Divided E-Book

Tim Marshall

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 398

Beschreibung

In his gripping new book The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World, Marshall digs deep into the past, present and future of the new 'astropolitics' that are set to change the face of life on Earth. Available to PRE-ORDER NOW in hardback, ebook and audio - out 27th April 2023 THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER New from the No.1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Prisoners of Geography Which side of the fence are you on? Every story has two sides, and so does every wall. We're in a new era of tribalism and the barricades are going up. Money, race, religion, politics: these are the things that divide us. Trump's wall says as much about America's divided past as it does its future. The Great Firewall of China separates 'us' from 'them'. In Europe, the explosive combination of politics and migration threatens liberal democracy itself. Covering China; the USA; Israel and Palestine; the Middle East; the Indian Subcontinent; Africa; Europe and the UK, in this gripping read bestselling author Tim Marshall delves into our past and our present to reveal the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come.

Leseprobe

Dedicated to my mother Margaret McDonaldand a life spent building bridges

CONTENTS

___________________________________________

Introduction

1   The Great Firewall: China

2   Build that Wall!: USA

3   Facts on the Ground: Israel and Palestine

4   Lines in the Sand: The Middle East

5   A Magnet for Migrants: The Indian Subcontinent

6   State of the Nations: Africa

7   Ever Closer Union?: Europe

8   The Groans of the Britons: UK

Conclusion: The Spaces in Between

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

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THE BORDER WALL BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE WEST Bank is among the most forbidding and hostile in the world. Viewed from up close, whichever side you find yourself on, it rears up from the ground, overwhelming and dominating you. Faced by this blank expanse of steel and concrete, you are dwarfed not only by its size but by what it represents. You are on one side; ‘they’ are on the other.

Thirty years ago a wall came down, ushering in what looked like a new era of openness and internationalism. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan went to the Brandenburg Gate in divided Berlin and called out to his opposite number in the Soviet Union, ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’ Two years later it fell. Berlin, Germany and then Europe were united once more. In those heady times, some intellectuals predicted an end of history. However, history does not end.

In recent years, the cry ‘Tear down this wall’ is losing the argument against ‘fortress mentality’. It is struggling to be heard, unable to compete with the frightening heights of mass migration, the backlash against globalization, the resurgence of nationalism, the collapse of Communism and the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. These are the fault lines that will shape our world for years to come.

We tend to hear a lot about the Israeli wall, the US–Mexico border wall, and some of those in Europe, but what many people don’t realise is that walls are being built along borders everywhere. It is a worldwide phenomenon in which the cement has been mixed and the concrete laid without most of us even noticing. Thousands of miles of walls and fences have gone up around the world in the twenty-first century. At least sixty-five countries, more than a third of the world’s nation states, have built barriers along their borders; half of those erected since the Second World War sprang up between 2000 and now.

In Europe alone, within a few years there could be more miles of walls, fences and barriers than there were at the height of the Cold War. They began by separating Greece and Macedonia, Macedonia and Serbia, and Serbia and Hungary, and, as we became less shocked by each stretch of barbed wire, others followed suit – Slovenia began building on the Croatian border, the Austrians fenced off Slovenia, Sweden put up barriers to prevent illegal immigrants crossing from Denmark, while Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have all started defensive fortifications on their borders with Russia.

But Europe is certainly not alone: the United Arab Emirates has built a fence along the border with Oman, Kuwait likewise with Iraq. Iraq and Iran maintain a physical divide, as do Iran and Pakistan – all 435 miles of it. In Central Asia, Uzbekistan, despite being landlocked, has closed itself off from its five neighbours, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. The border with Tajikistan is even mined. And on the story goes, through the barriers separating Brunei and Malaysia, Malaysia and Thailand, Pakistan and India, India and Bangladesh, China and North Korea, North and South Korea and so on around the world.

These walls tell us much about international politics, but the anxieties they represent transcend the nation-state boundaries on which they sit. The primary purpose of the walls appearing throughout Europe is to stop the wave of migrants – but they also say much about wider divisions and instability in the very structure of the European Union, and within its member nations. President Trump’s proposed wall along the US–Mexico border is intended to stem the flow of migrants from the south, but it also taps into a wider fear many of its supporters feel about changing demographics.

Division shapes politics at every level – the personal, local, national and international. Every story has two sides, and so does every wall. It’s essential to be aware of what has divided us, and what continues to do so, in order to understand what’s going on in the world today.

