China's Geographic History

The grand cycle of a demographic superpower now in uncharted territory.

Previously in this series:

‘Geography is the fractal objective function of humanity’ - an introduction to the core concepts of how the physical and digital landscape shapes the fate of peoples, cultures, and nations. Recently extensively rewritten.

‘Geography: Portugal’ - Exploring the rise and fall of a global superpower.

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The heart of Chinese civilisation is the Great Plain stretching from Shanghai in the south to Beijing in the north. An area roughly the size of France, fed by some of the world’s great rivers, creating one of the world’s most productive agricultural land, supporting the largest population in the world throughout most of history. Yet its sheer scale and lack of natural boundaries are key contributors to China’s periodic schisms and some of the bloodiest conflicts in history.

Relief map of China and the surrounding region. The North China Plain is clearly visible as the large green expanse (mostly <50m above sea level) to the middle right of the image.

Our story begins in modern-day Tibet and Xinjiang Province, the most inland location on Earth. Being in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, it’s also one of the world’s driest¹. The prevailing wind at this latitude sweeps from west to east, stripping the landscape of its fertility and depositing it, along with sediments from the dry surrounding areas of Tibet and the Gobi Desert, into the vast Huangtu Loess Plateau, the world’s largest deposit of fertile silts.

Each summer, the warming seas and air push a front of tropical air North, bringing the East Asian Monsoon. These heavy rains fall on the otherwise dusty Loess, sweeping enormous volumes of silt into the Yellow River², and then down into the flatlands of North China Plain. The sediment flow is so great that much of Hebei Province, south of Beijing, was underwater as recently as 2500 years ago. The entire plain can be thought of as the delta of the Yellow River.

Yellow River course changes and land formation estimates by Qiushufang

The same process that brings fertility also brings periodic devastation. Silt deposition raises the height of the land relative to the land around it. Every few decades, heavy rain in the plateau would cause the river to unpredictably burst its banks and send millions of tonnes of muddy water flooding into areas the size of Belgium, drowning tens to hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people, destroying crops, and starving millions, earning the river epithets like ‘China’s Sorrow’ and ‘The Scourge of the Sons of Han’. Managing the river’s floods is a Sisyphean task as the enormous sediment load quickly raises the height of the riverbed relative to the surrounding lands, and lowers the effective height of the defences. Preventing a breach across hundreds of kilometres of walls is a task of escalating difficulty; catastrophic failure is inevitable.

The Yellow’s low Winter flows and frequent course changes also make it poorly navigable and precarious as a permanent base of power. Consequently, while the Yellow River was home to a birth of Agriculture and many early neolithic societies, as cultural technology progressed and civilisations grew in size, political control of the plain tended to be exercised from its periphery, either inland from where the Yellow enters the Plain at the likes of Xi’an, or increasingly, from the more stable and navigable Yangtze to the South or Hai River Basin to the North. It’s instructive that the literal translations of ‘Nanking’ and ‘Beijing’ are Southern Capital and Northern Capital, respectively.

The scale and productivity scale of the plain ensured that a united China was forever the demographic superpower of the region, but its wealth also presented an often irresistible target for raids from surrounding neighbours. With few natural borders or chokepoints to defend, men on horseback could strike from anywhere and disappear into the endless steppe before a superior force could be marshalled and brought into position. Thus, wherever the centre of political power, the Chinese Emperor had always to concern themselves with controlling the periphery via large standing armies. Thus, the fundamental tension of every Chinese empire: too little for the provinces, and they’d be subject to frequent raids. Too much support and you risk enabling an independent centre of power and subsequent rebellion.

Relief map of Southern China and its surrounds, originally produced by Kanguole

For an empire with its capital on the Yangtze River, the river’s natural course draws attention to the west and south. The river’s main course is navigable for over 2,500km to Chongqing in the Sichuan Basin (itself a fertile alluvial plain), and into the hinterlands of the Tibetan Steppe³. Meanwhile the river’s primary tributaries, also highly navigable, stretch South into the broken hills separating the Yangtze watershed from the Pearl River’s. Lacking natural boundaries like a mountain range, open water, or wide stable river like the Maekong or Danube, drawing and enforcing a stable border between a Yangtze and Pearl state is almost impossible for pre-modern societies. Minor border disputes are inevitable, and Nanjing has every incentive to capitalise by invading, incorporating the Pearl, and vassalising the Red River and beyond. Finally, unlike further north, the coast to the south of the Yangtze River Mouth is a long chain of islands and coastal communities with rich sealife. These naturally fall under the sway of an empire of shallow-draft ships based on the Yangtze.

