Eurasia_Return_to_Sino-Centrism.docx

Eurasia - A Return to Sino-Centrism?





By Michael Akerib, Senior Partner, Rusconsult
The geography 

Europe and Asia are a single super-continent lying, but for the exception of the Arabian and Indian subcontinent and Russia's Sakha peninsula, on a single tectonic plate. Europe's share of this landmass is only 20%, but it holds the largest proportion of agricultural land.

McKinder, one of the founding authors of the science of geostrategy, used the wording 'World Island' which seamen used to denote Eurasia and its African appendix. 

The Himalaya-Hindu Kush-Karakorum mountain chain has the world's highest peaks, but it is the Mongolian steppes that are one of the most effective barriers between Asia and Europe together with deserts and several major rivers along which people settled. This led to cultural fragmentation particularly in Asia and the rise of very different languages. Vernacular languages were used along trade routes.

 

Civilization 

Paleolithic Europeans, who separated from Africans around 40,000 years ago, occupied the European continent until the arrival, 8,000 years ago, of a population from the Near East, which was in search of food and introduced farming.

Originally centered on the Mediterranean, where civilization flourished, trade routes encouraged migration west- and north-wards. There was little migration towards Eastern Europe.

Tool manufacture was very different between Europe, Western and Southern Asia and Africa on one side and the rest of Asia on the other and possible generic differences may be the basis for this, although there is the clear possibility that the availability of different materials may really be the cause.
From 500 BC to 1500 AD, Eurasia was dominated by four civilizations: the Chinese, the Greek, the Indian and the Middle Eastern. Scythian warriors and barbarian nomads from the Central Asian steppes ensured that a contact was maintained between them, borrowing and redistributing various cultural and technological elements.

For several centuries, Byzantium was the center of civilization as it diverged from Western civilization and leaned towards the East.

Europeans exported their culture to lands as far away as the American and Australian continents.

Population

Eurasia contains 75% of the population and 75% of the planet's energy resources and most of the world's wealth. Seven out of the world's most populated countries are in Eurasia.

Two thousand years ago Eurasia's population was of 200 million inhabitants divided into four equal groups living in China, India, the Middle East and Europe including the southern Mediterranean. 

By the end of the thirteenth century, China's population was between 70 and 100 million inhabitants. Xian, China's old capital, called at the time Changan, was the world's greatest urban center with a population of two million and was extremely cosmopolitan.

Europe, until the end of the ninth century saw large migratory waves that gradually filled the continent: Slavs, Germans displacing the Celts, the Arabs. It is only starting in the 17th century that Russia and Northern Europe became more intensely populated. 

When the feudal system collapsed simultaneously throughout Eurasia, the population started growing with a consequent deforestation and conversion of space into arable land. Europe's population had thus access to higher amounts of protein.

A series of bad harvests at the beginning of the fourteenth century had two major consequences: a general famine and a lowered immune system that allowed the spread of the Black Death that killed a third of the population of Eurasia. Some historians believe the figure was as high as 50%.

The sharp increase in population that had occurred in Europe over the previous one hundred years - from approximately 25 million to 100 million - resulted in a major urban growth in appalling sanitary conditions and this was, no doubt, a contributing factor of the immense mortality due to the Plague.

The peasants who had survived in Western Europe were able to take possession of abandoned land and move away from marginal areas to more productive land. They also secured their freedom from forced labor. However, this was not the case in Asia where cheap labor persisted. Cheap labor is antithetic with technology.

In Britain, the nobility farmed the land with modern techniques which required a substantially smaller number of peasants. 

Great Britain and Western Europe were thus able to accumulate considerable wealth while representing less than 20% of the world's population.

China had a fast population growth due to earlier marriage and to the absence of immigration. This led to a more intense use of resources.
In the seventeenth century population both in China and Europe reached a new high, but started declining at the end of that century to eventually reach a plateau. 

