China Shows that Geopolitics is Less Relevant than Ever

When J.R.R. Tolkien was asked, late in life, how he had created the extraordinarily rich and complex world in which his famous adventures took place, he answered that he “wisely started with a map and made the story fit”. Before him, Robert Louis Stevenson gazed at the map of Treasure Island that he had drawn for his own story, and “found the pirates began crawling out of it, Long John Silver with his cutlass between his teeth”. The romance of adventure aligns naturally with a map, for it allows the narrative to unfold step by step, growing into the space delineated. But there is always the danger that maps overwhelm the brute facts of geography, comprising instead a kind of spatial yearning that substitutes for the difficulty of actually bringing the story to life. As long as the story remains fiction though, X really can mark the spot.

Perhaps there is a carto-tropic property of the human mind that exaggerates the significance of maps, substituting an idea of control…