China and Iran E-Book

Edward Burman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

China and Iran have featured heavily in the news in recent years. China is both a military and an economic superpower with 20% of the world's population; Iran is suspected of developing nuclear weapons and arming terrorists, and sits on the world's second-largest oil and gas reserves. They are also surprisingly close geographically: Iran is only 700 miles across Afghanistan from China's extreme western border. A 25-year, $100 billion deal to supply China with oil and gas and the large number of Chinese companies operating in Iran shows that the two are moving increasingly close in both political and economic terms. But what does this mean for the rest of the world, and especially for 'the West?' Edward Burman examines how the strikingly similar histories of these two ancient civilisations can inform what the likely consequences for the world of an alliance between them might be.

Leseprobe

CHINA

AND

IRAN

CHINA

AND

IRAN

Parallel History, Future Threat?

EDWARD BURMAN

First published 2009

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © Edward Burman, 2009

The right of Edward Burman to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9661 0

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Introduction

Maps

Part I:

The Seeds of Resentment

Chapter 1:

Iran to ‘East Turkestan’

Chapter 2:

Parallel Modern History

Chapter 3:

Routes to Modernisation

Chapter 4:

History in Popular Art

Part II:

The Convergence of the Twain

Chapter 5:

Parallel Needs

Chapter 6:

Mutual Interest in the Twenty-first Century

Chapter 7:

Future Threat

Part III:

Scenarios 2030-2050

Chapter 8:

Drivers of Future Alliances

Chapter 9:

Scenarios

Epilogue

Bibliography

Introduction

Two questions recur frequently in strategic thinking about the world in the twenty-first century: first, what will be China’s role as it reassumes its traditional importance in world affairs; and, second, what will be the role of Iran? Yet these questions are rarely considered in tandem.

This book will show how these apparently diverse and distant countries – actually only 700 miles apart across Afghanistan as the crow flies – are in fact profoundly similar, and how the forces that shaped their present forms were driven by a potent blend of admiration for and resentment towards Western imperialism. For each has been conditioned over the past 150 years by an on-off love-hate relationship with Western political ideologies, and in each case development and modernisation have been characterised by spurts of economic and political reform based on European and American ideas alternating with outbursts of anti-colonial and, later, anti-American sentiment. At present, despite the presence of US and EU sanctions, military expenditure and technological sophistication in each country are on the rise; in the near future, as demand-driven conflict over natural resources such as oil and gas increases, China and Iran are likely to become closer allies. The initial signs are already visible. Several key long-term deals for the development of oil and gas fields and supplies to China have been signed over the past few years, one of which alone – as we shall see later – is worth $100 billion over a twenty-five-year period; in return, there is increasing trade in Chinese-made computers, cars and domestic appliances, and several hundred Chinese companies now operate in Iran beyond the oil and gas fields. Plans for improved links by sea, road, railway and pipeline are being implemented. Yet outside specialised sources, perhaps temporarily blinded by the focus on Afghanistan and Iraq, the Western world seems oblivious to this growing partnership. This book seeks to explain the consequences of this important shift in geopolitical alliances.

China and Iran, or Persia, as it was known until 1935, are both countries whose people nurture a sense of their long and proud history. In its most ancient form, the Persian language dates to the Achaemenian Period, between 550 and 330 BC, when it appeared in cuneiform inscriptions, overlapping with the evolution of classical Chinese during the Spring and Autumn Period of the Eastern Zhou dynasty from 771 to 481 BC.1 At that time, the area of the Persian Empire was much greater than that of China, nearly as vast as its Chinese counterpart at its territorial zenith under the Mongols over a thousand years later – when the ‘Chinese’ empire comprehended Persia as part of the Ilkhanate. When the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great (r.550–529 BC) presented himself to the Babylonians as ‘king of the four quarters’,2 he was enunciating a concept akin to that of the Chinese emperors who thought of the furthest extent of their central and universal kingdom in terms of the ‘four seas’. Under his successor Darius the Great (r.522–485 BC), Achaemenid Persia exercised influence over the entire area between East and West, comprising north-western India, Afghanistan, much of southern Russia, and satrapies as far west as Thrace and Libya. It was Darius who organised the empire into twenty provinces each ruled over by a governor known as the satrap, and introduced a system of tribute remarkably similar to that of the later Chinese Empire.3 This is something usually overlooked in discussions of the modern ‘Iranians’, who resent being associated with Arabs and also dislike being compared as a nation to Iraq (a very recent coinage as the name of a country, in 1920, deriving from the Farsi phrase ēr āk, meaning ‘lower Iran’); after all, King of Babylon was one of Cyrus’s many titles.

