Why is China increasing its assertiveness towards Taiwan? Why the Belt and Road initiative? Why the oppression of Uighurs? Why the occupation of Tibet? Why the creation of islands in the South China Sea? It all comes from the Hu Line.Source: Tomaatje12
The historical dangers to China are really internal, I believe. The "Mandate of Heaven" is earned and kept by the ruler(s) who are strong enough to enforce policies and activities that require a central governing authority that can, for example, raise huge levees of laborers (in the old days) to keep the big rivers within their banks. Some parts of the Yellow River run 50-60 feet of the surrounding land owing to the steady deposition of silt that gives the river its name. The banks of the river are really huge earthen levees built and maintained through the authority of the central government. When the ruler(s) become corrupt or incompetent and catastrophe ensues, hundreds of thousands can and have died. The Chinese have never been good at projecting power beyond their borders. The Europeans made inroads in the 1800s because of Chinese weakness. The Communists are just the latest in a parade of internal conquerors who claim the Mandate over the weakness of the Nationalists who had completely exhausted themselves fighting the Japanese. Now, the world is paying a terrible price for the Chinese hubris and overreach with the Corona virus experiments gone awry. This release of such a monstrous killer on the people of the earth -- including China -- not only makes Chernobyl relatively inconsequential as an example of deadly incompetence, but it is a shadow that will never leave the Chinese people. And soon, the inevitable demographic decline will begin taking a toll on the plans of an expansionist overlord class of some 80 million CCP members in a country of 1.4 billion that is growing old before it got rich. It is only a matter of time till the Mandate passes from these terrible men.
"The Chinese have never been good at projecting power beyond their borders."
Are you sure you're not projecting Western behaviour onto China??? Just because European powers colonized the world doesn't mean that China ever had any interest in colonization.
From 1405-1433, Admiral Zheng He lead a massive fleet of over 300 ships, comprised of over 20,000 sailors and military personnel, on a series of voyages as far away as East Africa. But their mission was diplomatic; not one of conquest.
Do you think the Corona virus was a deliberate attempt to cull the elderly and the sickly in China - economic burdens - but it escaped too soon with devastating results?
China will hit a wall soon and suddenly. 1. Their growth was fueled by vast numbers of young people moving off the farm. They are running out if those. 2. They have built so much infrastructure so fast that it will all start to need repair & replacement at the same time. 3. They are building a vast military, which takes wealth away from productive uses. 4. They will need more social spending since there are a higher percentage of elderly people than before, & familes can't support them. 5. They are starting to regulate industry more because people won't tolerate the pollution & bad working conditions. In other words, the reckless growth of recent decades will come to an end. The U.S. has the same problems, but I think they will hit China harder.
1. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. But its goal is to lift its remaining 600 million people out of poverty by 2035--more than enough people for growth.
2. Most of China's infrastructure is brand new. It won't have to repair or replace its infrastructure for another 20-30 years. But the eventual repair/replacement will increase GDP as it will result in the creation of value added infrastructure.
3, China's military expenditure only looks large because the its economy has grown so much. As a share of GDP, China's military expenditures have fallen to from 2.48% of GDP (1992) to 1.89% (2019).
4. A smaller population is good for China and the world. China has been planning for an aging and declining population for decades--this was the purpose of its one-child policy. The problem isn't social spending--governments 'print' FIAT money out of thin air. The issue is serving a growing population of seniors with a declining workforce. This can be achieved by increasing PRODUCTIVITY. This is why China is investing heavily in AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, advanced manufacturing, etc.--all areas that will allow MORE work with FEWER people.
5. Increasing living standards is the name of the game. Why wouldn't China want to increase the quality of life of its citizens???
China's concern with Taiwan has a lot more to do with the fact that they have a historical claim on the country's title, rather than geography alone. If Taiwan were not the exiled previous government, you'd see only as much chinese posturing as against Vietnam or the Philippines. Which while certainly not friendly, would not be at the level of an existential threat (politically) that it treats Taiwan as.