In the Indian sub-continent, the main cities of the Mughal empire had a population of half a million each, and the population of the Indian sub-continent increased from a figure of 50 to 80 million in 1500 to reach 130 to 200 million in 1700. 

At that same period, the population of South East Asia is of 23 million, thus only 20 to 25% of China's population. Several cities had a population of 100 000 inhabitants.

In the two centuries from 1500 to 1750, Japan's population grew from 16 to 32 million. Several cities had over one million inhabitants. 

By 1750, the population patterns in both Asia and Europe were such that an ecological disaster was imminent, considering that technology had not developed to the point of enabling the population to better utilize resources.

By 1820, 55% of the world's population lived in China and India. Starting in 1950, both countries witnessed a population explosion.



The economy

As far back as 4000 years ago, the Silk Road was a global trading system. Its name originates with the trade of Chinese silk to India, and then to Rome through the Red Sea. Roman gold coins and products such as glass and wine were used as payment instruments. Mongolia and the steppe was another trading route and the Mongols will take advantage of it to build the world's largest contiguous empire.

If trade was essentially in silk cloth and finished products such as silk carpets, other products such as Indian cotton, medicinal products, Southeast Asian timber, tea and rice as well as agricultural and weapon technology were also exchanged. 

These trade routes flourished until the thirteenth century and goods penetrated deeply into Europe, including some cities of Northern Europe.
Jewish traders, called Radhanites, brought to Europe, from the Arab world, jewelry, perfume, silk, spices and slaves.

China was, at the time, a very powerful country, with a navy so powerful that it explored, under Admiral Cheng Ho, Arabian Gulf and Eastern African ports.

Two, not necessary self-exclusive, explanations have been put forward for the collapse of the global trade routes: the bubonic plague and the collapse of the Mongol empire.

Technology

In the medieval world, China was the most developed region of the world, whether one considers it from the point of view of technology or wealth.
From the ninth to the fourteenth century, China benefited from an agricultural revolution, sustained by hydraulic techniques, and from considerable progress in communications. China's agriculture was the world's most sophisticated.

Chinese technology developed earlier than European know-how. In the eleventh century, printing was common and therefore a large number of books existed. Chinese cities also counted larger populations than those in Europe. Paper money was common. There was a large production of iron. Gunpowder had been invented and so had the compass. The junks were as big as galleons and military vessels were numerous and very large.

Gradually, however, Europe will overtake China both with regard to technology and wealth.

Several theories have been put forward to explain this major change.
One theory suggests that dietary differences between Europe and Asia, with Europeans consuming plants rich in protein, were an important factor in Europe's development. 

Russia, China and Eurasia

One of Putin's main policies has been the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) that, in fact, was to be more than a security tool (the Collective Security Treaty Organization) but that would also enhance economic development. It served to create a Russian sphere of influence on the region, to create an empire in opposition of the influence of the European Union (EU) and of China. If necessary, instability in the other countries was encouraged to attain the imperial dream. 



So far, there has been neither improved security through the building of infrastructure, nor economic development.

In this undertaking China is proving to be a major rival as it is using Central Asia as a land bridge to Europe in a project called One Belt, One Road. In this project, China undertakes to build infrastructure in Central Asia to help the countries in the area boost exports, but it will also use the infrastructure to allow for the shipment of much needed commodities to China and for faster and cheaper routes to export Chinese products. Estimates show that once the project, will be accomplished by 2025 to 2030, it will add $ 2.5 trillion to China's exports.

Russia's economy suffering from the sanctions imposed to it as well as from lower oil and commodity prices, Central Asian countries are increasingly relying on China for their financial needs. Tajikistan has gone as far as ceding part of its territory to China for debt relief.

China sees the One Belt, One Road initiative as a means of restoring its previous place at the center of Eurasia's economy and, longer term, as the world's hegemon. 

Sinocentrism is a historical model in which China was the cultural center of the world and other countries paid a tribute to it. We may well be returning to a similar system as the other countries in Eurasia continue on a downward demographic and economic slope.