China vaunts a longer history, as much as five thousand years’ worth, although documentary evidence dates from the ninth century BC. It is indisputable, however, that Chinese civilisation has evolved over a much longer period than that and its influence on neighbouring countries including Japan, Korea and Vietnam was profound and long-lasting. The Confucian classics which are the basis of this civilisation were composed around 500 BC, and the first empire dates from 221 BC, when the king of one of seven rival Warring States, the Qin, managed by conquest and annexation to create a single, stable polity and establish himself as the first emperor, Qin Shihuang, standardising the written script and setting up a strong central administration which informs China even today (had he heard of Darius the Great?). Thereafter it was ruled as a single empire, sometimes contracting and sometimes expanding, reaching its greatest extent as a Chinese empire in the eighteenth century. The political vision of the modern republic, deriving from the ideals of Emperor Qianlong (r.1735–1795) and the first president, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), was one of a single nation comprising the ‘five peoples’ of Han, Mongol, Tibetan, Hui and Manchu united within a territory much larger than that of Qin Shihuang.

Today, a much smaller but still vast Iran (nearly seven times the size of the United Kingdom) has a population of about 68 million, all Muslim save tiny minorities of Baha’i, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians, having doubled since the last Shah’s time. By contrast, China (which is in turn over six times the size of Iran) has anywhere between 100 and 150 million Muslims. Officially there are only 20 million, but this is taken to mean practising Muslims; if, however, we include what might be defined ‘cultural Muslims’ – that is men and women of Islamic background who accept some of the basic cultural elements of Islam in their daily lives but do not participate in public prayers in the mosques – then the number is well over 100 million.

In the ancient past, links between the two countries were strong. In one of the few detailed studies of the cross-influence of the two countries, Berthold Laufer, an early twentieth-century German-trained orientalist who knew all the relevant languages (including Chinese, Persian, Sanskrit, Mongolian and Tibetan), explained a little-known role of Persia:

We now know that Iranian peoples once covered an immense territory, extending all over Chinese Turkistan, migrating into China, coming into contact with Chinese, and exerting a profound influence on nations of other stock, notably Turks and Chinese. The Iranians were the great mediators between the West and the East, conveying the heritage of Hellenistic ideas to central and eastern Asia and transmitting valuable plants and goods of China to the Mediterranean area.4

Then, as now, the inhabitants and traders of both countries were extremely pragmatic – ‘utilitarian’ is the word Laufer uses – in the ideas and products they decided to use or disseminate. The means of dissemination was the Silk Road linking East and West through Iran, which will be discussed below.

In the preface to the first book ever written about the Chinese Muslims, Islam in China: A Neglected Problem (1910), Marshall Broomhall observed that the ‘accessible Moslem population of China is larger than the Moslem population of Egypt, Persia, or Arabia’.5 This has not changed. There is, however, one important difference. In Iran the population is mostly Shi’a; only around nine per cent of the population is Sunni, and was forcibly returned to a unified religious stance by the events of the Revolution in 1978–9. In China there are wide and significant differences. Chinese Muslims do not constitute a single bloc either in time or in space. In terms of time, there have been several waves of influence and immigration, most notably the first influx as Islam spread eastwards in the early centuries of its history, and a second, mainly Sufi influx in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In terms of space, there are ten different Muslim minority groups, which Sun Yat-sen conflated into the Hui in his rhetoric of the ‘five peoples’, mostly with a strong geographical focus. Two groups are the largest and most visible, the Hui themselves, who are found throughout China, and the Uyghurs, who are concentrated in Xinjiang, followed by the Kazakhs and seven smaller groups of Dongxiang, Kyrgyz, Salar, Tajik, Uzbek, Bonan and Tatar Muslims. As we shall see, there are also wide variations in religious practice and language between these groups. Yet their deepest loyalty is to the Islamic faith and a sense of kinship with other Muslim peoples, and, as one of the world’s leading experts on Muslims in China has expressed it, although compared with the total population of China they are relatively few ‘they play a role disproportionate to their numbers in influencing relations with Central Asia.’6 Here, Central Asia stands for a vast region of common interest and influence which extends from the strongly Muslim Chinese provinces of Gansu, Ningxia and Xinjiang to Iran, Turkmenistan and western Kazakhstan.7 For China and Iran are physically linked by a crescent of Muslim nations with populations which correspond to the various minorities within China – one group consisting of Kazakhstan, Kygrystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, together with a second group consisting of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the south – with the Uyghurs placed strategically between the groups.