I heard that China acquired (or tried to acquire) lands in the North-East of Iceland (thus resolving the Icelandic banking fiasco), as it seeks to secure a deep-sea port on the rim of the melting Artic Sea, at the gates of the Atlantic Ocean towards Europe and the Americas. Is this correct ?
A molten ice cap will create a new Mare Nostrum : a Mediterranean 2.0 between the richest countries in the world, with ultra-short shipping lanes, short-circuiting the Suez and Panama canals.
Russia stands to be the greatest winner of climate change, as it controls over half of the Arctic perimeter, and a molten permafrost in Siberia will over time create the largest fertile plains on Earth, with plenty of rivers disclosing it to the new Наше море for exporting its mineral and forestry riches.
China desperately needs a strategic counterweight.
That's also the most immediate reason why Trump tried to buy Greenland.
I just read about that following your comment. Crazy! Very interesting... It is interesting to see what countries can do when they become a bit creative and have the means...
If we take the assumption that Chinese people aren't any different from other people and are rational-optimizers geopolitically, we run into many counter-examples of countries (including global powers) being geographically vulnerable from land and sea and yet not having the same compulsion to close all the gaps.
First example: The United States' Gulf and Caribbean coasts. Taiwan is about as far from Mainland China as the Normandy Coast of France is from the Allied staging grounds in England used to invade it during WWII. And the Taiwan Strait, like the English Channel, is notoriously hostile for sailing. The Florida Straits, by contrast, leave the Continental US a stone's throw from Cuba (which was an explicit ally of both the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War), with calm, easily navigable waters between. Staging an invasion across those mere 93 mi (150 km) would be exponentially easier than crossing double that distance across the stormy English Channel or Taiwan Strait. The United States has invaded Cuba its fair share and even run the place for a while after the Spanish-American War, but it hasn't tried such forays since the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion. Why?
Another example: Japan. China keeps trying to peel away Japan's nearest islands. It has historical reasons to be wary of its former invader, certainly. But why isn't Japan similarly focused on securing more buffer zones against China? The insecurity should be mutual. If anything, China is now more of a risk to Japan's territorial integrity than the other way around.
Last example: India. India and China have fought real-actual hot wars in the second-half of the 20th Century, far more recently than Japan and China's WWII fighting. If you count minor border skirmishes, India and China are still drawing blood in the Himalayas today. China is also allies with India's sworn enemy and primary geopolitical adversary, Pakistan, which is nuclear armed, to boot, making that triangular conflict all the more existential. So why isn't India venturing out into the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Andaman Sea, and South China Sea?
Geopolitics is not just geography though, right? You need to account for the network effects of history.
US-Cuba: Cuba doesn't have a good-enough geography to support a population that could threaten the US, hence the threat was USSR missiles.
The US doesn't invade anymore because since the 1800s ideas of national sovereignty make it internationally less acceptable and locally much harder to maintain.
Another factor that likely lowers the temperature in Cuba: the US maintains a military base there at Guantanamo. Probably one reason why it wouldn't close the base or give up the perpetual lease thereto, even if/when the shady, extra-judicial GWOT use-case of the prison there was abandoned.
But certainly one could imagine China emulating the encirclement that the United States has engineered around it in the Pacific by stringing a pearl necklace of bases in Venezuela, Cuba, and neglected Caribbean or Central American countries that opt for Chinese vassalage (or at least non-alignment between the world's two superpowers) for the same reason others have: nominal political nonintervention in the affairs of local autocrats who play ball on core interests like Taiwan, FDI, and the pull of market access to the world's biggest economy. There are already the first signs of this in increased engagement between China and energy-exporter Trinidad and Tobago and the wider China–CELAC Forum.
Once it becomes clear how close to the door China is, Americans may begin to understand the feelings of encirclement and threat that China feels from all the American points of presence in the East and South China Seas. So, perhaps American policy toward the Caribbean will return again to the gunboat diplomacy of the late 19th Century, regardless of 20th Century norms around national sovereignty?
