Since the start of the 2000s, the People's Republic of China has become an increasingly important player on the Central Asian scene, both diplomatically and strategically, in particular through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. At the economic level, China has positioned itself among the largest traders and investors in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. This growing Chinese presence has drastically challenged the traditional influence of Russia and weakened that of the United States and Europe. The purpose of this book is to go beyond a geopolitical analysis by articulating an external influential factor, namely China, and changes in the domestic order in neighboring Central Asia. It engages in an analysis of the contemporary transformations that are occurring within the systems and societies of Central Asia. China has become a subject of public debate, academic and expert knowledge. New cultural mediators, petty traders, lobby groups, migrants, and diasporas, have also emerged. China's rise to power has worked as a catalyst compound of the anxieties and phobias associated with the major social transformations that have occurred in Central Asia over the last two decades. Sinophobia and Sinophilia are now closely associated.

The China Questions 2 assembles top experts to explore key issues in US–China relations today, including conflict over Taiwan, economic and military competition, public health concerns, and areas of cooperation. Rejecting a new Cold War mindset, the authors call for dealing with the world’s most important bilateral relationship on its own terms.

Winner of the 2022 Bancroft Prize Shortlisted for the 2022 Cundill History Prize Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize How Chinese migration to the world’s goldfields upended global power and economics and forged modern conceptions of race. In roughly five decades, between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over “the Chinese Question”: would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration? This distinguished history of the Chinese diaspora and global capitalism chronicles how a feverish alchemy of race and money brought Chinese people to the West and reshaped the nineteenth-century world. Drawing on ten years of research across five continents, prize-winning historian Mae Ngai narrates the story of the thousands of Chinese who left their homeland in pursuit of gold, and how they formed communities and organizations to help navigate their perilous new world. Out of their encounters with whites, and the emigrants’ assertion of autonomy and humanity, arose the pernicious western myth of the “coolie” laborer, a racist stereotype used to drive anti-Chinese sentiment. By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States and the British Empire had answered “the Chinese Question” with laws that excluded Chinese people from immigration and citizenship. Ngai explains how this happened and argues that Chinese exclusion was not extraneous to the emergent global economy but an integral part of it. The Chinese Question masterfully links important themes in world history and economics, from Europe’s subjugation of China to the rise of the international gold standard and the invention of racist, anti-Chinese stereotypes that persist to this day.

Since 2000, China has gained significantly in importance in Central Asia and is now in a position to pose a threat to traditional Russian domination in the region. Exactly how China will intensify its presence in Central Asia and how this alliance/competition with Russia will play itself out is going to depend partly on the approaches and attitudes of the Central Asian states themselves. For this reason, it is essential to comprehend not only Chinese and Russian objectives in the region, but also to look at the indigenous viewpoints of Central Asian governments, their visions of the world, and their room for initiative on political and geopolitical issues. Existing publications on the topic of China-Central Asian relations are generally limited to discussing energy issues (collaboration on hydrocarbons) and security questions (the collective management of terrorist threats), and for the most part only present Russian and Chinese viewpoints. The objective of this Silk Road Monograph is to go beyond this first level of analysis by giving a voice to those most concerned by these issues, namely the Central Asians, paying special attention to their views of the "Chinese question". Studying domestic Central Asian views about China will enable us to deepen geopolitical reflection, insofar as the rise of either Sinophilia or Sinophobia in Central Asia will most probably have a significant political, geo-strategic, and cultural impact on the situation in the region, and work either to speed up or to slow down Chinese expansion in it.