In recent years, China has moved gradually but ineluctably into closer relations with the ex-Soviet nations through membership, together with Russia itself, of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in a clear attempt to diminish and restrict American influence in Central Asia. Xu Jian, a foreign policy specialist at the China Institute of International Studies, argues that ‘increasing regionalism is an important way to restrain American hegemonism.’8 Observers admitted to the SCO include Pakistan (predominantly Sunni although twenty per cent of the population is Shi’a) whose relationship with China is considered to be the ‘most stable and durable element of Chinese foreign relations’9 and also India, where there are around 170 million Muslims with a dominant Persian and Sufi heritage. India and Pakistan have a common ‘Persian’ heritage of language shared in vocabulary and script between Farsi, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi, the latter three of which are derived from the former and are widely spoken in both countries and also in Afghanistan (the official language of Tajikistan, Tajik, is another variant of Farsi, though now written in Cyrillic script).10

Iran itself also has observer status in the SCO, and could become a full member when relations with China – the main force behind the organisation – develop in future years and present controversies over its nuclear policies are overcome by effective full membership of the nuclear club. Member states and observers of the SCO share problems of economics, defence and terrorism, but especially of future energy supply and demand. They also share fears of each other: China and Russia have many good reasons to be suspicious of one another, while other members remember the very recent Soviet domination of their territories. China and Iran do not have these difficulties, but rather a common, distant background. In coming years, pressure on the supply of oil and natural gas is likely to increase rather than decrease suspicions and resentments, and also to increase rather than decrease the number of such previously unimaginable partnerships as that between China and Iran. This may sound odd, or at first sight implausible. But if we think of some of the stranger partnerships formed in opposition to American hegemony, such as those between Russia and Iran, China and Pakistan or China and Sudan, then we will see that this is not the case. In three or four decades much could change, and the aim of this book is to consider possible scenarios for the future based on an examination of past and present.

Oddly enough, there have only been two books in English dealing with China and Iran together. The first was A. H. H. Abidi’s China, Iran, and the Persian Gulf, published in 1982, most of which deals with relations between the two countries during the reign of the last Shah and in the first two years of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic. The second is John Garver’s more recent academic study China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World, published in 2007. The focus of Garver’s scholarly work – in spite of its title – is very much on the impact of relations between these countries on the United States and its foreign policy, and on such problems as China’s possible response to an American attack on Iran. Neither of those books considers the future geopolitical consequences of Chinese-Persian relations per se.

This book is not only about China and Iran, for that relationship will succeed or fail against the backdrop of what one futurologist has imagined as a ‘time of extremism, religious belligerence and suicidal terrorism’11 driven by a wide range of problems such as global warming, the Islamic resurgence, terrorism, regional warfare, the depletion of oil and conflicts due to population increase.

Notes

1. Browne, Literary History of Persia, p. 7; Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual, Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 21–2.

2. Quoted in Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, p. 51.

3. See the excellent summary of the conquests of Darius, in Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire, Chapter X (pp. 135–51).

4. Laufer, ‘Sino-Iranica: Chinese contributions to the history of civilization in ancient Iran’, p. 185.

5. Broomhall, Islam in China: A Neglected Problem, pp. ix-x.

6. Gladney, ‘Central Asia and China: Transnationalization, Islamization, and Ethnicization’, p. 435.

7. The Economist has referred to Xinjiang ironically as ‘Chinastan’ (4 September 2008).

8. Quoted, and translated from Chinese, by Gries, ‘China Eyes the Hegemon’, p. 408.

9. Garver, Protracted Contest; Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century, p. 187

10. In 1977 I had the amusing experience of travelling through the deserts of south-eastern Iran, near Zabol and the frontier with Pakistan, with a Tajik-speaking geologist: I could read aloud the consonants on road signs and guess at the pronounciation (painters of the hand-painted signs didn’t bother to use vowel-signs to indicate vowels), and he then recognised the place-names from the sound and sometimes knew the route; in fact I had already had a similar experience three years earlier in Algeria when French road signs were suddenly abolished and taxi drivers who spoke Arabic couldn’t always read it.