Picture the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the sequence titled ‘The Dawn of Man’. On the African Savannah in prehistoric times, a small tribe of proto-man/apes is drinking peacefully at a watering hole when another tribe turns up. The individuals are quite happy to share with their own group – but not with this new ‘other’ tribe. A shrieking match ensues in which the new group succeeds in taking over the watering hole, forcing the others to retreat. At this point, if the newcomers had had the nous to make a few bricks and mix some cement they could have walled off their new possession and guarded it. But, given that this is set a few million years ago, they have to fight it out again when the first tribe returns some days later, having boned up on warfare, to reclaim its territory.

We have always liked our space. Grouping into tribes, feeling alarmed by a lot of outsiders and responding to perceived threats are very human things to do. We form ties that are important for survival, but also for social cohesion. We develop a group identity, and this often leads to conflict with others. Our groups are competing for resources, but there is also an element of identity conflict – a narrative of ‘us and them’.

In the early history of mankind, we were hunter-gatherers: we had not settled, or acquired permanent fixed resources that others might covet. Then, in parts of what we now call Turkey and the Middle East, humans started farming. Instead of roaming far and wide to find food, or graze livestock, they ploughed the fields and waited for the results. Suddenly (in the context of evolution) more and more of us needed to build barriers: walls and roofs to house ourselves and our livestock, fences to mark our territory, fortresses to retreat to if the territory was overrun, and guards to protect the new system. Those walls were functional – and they often worked.

The age of walls was upon us and these great fortifications have gripped our imagination ever since. We still tell each other tales of the walls of Troy, Jericho, Babylon, the Great Wall of China, Great Zimbabwe, Hadrian’s Wall, the Inca Walls in Peru, Constantinople and many others. On and on they stretch, through time, region and culture, to the present – but now they are electrified, topped with searchlights and CCTV.

However, these physical divisions are mirrored by those in the mind – the great ideas that have guided our civilizations and given us identity and a sense of belonging – such as the Great Schism of Christianity, the split of Islam into Sunni and Shia, and in more recent history the battles between Communism, Fascism and Democracy.

The title of Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book The World is Flat was based on the belief that globalization would inevitably bring us closer together. It has increased international trade: you can click a button and someone in Shanghai will put something in a box and send it to you – but that is not necessarily unity. Globalization has also inspired us to build barriers, especially after the financial crisis of 2008, when the money ran out. When faced with additional perceived threats – terrorism, violent conflict, refugees and immigration, the increasing gap between rich and poor – people cling more tightly to their groups.

The new age of division in which we find ourselves is mirrored and exacerbated by developments in the digital world. The co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, believed social media would unite us. He has subsequently admitted that he was mistaken. In some respects it brought us closer together, but it has simultaneously given voice and organizational ability to new cyber tribes, some of whom spend their time spewing invective and division across the World Wide Web. There seem now to be as many tribes, and as much conflict between them, as there has ever been. The question we face today is: what form do our modern tribes take? Do we define ourselves by class, by race, by religion, by nationality? And is it possible for these tribes to coexist?

It all comes down to this ‘us and them’ concept and the walls we build in our minds. Sometimes the ‘other’ has a different language or skin colour; a different religion or other set of beliefs. One example of this came up recently when I was in London with a group of thirty leading young journalists from around the world who I was helping to train. I’d mentioned the Iran–Iraq war, in which up to 1 million people died, and had used the possibly clumsy phrase ‘Muslims killing Muslims’. A young Egyptian journalist jumped from his chair and shouted that he could not allow me to say this. I pointed out the statistics from that terrible war and he replied, ‘Yes, but the Iranians are not Muslims.’

The penny dropped, along with my heart. The majority of Iranians are Shia, so I asked him, ‘Are you saying that the Shia are not Muslims?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘The Shia are not Muslims.’

Such divisions do not come down to competition for resources, but rather to a claim that what you think is the only truth, and those with differing views are lesser people. With such certainty of superiority, the walls quickly go up. If you introduce competition for resources, they go up higher. We seem to be in that place now.

The world is in many ways better than it has ever been. In recent decades hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of extreme poverty; rates of malaria are going down; polio has almost been eradicated; infant mortality is going down. Would you rather live in the sixteenth century or the twenty-first? Despite all her power and wealth, Queen Elizabeth I suffered far more with severely painful toothache than most people living in the West today ever will. But we are putting a lot of this progress at risk. The post-Second World War era that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall has given way to a new phase, in which the centre ground is increasingly put under pressure while the siren call of the extremes grows stronger. We are not necessarily going backwards, but we need to understand, acknowledge – and sometimes even accept – the divisions that exist if we want to build towards unity.