I wonder if we're not buying into the current Chinese strategy as something rational and eternal and even ethically justifiable, when it could just as likely be very historically contingent and a product of the perspective of current Chinese leadership.
And maybe it's actually very irrational. Americans expending a lot of military assets, geopolitical capital, and risk invading Cuba or the Bahamas would seem insane, despite any fundamental geological justification of covering a vulnerable flank. Because nobody believes that Florida would or could be invaded by Russia or China via Cuba. And not even the most Hawkish American leaders would suggest any potential invasion of China from land or sea. Nor would or could tiny Taiwan attempt alone now to recapture China, despite its nominal historical claims (forced into continued existence by CCP doctrine more than anything). The Kennedy Administration wasn't keen on the Soviets placing nuclear missiles on the island, but nobody's going to do that in Taiwan, either. So, where's the actual danger? It's hard to argue that Taiwan (or Hong Kong) even really presented the CCP with a problematic propaganda weakness, given the evident success of the China Model of development on the Mainland.
China is surrounded by enemies or unfriendly countries in a way the US isn't.
More importantly, China considers Taiwan part of China (which it was until recently), and Taiwan is made up of a vast majority of Han. So China wouldn't be eliminating a threat, it would "make itself whole" from their perspective. Vastly different mindset.
One way you can think about it as a different mindset is that China would be much more welcome in Taiwan than the US in Cuba. The former would be considered a reunification (albeit forced), the latter an invasion. Cultural and ethnic reluctance would be much higher in the 2nd case.
I agree with everything up until the last paragraph.
Firstly, we need to not restrict the definition of a legitimated nation-state to only ethno-statehood (in this case, made of Han Chinese). This runs the risk of an ethnic essentialism that wrongly (and, at times, dangerously) suggests that Overseas Chinese all identity with the Han Chinese Mainland above all other ties. (A perverse logic that caused the United States to lock up its own Japanese-American population during WWII). If there are 5-10 million "Huaqiao" living in countries like Thailand and Malaysia, would the Chinese be greeted as liberators, like Hitler unifying the German peoples? Singapore is 75% Chinese. Is it a rightful part of China, too?
Han Taiwanese prior to a generation ago didn't have the lived history of democracy, Western lifestyles, and a growing nationalism pulled by a divergent history from the Mainland and pushed by the CCP's increasingly unattractive regression of the sovereignty of special administrative zones in Hong Kong, Macau, etc. There's increasing evidence that a simple majority of Taiwanese now see themselves as more Taiwanese than Chinese-in-Taiwan. An invasion of Taiwan, with all that would involve, would only be a crucible of nationalistic feelings. Would it be "successful?" Probably. Hong Kongers have had to just accept their fate or leave. Taiwanese would have to do the same. But they wouldn't consider their plight as a reunification, any more than Hong Kongers now do. Maybe it would be very similar to an American occupation of Cuba, either in the first half of the 20th Century or today?
Secondly, remember that the US was already in Cuba, first formally and then neo-colonially, from 1902 through the Revolution. And even today, despite the mutual geopolitical acrimony, embargo, and distinct political-economies, Cuban and Americans aren't really so different, especially given common history as settler-colonial New World countries, centuries of cultural exchange across the Florida Strait, Cuban-Americans (and Hispanics, generally) being such an integral part of the socio-political fabric in the US, and Cubans having diaspora connections.
Calling Tibet a country shows how incompetent you are. Not a single nation recognizes it as such, nor does it have de facto control over a single square meter of land. It fits precisely 0 definitions of a country and no nation would argue otherwise.
Super-interesting how much of a loooong play China is making with the Belt/Road. Americans too busy in-fighting. China's economy was already going to surpass USA's but this is just...
Really enjoyed reading this. Although, I respectfully disagree with your categorisation of Indus and Ganges civilisation as distinct as they are connected by same Indus-Ganges Plain. Creation of Pakistan is a recent phenomenon in India's millennium old civilisation. Geography is destiny and maybe we will see reconciliation between India and Pakistan as they are more alike than unlike.
