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It is difficult to find a westerner who does not intuitively supportthe idea of a free Tibet. But would Americans ever let go of Texas orCalifornia? For China, the Anglo-Russian great game for control ofcentral Asia was neither inconclusive nor fruitless, something thatcannot be said for Russia or Britain. Indeed, China was the big winner.
Boundary agreements in 1895 and 1907 gave Russiathe Pamir mountains and established the Wakhan Corridor - the slendereastern tongue of Afghanistan that borders China - as a buffer toBritain. But rather than cede East Turkestan (Uighurstan) to theRussians, the British financed China's recapture of the territory,which it organised into Xinjiang (which means "New Dominions"). WhileWest Turkestan was splintered into the hermetic Soviet Stans, Chinareasserted its traditional dominance over Xinjiang and Tibet, today itslargest - and least stable - provinces. (Beijing has now accused theDalai Lama of colluding with Muslim Uighur separatists in Xinjiang.)But without them, the country would be like America without allterritory west of the Rockies: denied its continental majesty andstatus.
Every backpacker who has visited Tibet and Xinjiang inthe past decade knows that the Chinese empire is painfully real: thewestern region's going concern is undoubtedly Chinese Manifest Destiny.With the end of the civil war in 1949, China endeavoured immediately toovercome the "tyranny of terrain" and tame the interminable mountainand desert landscapes with the aim of exploiting vast natural assets,establishing penal colonies and military bases, and expand theLebensraum for its exploding population.
Both Tibet andXinjiang have the misfortune of possessing resources China wants and ofbeing situated on the path to resources China needs: Tibet has vastamounts of timber, uranium and gold, and the two territories constituteChina's geographic gateway for trade flow outward - and energy flowinward - with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan andPakistan.
Decades of labour by the army and swarms of workershave paved the way for unchallenged Chinese dominance. Thehigh-altitude train linking Shanghai and Lhasa that began service in2006 represents not the beginning of Chinese hegemony, but itsculmination.
Tibet and Xinjiang today set the stage for the birthof a multi-ethnic empire in ways that resemble nothing so much asAmerica's frontier expansion nearly two centuries ago. Chinese thinkabout their mission civilatrice much as American settlers did: they arebringing development and modernity. Asiatic, Buddhist Tibetans andTurkic, Muslim Uighurs are being lifted out of the third world -whether they like it or not.
They are getting roads, telephonelines, hospitals and jobs. School fees are being reduced or abolishedto promote basic education and Chineseness. Unlike those Europeans whoseek to define the EU as a Christian club, there are no Chineseinhibitions about incorporating Muslim territories. The new mythologyof Chinese nationalism is based not on expunging minorities butgranting them a common status in the paternalistic state: Uighurs andTibetans, though not Han, are told they are Chinese.
"The SovietUnion collapsed because they experimented with glasnost prematurely,before the achieved unity among the peoples," explains a Chineseintellectual in Shanghai who studies central Asia. Large empires aremaintained through a combination of force and law; and as recent weeksillustrate, China is determined not to waver.
In even theremotest corners of Tibet, small bases house platoons of the People'sLiberation Army, with soldiers menacingly practising martial arts twicedaily in public squares, often right next to ancient Buddhist stupas.Inaccessible jungle areas designated environmentally protected zonesare often actually military encampments. Signs trumpeting "Tibet power"refer strictly to the Chinese electricity company.
China haspumped in billions of development dollars, hoping to generate goodwillamong the scarcely 3 million Tibetans. In Lhasa, crumbling stonequarters have been replaced with sturdy homes built along thoroughfaresconnecting the city to the new railway station. The consequence ofChinese modernity, however, is that a city that once symbolisedcultural authenticity has become merely a gateway to the remoteplateaus where wild yak still outnumber people.
An even greaterprize than Tibet is the far larger and more populous Xinjiang, with itsoil deposits, deserts and mountains. Its demographic dilution has beendubbed "apartheid with Chinese characteristics". Xinjiang's Muslimshave always been unruly, even briefly securing an independent EastTurkestan at the end of the civil war. But massive Han resettlementbegan with the "Develop the west" campaign of the 1950s, and in thecultural revolution Xinjiang was sealed off for a massive pogrom ofmosque destruction and Qur'an burning. Violent clashes in Urumqi,Xinjiang's capital, in 1996 proved that no peaceful Islamic culturewould prevail in a Chinese-dominated environment. China suspended allmosque reconstruction and launched a "Strike Hard" campaign,imprisoning and executing hundreds of suspected separatists. Today onecan see the results of a programme Mao and Deng began, but nevercompleted: a railway and highway transporting coal, migrants and goodsacross the Taklamakan desert, facilitating the Hanification of aprovince where Uighurs now make up only half the population.
Theannihilation of local people, history and architecture, and theirreplacement with shiny skyscrapers paying tribute to modern Chinesecapitalism, make Urumqi the Shanghai of the northern Silk Road. Asix-lane freeway runs through the city, and the Han majority fill upspiffy Japanese cars at the large Sinopec and PetroChina petrolstations. Urumqui buzzes with traders from Russia to Pakistan and allStans in between, who buy cheap Chinese goods to be sold back home at aprofit. Uighurs are now a marginalised minority in the city. Chinesetourists crowd the few accessible natural attractions, making theemerald-coloured Heavenly Lake no longer very heavenly.
Ironically,China's near absolute sense of security over both provinces is thegreatest hope for a Chinese glasnost: China no longer faces anymeaningful resistance to its rule and so some day may lighten up.Spiritual Tibetans have long looked south to Nepal and India for theircultural underpinnings, and in the 18th century Tibet was allowed afunctional autonomy from China, a model the current Dalai Lama hasproposed. Once he passes the scene, China might be less anxious aboutcultural exchange between Buddhists, further restoring Tibet's role asthe Silk Road passage it was when Dunhuang's Caves of the ThousandBuddhas were carved, more than a millennium ago.
Tibetans andUighurs will gradually become more prosperous than their neighbouringMongols, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians, and Nepalis -and this may provide a basis for Chinese claims of a benevolenthegemony elsewhere in Asia. But China will achieve that dominancebefore it talks about it.
· This is an editedextract from Parag Khanna's book The Second World: Empires andInfluences in the New Global Order, which will be published next week