pleae note anything below you agree with was probably pinched from ezra vogel's life time work; anything you diagree with is probably my own ignoramus chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk

when we say china has about 20 borders we include places like japan that if you read ezra vogel were best friends with v=china whenever both few- there was a strange 2000 years from the birth of christ which i dont fully understand as golden rule religions ordered europe and the asian landbridge to the tricontinent but far east cultures continued with more urgent community challenges - eg keeping nature's gods of plagues away from each others nations

if europe only had one dominant plague the black death in the first 2020 years after christ, japan and the chinese continent were continuously swapping plagues- of course we dont know but this may have been the cost of being the eastern end of the world trade across the old world with the med sea and up to 1500 italy coordinating the west end

in any event if we replayed the marco polo game where he was asked to be the mayor for a year of chia's market hub hangzhou but with a 2017 birds eye view that the olympics/world economic forum said it would bring 

obviously china's 2 trickiest borders since the start of the united nations have been ussr and n korea

if you read border history - china thought in 1968 that its small war with ussr had gone quite well- basically china told russia it wanted to getback to world trade after 109 years of britain having isolated china- indeed chia was more explicit it would start to design capitalism but it wasnt yet sure if it wanted to app american european or japanese models of valuing its peoples future

and indeed until the fall of the berlin wall 20 years later- there seems to have been quite a lot of respect - though actually what this may mean is that much of the borders we are talking about were iced up, very sparsely populated, really not where you would bother fighting over subject to one proviso- no change in who owns what natural resources either side of the border

if we newslash back 10 years from the point of view of von neumanns 100 times more connected world every decade from 1955

we can now see that it was a total failure of the un and g8 not to invite india and japan and korea to form a g11 in 1985 (with the first trillion times more connected of peoples livelihoods) however both the eu and usa lost any way of sensing this view from 1963 with the assassination of kennedy and the start of the eu's own corn laws- the common agri policy which started turning all med sea borders into the sea of refugees

THE GOOD NEWS BELT

back in the 1950s japan had started connting the good news win-win world trade belt- this passed through korea south, taiwn, hong kong, singapore - by 1970 or so japan nor russia was the second largest investor in how worldiwde peoples lived and traded and the chinese diaspora the third- in other word in positiv

so china's really big challenge was noth kora; unlike ussr which anyhow was telling the worlds media that it was an equal superpower to usa, north korea did not like to hear chinese people were starting off an entreprenurial revolution where communities of people self-organised and women held up half the sky; what this means in terms of a chinese leaders responsibility to relate to north korea is unimaginable to me; though as far as i can see 21st century chinese leaders have done a more balanced job than the rest of the world could have expected; i have argued elsewhere that it would probably take a global trillion dollar investment to sustain north korean peoples as well as some bargain with the ruling family on how they could be included ...