Throughout most of history, information travelled at the speed of a horse. News of events from the Northern Hinterlands, 2500km or more distant, might take months to arrive in Nanjing. Crucial context would often be missing, information lost, and perhaps the sender might be out of favour, or not be fully trusted in the capital. Thus, in addition to the maintenance of the dykes and canals of the Yellow River, Nanjing finds itself drawing on the wealth of the North China Plain to concern itself with the maintenance of the coast, including pirates or rebellions generals based in Taiwan, sometimes unruly vassal states to the South, and incursions from the Tibetan Steppe.

Relief map of Northern China and its surrounds, originally produced by Hugo Lopez.

With your capital based in the North (e.g. at Beijing), the political map looks very different. The emperor’s⁴ primary concern is with the endless Mongolian Steppe to the North and West (protecting the increasingly important trade route of the ‘Silk Road’ from the West to Xi’an). The nomadic tribes here have mastered the arts of horse logistics. The lack of rivers into the interior constrains the logistics of any grand army you might send. Further, given the nomadic nature of the tribes here, you lack an achievable objective beyond ‘seize some grassland’ before going home for winter. The only practical solution is to maintain a vast array of garrisons, supplied at great expense from the resources of the Plain and the South. Over centuries, great protective walls have been constructed. Logistical infrastructure like canals and roads were built, frontier towns and outposts have slowly transformed into thriving cities, and the classic tale unfolds of the progressive encroachment of an agrarian society on the lands of the nomads and hunter-gatherers.

As emperor, rather than the distant Pearl or Red River valleys, your concern is with your sometimes vassals based around Shenyang in the Liao Valley and the Korean Peninsula. The Tungusic-speaking peoples of Northern Manchuria, if united, pose a serious threat. Japan can sometimes be forced to pay tribute, but at other times its broken landscape and offshore islands make it an ideal base for piracy and even invasion.

Thus, the stage is set for the grand cycle of the empire. A charismatic leader raises a great army and conquers a weak and disunited North China Plain. Not being fools, they establish a new capital away from the dangerous Yellow River at the edge of the Plain and install trusted competent lieutenants to manage the provinces. No other power can hope to compete with the overwhelming demographic power of the Plains, so the new empire comes to dominate the region, limited only by the logistical, communication, and coordination challenges imposed by the scale of its ambition. Over the generations, loyalties fray. The maintenance of distant provinces degrades, precipitating a series of disasters: a major Yellow River flood; a series of poor governorship appointments, and costly raids from the steppe. The mandate of heaven is lost. Rebellion, perhaps involving or led by Steppe ‘barbarians’. Death on the scale of a World War. Perhaps the rebellion ends in total victory or defeat, but often complete disintegration, or division between the North and South.

Political map circa 1142, following the collapse of the Song Dynasty in the North to the Manchurian Jurchens. Compiled by Mozzan.

While political and cultural division often occurred along the Huai River (as above), the changeable rivers of the Plain make a poor basis for a stable border. Conflict is virtually inevitable, whether over the shifting landscape itself, rights to the canals and other infrastructure, or any number of incidents that can easily spiral out of control when, thanks to the distances involved, both capitals are reacting to events long after they’ve occurred. Eventually, the Plain is reunified, either by the stronger dynasty less encumbered by internal politicking and bureaucratic ineptitude or, as in the case of the Song & Jin, conquered by an external power like the Mongols exploiting the weakness of an ununified China. Even here, within a few generations, the conquering culture bows to the sheer demographic power of the Plain, adopting its customs and methods, and completing the cycle of Chinese Empire.

A unified China was one largely without peers. Yes, the borders required defending, and the coast patrolled for pirates, but so long as the Empire did not fall into decay, its might was unchallenged. Ambitious emperors might attempt to conquer or demand tribute from neighbours like Japan, Burma, and even states as far as Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. Perhaps the most famous of these expeditions were conducted by the famed admiral Zheng He during the early 15th Century while the Ming Dynasty was at the height of its power. These voyaged throughout the South-West Pacific and Indian Oceans as far as the coasts of Africa, establishing trade, collecting tribute, and deposing any regimes hostile to Chinese hegemony. The great Chola Empire of Tamil Nadu had collapsed, leaving, from the Chinese perspective, no true competitors or centres of great wealth, culture, or technology. Consequently, while the voyages brought great prestige to the individuals involved, the value proposition for the state relative to their great cost was more dubious.

