Another ‘Prison of Nations’ : China: As in the Soviet Union, a regional decoupling could end communism.

Millions of Americans grew up reading newspapers that used the terms Soviet Union and Russia interchangeably. During the past decade, we have done better, learning that by no means all of the citizens of the Soviet Union are Russians. “The Ukraine” has lately become the politically correct Ukraine, and our newspaper maps (and television maps on the rare occasions when television uses a map at all) now routinely present the nations within the now-fractured union in appropriately different colors instead of the former sea of red.

The comparable process has not taken place for China, but it well could. The terms China and People’s Republic of China deserve to be only somewhat more interchangeable than Russia and Soviet Union. The Han, or ethnic Chinese, who occupy about the same position in the People’s Republic that the Russians have occupied in the Soviet Union, outnumber the non-Han by a far wider margin than the Russians have ever outnumbered the non-Russians. However, if we talk in terms of territory--and therefore maps--rather than population numbers, the picture still might undergo a drastic change.

The continued efforts of the Dalai Lama have gone some distance in separating Tibet from China in the Western mind, but Tibet still disappears into China on journalistic maps more often than, these days, Kazakhstan disappears into Russia. Xinjiang, along the Soviet border, a sparsely populated but even larger area whose population may look Chinese to the average Westerner but is Turkic in language and Muslim by religion, would stand out even more dramatically on an ethnically accurate map. The Manchurians of far northeastern China, who ruled the Han for centuries, may now be differentiated from the Han more by history than by ethnicity; but similar judgments were passed not long ago about the relationship of the Ukrainians to the Russians. The question would, in any event, not be prejudged by maps that sharply indicate state borders drawn by the communist Chinese themselves.

During the 18th Century, as Russia’s Romanoff dynasty expanded into Central Asia from the West, China’s Qing dynasty did the same from the East. To some extent, the populations along the eventual border between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic have more in common with each other than either has with their erstwhile conquerors.

Perhaps the most striking example is that of the regions once called Outer and Inner Mongolia, the former now an independent state, the latter still an autonomous region within the People’s Republic of China. Andrew Higgins, Beijing correspondent for the Independent of London, was recently expelled from China for reporting on nationalist activity in Chinese Mongolia.

The disestablishment of communism in independent Mongolia, long a Soviet satellite, is a development only months old. The great Erdene Zuu monastery re-opened only this past March. And yet on Sept. 28, the Dalai Lama mingled religion and anti-communism in an address to a religious service attended by 7,000 in the capital, Ulan Bator, and it seems likely that over time, Buddhism in Mongolia may combine with nationalism as Catholicism combined with nationalism in Poland. The Dalai Lama is Tibetan, of course, not Mongolian, but Mongolians practice the Tibetan or Vajrayana form of Buddhism. He has a symbolic importance like that of the Pope.

Russian communism followed more directly on the fall of the Romanoff dynasty than Chinese communism followed on the fall of the Qing dynasty. Nonetheless, Chinese communism inherited, just as Russian communism did, a “prison of nations,” to use Lenin’s famous phrase. And an opening of the prison may accompany the end of Chinese communism even as it has the end of Russian communism. The doors won’t open tomorrow, but it isn’t too soon for a second look at the maps.