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Introduction to “Cartographic Anxieties”

2017; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ach.2017.0000

2158-9674

Franck Billé,

Japanese History and Culture

Introduction to “Cartographic Anxieties” Franck Billé (bio) PREAMBLE Russia and China laid to rest their territorial disputes in 2004,1 after decades of hostility and the clashes in 1969 that led to the Sino-Soviet split (Sovietskokitaiskii raskol; Zhong-Su jiaowu 中苏交恶) and the hermetic closure of the border. As negotiations were proceeding apace, a rumor started circulating in Russia that some Chinese citizens were surreptitiously throwing rocks and sandbags into the Amur River in an attempt to increase Chinese territory by linking disputed river islands to their side of the river (Lomanov 2004). The majority of commentators were understandably dismissive of these claims—the image of a country as large as China trying to extend its boundaries in such a furtive manner elicited a certain degree of amusement. That so much effort would be expended for the sake of two small islands of no particular significance, and that such attempts should be perceived as a vital threat to Russia—an even larger country—seemed rather puzzling. Yet contemporary conflicts over precisely such minuscule and apparently worthless pieces of real estate are common. For example, the linchpin of the current conflict between India and Pakistan is the snowy expanse of the Siachen Glacier, a Himalayan area unfit for human life over which India and Pakistan have lost over two thousand soldiers since 1984—”97 percent of them killed by the weather and the terrain” (Krishna 1994, 511). This region was left unmapped at Partition, as neither side anticipated it would become a matter of contention. Given the area's lack of strategic value, combined with its forbidding [End Page 1] physical terrain and weather conditions, it was “mutually agreed that there was little need to go beyond map coordinate NJ9842 on the original cease-fire line” (Abraham 2014, 142). Nations are eager to portray such territorial disputes as steeped in deep history, but struggles over exact lines of demarcation are, for the most part, very recent. The Paracel and Spratly Islands, currently at the center of an embattled dispute between China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines—and the subject of Edyta Roszko's article in this special issue of Cross-Currents—were unoccupied, and largely unclaimed, until the end of World War II. If the borders of territories that are being disputed are particularly sensitive, even long-settled borders between friendly nations are subject to considerable scrutiny. A new concept of “movable border” has thus recently been introduced by the Italian government into national legislation to track in real time the minute changes to the Austrian-Italian border due to global warming and shrinking Alpine glaciers. A grid of twenty-five solar-powered sensors has now been fitted on the surface of the glacier at the foot of Mount Similaun; every two hours these sensors record data, allowing for an automated mapping of the shifts in the border.2 It is in such attempts that we really grasp the desire to contain and account for the nation's tiniest fragments—even if said fragments are found in frozen, inaccessible, and uninhabitable locations. In fact, the point here is not concerned with human appropriation or utilization, but with definition; to be a fully sovereign nation, all borders must be defined and incontestable. In the case of Kashmir, disputed by India and Pakistan, the struggle is not to make use of the land at the border, but to reconcile the numerous demarcation lines that have been drawn on paper by multiple actors—specifically the “Line of Control” (LoC) on the western borders of the Himalayas and the “Line of Actual Control” (LAC), the de facto boundary between India and China. A definitive and unambiguous line of demarcation beyond map coordinate NJ9842 represents an ideal that both countries are slowly creeping toward, with the aid of new technologies such as laser fences, motion sensors, CCTV cameras, and a network of radars. Eventually, it is hoped, the border will be fully mapped, with every single inch accounted for. It will never be manned, nor is that the objective. A similar desire for cartographic appropriation may be seen in the case of the Amur River islands over whose control China and the Soviet Union...