11. Martin, The Meaning of the 21st Century, p. 5.

Maps

1. Near East, Middle East and Far East.

2. Turkestan: East and West.

3. Countries bordering the Caspian Sea.

4. The Silk Road.

5. The member states of ECO (Economic Cooperation Organization).

PART I

The Seeds of resentment

Resentment seems to have been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only. It is the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence. It prompts us to beat off the mischief which is attempted to be done to us, and to retaliate that which is already done; Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, 1759

I should like a flagstaff in front of the house, but that would be resented, for there is a tradition that this implies territorial rights. Sir Arnold Wilson, S. W. Persia: Letters and Diary of a Young Political Officer, 1907–1914, 1942

Chapter 1

Iran to ‘East Turkestan’

The geographical range of this book extends from the modern nation known as Iran to the Chinese province of Xinjiang. It comprises the huge, sometimes ambiguous and often misunderstood area between Europe and Asia, between West and East, which has fallen foul of modern definitions. Indeed, its cities and provinces often slip into history briefly before disappearing again, as George Curzon noted in 1889 when he wrote of the beautiful Silk Road oasis of Merv (once in Persia, and now in Turkmenistan) that it was ‘difficult to realise that a place which less than a decade ago was pronounced to be the key of the Indian Empire is now an inferior wayside station on a Russian line of rail.’1 For our purposes, it is a single area whose coherence may have an impact on the future of world power – as it has often had in the past. We will follow the wisdom of Herodotus, who over two thousand years ago questioned the need to assign the three different names Asia, Europe and Libya (i.e. Africa) to ‘a tract which is in reality one’, which according to the Greek historian had no obvious boundaries.2 Instead of such simplicity we are saddled with expressions like Far East, Middle East, Central Asia and Inner Asia which sometimes obfuscate rather than clarify. Then there are even more confusing coinages such as Transcaspia, and evocative names like Oxiana and Greater Khorassan. So let us begin with some definitions.

Near East, Middle East and Far East

These geographical expressions are often used in everyday conversation and in the media in different ways. The ‘Far East’ is perhaps the easiest to define: in the language of the British Empire, it was used to mean all countries east of India. Today, India and its neighbours such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Myanmar are sometimes added to the core countries of China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, and Cambodia, together with island nations such as Indonesia and the Philippines. More usually, it is used to refer to the countries comprising South Asia, East Asia and South-East Asia.

The ‘Middle East’ is a much more difficult and abused concept. Nowadays we tend to think of it in media terms of a central conflict core of Israel and the Palestinian Territories surrounded by Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon which are often embroiled in the conflict. Since the expression ‘Middle East’ used in this way also refers more loosely to Arab and Islamic nations, it is often extended in one direction to the Gulf and occasionally in the other as far as Morocco – which is actually situated to the west of most European countries (Arthur Koestler noted many years ago that Marrakesh was where ‘the Arabian Nights survive at 8 degrees longitude west of Greenwich’3). In the first sense, it is the area of reference of an influential book like Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is rooted in memories of Arab-Israeli conflicts and the Lebanese Civil War and rarely gets further east than the literary Persia of the fourteenth-century poet Hafez (which is in any case viewed through the prism of Goethe4). This area, together with Turkey and the Balkans, used more accurately to be called the ‘Near East’, a usage which will free up part of the Middle East and make the central argument of this book more comprehensible.

For the purposes of our argument we will use the term the Near East to mean a Christian/Judaic/Islamic area comprising Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. The Middle East will be used – unusually but consistently – to refer to a Muslim bloc comprising Iran, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, and the ‘-istans’: Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. One of the most striking facts for a visitor to Oman is the proximity to and affinity with Pakistan, and even Karachi, in the east, is only a ninety minute flight from Muscat. As if to prove the point, in September 2008, the Pakistan Cricket Board signed a three-year deal to play its home internationals in neighbouring Dubai. The Far East will be used to define the largely Buddhist area comprising Japan and South Korea, the countries of Indo-China, especially Vietnam, and China itself (see Map 1).