For the purpose of this book I use walls as shorthand for barriers, fences and divisions in all their variety. We do look at physical walls in each chapter, most of which involve bricks and mortar, or concrete and wire, but those walls are the ‘what’ of division, not the ‘why’ – and they are just the beginning of the story.

I haven’t been able to cover every divided region. Instead I have focused on those that best illustrate the challenges of identity in a globalized world: the effects of migration (the USA, Europe, the Indian subcontinent); nationalism as a force for both unity and division (China, the UK, Africa); and the intersections of religion and politics (Israel, the Middle East).

In China, we see a strong nation state with a number of divisions within its borders – such as regional unrest and wealth disparity – that pose a risk to national unity, threatening economic progress and power; thus the government must exert control over the Chinese people. The USA is also divided, for different reasons: the era of Trump has exacerbated race relations in the Land of the Free, but has also revealed a hitherto unrivalled split between Republicans and Democrats, who are more opposed than ever before.

The divisions between Israel and Palestine are well established, but with so many further subdivisions within each population it is almost impossible to try to agree upon a solution. Religious and ethnic divisions also spark violence across the Middle East, highlighting the key struggle between Shia and Sunni Muslims – each incident is the result of complex factors, but much of it comes down to religion, especially the regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In the Indian subcontinent population movements, now and in the coming years, reveal the plight of those fleeing religious persecution as well as that of the many economic and climate refugees.

In Africa, the borders left behind by colonialism are proving difficult to reconcile with tribal identities that remain strong. Across Europe the very concept of the EU is under threat as the walls go back up, proving that the differences of the Cold War years haven’t entirely been resolved, and that nationalism has never really gone away in the age of internationalism. And as the UK leaves the EU, Brexit reveals divisions throughout the kingdom – long-established regional identities, as well as the more recent social and religious tensions that have formed in the era of globalization.

In a time of fear and instability, people will continue to group together, to protect themselves against perceived threats. Those threats don’t just come from the borders. They can also come from within – as China well knows . . .

CHAPTER 1

THE GREAT FIREWALL

China

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‘As in the real world, freedom and orderare both necessary in cyberspace.’

– President Xi Jinping

The Great Wall of China is over 13,000 miles long, running roughly along the border between central China and Inner Mongolia.

CHINESE EMPERORS HAVE ALWAYS STRUGGLED TO unite their disparate and divided fiefdoms into a unitary whole. President Xi Jinping is no different. He may not be called emperor, but his official titles give the game away – General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the People’s Republic of China, Chairman of the Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development – the list goes on and on. He’s not just a Supreme Leader, he’s a Very Supreme Leader.

Everything about what he leads is vast, including the challenges. China’s five geographical time zones amount to an area the size of the USA. Within this space live 1.4 billion ethnically diverse people, speaking dozens of different languages; it’s a multi-ethnic empire with Communist Chinese characteristics. There may be five geographic time zones, but there’s only one that is official. The answer to the question ‘What’s the time?’ is ‘Whatever time Beijing says it is.’ This central rule has long been the case, but the twenty-first-century emperor has a luxury few of his precursors enjoyed. He can survey his empire from the air – not just the area encompassed by the Himalayas, to the Sea of Japan and the Gobi Desert, down to the South China Sea, but now the economic empire spanning the globe.

Xi is good at projecting his power. He travels more than many of his predecessors. He flies to the world’s capitals, confident in the united economic power of the new China, but en route to the airport he will be reminded of how careful Chinese leaders must always be to ensure that the centre holds. To do this they have become masters at quietly promoting unity through division.

As you drive north-east along the Airport Expressway out of Beijing towards the Great Wall of China, the divisions within the population are at first difficult for an outsider to identify, but then become increasingly easy. Xi can see these at a glance because many have arisen in his lifetime, some under his leadership.

From the city centre, with its gleaming, neon-lit temples to consumerism and upscale apartment blocks for the well-off, the road leads on past miles of high-rise flats inhabited by the ever-burgeoning middle classes. Further out are the factory and industrial workers who, year on year, continue to flow in from the countryside to the capital and other big cities. A local can spot which apartment blocks house the better off, and which have been hastily thrown up to cope with the influx. Once out into the small towns and villages, there is little neon and less commercialization. In this part of China the towns are drab, colourless, spartan affairs with few amenities; to the foreign eye, there is only an overwhelming sense of greyness. This is perhaps China’s greatest divide – that between urban and rural, rich and poor – and, as we shall see later, it worries the ruling Communist Party. It knows that the unity and stability of the People’s Republic depend to a great extent on bridging the gap, and that its iron grip on the people will slip if it fails to do so.

