This book offers the prequel to China's successful implementation of its New Silk Road, the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The preconditions for the establishment of especially the land route between China and Western Europe have been set decades ago in Central Asia. In the political, security, and economic realms, China had to find arrangements with Russia as well as the Central Asian states. Border disputes had to be resolved, a security architecture and political cooperation was lacking. The key to BRI's success today lies in China's successful diplomacy of the 1990s and 2000s. This book tells the exciting story behind the largest geopolitical infrastructure project of our time.

This book analyses China’s multidimensional rise in the context of the international political economy, drawing on Susan Strange’s concept of "structural power." Examining the sources of Chinese power along with its geopolitical, economic, and cultural reflections, the authors consider how China’s rise is linked with the incremental process of multipolarization in world politics. Providing a systematic, analytical, and empirically rich account of China's surge in the international political economy, this study will appeal to scholars, policy-makers, and students with interests in China studies, international political economy, and international relations.

The book focuses on international cultural relations dealing with cultural heritage in terms of heritage diplomacy. The contributors discuss the potentials and limitations of heritage diplomacy and how it could be approached in theory, policy, and praxis. Cultural heritage is an essential element in transmitting values, establishing narratives of historical and contemporary connectivity, and creating subjective and collective identities and a feeling of belonging. During the past decade, the potential of cultural heritage for state foreign policy and in international heritage governance has attracted increasing interest among heritage scholars. This potential, however, remains under-researched in the broader spectrum of international cultural relations. This volume aims to critically explore the previous research on heritage diplomacy, develop its theoretical basis and scope, and thereby extend the discussion to new topics and themes. The articles extend the discussion of cultural heritage from its role in ‘soft power’ and foreign policy to a dialogic approach within international cultural relations. Such an approach deconstructs existing hierarchies in domestic and international power relations and understands cultural heritage as a contact zone that fosters people-to-people connectivity and cooperation based on trust. Heritage Diplomacy: Discourses, Imaginaries and Practices of Heritage and Power will appeal to upper-level students, researchers, and academics interested in Heritage Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, International Relations, and Policy Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of Cultural Policy.

Should Chinese energy investments be excluded from the liberal economic system based on geopolitical assessments only? This book explores the potential regulatory control by the Chinese government over foreign energy investments to achieve their perceived strategic objectives. Host states in which Chinese energy companies make investments have increasingly opposed Chinese energy investments in their national security reviews, based on concerns that these investments have strategic objectives. The book analyses China's investment-related law, regulations, and energy policies to examine how overseas energy investment-making is governed. The book also explores the role of the Chinese government in energy investment promotion and protection. Uniquely, the examination of China's potential regulatory control provides an objective criterion, rather than geopolitical considerations, for host states to assess the nature of Chinese energy investments. The book helps readers to open the 'black box' of Chinese energy investments from a regulatory perspective. It is a useful resource for researchers as well as practising lawyers assisting their Chinese clients through national security reviews, or when trying to determine whether China's SOEs can bring cases before investor-state arbitration tribunals.

This book explores the foreign and security policies of Germany, France and the UK vis-à-vis China. Despite the progress made by the Lisbon Treaty and notwithstanding the first EU Global Strategy, the European Union does not have a strategy to address the rise of China. Since this strategic deficit does not automatically reflect the level of EU member states, this book argues that the vacuum at EU level provides member states with an opportunity to fill this gap. By assuming that an increase in national policies on China would eventually lead to a comprehensive European strategy for China, the author focuses on the three biggest European countries and looks at the rise of China to understand the development of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy vis-à-vis the PRC. While the CFSP depends on the contribution of EU member states, their role in shaping the CFSP towards China has not been researched yet, and this book fills the gap.

Silk Road: The Study of Drama Culture is the translated edition of the Chinese academic book of the same title written by Professor LI Qiang from Shaanxi Normal University, China. The book breaks through the concept of regarding Han Drama as the center, yet elaborates the Silk Road drama as an inclusive culture and a prevailing literary art form in human civilization. Relying on his extensive experience and broad vision, the author conducts the thorough study by means of literature, artifacts and academic fieldwork. The book studies the drama culture of all ethnic groups from Asia, Europe and Africa and touches upon the cultural exchanges between China and its neighboring countries, between the East and the West. The carefully presented details in this book are aimed to explore all the related fields such as dramaturgy, philology, phonology, religion, history, geography, archeology, ethnology, and folklore between the East and the West from the perspective of cultural anthropology. The explanations in the book contribute to an in-depth study on the origins of the Silk Road and the drama culture along the Silk Road.

This book is an analysis of the developments associated with the Belt and Road Initiative (B&RI) five years after Xi Jinping announced both the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) and the 21st Maritime Silk Road (21MSR). Together, these two dimensions constitute the B&RI, providing the so-called Chinese ‘project of the century’ with regional, inter-regional and global reach. This book aims at assessing the impact of the B&RI in all these dimensions and levels of influence. This is a current and promising theme, not only in the short and medium terms, but also within a broader timescale, reflecting Chinese strategic thinking itself, since Chinese philosophy and culture are oriented towards long-term and inter-generational perspectives. Likewise, both the title of this publication and the way it has been organized result from the empirical perception that China asserts a conservative attitude towards foreign affairs, redesigned in multiple dimensions, to create a perception of domestic unity and global prestige. In this vein of thought, the B&RI is already influencing and will continue to influence, directly or indirectly, the current economic and political order.

Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an unprecedented study tracing the history of ‘the Other’ through the ages in British theatre. The diverse and often contradictory aspects of this history are expertly drawn together to provide a detailed background to the work of African, Asian, and Caribbean diasporic companies and practitioners. Colin Chambers examines early forms of blackface and other representations in the sixteenth century, through to the emergence of black and Asian actors, companies, and theatre groups in their own right. Thorough analysis uncovers how they led to a flourishing of black and Asian voices in theatre at the turn of the twenty-first century. Figures and companies studied include: Ira Aldridge Henry Francis Downing Paul Robeson Errol John Mustapha Matura Dark and Light Theatre The Keskidee Centre Indian Art and Dramatic Society Temba Edric and Pearl Connor Tara Arts Yvonne Brewster Tamasha Talawa. Black and Asian Theatre in Britain is an enlightening and immensely readable resource and represents a major new study of theatre history and British history as a whole.

Part graphic novel travelogue, part tongue-in-cheek travel guide, this collection gathers the adventures of caustic cartoonist Ted Rall in the wild and woolly central Asian countries, a veritable powder keg sitting atop the oil the world will need tomorrow. The book combines articles with comics in chapters that relate Rall’s experiences retracing the legendary Silk Road, from the sublime history of China to the absurdity of the present-day petty dictatorships of the “The ’Stans,” to which the author had the temerity—or perhaps stupidity—to return, including once with a group of listeners on his radio show, on a dare. This always-lively compendium offers readers an exotic adventure, satire, and a fun way to find out more about an often overlooked part of the world that looms in importance with its immense, and immensely coveted, reserves of oil.

The proposed book uses the Star Trek television/movie and Star Wars movie series to explain key international relations (IR) concepts and theories. It begins with an overview of the importance of science fiction in literature and film/television. It then presents the development of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, and discusses how their progression through time has illustrated key IR theories and concepts. As a bonus, it compares the two franchises to another recent science fiction franchise used to teach IR (Battlestar Galactica).