At the end of his famous address “The Geographical Pivot of History,” published in 1904, Mackinder made a bold prediction: if China and Japan organized themselves, overthrew the Russian Empire, and conquered its territory, they would combine the enormous advantages of the sea with the immense resources of the continent. Were this prospect to become a reality, it would bring about a “Yellow Peril” threatening the free world of the West. Less than two weeks after this address, the Russo-Japanese War broke out. I agree with Professor Xiaofeng that our present understanding of the importance of the Russo-Japanese War is inadequate. The Russo-Japanese War was not merely a war between East and West. More importantly, it revealed the fundamental problem confronting the globe in the nineteenth century: once the great powers had finished dividing up the world, they faced conflicts among themselves, such that these internal conflicts among the great powers would inevitably develop into a world war. The Russo-Japanese War can therefore be understood as a prelude to the First World War; some even call it “World War Zero.”
在1904年发表的著名演讲《历史的地理枢纽》的结尾，麦金德做了一个大胆的预测：假如中国与日本组织起来，推翻俄罗斯帝国，并征服它的领土的话，那就会把海洋的巨大优势与巨大的大陆资源结合在一起。这个图景一旦实现，就会导致一场威胁西方自由世界的“黄祸”。这个演讲之后不到两周时间，日俄战争就爆发了。我同意小枫老师的看法，目前我们对日俄战争重要性的理解不够。日俄战争不仅是东西方的战争，更重要的是，展现了十九世界全球面临的根本问题：当列强瓜分完全球之后，就面临着内部的冲突，以至于列强的内部冲突必然演变为世界大战。因此，日俄战争可以被理解为第一次世界大战的前奏，也有人把它叫做“零次世界大战”。
This war directly shaped the basic political configuration of the twentieth century. First, it hastened the end of Russia’s tsarist regime. Russia’s defeat in 1905 brought the outbreak of a bourgeois revolution, which, in Lenin’s words, was a “dress rehearsal for the October Revolution.” In other words, the Russo-Japanese War accelerated the geopolitical rise of the Soviet empire. Second, Japan’s defeat of the Qing government in the First Sino-Japanese War was a victory within the traditional Chinese civilizational sphere. Only by defeating Russia, a country of Western civilization, in the Russo-Japanese War did Japan truly become the representative of Eastern civilization. This sense of cultural confidence and pride accelerated the rise of Japan’s fascist empire and can be seen as the spiritual beginning of Japan’s construction of the so-called “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
这场战争直接塑造了20世纪的基本政治格局。第一，它加速了俄国沙皇政权的结束，1905年俄国战败就爆发了资产阶级革命，用列宁的话来讲，这是“十月革命的总演习”。换句话说，日俄战争加速了苏联帝国在地缘政治中的崛起。第二，日本甲午战争打败清政府是传统中国文明圈内部的胜负，而唯有在日俄战争中战胜西方文明的俄国才真正成为东方文明的代表，这种文化自信心与自豪感加速了日本法西斯帝国的崛起，可以看作是日本建构所谓“大东亚共荣圈”的精神开端。
There were many reasons for the defeat of Japan’s fascist empire. From a geopolitical perspective, one important reason was that Japan constantly vacillated between being a continental empire and a maritime empire. On the one hand, Japan wanted to become a continental empire, which meant confronting the Soviet Union. Yet Japan also wanted to become a maritime empire, which inevitably brought it into conflict with the United States. Ultimately, Japan was defeated under the combined pressure of the continental empire of the Soviet Union and the maritime empire of the United States.
日本法西斯帝国的失败有很多原因，从地缘政治的角度看，一个重要原因就在于日本始终在大陆帝国与海洋帝国之间摇摆。一方面日本希望成为大陆帝国，这就意味着日本要与苏联对抗，但日本希望成为海洋帝国，这必然与美国冲突。最终，日本失败于大陆帝国苏联和海洋帝国的美国之间的双重挤压。
After Japan’s defeat, however, China faced the same geopolitical dilemma that Japan had confronted: caught between the two great empires of the Soviet Union and the United States, was China to become a continental country or a maritime country? Behind the different ideologies of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party lay different geopolitical strategies. The Kuomintang had originally arisen in the coastal regions of Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. The Chinese Communist Party initially arose in coastal cities, but Mao Zedong’s movement from the base areas in Jiangxi and Hunan to Yan’an by way of the Long March effectively represented a choice of the path toward becoming a continental country. Thus, although the Kuomintang possessed powerful military forces, the Communist Party’s occupation of the northwest, followed by its securing the northeast first, consistently gave it a geostrategic advantage.