At the heart of this huge tripartite region sits what the Persians named Turkestan, the ‘land of the Turks’. This is usually defined as extending from the Caspian Sea in the west to the eastern edge of the Tarim Basin in China, and from the Aral-Irtysh watershed in the north to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan in the south. It therefore comprises much of what has been defined above as the Middle East, to which we will add Iran and the Gulf States. Historically, Turkestan has fallen within the bounds of both the Persian Empire and the Chinese Empire: the entire territory was held by the Achaemenians around 500 BC, then by the Seleucids from 323 to 60 BC; around 200 BC it was divided into Parthia in the west and Bactria in the east. Then, during the Han dynasty, much of Turkestan fell under the sway of China, facilitating the passage of Buddhism from India through eastern Turkestan into China; with the fall of the Han, in AD 220, control swung back to Persia under the Sassanids (AD 226–651). Although with the spread of Islam much of the area came under Arab and later Turkish control, with an interregum of ‘Chinese’ control under the Mongols, the culture of the entire area remained predominantly Persian until the last century. Persian was one of the three official languages of the Mongol court in Peking, and many inhabitants of the Soviet Islamic Republics continued to speak it between themselves. More recently, most of the area fell within the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union.

Conventionally, it has been divided into Western Turkestan (also known as Russian Turkestan, comprising Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan; collectively 4 million square kilometres) and East Turkestan (or Chinese Turkestan, now known as Xinjiang; 1.6 million square kilometres, see Map 2). Most of the countries in Western Turkestan thus defined are predominantly Muslim, with between seventy-five and ninety per cent of the population belonging to that faith, with the exception of Kazakhstan which has an almost equal balance of Muslims and Russian Orthodox at forty-seven and forty-four per cent respectively.5 Uzbekistan is perhaps the most potentially explosive, as we shall see, with eighty-eight per cent of the largest population of these countries – nearly 28 million in 2008 – being Sunni Muslims, and with the greatest penetration of Islamic fundamentalism.6 It is also the world’s eighth biggest exporter of natural gas, and in order to avoid control of its exports by Russia’s Gazprom has recently looked to another SCO partner, China, as a major market. In July 2008 construction work began on a gas pipeline which could be used to export as much as half of Uzbekistan’s production to China.

The inhabitants of modern Turkey originated in this region, migrating westwards sometime before the tenth century ad, and the linguistic and cultural ties remain strong. It is a vast and wild land which has generated military giants such as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and mythical figures like Prester John, cities of the imagination such as Xanadu, and quasi-mythical places like Samarkand and Bokhara; its size and impenetrability allowed legends recounted by medieval authors like Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville to flourish, not to mention characters such as the more recent Borat. Kazakhstan alone is fifteen times the size of the United Kingdom, but with a quarter of its population;both Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are roughly twice the size of the UK, with only Tajikistan being substantially smaller. Much of the landscape in all these countries consists of desert and mountains.

East Turkestan, or Xinjiang as the Chinese named it in the nineteenth century, is a land in the same mould. The sinologist Owen Lattimore, who knew it in the first half of the twentieth century as well as anyone then living, described it as a region with ‘more different kinds of frontier than could be found in any area of equal size anywhere else in the world’, by which he meant linguistic, cultural, religious and economic (pastoral, nomadic and industrial) as well as political frontiers.7 A more recent scholar notes that Xinjiang has been part of Tibetan, Arab, Turkic, Mongol, Russian and Chinese empires, and that its study requires readings of texts in ‘Tokharian, Türk, Soghdian, Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, classical Chinese, Chagatai and Persian’ as well as secondary works in Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Turkish and the major European languages.8 In short, it is a palimpsest of cultures and frontiers, and a daunting topic for scholarly research which needs to use manuscript materials and other primary sources, or even early printed books.

