纽约时报：中国国力的地缘因素

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非常明显，中国的地理环境得天独厚，但人们在讨论该国的经济活力和民族自信时往往会忽视这一点。然而，这一点非常重要：它意味着，中国将处于地缘政治的中心位置，即便该国的世界强国之路不一定是一帆风顺的。
今天，中国和一个世纪前的美国一样野心勃勃，但原因完全不同。中国没有通过传教的方式介入世界事务，并试图传播一种意识形态或一种政府体制。相反，为了支持其庞大人口不断提升的生活水平，中国需要确保能源、金属和战略矿产的安全，正是这种需要推动了它的行动。为了完成这项任务，中国在那些富有其养活国内人口所必需的资源的地方——不论是邻国还是相隔甚远的区域——建立了对自己有利的权力关系。
仅仅通过确保其经济上的需求，中国就正在改变东半球权力的平衡，这必然会对美国产生强烈影响。在陆地和海洋，由于中国在地图上的有利位置，北京的影响力正在扩散——从中亚到中国南海海域，从俄罗斯远东地区到印度洋。中国是一个正在崛起的陆地强国，并且，正如拿破仑的名言所说，这种国家的政策与其地理是一脉相承的。
在中国国内，新疆和西藏是两个其居民DIZHI政府拉拢的主要地区。这两个地区种族民族主义的紧张局势使中国与周边国家的关系变得复杂。
为了保住新疆以及该地所埋藏的石油、天然气、铜矿和铁矿，北京数十年来不断让内地的汉族人迁入该地。西藏高原富含铜矿和铁矿，且该地在中国领土中占据了很大比重。中国没有西藏，就好像是一个人没有臀部——而印度就会在自己的次大陆权力基地上添上一个北部地带。正因为如此，中国非常害怕西藏自治，并且疯狂修建穿越该区域的公路和铁路。
新疆和西藏处于中国的合法边界之内，但中国政府与这两个省的人民之间的紧张关系表明，北京要超越汉族核心地区来扩张其影响力，势必会遇到阻力。
即便中国的边界看起来很稳固，但该国的外形使它看起来好像存在导致国家不完整的危险——最初的大中华区（Greater China）的某些部分好像曾经被分离了出去。
中国的北部边境线环绕蒙古——一块看起来像是曾经从中国背部咬去的广袤领土。蒙古是世界上人口密度最低的国家之一（面积156万平方公里，人口却仅280万），目前在人口上正受到相邻的中国城市文明的威胁。由于中国曾经为了获取更多的耕地而征服过外蒙古，北京再次摆出征服蒙古的姿态，尽管是通过获取其自然资源——石油、煤炭、铀矿以及富饶而空旷的大草原——这种间接的方式。
蒙古北部和中国东北三省的北部是俄罗斯远东地区，这儿有着两倍于欧洲的广袤土地，人口稀少且数量不断缩减，天然气、石油、木材、钻石和黄金资源储量丰富。和蒙古一样，俄罗斯害怕的不是中国军队某一天会入侵或正式吞并俄罗斯远东地区，而是中国的人口和企业对该地区的控制正在逐渐加强。在未来，随着中国国力的增强，我们可以想象，美国可能会与俄罗斯合作建立战略联盟从而与这个中部王国相抗衡。
中国的影响力还正在向东南方向扩展。事实上，由于东南亚各国相对弱小，大中华区的出现受到的阻力最小。
相对来说，基本上没有什么地理屏障将越南、老挝、泰国和缅甸这些国家与中国隔离开来，一个以湄公河流域为中心并且通过公路与河流将印度支那的所有国家联结起来的势力范围得以形成，可以将中国云南省的昆明看作是这一势力范围的自然首都。由于这一区域是作为一个整体而存在的，北京已经在某些方面采取了分而治之的策略。在过去，它分别与东盟（东南亚国家联盟）的每个国家进行谈判，而不是与作为一个单位的所有国家进行谈判。中国与东盟新近达成的自由贸易区协定可以说明，中国是如何继续发展与其南部邻国的有利可图的关系的。它将东盟作为一个销售高价中国制造品、收购廉价农产品的市场。
在东南亚，由于美国的权力鼎盛时期已经过去了，而中国的权力正在崛起，该地域的国家越来越相互合作，以缓解北京分而治之的策略。例如，印度尼西亚、马来西亚和新加坡已联合起来打击海盗。这些国家变得越自立，它们受中国崛起的威胁就越少。
中亚、蒙古、俄罗斯远东地区和东南亚是受中国影响的自然地带。但它们的政治边界不太可能会发生改变。而朝鲜半岛的情况则有所不同。当然，没有人真的认为中国会吞并朝鲜半岛的任何部分。但是，尽管中国支持金正日的斯大林式的政权，它依然有计划可以让朝鲜半岛脱离金的统治。北京希望最终向半岛派遣在华的成千上万名北朝鲜的叛逃人员，使之可以建立一个亲华的政治基础，从而使中国逐步从经济上接管该地区。
这就是为什么北京会更愿意看到在北朝鲜形成一个更加现代而专制的国家——这样一个国家会在中国和南朝鲜充满活力的中产阶级民主国家（韩国）之间建立一个缓冲区。我们很容易做出这样的设想，未来韩国将会被纳入大中华区，而美国在东北亚陆地上的影响力将会降低。
中国在陆地上的空前强大在一定程度上应归功于中国外交官，他们近几年一直忙于解决该国与各中亚共和国、俄罗斯以及其他邻国之间的许多边界争端。