Unity has always been crucial to China’s success, and at the same time one of its biggest challenges. In the past, the one thing that played both a physical and symbolic role in unifying the country was the Great Wall of China. If Xi kept going along the Expressway, straight past the airport, he’d end up on an eight-lane highway heading further north-east, and from there arrive at a structure that has gripped the world’s imagination.

As you approach the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, the highway diminishes into a simple two-lane road, the buildings become fewer and the landscape increasingly verdant. A few miles away from the wall, the road leads to a car park where you must transfer to a coach to take you to where the road ends. Then it’s either a cable car to the top or a steep 2-mile hike, possibly accompanied by a herd of goats. The unguided goat tour is not optional – if the goats want to follow you, they will; if they don’t, they won’t. Whichever route you choose, you will eventually see something that makes the effort more than worthwhile.

When I first gazed over the miles of brickwork snaking along the mountain tops, I was not as overawed as I had been at, say, the Grand Canyon. Nor did I feel overwhelmed, as I was by the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa in Dubai. I did not feel political ideology emanating from it, as I did when I visited the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War. But there was something else. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I understood China just a little bit better than before.

It didn’t make me any sort of expert – far from it – but in that moment I had a much better appreciation of phrases such as ‘ancient culture’ and ‘the greatest feat in human history’, and of the concept that many in the People’s Republic still divide the world into those who are Chinese and those who are not. After all, the wall was built around a simplistic idea: on one side of it was civilization and on the other barbarity.

Behind me, to the south, lay the heartland of the Middle Kingdom populated by the Han people. To the north, in the far distance beyond the mountains, was where the steppe and desert of Mongolia began, flanked on the right by Manchuria and on the left by the Xinjiang region.

Before the wall existed, some 2,500 years ago, the northern mountains offered a degree of protection to the Han, who had developed settled societies in the fertile lands of the North China Plain. But raiding parties, and occasionally whole armies, from all three regions would find ways through the mountain passes into the flat agricultural lands of the feudal states and cities such as Beijing, Luoyang and Kaifeng. And so, over centuries, the Chinese would develop the quintessential symbol of ‘us and them’ cast in stone.

The great American Sinologist John King Fairbank had perhaps one of the best descriptions of the Great Wall, calling it ‘a line of demarcation separating the steppe from the sown field, nomadism from agriculture, and barbarism from civilization’. And this fits with the prevailing attitude of ‘Sinocentrism’ at the time – the belief that China was the cultural centre of the earth, and the most advanced civilization. The Han also believed that China’s emperor was the only ruler on earth who was mandated by heaven itself, and thus the legitimate emperor of the world. It therefore followed that not only were all other rulers subordinate, but that all other civilizations were inferior. Near neighbours of different ethnicities were to be brought under the rule of the emperor, although they could have their own local leaders. Nearby barbarian states could have kings, but they had to recognize that they were lesser than the Chinese emperor. And even places further afield, such as Xinjiang, Java and Japan, were deemed ‘tributary states’ and had to pay tribute to the Middle Kingdom. This was not a world view designed to win friends, but it certainly influenced people, and for long periods it worked.

Over the centuries, the Great Wall enhanced China’s security, binding it as a political entity and providing the stability to develop farmland in western and northern regions. As the wall stretched westwards it also protected part of the Silk Road, thus furthering economic growth. At its longest, and including the parallel walls, the defensive system stretched for more than 13,000 miles. To give a sense of its magnitude, that is equivalent to four walls parallel to each other, each stretching from the east coast of the USA all the way across to the Pacific Ocean, with a lot of bricks to spare.

Although the physical role it played in uniting the country diminished over the years, it remained an important symbol in the national consciousness. So much so that after the Communists came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong mentioned the wall in a poem about the Long March titled ‘Mount Liupan’, which includes the lines:

The heavens are high, the clouds are pale,We watch as the wild geese disappear southwards.If we fail to reach the Great Wall we are not true men,We who have marched more than 20,000 li . . .

The wording of the penultimate line has subsequently been adapted into a popular proverb that says, ‘One who fails to reach the Great Wall is no hero’, meaning ‘If you can’t overcome great difficulties, you’re no hero.’

The poem caused some problems in the new regime, as the Communists seemed to have conflicting views of the wall – many saw it as a symbol of the nation’s feudal past and believed it should be consigned to history, even encouraging people to vandalize it. But, given that Mao had written about it, other Communists wanted to visit it to show ‘Chairman Mao spirit’. If you go to the Mutianyu section, you can see written in gigantic white characters on the mountain top, ‘Loyalty to Chairman Mao’. And the wall was mentioned in the national anthem, adopted in 1949, so it was clear the Party recognized its cultural and historical importance. For the most part, they settled for ignoring it – to begin with, at least. During the Cultural Revolution, however, the most fervent of the Red Guards actively destroyed sections of the wall – to them it was a part of the ‘Four Olds’, which had no place in the new China: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas.

