This book facilitates exchanges between scholars and researchers from around the world on China-Eurasia relations. Comparing perspectives and methodologies, it promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on China’s pivot towards Eurasia, the Belt and Road initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Beijing’s cooperation and arguments with India, the EU, Western Balkans and South Caucasus states and the Sino-Russian struggle for multipolarity and multilateralism in Eurasia. It also researches digitalization processes in Eurasia, notably it focuses on China's Silk Road and Digital Agenda of Eurasian Economic Union. Multipolarity without multilateralism is a dangerous mix. Great power competitions will remain. In the Asian regional system more multilateral cushions have to be developed. Scholars from different nations including China, India, Russia, Austria, Armenia, Georgia, United Arab Emirates and Montenegro introduce their own, independent research, making recommendations on the developments in China-Eurasia relations, and demonstrating that through joint discussions it is possible to find ways for cooperation and for ensuring peaceful coexistence. The book will appeal to policymakers and scholars and students in Chinese, Eurasian, International and Oriental Studies.

Under the ambitious leadership of President Xi Jinping, China is zealously transforming its wealth and economic power into potent tools of global political influence. But China's foreign policy initiatives, even the vaunted "Belt and Road," will be shaped and redefined as they confront the ground realities of local and regional politics outside China. In China's Western Horizon, Daniel S. Markey, a scholar of international relations and former member of the U.S. State Department's policy planning staff, previews how China's efforts are likely to play out along its "western horizon:" across the swath of Eurasia that includes South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Drawing from extensive interviews, travels, and historical research, Markey describes how perceptions of China vary widely within states such as Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran. Powerful and privileged groups across the region often expect to profit from their connections to China, while others fear commercial and political losses. Similarly, Eurasian statesmen are scrambling to harness China's energy purchases, arms sales, and infrastructure investment. These leaders are working with China in order to outdo their strategic competitors, including India and Saudi Arabia, and simultaneously negotiating relations with Russia and America. On balance, Markey anticipates that China's deepening involvement will play to the advantage of regional strongmen and exacerbate the political tensions within and among Eurasian states. To make the most of America's limited influence in China's backyard (and elsewhere), he argues that U.S. policymakers should pursue a selective and localized strategy to serve America's specific aims in Eurasia and to better compete with China over the long run.

China's Belt and Road Initiative has become the organizing foreign policy concept of the Xi Jinping era. The 21st-century version of the Silk Road will take shape around a vast network of transportation, energy, and telecommunication infrastructure linking Europe and Africa to Asia. Drawing from the work of Chinese official and analytic communities, China's Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative examines the concept's origins, drivers, and various component parts, as well as China's domestic and international objectives. Nadáege Rolland shows how the Belt and Road Initiative reflects Beijing's desire to shape Eurasia according to its own worldview and unique characteristics. More than a list of revamped infrastructure projects, the initiative is a grand strategy that serves China's vision for itself as the preponderant power in Eurasia and a global power second to none.

China has emerged as a dominant power in Eurasian affairs that not only exercises significant political and economic power, but increasingly, ideational power too. Since the founding of the People’s Republic, Chinese Communist Party leaders have sought to increase state capacity and exercise more effective control over their western frontier through a series of state-building initiatives. Although these initiatives have always incorporated an international component, the collapse of the USSR, increasing globalization, and the party’s professed concerns about terrorism, separatism, and extremism have led to a region-building project in Eurasia. Garcia traces how domestic elite-led narratives about security and development generate state-building initiatives, and then region-building projects. He also assesses how region-building projects are promoted through narratives of the historicity of China’s engagement in Eurasia, the promotion of norms of non-interference, and appeals to mutual development. Finally, he traces the construction of regions through formal and informal institutions as well as integrative infrastructure. By presenting three phases of Chinese domestic state-building and region-building from 1988-present, Garcia shows how region-building projects have enabled China to increase state capacity, control, and development in its western frontier. Recommended for scholars of China’s international relations and development policy.

From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under their control, while gaining dominant influence in Tibet. The China we know is a product of these vast conquests. Peter C. Perdue chronicles this little-known story of China's expansion into the northwestern frontier. Unlike previous Chinese dynasties, the Qing achieved lasting domination over the eastern half of the Eurasian continent. Rulers used forcible repression when faced with resistance, but also aimed to win over subject peoples by peaceful means. They invested heavily in the economic and administrative development of the frontier, promoted trade networks, and adapted ceremonies to the distinct regional cultures. Perdue thus illuminates how China came to rule Central Eurasia and how it justifies that control, what holds the Chinese nation together, and how its relations with the Islamic world and Mongolia developed. He offers valuable comparisons to other colonial empires and discusses the legacy left by China's frontier expansion. The Beijing government today faces unrest on its frontiers from peoples who reject its autocratic rule. At the same time, China has launched an ambitious development program in its interior that in many ways echoes the old Qing policies. China Marches West is a tour de force that will fundamentally alter the way we understand Central Eurasia.

The global order, based on international governance and multilateral trade mechanisms in the aftermath of the Second World War, is changing rapidly and creating waves of uncertainty. This is especially true in higher education, a field increasingly built on international cooperation and the free movement of students, academics, knowledge, and ideas. Meanwhile, China has announced its plans for a "New Silk Road" (NSR) and is developing its higher education and research systems at speed. In this book an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars from Europe, China, the USA, Russia, and Australia investigate how academic mobility and cooperation is taking shape along the New Silk Road and what difference it will make, if any, in the global higher education landscape. Opening chapters present the global context for the NSR, the development of Chinese universities along international models, and the history and outcomes of EU-China cooperation. The flows and patterns in academic cooperation along the NSR as they shape and have been shaped by China's universities are then explored in more detail. The conditions for Sino-foreign cooperation are discussed next, with an analysis of regulatory frameworks for cooperation, recognition, data, and privacy. Comparative work follows on the cultural traditions and academic values, similarities, and differences between Sinic and Anglo-American political and educational cultures, and their implications for the governance and mission of higher education, the role of critical scholarship, and the state and standing of the humanities in China. The book concludes with a focus on the "Idea of a University"; the values underpinning its mission, shape, and purpose, reflecting on the implications of China's rapid higher education development for the geo-politics of higher education itself.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, global labor migration, trade, and overseas study brought China and the United States into close contact, leading to new cross-cultural encounters that brought mixed-race families into being. Yet the stories of these families remain largely unknown. How did interracial families negotiate their identities within these societies when mixed-race marriage was taboo and “Eurasian” often a derisive term? In Eurasian, Emma Jinhua Teng compares Chinese-Western mixed-race families in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, examining both the range of ideas that shaped the formation of Eurasian identities in these diverse contexts and the claims set forth by individual Eurasians concerning their own identities. Teng argues that Eurasians were not universally marginalized during this era, as is often asserted. Rather, Eurasians often found themselves facing contradictions between exclusionary and inclusive ideologies of race and nationality, and between overt racism and more subtle forms of prejudice that were counterbalanced by partial acceptance and privilege. By tracing the stories of mixed and transnational families during an earlier era of globalization, Eurasian also demonstrates to students, faculty, scholars, and researchers how changes in interracial ideology have allowed the descendants of some of these families to reclaim their dual heritage with pride.