Also can you elaborate as to what happened to people of other ethnicities living in south and north of North China Plain? Did they also undergo Han-isation as we are witnessing today in Xinjiang? Or were they also Hans?
One thing I have always appreciated that even there were countless wars in Indian history and various empires have risen and fallen, there have been very few instances of civilian/cultural genocide. What can be the reason for this?
For that you need one region that prevails. In China, it’s easy because there’s one single massive plain, which the Han happened to inhabit.
The Indian Subcontinent is very different:
- Indus vs Ganges means 2 elongated plains, connected in one point. Easy to conquer, hard to keep
- India south of the Ganges is mountainous enough to be a different, harder area to conquer, but flat enough that most of it can sustain agriculture
- The farther south you go, the more different the climate is. Kashmir vs Kerala are worlds apart. Hard to adapt civilization to both (hence why Kerala and Tamil areas have been the least politically unified to the north in history)
"The same thing happens with the border with Burma and Thailand: China has a buffer there that is mostly full of mountains and jungle, so it’s very hard to invade. It’s safe." China doesn't have a border with Thailand.
Wow! What a piece! Never have I ever taken notes while reading a substack and I did it for this! Mentioning this in this week's edition of my newsletter!
The historical dangers to China are really internal, I believe. The "Mandate of Heaven" is earned and kept by the ruler(s) who are strong enough to enforce policies and activities that require a central governing authority that can, for example, raise huge levees of laborers (in the old days) to keep the big rivers within their banks. Some parts of the Yellow River run 50-60 feet of the surrounding land owing to the steady deposition of silt that gives the river its name. The banks of the river are really huge earthen levees built and maintained through the authority of the central government. When the ruler(s) become corrupt or incompetent and catastrophe ensues, hundreds of thousands can and have died. The Chinese have never been good at projecting power beyond their borders. The Europeans made inroads in the 1800s because of Chinese weakness. The Communists are just the latest in a parade of internal conquerors who claim the Mandate over the weakness of the Nationalists who had completely exhausted themselves fighting the Japanese. Now, the world is paying a terrible price for the Chinese hubris and overreach with the Corona virus experiments gone awry. This release of such a monstrous killer on the people of the earth -- including China -- not only makes Chernobyl relatively inconsequential as an example of deadly incompetence, but it is a shadow that will never leave the Chinese people. And soon, the inevitable demographic decline will begin taking a toll on the plans of an expansionist overlord class of some 80 million CCP members in a country of 1.4 billion that is growing old before it got rich. It is only a matter of time till the Mandate passes from these terrible men.
You're also ahead of the curve. The things you mention here are core pieces of my next article! Thanks for sharing!
"The Chinese have never been good at projecting power beyond their borders."
Are you sure you're not projecting Western behaviour onto China??? Just because European powers colonized the world doesn't mean that China ever had any interest in colonization.
From 1405-1433, Admiral Zheng He lead a massive fleet of over 300 ships, comprised of over 20,000 sailors and military personnel, on a series of voyages as far away as East Africa. But their mission was diplomatic; not one of conquest.
Do you think the Corona virus was a deliberate attempt to cull the elderly and the sickly in China - economic burdens - but it escaped too soon with devastating results?
No
I think they f***ed up in a lab
I'm not sure how much it matters though
China will hit a wall soon and suddenly. 1. Their growth was fueled by vast numbers of young people moving off the farm. They are running out if those. 2. They have built so much infrastructure so fast that it will all start to need repair & replacement at the same time. 3. They are building a vast military, which takes wealth away from productive uses. 4. They will need more social spending since there are a higher percentage of elderly people than before, & familes can't support them. 5. They are starting to regulate industry more because people won't tolerate the pollution & bad working conditions. In other words, the reckless growth of recent decades will come to an end. The U.S. has the same problems, but I think they will hit China harder.