Mao died in 1976, and with him the Cultural Revolution. After 1978 the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, began a methodical reconstruction of the wall. He started slowly – the early post-Mao years were a time for caution – but by 1984 he was confident enough to pronounce, ‘Let us love our China and restore our Great Wall.’ In this particular endeavour, it’s likely that Deng had one eye on tourism and foreign currency; the Communist leadership was beginning to embrace aspects of capitalism, and was well aware of how far it had fallen behind other parts of the world. And so laws were passed to make it illegal to damage, remove or write graffiti on any part of the wall, alongside attempts at rebuilding (with mixed success) and a drive towards attracting visitors.

The Great Wall has played a huge role in the popular imagination of both the Chinese and the rest of the world – although some historians argue that the Europeans were more obsessed by it than the Chinese themselves and that this contributed towards awareness of, and identification with, the structure in China itself. So the wall has been instrumental in defining China from outside as well as within its own confines.

In reality, the wall was only ever partially successful in military terms. Without doubt its early-warning system, fortifications and strategic strongholds offered some protection, but, as we’ve seen, they were hardly impregnable. However, its role as a symbol of defence, of dividing the Han from the ‘outsiders’, was invaluable; today it remains an icon of a great and ancient culture.

But what of the great and modern culture?

Qin Shi Huang, the founder of the Qin dynasty, succeeded in uniting seven warring states into one China in 221 BCE, but just because it has lasted twenty-three centuries does not automatically mean it will last another.

The Chinese do not like to talk to outsiders about the country’s problems or divisions. Whereas you’ll not have to go far to find someone in Britain or France, say, who will happily tell you their country is going to the dogs, in China it is considered unpatriotic and a loss of face to criticize the state. Of course, it might also be risky given that China remains a one-party dictatorship.

Nevertheless, there are problems and divisions in the twenty-three provinces, four municipalities, five autonomous regions and two special administrative regions. One of the biggest is that between the Han heartland and the non-Han areas that surround it in a semicircle. To the north-east is Manchuria, to the north Inner Mongolia, to the north-west Xinjiang and to the west Tibet. These regions are crucial for security, natural resources and trade, but they aren’t all in favour of Chinese rule. Manchuria is now totally dominated by the Han, but the other regions maintain their own identity, language, customs and, in the cases of Xinjiang and Tibet, their own religions (Islam and Buddhism) and separatist movements.

China has tried to control Xinjiang and its Uighur people for several centuries, but the population has never fully accepted domination by Beijing. There were a series of uprisings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and even a short-lived Eastern Turkestan Republic in the 1930s. Mao then annexed Xinjiang in 1949 and it now accounts for about one-sixth of China’s territory. To give an idea of how barren and sparsely populated Xinjiang is, it’s worth pointing out that it is about half of the size of India but with less than 2 per cent of its population.

Distribution of the Han population across China’s provinces (2010).

The intervening years have seen a mass movement of Han settlers into Xinjiang, and in a few years’ time they are likely to comprise almost half of the current 22-million-strong population. This has not gone unopposed. The Uighurs complain that they are excluded from the better jobs and persecuted by militia formed within state-controlled construction industries, and there are occasional riots and ethnic clashes. Opposition is sometimes conducted through the legal system, but there is also a small terrorist campaign, fuelled partially by Muslim fighters who have returned from Iraq and Syria. Jihadist organizations in the Central Asian republics are thought to assist them with money and, if necessary, safe havens. Alarm bells began to ring when the Islamic State (IS) terror group released a video showing Uighur men training in Iraq, vowing to plant their flag in China and threatening that blood would ‘flow in rivers’.

In the spring of 2017 there was an outbreak of ethnic violence in the area between Uighurs and Han. This was followed by a massive show of force by heavily armed government troops. The regional Communist Party leader recommended that the soldiers ‘bury the corpses of terrorists in the vast sea of the people’s war’. President Xi was somewhat more restrained, contenting himself with a call for a ‘Great Wall of Iron’ to be built to safeguard Xinjiang and a warning that ethnic division would not be tolerated – ‘Just as one loves one’s own eyes, one must love ethnic unity,’ he said. In early 2018 Xi’s version of this unity was to decree that 1 million Communist Party officials would be dispatched to live with local Uighur families. The recipients of these enforced ‘home stays’ are encouraged to do their bit for ethnic relations by providing their ‘guests’ with detailed information on their political views. It’s a sort of Chinese B&B meets Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Love’ but where Room 101 is your front parlour.