中国的海岸线条件和其大陆内部一样得天独厚，但是，它在海上所面临的敌对环境要比陆地上严重得多。中国海军所称的“第一岛链”——即朝鲜半岛、千岛群岛、日本（包括琉球群岛）、台湾、菲律宾、印度尼西亚和澳大利亚，令他们头疼不已。中国已经卷入了对中国东海和南海能源丰富的海底区域的各种争端中：与日本存在钓鱼岛/尖阁群岛之争，与菲律宾和越南存在南沙群岛之争。这类纠纷可以让北京在国内激起民族主义情绪，但对中国海军战略家来说，这幅海景大体还是非常严峻的。
对于这种备受局限的感觉，中国有时会采取侵略性的回应方式。例如，2009年3月，一批中国海军船在中国南部海域骚扰正在公开执行任务的美国“无暇”号侦查船。
当然，中国不会很快攻击美国的航母，而且，要想直接在军事上挑战美国，它仍然还有很长的路要走。但中国旨在沿着其海岸线发展这样的能力，即在美国海军无论何时何地想进入第一岛链和中国沿海之间的地方时对其加以劝阻。由于塑造自己对手的行为的能力是权力的本质，这一证据可以表明大中华区正在从海洋和陆地上崛起。
台湾的未来对于大中华区的出现至关重要。如果台湾回到中国大陆的怀抱，那么中国海军在与第一岛链对峙时会忽然处于一个有利的战略位置。根据2009年兰德公司的一项研究，到2020年，美国将不再能够保护台湾免于中国的攻击。该报告认为，到时中国在台湾海峡发生的一场战争中能够打败美国。

中国还准备不仅从军事上，还在经济和社会方面包围台湾。大约30%的台湾出口进入中国。每周台湾与大陆之间有270个商业航班。……大陆对台湾的整合可能会增加；然而，它会如何演变是不确定的，而且它的演变对该区域大国政治的未来格局而言将非常关键。
如果美国轻易放弃台湾，那么日本、韩国、菲律宾、澳大利亚以及太平洋地区其他的美国盟友会开始怀疑华盛顿承诺（保卫西太平洋）的分量。这可能会鼓励这些国家向中国靠拢，从而使一个势力真正覆盖东半球的大中华区得以出现。
除了把应对台湾的力量集中起来，中国海军在南海以及中国通向印度洋和世界油气运输路线的门户中布置更多的军事力量。在未来几十年里，中国南海可能会成为“亚洲的地中海”和政治地理中心。
但是，中国在“亚洲地中海”及其以外的海域布置军事力量的努力，存在一个核心矛盾。一方面，中国似乎打算拒绝美国船只随意进入其沿海海域。另一方面，它仍然不能保护其在海上的通信线路，这会使其对美国军舰的任何攻击都徒劳无功，因为美国海军可以通过在太平洋和印度洋中阻截中国船只从而轻易地切断中国的能源供给。中国并没有直接对抗美国，而是企图适当地影响美国的行为从而避免发生对抗。
那么，美国能否在避免与中国发生冲突的前提下，维护亚洲地区的稳定、保护其亚洲盟友并限制大中华区的出现？
相较于下面的两种做法：不惜一切代价阻止大中华区出现和同意中国海军将来可以在“第一岛链”巡逻，加强美国在大洋洲的空军和海军势力是一个折中的方法。这种方法可以确保中国要为其对台湾采取的任何军事行动付出惨重代价。
然而，不论如何，美国对第一岛链的控制正在开始被迫放松。当地居民已逐渐不太同意外国军队驻留在他们中间。而中国的崛起立刻会使北京变得令人生畏而引人入胜——这种矛盾的感情可能会使美国与其太平洋盟国的双边关系变得复杂。在中亚、印度洋、东南亚和西太平洋，大中华区可能正在政治上、经济上或军事上逐渐形成。
与此同时，值得注意的是，正如政治学家罗伯特·罗斯（Robert Ross）在1999年所指出的那样，在军事上，美中关系将比曾经的美苏关系更加稳定。美国海军将持续强于中国海军。
尽管如此，中国的经济和军事力量的增长是一个不争的事实，它在未来几年里会加剧中美之间的紧张局势。用政治学家约翰?米尔斯海默（John Mearsheimer）的话来说，作为西半球霸主的美国会竭力阻止中国成为东半球的霸主。这一论调会成为当代的主旋律。
作者简介：
罗伯特·卡普兰，美国《大西洋》月刊记者，华盛顿新美国安全中心高级研究员。本文的一个更全面的版本在5 / 6月的《外交事务》杂志上。

英文原文：


April 20, 2010
I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor
The Geography of Chinese Power  （黄色部分由译者摘自本文在《外交事务》杂志上的全文）
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