In its later history, with the expansion of the Russian Empire to the north and west, the Qing Empire to the east, the British Empire in Persia, and in India to the south and south-east, Turkestan became the bone of contention of what is known as the ‘Great Game’ for the control of Eurasia. One rather forgotten tool to understand the importance of this palimpsest is Halford John Mackinder’s theory of the Eurasian ‘Heartland’ and its pivotal role in geopolitical power. His theories – especially the notion that whoever controls Eurasia, or the ‘world island’ as Mackinder calls the area stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze rivers, controls the world – influenced Hitler, which rendered them deeply unfashionable in the post-war world. But Mackinder’s work contains much of interest.

The underlying theory evolved from an article entitled ‘The geographical pivot of history’, published in The Geographical Journal in 1904,9 to its extended book-length form in Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction. This was first published in 1919, and again in 1942 as the original geopolitical circumstances were repeated in another world war. After a review of the history of sea power, Mackinder explains his concept of the joint-continent of Europe, Asia and Africa as a single ‘World Island’,10 a definition which was only possible with the modern discovery of the North Pole and the consequent knowledge that the sea continued around the north of this land mass. Indeed, in his view there was ‘one ocean covering nine-twelfths of the globe’ and ‘one continent – the World Island – covering two-twelfths of the globe’.11 Hence its immense importance and centrality. Bearing in mind his observation that this world-island is ‘possessed potentially of the advantages both of insularity and of incomparably great resources’,12 and the obvious fact that the greater part of the world’s population may be found there, we can see how at its heart it may consist of an area whose main axis in terms of resources is based on China and Iran – or what Mackinder refers to as the ‘Iranian Upland’ of Persia, Afghanistan, and Baluchistan13 linking eastwards to the uplands of Tibet and Xinjiang. North of these uplands runs a broad belt of steppe and forest, probably the original home of the horse and the twin-humped camel, an area which was notoriously united under the empire of great horsemen like the Mongols. Together they form a heartland which offers no access to the sea, and which has been dominated briefly and in various epochs by the Persian, Mongol and Russian empires, and to a lesser extent at its eastern end by China, and at its western end by the Macedonian, Roman, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and in its southern part by the British Empire. Not by chance, this area also comprehends the spheres of influence of the world’s four great religions.14

Mackinder believed that problems of distance and maintaining long supply lines lay behind past failures to dominate this immense region for long periods (an idea which is confirmed in Arrian’s narrative of Alexander the Great’s eastern campaign), and that the new railway network he envisaged would obviate these historical difficulties. This was not in fact an entirely original notion, since Russia had built the Trans-Caspian Railway in the 1880s and 1890s for strategic purposes – it was, as Curzon tells us in his contemporary account of that railway, with fascinating historical photographs, primarily a military railway built under the command of a general and intended to overcome the ‘scarcity and loss of transport animals’ on earlier military campaigns.15 Nowadays, the Registan Express (named for the square at the centre of Samarkand) links Samarkand and Tashkent in four hours.

But Mackinder went further to argue that a new, rising national power would be able to utilise the new connectivity provided by a more elaborate network to control the ‘Heartland’ – and by extension the ‘World Island’ and thus the whole world. Such a theory was, of course, attractive to the Nazis. Indeed the main focus of the book-length version was on the western end of the Heartland, and historical arguments on the specific circumstances of the First World War. Yet the ‘pivot area’ of his maps is clearly identifiable with the land mass which stretches from western Iran, from the line of the Zagros Mountains, to the eastern coast of China, excluding the areas south of the Himalayan range and also Indo-China.

More recently, it is interesting to see how the Gwadar Development Authority in southwest Pakistan, a port, as we shall see below, being developed together with the Chinese, presents its strategic position as a replica of the Mackinder pivot maps of a century earlier (see www.gda.gov.pk/pages/asiaregion.html). In one obvious way, it is a self-defeating map, which actually puts Iran’s competing port Bandar Abbas at the centre of the entire scheme, as well as adding Turkey’s European extension to link China to the West. It is, if anything, a vision of Iran’s future rather than that of Pakistan, and emphasises that country’s role as it sets up a strong visual triangle between China, Iran and Kazakhstan. It is also noteworthy how the axis of the entire Pakistan transport network, of both highways and railways, follows a predominantly north-east - south-west line which leads directly from China to the Persian Gulf and Iran.