Despite the unrest, there is little chance of Beijing loosening its iron grip. The region acts as a buffer zone, is on the new Silk Road and so is crucial for trade, and it has large reserves of the coal that energy-hungry China so badly needs. But, even so, the authorities are seriously concerned about events there. Such divisions and dissension undermine the Communist Party’s image as the only source of power and protector of the people.

The same goes for Tibet. Strategically it serves as a buffer zone for the heartland, preventing India from dominating the high ground along the border – arguably, the Himalayas act as a barrier, which is perhaps why a major conflict has never emerged between the two nations. This also allows China to protect its water sources – Tibet is sometimes called the ‘Asian Water Tower’ as so many major rivers flow out of the region.

If you measure Tibet by the three Tibetan provinces, it is about 965,000 square miles, or nearly four times the size of France, and thus equals about a quarter of China’s land mass. However, when Beijing refers to Tibet it means the Tibet Autonomous Region, which was established after China defeated the Tibetan army in 1950. It is less than half the size of the original three provinces, as the rest of the area became absorbed by other Chinese regions, and it contains only a third of China’s ethnically Tibetan population.

As with the Uighur Muslims, the Tibetan Buddhists retain a strong sense of identity separate from the Han Chinese. But for both regions, any hope of self-rule has almost disappeared. In Tibet, it’s estimated that half of the population are now Han. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, but it’s thought that there are about 6 million Tibetans and 6 million Han living in the area as a whole. In the larger towns they live cheek by jowl, albeit often in different neighbourhoods, although in the rural areas the Tibetans remain a majority.

The divisions between the ethnicities are something the state believes it can handle, as long as those within the Han are smoothed over. And it is these divides that may pose the greatest threat to the prospects of long-term prosperity and unity in China. It’s a threat taken very seriously by the Communist Party. It has learned the lessons of history and knows what happens when the state is weakened by a fragmented population.

In the nineteenth century, China saw a major reversal in the way its trading operated. The land trade routes through Central Asia had always been the economic priority, but now the sea lanes became the primary route. This reversal was not entirely by choice – the British and other foreign powers had used their military strength to force favourable trading terms upon China. As a result, the focus of trade shifted to the Pacific coast, which helped the communities in that region to develop, but it weakened the trading prospects of the interior, which in turn reduced the amount of money spent on its infrastructure. So while the coastal regions prospered, the dirt-poor farmers remained dirt poor – and the foreigners became increasingly powerful. This undermined the central authority over the regions and was partly responsible for the splintering of the state. Given such a divided population, the centre could not hold. A now thoroughly weakened China was helpless in the face of, first, the ‘barbarian’ colonialists, then civil war, and finally invasion by the old enemy, Japan, beginning in 1931.

After the Second World War, when the Communists had won the civil war, they knew they had somehow to bring the country back together. Communist regimes are not known for their liberal tendencies or their relaxed approach to rules and power-sharing. Out went the foreigners and into the regional capitals went the Party cadres. Under Mao they brutally repressed any signs of dissent from the regions and centralized all power in the Party based in Beijing, which from 1949 was again the capital of the country.

Many of the trade links with the developed world were cut, which partially resulted in that great communist ideal – equality. Slowly the coastal areas became almost as poor as the interior, solving that particular imbalance between the regions. Aside from much of the Party hierarchy, most people continued to be poor for several decades as Mao consolidated power and brought the non-Han territories under his control.

Mao may have reunited the country but it came at the cost of development, and at exactly the time when other nations in the region were emerging into the world economy and rapidly improving themselves. Japan, South Korea, Singapore and others were all outpacing China in economic terms, some in a military capacity as well. If this trend were to continue, it would threaten both China’s defensive security and its internal cohesion, once it became apparent to all how far behind the Chinese had fallen.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, took a deep breath and a gamble: if Chinese consumers were too poor to buy many of the goods China could produce, the economy had to be opened up to the outside world once more. This meant trading via the Pacific coast, so the coastal regions would again prosper more quickly than the interior, thus risking a repeat of the divisions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It was, and still is, a race against the clock. It is also a strategy that relies on an economic policy that must maintain its relentless pace, no matter what. China has to continue making things. The world has to keep buying these things. If the demand drops, China cannot afford, as a normal capitalist system might, to stop making these things. It must keep up production, keep the factories open, subsidize the banks; no matter the surplus – try to dump some products abroad at fire-sale prices, sell even more to the part of the domestic population which can afford them. Just don’t let the system stop, because if it does, so might the entire country.