I'm not convinced that China will hit a wall.
1. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. But its goal is to lift its remaining 600 million people out of poverty by 2035--more than enough people for growth.
2. Most of China's infrastructure is brand new. It won't have to repair or replace its infrastructure for another 20-30 years. But the eventual repair/replacement will increase GDP as it will result in the creation of value added infrastructure.
3, China's military expenditure only looks large because the its economy has grown so much. As a share of GDP, China's military expenditures have fallen to from 2.48% of GDP (1992) to 1.89% (2019).
4. A smaller population is good for China and the world. China has been planning for an aging and declining population for decades--this was the purpose of its one-child policy. The problem isn't social spending--governments 'print' FIAT money out of thin air. The issue is serving a growing population of seniors with a declining workforce. This can be achieved by increasing PRODUCTIVITY. This is why China is investing heavily in AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, advanced manufacturing, etc.--all areas that will allow MORE work with FEWER people.
5. Increasing living standards is the name of the game. Why wouldn't China want to increase the quality of life of its citizens???
China's concern with Taiwan has a lot more to do with the fact that they have a historical claim on the country's title, rather than geography alone. If Taiwan were not the exiled previous government, you'd see only as much chinese posturing as against Vietnam or the Philippines. Which while certainly not friendly, would not be at the level of an existential threat (politically) that it treats Taiwan as.
Very interesting, and masterly done !
I heard that China acquired (or tried to acquire) lands in the North-East of Iceland (thus resolving the Icelandic banking fiasco), as it seeks to secure a deep-sea port on the rim of the melting Artic Sea, at the gates of the Atlantic Ocean towards Europe and the Americas. Is this correct ?
A molten ice cap will create a new Mare Nostrum : a Mediterranean 2.0 between the richest countries in the world, with ultra-short shipping lanes, short-circuiting the Suez and Panama canals.
Russia stands to be the greatest winner of climate change, as it controls over half of the Arctic perimeter, and a molten permafrost in Siberia will over time create the largest fertile plains on Earth, with plenty of rivers disclosing it to the new Наше море for exporting its mineral and forestry riches.
China desperately needs a strategic counterweight.
That's also the most immediate reason why Trump tried to buy Greenland.
I just read about that following your comment. Crazy! Very interesting... It is interesting to see what countries can do when they become a bit creative and have the means...
If we take the assumption that Chinese people aren't any different from other people and are rational-optimizers geopolitically, we run into many counter-examples of countries (including global powers) being geographically vulnerable from land and sea and yet not having the same compulsion to close all the gaps.
First example: The United States' Gulf and Caribbean coasts. Taiwan is about as far from Mainland China as the Normandy Coast of France is from the Allied staging grounds in England used to invade it during WWII. And the Taiwan Strait, like the English Channel, is notoriously hostile for sailing. The Florida Straits, by contrast, leave the Continental US a stone's throw from Cuba (which was an explicit ally of both the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War), with calm, easily navigable waters between. Staging an invasion across those mere 93 mi (150 km) would be exponentially easier than crossing double that distance across the stormy English Channel or Taiwan Strait. The United States has invaded Cuba its fair share and even run the place for a while after the Spanish-American War, but it hasn't tried such forays since the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion. Why?
Another example: Japan. China keeps trying to peel away Japan's nearest islands. It has historical reasons to be wary of its former invader, certainly. But why isn't Japan similarly focused on securing more buffer zones against China? The insecurity should be mutual. If anything, China is now more of a risk to Japan's territorial integrity than the other way around.
Last example: India. India and China have fought real-actual hot wars in the second-half of the 20th Century, far more recently than Japan and China's WWII fighting. If you count minor border skirmishes, India and China are still drawing blood in the Himalayas today. China is also allies with India's sworn enemy and primary geopolitical adversary, Pakistan, which is nuclear armed, to boot, making that triangular conflict all the more existential. So why isn't India venturing out into the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Andaman Sea, and South China Sea?
So many interesting questions!