Zheng He died amid growing concerns about foreign plagues and influence. In 1449, after a catastrophic military disaster in Inner Mongolia, where a Ming army in the hundreds of thousands was defeated by a force a tenth the size and the emperor captured, the decision was made to refocus on the interior. The treasure fleets were scrapped, and a series of isolationist policies were enacted, including a ban on overseas trade. These policies were a colossal failure on their own terms - hampering the Chinese Economy and resulting in widespread smuggling and piracy. Further, the timing of the decision to withdraw from the world for a time could not be more unfortunate for the fortunes of the Empire, given the imminent geographic connection of East Asia with Europe.

The Portuguese rounded the Horn of Africa in 1488, reached the shores of China in 1513, and began regular trade along the Fujian Coast several years later. Silk Road trade had been highly profitable since the days of the Roman Empire, but it was constrained by the overland distances involved and the high transaction costs imposed by banditry, intermediary taxes, and indirect supply. The Portuguese were able to circumvent these via the overseas route, but as monopsony buyers⁵, most of the economic benefits accrued to Portugal rather than Ming China.

Unlike European expansion into the Americas, the technological capabilities of the Chinese and Europeans were broadly comparable. The Portuguese enjoyed an overwhelming advantage throughout most of their travels and became habituated to acting with total impunity, raiding coastal villages, taking slaves, and forcing trade via gunboat diplomacy. This naturally brought them into conflict with the Chinese, who defeated the Portuguese in a series of early naval battles. Unfortunately, rather than seizing the opportunity to restart overseas expeditions and attempt to open multi-lateral trade, China instead saw cause to progressively double down on isolationism. Foreshadowing the later Canton System restricting overseas trade to the area around Guangzhou (previously known as Canton), the Portuguese were eventually allowed to open a small trading outpost on Macau, with the idea that this would help contain and manage foreign influence and piracy. In practice, however, thanks to the bribery of local officials, the Europeans gained a substantial foothold in the region.

A young dynasty earlier in the grand cycle may have been better placed to navigate the unprecedented upheaval of China’s objective function, but corruption in Macau was indicative of the weakening authority and capability of the Ming State. In 1618, an imperial Ming-appointed chieftain managed to unite the fractured Manchurian tribes and declared independence from Ming rule. Beijing was slow to react. Generals sent to deal with the problem defected. Elsewhere in the empire, local leaders frustrated by years of poor and extractive management, rose in rebellion, devastated the interior by deliberately flooding the Yellow River, and eventually attacked Beijing in 1644, crowning themselves themselves Emperor. In the Chaos, a key stronghold along the Great Wall was all but abandoned as troops left to attempt to restore order, allowing Manchurian forces to sweep through into the North China Plain, seize Beijing, and establish the Qing Dynasty.

Early Qing Emperors primarily concerned themselves not with the Europeans or new economic opportunities, but with the pacification of Ming loyalists and the ethnic Han majority. The ‘Ming-Qing Transition’ is one of the most bloody periods in world history, with estimates of up to 25 million deaths. Previously the world’s largest economy by far, the Chinese economy never recovered per-capita economic output, even as Europe was going through the Industrial Revolution. Qing China's continued isolationism became increasingly untenable in the face of growing European power and ultimately collapsed during the Opium and civil wars of the mid-18th Century, helping usher in what later propagandists⁶ would dub the ‘Century of Humiliation’ where China was forced to accept unfavourable trade terms, lost control of its former vassal states and even large portions of its interior, especially after the Japanese invasions of the early 20th-Century.

Qing territorial losses 1840-1911 by SilverStar54

As part of negotiations to fight the Japanese⁷, the Allies guaranteed China's independence, the return of much of its former territories, and the repeal of the various unequal treaties signed over the past century. Though the Nationalists with whom these treaties were signed subsequently lost the Civil War to the Communists, the destruction of the European continent during WWII made involvement in East Asia increasingly non-viable. While the Americans and Communist China did come to blows in the proxy war on the Korean Peninsula, US foreign policy was primarily concerned with countering the Soviet Union, notably in Indochina. The relative absence of foreign interference has allowed China, particularly under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, to rebuild its institutions and begin to reassert itself on the world stage.

With the advent of cheap globalised trade and the Green Revolution, the capacity of a nation to support a large population has become increasingly divorced from the fertility of its soils. Modern agritech allows The Netherlands, with a land area less than a 10th the size of the North China Plain, to be the world’s third-largest exporter of food. Germany is the preeminent power in Europe, but produces less than half of its own food⁸. In a world of scarcity and famine, geopolitical power is based on the productivity of a nation’s soil. Today, food scarcity is increasingly uncommon, and power and prosperity are instead a function of the productivity of a nation’s people and its strategic allies.