This is a fascinating capitalist version of the old Soviet Communist system, which produced as many tractors as the government told it to, regardless of how many were needed. It has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty – at the cost, however, of environmental damage and the renewed widening of the gap between the coastal region and the interior, the rich and the poor.

The wage difference between rural and urban workers has narrowed slightly in the past few years, but even now someone in a city can expect to earn three times as much as a country worker. Levels of income inequality in China are among the highest in the world, leading to a feeling that China’s wealth-making machine has served the few, not the many – or in Chinese slang, for ‘the Zhao family’, an idiom similar to ‘the top dogs’. The expression has its popular roots in a 1921 novel, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun, which includes the line ‘You think you’re worthy of the surname Zhao?’, referring to a wealthy clan. The phrase began to appear on the Chinese internet in 2015 and now the saying ‘Zhao and not Zhao’ is equivalent to ‘the haves and have-nots’.

Distribution of wealth across China’s provinces, GDP per person (2010).

All countries have wealth inequality, and all have similar sayings, but the difference in China is the size of that gap, and the sheer number of people on the wrong side of it. A 2015 report from the China Family Panel Studies at Peking University exploring the ‘well-being of the Chinese population’ concluded that, overall, wealth inequality was getting worse. It reported that a third of China’s wealth is owned by 1 per cent of households, while the bottom 25 per cent of households account for just 1 per cent of wealth. The disparity can be traced back to the opening up of the economy in 1979.

The government is very aware of the problems and dangers such division can pose, especially as an internet poll conducted in 2015 suggested that wealth inequality, with its knock-on effects on health and education, is the top issue that people want the government to address. In a news item on the report the People’s Daily newspaper commented, ‘These inequalities are growing steadily. If they cannot be effectively solved, they may very likely threaten social stability and thus become a bottleneck in future social development.’

There is even a divide between the generations, with some elderly people harking back to the days of Mao and ‘equality’. They look askance at the younger generation, more of whom are urban, better educated and consumerist, or at least seek to be. The Communist Party’s future is dependent on what it delivers to them and vice versa.

The developing fissures in Chinese society cannot be allowed to widen. One of the ways in which the government intends to address the problem is to create a much bigger urban consumerist population, thereby offsetting the blows to the economy when exports abroad falter. Estimates vary, but at least 150 million people have left the rural areas this century and the number is expected to increase. It is the younger generations who move from the countryside, and within them are a disproportionate number of men – married men will sometimes travel to find work in the cities, leaving behind family members to maintain the fields. Despite this, it is crucial to remember that even now about 900 million Chinese live in rural areas and about 500 million in an urban environment.

Change has been quick, and will quicken. By 2026 Beijing hopes to have moved another 250 million people, meaning that by then half of the population will be urban. To achieve this involves a mass uprooting of people, along with the destruction of villages and the building of cities, megacities, roads and high-speed railways. The majority of the movement continues to be from west to east, the west still tending to be more rural, with higher illiteracy rates; the east, especially towards the seaboard, is increasingly urban and oriented towards technology, industry and business.

However, the mass migration to the cities reveals and exacerbates another gap within the urban population, again between rich and poor. It has been created by the hukou system, a form of registration that is rooted in the social structure of the country. It is one of the things that have helped to entrench the perception of the rural population as second-class citizens.

The hukou system predates the Great Wall, going all the way back to the Xia dynasty (2070–1600 BCE), which started registering every member of every family. In 1953 the Communist Party continued to use the ancient system but also started to classify people as rural or urban dwellers. This was not just another way to keep tabs on everyone; it was intended to stop people migrating to the urban areas, which were not capable of absorbing an influx at the time, and to avoid a repeat of the inequalities between country and city of the previous century.

To this day the system still exists and everyone’s name, parents’ names, date of birth, spouse, etc., must be registered – which is normal in many countries. But, in China, where you are registered determines where you live and, crucially, where you can receive state aid and in what form. The key divisions arise in the local vs non-local and agricultural vs non-agricultural categories.

Let’s say your family is registered as non-agricultural Shanghai. This immediately gives you access to a wide range of health and education services in the city. For example, according to a paper in the China Economic Review, funding per pupil in Beijing in 1998 was twelve times greater than in Guizhou province, a ratio that increased to fifteen in 2001. On the other hand, if your family is registered as agricultural from a farming region 1,000 miles west of Shanghai, the schools you have access to are way below the standard of those in Shanghai, as are the limited range of social services. Moreover, your work consists of back-breaking labour, which sometimes results only in subsistence farming.

