending to become the Karakoram Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. This is nature’s version of a Great Wall of China, or—looking at it from New Delhi’s side—the Great Wall of India. It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet off from each other both militarily and economically.
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China claims the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, India says China is occupying Aksai Chin; but despite pointing their artillery at each other high up on this natural wall, both sides have better things to do than reignite the shooting match that broke out in 1962, when a series of violent border disputes culminated in vicious large-scale mountain fighting.
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Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon.
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If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as “China’s Water Tower.” China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the United States, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.
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In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army began building roads into Tibet, and since then they have helped to bring the modern world to the ancient kingdom; but the roads, and now railways, also bring the Han.
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.” The Kunlun separated Xinjiang province from Tibet, for which Theroux gave thanks: “That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more.” But the Chinese built it. Which, perhaps, only they could have done. The line into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, was opened in 2006 by the then Chinese president Hu Jintao. Now passenger and goods trains arrive from as far away as Shanghai and Beijing, four times a day, every day.
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Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian, and Uighur; now all three are majority Han Chinese, or approaching the majority. So it will be with Tibet.
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Just as the Americans looked west, so do the Chinese, and just as the iron horse brought the European settlers to the lands of the Comanche and the Navajo, so the modern iron roosters are bringing the Han to the Tibetans.
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Southeast of this Kazakh border is the restive “semiautonomous” Chinese province of Xinjiang and its native Muslim population of the Uighur people, who speak a language related to Turkish.
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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. They watched the collapse of the Russian Empire result in their former Soviet neighbors in the stans becoming sovereign states, were inspired by the Tibetan independence movement, and many are now again calling to break away from China.
Interethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to more than two hundred deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of “One Belt, One Road.” The road is, oddly enough, the sea route: the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods, the belt is the “Silk Road Economic Belt,” a land-based route based on the old Silk Route that goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southward to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar in Pakistan. In late 2015, China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which “the belt and the road” will be connected.
Most of the new towns and cities springing up across Xinjiang are overwhelmingly populated by Han Chinese attracted by work in the new factories in which the central government invests. A classic example is the city of Shihezi, eighty-five miles northwest of the capital, Ürümqi. Of its population of 650,000, it is thought that at least 620,000 are Han. Overall, Xinjiang is reckoned to be 40 percent Han, at a conservative estimate—and even Ürümqi itself may now be majority Han, although official figures are difficult to obtain and not always reliable due to their political sensitivity.
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In early 2016, local government officials said that deradicalization efforts had “markedly weakened” the nascent Islamist movement. However, given that the Turkish army said it had arrested 324 suspected jihadists from Xinjiang en route to Syria in 2015, that seems unlikely.