Jacob Dreyer in Noema Magazine: Over the past few years, the flimsy states and territories that cover the Eurasian continent as lightly as gauze have been getting pushed and pulled into a new way of being. In response to volatile oil prices, temperatures creeping ever higher, forests burning and deserts growing, China is reordering the internal logic of the supercontinent under the banner of a technological dream of endlessly renewable electricity.
The sources of this electricity, as if in fulfillment of an ancient pagan dream, are the rays of the sun, the breeze across the prairie and the cascades of mountain rivers. While new reservoirs of fossil fuels and seams of ores are being penetrated here too, two-thirds of all wind and solar projects that are currently under construction are located in China, and the country is expected to install more than half of the world’s total solar power in 2024 alone, both within and outside its borders. Across these huge distances and extreme temperatures — what the English geographer Halford Mackinder called the “Heartland” of the “World Island” — new towns are being built, even new capitals, all linked by lengths of glass and plastic wires to vast fields of solar panels and wind turbines and mega-dams.
This monumental industrial transformation is reshaping the internal logic and economic priorities of countries from Mongolia to Pakistan to Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia. It’s reordering political alliances and trade routes across the entire post-Soviet space and the Arab world — or, if you prefer to think in historical terms, most of the Mongol Empire’s territory circa 1259. In seeking to decarbonize, China is upending Eurasia’s and indeed the global economy, whose denomination is the petrodollar, and restructuring the United States-led world. What this post-oil world looks like depends on where you visit. In Mongolia and Saudi Arabia, I discovered that the industry of the global renewable energy transition is very much oriented toward China.
While the Chinese are building a new Eurasia in the form of a totalizing machine, Russian intellectuals have had a different fantasy of Eurasia for at least the past hundred years. From Aleksandr Dugin and Sergei Karaganov, and Lev Gumilev before them, this fantasy has been derived from some romantic vision of communist, pagan, primitive, anti-modern Mongol hordes. Gumilev, the strange and bitter celebrity ethnologist of Russia’s 1990s, prophesized a return to a Mongolic way of life, one infused with the purity of the endless earth and the mysticism of shamans in which the life of the people shines, and shines, and shines. Before him, Fyodor Dostoyevsky decried the crystal palace in London as a symbol of Western modernity, alien to the Russian soul.
Russia today revels in playing the innocent victim, just trying to defend itself, gathering the clans to fight modernity. That’s an incoherent position and ironic, because by fleeing from a complicated, decadent, urban, enlightened Europe, Russia is delivering itself into the jaws of a more sophisticated machine than 21st-century Europe could ever hope to be. China is a hyper-organized, rationalist, urban technocracy that forcibly integrates foreign peoples and embraces a generic globalism as much as anywhere on Earth. So if the Russian Eurasianists think that by discarding Europe and allying with China they can turn their backs on the contemporary, they are sadly mistaken.
At the heart of the contemporary Chinese empire is a digital megastructure that might be the true protagonist of our time, reordering energy, land, and human life around its need to adjust to a new enviro-political reality. When COP29 opens in November in Baku, a Eurasian city built on oil that is today crisscrossed by infrastructure with Chinese characteristics, a latter-day Pax Mongolica will see itself in the mirror: a Sinified Eurasian continent remaking itself with renewable power.
More here.