但是，日本战败之后，中国也面临着日本当年同样的两难地缘选择，在苏联和美国这两大帝国的夹缝中，中国究竟是成为大陆国家还是海洋国家？国共两党的不同意识形态背后乃是不同的地缘战略，国民党本来就是两广江浙这些沿海地带兴起的，而中国共产党一开始兴起于沿海城市，但毛泽东从江西湖南根据地以至于长征达到延安，实际上选择了一条成为大陆国家的路线。因此，虽然国民党拥有强大的军事实力，但共产党占领西北、后来抢先占领东北始终具有地缘战略上的优势。
Although New China took the path of a continental country and allied itself with the Soviet Union, it always harbored the intention of moving toward the maritime world. The retention of Hong Kong as a colony is one example. When the Soviet empire tried to control China and turn it into a vassal state, China was forced to break with the Soviet Union and thus resolved to turn toward the maritime world. When Nixon visited China in 1972, China and the United States set aside ideological interference and established a geopolitical alliance. This fundamentally overturned the geopolitical advantage the Soviet Union had once enjoyed in its struggle for supremacy with the United States, thereby planting the seeds of its dissolution. China’s entry into the maritime world therefore began in 1972, rather than with reform and opening up. Without the global geostrategic foundation laid in 1972, China’s reform and opening up could not have integrated the country into the United States–led maritime world system.
新中国虽然走向大陆国家与苏联结盟，但新中国始终怀有迈向海洋世界的心思。保留香港殖民地就是一个例子。当苏联帝国试图控制中国将中国变成为其附庸国时，中国被迫与苏联决裂，从而下决心转向海洋世界。1972年尼克松访华，中美双方排除意识形态的干扰建立了地缘联盟，从根本上颠覆了苏联在与美国争霸中曾经拥有的地缘政治优势，由此埋下了解体的根源。因此，中国加入海洋世界不是从改革开放开始，而是从1972年开始，没有1972年奠定的全球地缘战略基础，中国改革开放不可能融入到美国主导的海洋世界体系中。
Similarly, China’s relationship with the United States is once again at a critical juncture today. Like the Soviet Union then, the United States is suppressing China’s development in pursuit of global hegemony. A Sino-American trade war is imminent, and this could very well push China once again toward close relations with continental Russia. In fact, in the face of American global hegemony after the Cold War, China and Russia have already been building the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” and Sino-Russian relations have been growing ever closer. If Sino-American relations move toward a complete rupture, the significance for the global geopolitical configuration would be no less than that of Nixon’s 1972 visit to China for the Soviet Union.
而类似地，今天中国与美国的关系又处在关键时期，美国就像当年的苏联一样，为了全球霸权而压制中国发展，中美贸易战迫在眉睫，这完全有可能将中国重新推向与大陆的俄国建立密切关系。事实上，面对冷战后美国的全球霸权，中俄已经在建构“上海合作组织”，中俄关系也在越来越密切。若中美关系走向全面破裂，那在全球地缘政治格局中的意义不亚于1972年尼克松访华对于苏联的意义。
If we examine New China’s trajectory from 1949 to the present within this global geostrategic configuration, we will find that all of China’s geopolitical efforts have been directed toward finding a point of balance between land and sea. This point of balance is also, in fact, the balance that sustains world peace. It is precisely in this sense that, as time goes on, we can increasingly appreciate the relevance of Mackinder’s theoretical insights to our own day.
在这种全球地缘战略的格局下，我们看新中国从1949年走到今天的历程，你会发现，中国全部的地缘政治努力就是在大陆与海洋之间寻找一个平衡点，这个平衡点实际上也是维持世界的和平的平衡点。也正是在这个意义上，时间越到后来，我们越可以感受到麦金德的理论洞见对于今天意义。