Search Results

Here the analysis steps back to consider how a renewed interest in the Silk Roads raises important questions about world history and the identities of nations and cities. It is argued that Belt and Road represents an elastic and expansive international political economy that shines a light on previously ignored histories. Recent research on Central Asia and the Indian Ocean reveals the importance of these regions to our understanding of world history. Potential exists for new stories to be told through academia, museums, and historical sites, and through the media. The chapter also reflects on how forms of scholarly knowledge that feed into public discourses on Silk Road history are being rearranged and reassembled in an era of Belt and Road.

This chapter evaluates how the shipping lanes that traverse the South China Sea region are the lifelines of China's future and will shape and influence its trajectory as a great power. If China can maintain and control the regional sea lanes of communication and the trade and maritime logistics hubs across the region, it can expand and project power well beyond the region, fulfilling President Xi Jinping's “Chinese Dream” that seeks “the great rejuvenation of China.” The aggregate is that China has much riding on the future development, success, and prosperity of its Maritime Silk Road and maritime economy. The chapter examines China's growing dominance in shipping, shipbuilding, logistics and supply chains, fisheries and aquaculture (also known as aquafarming), and regional port acquisitions and development from Taiwan to Australia. Moreover, China's growing maritime geoeconomic entrenchment in Cambodia, Brunei, and Malaysia will make it increasingly harder for other regional and global powers — particularly the United States, India, Japan, Taiwan, and others — to compete economically in the maritime space. It also makes it more challenging to box China in regionally owing to its increasingly independent and reinforced maritime networks.

ASEAN has long promoted its key interests in a stable and autonomous Southeast by binding outside powers to ASEAN’s norms and institutions. Today, domestic political change, divergent interests among ASEAN countries, and the changing balance of power in the Asia-Pacific are eroding the ASEAN cohesion necessary for a collective ASEAN external policy. ASEAN policy is based on soft power and therefore is dependent on a stable balance of power. China’s rise has upset that balance, triggering Sino-American tensions and conflicts with some Southeast Asian states. ASEAN’s goals of regional stability and autonomy from great power hegemony are increasingly coming into conflict, which may force ASEAN members to choose between them.