We should not therefore be surprised to see that in 1950 a specialist on Turkestan in its broadest sense like Lattimore could give the title Pivot of Asia to a book on Xinjiang, and open the first chapter by asserting that ‘A new center of gravity is forming in the world.’16 Moreover, the Anglo-American coup d’état against Mossadegh three years later, which placed the Shah of Iran back on his throne after a brief exile in Rome, may also be read in the context of Mackinder’s thesis, as can the more recent American wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, air power, especially that of long-range bombers, presents an alternative to the railways, which have not yet ‘covered’ Eurasia to the extent that Mackinder might have wished: USAF sorties into Afghanistan from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and into Iraq from Turkey, accord perfectly with his vision. For Turkestan is once again pregnant with military menace. Just as America sought permission for an air-base in Bishkek in 2001, so China conducted military exercises with Kyrgyzstan in 2002 and 2003, and Russia is engaged in providing military training and equipment for the member countries of CSTO (the Collective Security Treaty Organization), namely Kyrgyzstan together with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. Mackinder’s ideas also play an indirect role in a more recent and much discussed work, The Clash of Civilizations by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (who does not however mention the earlier book). In the manner of his predecessor, Huntington first aired his thesis in an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1993, republished in a short book together with the comments of seven critics of the original article (1996), and then developed it into book length with the same title (again in 1996). In particular, Mackinder’s ideas resurface in Huntington’s notion of an Islamic-Confucian alliance against the West. Much derided both in China and in the United States and Europe on publication, in a reduced form some of the elements of Huntington’s thesis are relevant here – especially because many Chinese nationalists were happy to accept his conclusions and thus implicitly accept the notion of an anti-Western alliance with Islam.17

In the book-length version of his argument, Huntington identified five major contemporary civilisations: Sinic (modified from Confucian in the original article), Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox and Western, with two further possibilities of Latin American and African civilisations.18 He defines the area of Sinic civilisation as mainland China plus the countries which have an influential population of overseas Chinese (such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore), together with Taiwan and non-Chinese counties which share Confucian culture like the Koreas and Vietnam. But it could also be said to include the political and economic weight of an overseas Chinese diaspora numbering around 50 million which nowadays ranges from 30,000 entrepreneurs and construction workers in Zambia to 45,000 scientists and technicians working in American universities.19 Taken together, these countries and diffuse groups constitute what he terms a ‘civilization-based world order’, which in fact, although Huntington does not argue this far, is comparable to the notion of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world order in the nineteenth century – whose members retain strong local values and loyalties to a ‘Motherland’ wherever they happen to be in the world.20 For these reasons, the new and developing power is a ‘civilisation-based’ power, as opposed to a power based on a core state.

In addition to this strictly Sinic vision, Huntington also recognises a historical ‘Inner Asian Zone’ which comprises ‘non-Chinese Manchus, Mongols, Uighurs, Turks and Tibetans’ who in the past needed for security reasons to be controlled by China.21 These peoples, both inside and outside the core state, will still need to be controlled as China expands westwards in economic and diplomatic terms, and together with the neighbouring member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but excluding Russia, will necessarily be a part of the ‘stealthy strategy toward global dominance’, which integrates military, economic, and diplomatic instruments and aims to displace the United States as the world’s pre-eminent power.22

In one of the most controversial sections of his book, Huntington wrote of a ‘Tehran-Islamabad-Beijing axis’ which seemed to come into being during its writing after a series of high-level visits and exchanges, with Chinese president Yang Shangkun travelling to Iran and Pakistan, President Rafsanjani of Iran travelling to Pakistan and China, and later Benazir Bhutto visiting China and Iran as soon as she became Prime Minister of Pakistan in 1993. In Huntington’s words

by the mid-1990s something like a de facto alliance had come into existence between the three countries rooted in opposition to the West, security concerns over India, and the desire to counter Turkish and Russian influence in Central Asia.23

Such an alliance, had it been formalised and had it endured, would clearly have pulled the remaining countries of Turkestan into a new version of the Great Game. But Huntington was obviously unable to take into account subsequent events in Pakistan, and the alternative Riyadh-Islamabad-Kabul axis which emerged in the early years of the new century. This geographically vertical, Sunni-inspired alliance, excluding China and Iran, was much more ‘local’ in the sense that it would not necessarily involve other countries in Turkestan.

The ‘Turkestans’ and the New Great Game