Geopolitics is not just geography though, right? You need to account for the network effects of history.
US-Cuba: Cuba doesn't have a good-enough geography to support a population that could threaten the US, hence the threat was USSR missiles.
The US doesn't invade anymore because since the 1800s ideas of national sovereignty make it internationally less acceptable and locally much harder to maintain.
Etc
Another factor that likely lowers the temperature in Cuba: the US maintains a military base there at Guantanamo. Probably one reason why it wouldn't close the base or give up the perpetual lease thereto, even if/when the shady, extra-judicial GWOT use-case of the prison there was abandoned.
But certainly one could imagine China emulating the encirclement that the United States has engineered around it in the Pacific by stringing a pearl necklace of bases in Venezuela, Cuba, and neglected Caribbean or Central American countries that opt for Chinese vassalage (or at least non-alignment between the world's two superpowers) for the same reason others have: nominal political nonintervention in the affairs of local autocrats who play ball on core interests like Taiwan, FDI, and the pull of market access to the world's biggest economy. There are already the first signs of this in increased engagement between China and energy-exporter Trinidad and Tobago and the wider China–CELAC Forum.
Once it becomes clear how close to the door China is, Americans may begin to understand the feelings of encirclement and threat that China feels from all the American points of presence in the East and South China Seas. So, perhaps American policy toward the Caribbean will return again to the gunboat diplomacy of the late 19th Century, regardless of 20th Century norms around national sovereignty?
I wonder if we're not buying into the current Chinese strategy as something rational and eternal and even ethically justifiable, when it could just as likely be very historically contingent and a product of the perspective of current Chinese leadership.
And maybe it's actually very irrational. Americans expending a lot of military assets, geopolitical capital, and risk invading Cuba or the Bahamas would seem insane, despite any fundamental geological justification of covering a vulnerable flank. Because nobody believes that Florida would or could be invaded by Russia or China via Cuba. And not even the most Hawkish American leaders would suggest any potential invasion of China from land or sea. Nor would or could tiny Taiwan attempt alone now to recapture China, despite its nominal historical claims (forced into continued existence by CCP doctrine more than anything). The Kennedy Administration wasn't keen on the Soviets placing nuclear missiles on the island, but nobody's going to do that in Taiwan, either. So, where's the actual danger? It's hard to argue that Taiwan (or Hong Kong) even really presented the CCP with a problematic propaganda weakness, given the evident success of the China Model of development on the Mainland.
China is surrounded by enemies or unfriendly countries in a way the US isn't.
More importantly, China considers Taiwan part of China (which it was until recently), and Taiwan is made up of a vast majority of Han. So China wouldn't be eliminating a threat, it would "make itself whole" from their perspective. Vastly different mindset.
One way you can think about it as a different mindset is that China would be much more welcome in Taiwan than the US in Cuba. The former would be considered a reunification (albeit forced), the latter an invasion. Cultural and ethnic reluctance would be much higher in the 2nd case.
I agree with everything up until the last paragraph.
Firstly, we need to not restrict the definition of a legitimated nation-state to only ethno-statehood (in this case, made of Han Chinese). This runs the risk of an ethnic essentialism that wrongly (and, at times, dangerously) suggests that Overseas Chinese all identity with the Han Chinese Mainland above all other ties. (A perverse logic that caused the United States to lock up its own Japanese-American population during WWII). If there are 5-10 million "Huaqiao" living in countries like Thailand and Malaysia, would the Chinese be greeted as liberators, like Hitler unifying the German peoples? Singapore is 75% Chinese. Is it a rightful part of China, too?