China’s blessed geography is so obvious a point that it tends to get overlooked in discussions of the country’s economic dynamism and national assertiveness.Yet it is essential: It means that China will stand at the hub of geopolitics even if the country’s path toward global power is not necessarily linear.
Today China’s ambitions are as aggressive as those of the United States a century ago, but for completely different reasons. China does not take a missionary approach to world affairs, seeking to spread an ideology or a system of government. Instead, its actions are propelled by its need to secure energy, metals and strategic minerals in order to support the rising living standards of its immense population. To accomplish this task, China has built advantageous power relationships both in contiguous territories and in far-flung locales rich in the resources it requires to fuel its growth.
Simply by securing its economic needs, China is shifting the balance of power in the Eastern Hemisphere, and that must mightily concern the United States. On land and at sea, abetted by China's favorable location on the map, Beijing's influence is emanating and expanding from Central Asia to the South China Sea, from the Russian Far East to the Indian Ocean. China is a rising continental power, and, as Napoleon famously said, the policies of such states are inherent in their geography.
Within the Chinese state, Xinjiang and Tibet are the two principal areas whose inhabitants have resisted China’s pull. Ethnic nationalist tensions in these areas are complicating Beijing's relationships with adjacent states. In order to secure Xinjiang — and the oil, natural gas, copper, and iron ore in its soil — Beijing has for decades been populating it with Han Chinese from the country’s heartland. The mountainous Tibetan Plateau is rich in copper and iron ore and accounts for much of China’s territory. Without Tibet, China would be but a rump--and India would add a northern zone to its subcontinental power base. This is why Beijing views with horror the prospect of Tibetan autonomy and why it is frantically building roads and railroads across the area.