China’s rise to becoming the second largest economy on Earth has been built on manufacturing - leveraging the cheap labour of its large and rapidly urbanising population to attract foreign investment of both capital and expertise. Labour is no longer so cheap, but with decades of experience and improved education and training practices, China is now home to the world’s largest and most highly trained manufacturing engineers and produces 35% of global manufacturing output. Post-covid, China’s previously unstoppable economic growth, over 6%pa since 1991, has become more rocky, with record numbers of manufacturers reporting losses, and far more sedate economic growth in line with more developed countries despite average incomes of just $12000pa.

China’s diplomatic fortunes have also been rocky of late. A decade ago, China’s approach was acclaimed by many geopolitical analysts. Nations previously strongly aligned with the US like The Philippines were announcing their realignment with China. The ‘BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group of emerging economies might once have plausibly grown into a genuine alternative power bloc but has since collapsed into farce.

China’s ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’, the natural outgrowth of China’s top officials drinking their own kool-aid about China’s return to its natural state of preeminent power, has backfired spectacularly, with opinions of China falling sharply throughout South East Asia. The ‘Belt and Road’ loan programme, once hailed as a masterstroke to split developing countries away from US-aligned institutions like the World Bank, has failed to generate either financial or diplomatic returns as the penalty clauses of bad loans are invoked by China, prompting many developing nations to accuse them of ‘neo-imperialism’ and ‘debt-trap diplomacy’⁹. Poor handling of the situation in Hong Kong, and belligerence over Taiwan have turned global public opinion against China. Meanwhile, motivated explicitly to recapture China’s former territorial glory and paranoia about encirclement via increasingly strategically irrelevant Pacific Island chains, China has been sabotaging its ability to form stable relationships with its neighbours in favour of a few strips of sand in the South China Sea - causing even the likes of communist Vietnam to sign strategic defence agreements with the US.

China today, while theoretically communist, more closely resembles a continuation of the imperial cycles of the past. The geography has changed of course. Communication and logistics are easier than it was during the days of the Ming Dynasty, but the complexity of Chinese society has increased to compensate. Beijing remains 60% correct on key issues. Xi is obviously highly talented at court politics. He’s successfully maneuvered himself into a position of power and has purged his enemies, but lacks the strategic competence of his Dengist predecessors.

What lies ahead for China? Its population is aging, and already beginning its long decline. It’s home to many of the world’s top engineers and AI research scientists, and the efforts of Chinese companies like Deepseek have already forced US companies to dramatically lower the inference prices of their SotA language models, though export controls on cutting-edge AI chips may soon begin to hinder further progress. Perhaps Xi may attempt to leverage China’s overwhelming production advantage to invade or force Taiwanese concessions. I’m particularly concerned about the potential for an unintended spiral into conflict over Kinmen Islands. China has been a key contributor to our present prosperity, and continues to have much to offer the world. Success lies in acknowledging that the geography of the past is no longer the key to its future.

1. Specifically, the sandy Taklamakan Desert, centre-right of image, receives just 1 inch of rain each year, little more than the 0.6 received by the driest place on earth - the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile. The Gobi desert, another primary source of sediments, is not quite so dry, but still receives less than 2 inches of rain in its depths.

2. The Huáng Hé (literally - Yellow River) is the most sediment-laden river in the world, and draws its name from the yellowish silt it carries.

3. Tibet’s reputation today is dominated by the image of the peaceful Dalai Lama, but throughout much of history has been the home of quintessentially steppe peoples. Societies based around the horse, and the sheep, often nomadic. Sometimes organising into great empires in fierce competition with the agricultural societies to the East, at other times fragmented, with a patchwork of tribes variously happy to raid or ally with the Chinese state.

4. I use ‘Emperor’ as a synecdoche throughout this essay, meaning ‘the centre of power in the Chinese state’. In practice, this might be the Emperor, a regent, court eunuchs, or a web of hidden alliances and devolved responsibilities.

5. Thanks to initial secrecy of the overseas route, and the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the world’s oceans between Portugal and Spain.

6. Specifically the KMT Nationalists, and later adopted by the Communists.

7. Also motivated by the desire to see a balancing force to the Soviet Union in East Asia after the defeat of the Japanese.

8. In 2020, Germany imported 89 billion euros (95b USD at 2020 rates) of food (primarily from its EU neighbours) but only produced 57.4 billion internally.

9. China likely made these loans in good faith, given that projects like Sri Lanka’s port were proposed by the nations themselves. The project, like many others, underperformed expectations and never made the promised returns. Lacking a clear strategy about Belt and Road’s true objectives, China proceeded to seize the port when payments were no longer made. Meaning it pissed off Sri Lanka in return for a loss-making white elephant.