Han Taiwanese prior to a generation ago didn't have the lived history of democracy, Western lifestyles, and a growing nationalism pulled by a divergent history from the Mainland and pushed by the CCP's increasingly unattractive regression of the sovereignty of special administrative zones in Hong Kong, Macau, etc. There's increasing evidence that a simple majority of Taiwanese now see themselves as more Taiwanese than Chinese-in-Taiwan. An invasion of Taiwan, with all that would involve, would only be a crucible of nationalistic feelings. Would it be "successful?" Probably. Hong Kongers have had to just accept their fate or leave. Taiwanese would have to do the same. But they wouldn't consider their plight as a reunification, any more than Hong Kongers now do. Maybe it would be very similar to an American occupation of Cuba, either in the first half of the 20th Century or today?
Secondly, remember that the US was already in Cuba, first formally and then neo-colonially, from 1902 through the Revolution. And even today, despite the mutual geopolitical acrimony, embargo, and distinct political-economies, Cuban and Americans aren't really so different, especially given common history as settler-colonial New World countries, centuries of cultural exchange across the Florida Strait, Cuban-Americans (and Hispanics, generally) being such an integral part of the socio-political fabric in the US, and Cubans having diaspora connections.
Tibet gives China control of the headwaters of the Mekong river, hydroelectric power and some control of the flow to downstream countries.
Which gives it power over these countries. Very good point.
Calling Tibet a country shows how incompetent you are. Not a single nation recognizes it as such, nor does it have de facto control over a single square meter of land. It fits precisely 0 definitions of a country and no nation would argue otherwise.
I meant over countries downstream of the Mekong. Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam.
Please no ad hominem. Those get people banned from here. Thank you.
Super-interesting how much of a loooong play China is making with the Belt/Road. Americans too busy in-fighting. China's economy was already going to surpass USA's but this is just...
They've been playing the game for 3000 years, and when they haven't, they've been gutted. So they know to play it.
Yeah, Ray Dalio's said most Chinese leaders are well-versed on China's long history, and how & why their past dynasties ended
您分析的很到位，中国为了自己的利益为这么做的，就像当年的美国西进运动一样 不过我不喜欢各种强权，我是理想化的无国界人士
更多的人应该像你一样！
Really enjoyed reading this. Although, I respectfully disagree with your categorisation of Indus and Ganges civilisation as distinct as they are connected by same Indus-Ganges Plain. Creation of Pakistan is a recent phenomenon in India's millennium old civilisation. Geography is destiny and maybe we will see reconciliation between India and Pakistan as they are more alike than unlike.
Yes the Punjab connection makes them much more of a unit than, say, Thailand vs Burma!
Also can you elaborate as to what happened to people of other ethnicities living in south and north of North China Plain? Did they also undergo Han-isation as we are witnessing today in Xinjiang? Or were they also Hans?
One thing I have always appreciated that even there were countless wars in Indian history and various empires have risen and fallen, there have been very few instances of civilian/cultural genocide. What can be the reason for this?
Han-isation!
It’s been running for thousands of years
No cultural genocide:
For that you need one region that prevails. In China, it’s easy because there’s one single massive plain, which the Han happened to inhabit.
The Indian Subcontinent is very different:
- Indus vs Ganges means 2 elongated plains, connected in one point. Easy to conquer, hard to keep
- India south of the Ganges is mountainous enough to be a different, harder area to conquer, but flat enough that most of it can sustain agriculture
- The farther south you go, the more different the climate is. Kashmir vs Kerala are worlds apart. Hard to adapt civilization to both (hence why Kerala and Tamil areas have been the least politically unified to the north in history)
This is wonderfully put together, thank you!
So much thanks you! This was very interesting and useful to understand a little more about China.
Gracias!
This was such a good post! Thanks for writing it, and really looking forward to the follow-up!
"The same thing happens with the border with Burma and Thailand: China has a buffer there that is mostly full of mountains and jungle, so it’s very hard to invade. It’s safe." China doesn't have a border with Thailand.
Thanks, you're right. It's Laos. Corrected!
Muchas gracias. Very pedagogic!
Again, a great piece! I really enjoy your GeoHistory articles. Thanks!
Wow! What a piece! Never have I ever taken notes while reading a substack and I did it for this! Mentioning this in this week's edition of my newsletter!
What an endorsement. I'm very glad!