Xinjiang and Tibet fall within China's legal borders, but the Chinese government's tense relations with the peoples of both provinces suggest that as Beijing expands its influence beyond its ethnic Han core, it is bound to encounter resistance.
EVEN WHERE China's borders are secure, the country's very shape makes it appear as though it is dangerously incomplete--as if parts of an original Greater China had been removed.
China’s northern border wraps around Mongolia, a giant territory that looks like it was once bitten out of China’s back. Mongolia has one of the world’s lowest population densities and is now being threatened demographically by an urban Chinese civilization next door.
Having once conquered Outer Mongolia to gain access to more cultivable land, Beijing is poised to conquer Mongolia again, albeit indirectly, through the acquisition of its natural resources——oil, coal, uranium, and rich, empty grasslands.
North of Mongolia and of China’s three northeastern provinces lies Russia’s Far East region, a numbing vastness twice the size of Europe with a meager and shrinking population and large reserves of natural gas, oil, timber, diamonds and gold.
As with Mongolia, the fear is not that the Chinese army will one day invade or formally annex the Russian Far East. It is that Beijing’s demographic and corporate control over the region is steadily increasing. In the future, with China the greater power, the United States might conceivably partner with Russia in a strategic alliance to balance against the Middle Kingdom.
China’s influence is also spreading southeast. In fact, it is with the relatively weak states of Southeast Asia that the emergence of a Greater China is meeting the least resistance.
There are relatively few geographic impediments separating China from Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. The natural capital of a sphere of influence centering on the Mekong River and linking all the countries of Indochina by road and river would be Kunming, in China's Yunnan Province. As for the region as a whole, Beijing has in some respects adopted a divide-and-conquer strategy. In the past, it negotiated with each country in ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) separately, not with all of them as a unit. Even its newly inaugurated agreement on a free-trade area with ASEAN demonstrates how China continues to develop profitable relationships with its southern neighbors. It uses Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) as a market for selling high-value Chinese manufactured goods while buying from it low-value agricultural produce.
As the United States' power in Southeast Asia passes its prime and China's rises, states in the region are increasingly cooperating with one another to mitigate Beijing's divide-and-conquer strategy. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore have banded together against piracy, for example. The more self-reliant these states can become, the less threatened they will be by China's rise.
Central Asia, Mongolia, the Russian Far East and Southeast Asia are natural zones of Chinese influence. But they are also zones whose political borders are not likely to change. The situation on the Korean Peninsula is different. No one really expects China to annex any part of the Korean Peninsula, of course, But although it supports Kim Jong-il’s Stalinist regime, it has plans for the peninsula beyond his reign.
Beijing would like to eventually dispatch there the thousands of North Korean defectors who now are in China so that they could build a favorable political base for Beijing’s gradual economic takeover of the region. This is one reason why Beijing would prefer to see a far more modern, authoritarian state develop in North Korea--such a state would create a buffer between China and the vibrant, middle-class democracy of South Korea.It is easy to conceive of a Korean future within a Greater China and a time when the United States' ground presence in Northeast Asia will diminish.
China's unprecedented strength on land is partly thanks to Chinese diplomats, who in recent years have busily settled many border disputes with Central Asian republics, Russia, and other neighbors.
China is as blessed by its seaboard as by its continental interior, but it faces a far more hostile environment at sea than it does on land.
The Chinese Navy sees little but trouble in what it calls the “first island chain”: the Korean Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Japan (including the Ryukyu Islands), Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia. China is already embroiled in various disputes over parts of the energy-rich ocean beds of the East China Sea and the South China Sea: with Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and with the Philippines and Vietnam over the Spratly Islands. Such disputes allow Beijing to stoke nationalism at home, but for Chinese naval strategists, this seascape is mostly grim.