So, you move to Shanghai to seek work in a factory. Your wages will immediately be higher, and you may be able to send some money back home. But you are registered as ‘rural agricultural’, so you do not qualify for social security or healthcare in Shanghai. In the event of marrying and having a child, you are also not registered for your child to be educated in Shanghai. This has resulted in a massive urban underclass of migrant workers from the rural areas who are now partially cut off from social services. They were second-class citizens in the countryside, and now find that they are regarded as such in the cities too.

The government faces a quandary when trying to address this problem. One option is to initiate a revolution in social funding in the countryside and bring the rural areas up to the standards of the cities. But not only would that cost vast sums of money, it might also keep people in the countryside at the very time the government knows it still needs to create an urban consumer population if its economic policy is to work. Worse still, some of those already in the cities might choose to go home. If that happens, the economic miracle goes bust, unemployment rockets and social disorder follows.

Somehow Beijing needs to balance the books. It must fund a hukou system in the cities for those who have come from the rural areas, while also increasing the funding for social services in general as the cities continue to grow – then somehow, ideally simultaneously, raise standards in the countryside while still encouraging movement to the built-up areas, preferably creating new cities in the interior.

This is quite a challenge, and how to tackle it is not straightforward; quite apart from the vast expense, the creation of so many new urban environments, spread out around the country, is a logistical challenge. Beijing is toying with the idea of allowing regional governments more power to tax at a local level, raise revenues through land sales and spend the proceeds as it sees fit. It might work. But if it fails, Beijing will have to bail out the local government. And even if it succeeds, it might fuel what the Party dreads – regionalism.

Deng appears to have known that his gamble would give rise to many of these issues. In a famous interview in 1986 Mike Wallace of CBS News asked the then eighty-two-year-old Communist leader about the startling phrase attributed to him from the late 1970s that ‘to get rich is glorious’. Deng replied:

According to Marxism, Communist society is based on material abundance . . . So to get rich is no sin. However, what we mean by getting rich is different from what you mean. Wealth in a socialist society belongs to the people. To get rich in a socialist society means prosperity for the entire people. The principles of socialism are: first, development of production and second, common prosperity. We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster. That is why our policy will not lead to polarization, to a situation where the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

He was half right and half wrong. Half wrong because the rich have got richer, but half right because despite the vast gap in equality, the poor have not got poorer – in fact many have got richer.

China has created a middle class of about 400 million people and it has lifted hundreds of millions more out of abject poverty. It’s a work in progress, and you can’t rule out the possibility of things going backwards, but there are enough Chinese who can still remember just how poor most people were before, and that there was almost no chance of lifting yourself out of that poverty – after all, most of the grandparents of today’s mature adults were peasants in a feudal society. This buys the Party a little more time to address the problem; but if it cannot narrow the wealth gap soon, eventually the resentment from the ‘non-Zhaos’ will grow.

Another problem the government faces is that of an ageing population. This isn’t unique to China, of course. But it is a particular issue for China because of the ‘one child only’ policy, which means that the population is ageing much faster than in other countries. In less than a decade the number of elderly will rise from 200 million to 300 million. Is the government prepared for such a change in demographics? Its economic policy has been reliant on a young and plentiful labour force. Proportionally, this pool of available labourers – and taxpayers – will get smaller at the same time as the financial burden of providing care to the ageing population increases, putting economic progress at risk.

Again the solution is not clear. One option is to raise the retirement age by five years, but that simply postpones the problem, and in the meantime creates another: the college graduates the education system is churning out want jobs; unemployment and lack of promotion are already difficulties and will only be exacerbated if the older generation retires later. The alternative is to ensure that the social services can provide pensions and drop the ‘one child’ policy. The latter was done in 2015, but the government is still looking for ways to fund the former.

These are the multiple divisions simmering within the Han population, all of which pose a potential threat to the government if they worsen. The authorities must retain control of China’s heartland if they are to keep its economic policy on track and the outlying regions in check. Their solution is to control the flow of information, to prevent dissenting ideas from spreading, to stop opposition consolidating. They must divide in order to unite; and so, in the age of the internet, the Great Firewall of China came into being.

This creates contradictory policies: suppressing information while simultaneously creating a vibrant economy that is increasingly based on data exchange across the country and with the outside world. In the early days of the internet this was not a problem for a government hell-bent on protecting its position as China’s only source of power and information. Access was limited, so all internal mass communication was state-controlled, and the few internet cafés or universities connected to the web could be easily monitored, both physically and electronically. As recently as 2005, only 10 per cent of the population had access to the internet. Now, however, the figure is 50 per cent – and rising. That’s about 700 million users, which is roughly a quarter of the world’s online population. And that is harder to control.