Photo: Cover of 'Great Game On: The contest for Central Asia and global supremacy' by Geoff Raby.
Great Game On: The contest for Central Asia and global supremacy
By Geoff Raby
What is the ‘Great Game’? It started in the nineteenth century as a struggle for Central Asia. Its foremost protagonist was Britain, and the country it conceived to be its antagonist was Russia. Then, Russia’s power had expanded into Central Asia, and in 1865 Russian troops attacked and captured Tashkent, generally regarded as the capital of Turkestan. In 1877-78 Russia led a coalition army which defeated the Ottomans, long a power in Central Asia.
Britain was convinced that the Russians were taking control of Central Asia in order to establish a path to India, on which it had designs. In fact, Russia had no such designs. Russia was aware of the ‘scramble for Africa’ engaged in by European powers, and that small powers like Belgium and Portugal had acquired large domains, but Russia was not situated geographically to do the same. But it could in Central Asia, and it did. Britain perceived that Russia was in territorial status, not India.
But that struggle for power in Central Asia was replaced by an old one: control of China’s borders. The Great Wall of China is an example of the length the Chinese had to go to to secure their frontier. When Genghis Khan drew up his army before it, he remarked to his generals that it was only as strong as the men defending it. They were not strong enough.
The next dynasty to control China was the Manchu. Theirs was the Qing Dynasty which lasted from 1644 to 1911 and brought the western-most province, Xinjiang, more firmly into the imperial system. Xinjiang was the province most distant from the centre of government, and its people were Turkic, not Han, and they were Muslim. During the Qing dynasty, Russian power had continued to spread, but its greatest political achievement was to extract Eastern Siberia from the Qing. Eventually, the Russians came against another power, the Japanese, who became a contender in the Great Game, and fought for control of China in the second world war. There followed a civil war in China between the nationalists and the communists, which the latter won. Joseph Stalin treated his fellow communist, Mao Tse Tung, as a junior, to his immense chagrin. Worse, he talked Mao into participating in the Korean war but did not take part himself, and he infuriated Mao by sending him a bill for the weapons he sent to the front. Nikita Khrushchev was far more accommodating, and poured in aid. China went on to become an industrial world power and, with Russia weakened by war, dominates the Eurasian land mass. It is the undisputable winner of the Great Game.
One concludes from this story that there is always a need for peacemakers, and here we Friends can offer our services. We do not have the power of players in the Great Game, but we have the support of a power greater than theirs. In a quiet gathering, we should wait for the guidance to come.