China’s answer to feeling so boxed in has been aggressive at times — for example when, in March 2009, a handful of Chinese Navy ships harassed the U.S. surveillance ship Impeccable while it was openly conducting operations in the South China Sea.
China is not going to attack a U.S. carrier anytime soon, of course, and it is still a long way from directly challenging the United States militarily. But its aim is to develop such capabilities along its seaboard to dissuade the U.S. Navy from getting between the first island chain and the Chinese coast whenever and wherever it wants. Since the ability to shape one's adversary's behavior is the essence of power, this is evidence that a Greater China is being realized at sea as on land.
MOST IMPORTANT to the advent of a Greater China is the future of Taiwan. If Taiwan returned to the bosom of mainland China, the Chinese navy would suddenly be in an advantageous strategic position vis-à-vis the first island chain.
According to a 2009 RAND study, by the year 2020, the United States will no longer be able to defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack. The Chinese, argues the report, will by that time be able to defeat the United States in a war in the Taiwan Strait.
Beijing is also preparing to envelop Taiwan not just militarily but economically and socially. Some 30 percent of Taiwan's exports go to China. There are 270 commercial flights per week between Taiwan and the mainland.……Increasing integration appears likely; how it comes about, however, is uncertain and will be pivotal for the future of great-power politics in the region. If the United States simply abandons Taiwan to Beijing, then Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and other U.S. allies in the Pacific will begin to doubt the strength of Washington’s commitments. That could encourage those states to move closer to China and thus allow the emergence of a Greater China of truly hemispheric proportions.
In addition to concentrating its forces on Taiwan, the Chinese navy is projecting more power in the South China Sea, China's gateway to the Indian Ocean and to the world's hydrocarbon transport route. The South China Sea may become "the Asian Mediterranean" and the heart of political geography in coming decades.
THERE IS, however, a contradiction at the heart of China's efforts to project power at sea in the Asian Mediterranean and beyond. On the one hand, China seems intent on denying U.S. vessels easy access to its coastal seas. On the other, it is still incapable of protecting its lines of communication at sea, which would make any attack on a U.S. warship futile, since the U.S. Navy could simply cut off Chinese energy supplies by interdicting Chinese ships in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Rather than fight the United States outright, the Chinese seek to influence U.S. behavior precisely so as to avoid a confrontation.
So can the United States work to preserve stability in Asia, protect its allies there, and limit the emergence of a Greater China while avoiding a conflict with Beijing?
Strengthening the U.S. air and sea presence in Oceania would be a compromise approach between resisting a Greater China at all cost and assenting to a future in which the Chinese Navy policed the first island chain. This approach would ensure that China paid a steep price for any military aggression against Taiwan.
However, the United States' hold on the first island chain is beginning to be pried loose anyway. Local populations have become less agreeable to the presence of foreign troops in their midst. And the rise of China makes Beijing intimidating and appealing at once--mixed feelings that could complicate the United States' bilateral relations with its Pacific allies. It is about time. A Greater China may be emerging politically, economically, or militarily in Central Asia, on the Indian Ocean, in Southeast Asia, and in the western Pacific.
In the meantime, it is worth noting that, as the political scientist Robert Ross pointed out in 1999, in military terms, the relationship between the United States and China will be more stable than was the one between the United States and the Soviet Union. The U.S. Navy will continue to be stronger than the Chinese navy.
Still, the very fact of China’s rising economic and military power will exacerbate U.S.-Chinese tensions in the years ahead. To paraphrase the political scientist John Mearsheimer, the United States, the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, will try to prevent China from becoming the hegemon of much of the Eastern Hemisphere. This could be the signal drama of the age.
Robert D. Kaplan is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic. A fuller version of this article appears in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs.
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