Introduction: China’s interactions in Eurasia

The rise of China is so far the biggest global phenomenon of the 21st century. It is also evident around China, on the Eurasian continent. The Symposium in this issue of Human Affairs focuses on this current significant phenomenon of China’s interactions in Eurasia.

China’s global interactions have become increasingly relevant since the beginning of the century when the results of new China’s model introduced gradually since 1978 began to show markedly. In 2001, China joined the WTO, and agreed with Russia and four Central Asian countries to set up the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. China handled the 2008 global economic and financial crisis well, which was mainly a crisis in the USA and other Western countries. Then, China’s global impact has been enhanced since 2013, when Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative in Kazakhstan, a project to revitalize and update the long-term historical cooperation via the Silk Road. Eurasian integration has also gained momentum since 2014, when Western powers began imposing sanctions on Russia over an accession of the Crimea, preventing Russia from cooperating more closely with the European Union and inadvertently prompting it to develop a partnership with China, its largest potential partner in Asia. China also had external motivation to work more closely with Russia and in Eurasia more generally. The USA has attempted to contain China because it sees China’s growth as competition. President Donald Trump released the new National Security Strategy in 2017 which reflects the “America First” mind-set on security issues and refers to the “revisionist powers of China and Russia” as major rivals. The US–China trade war of 2018 was not long in coming. All these internal and external factors, amplified by other regional influences, have led to China interacting significantly more with its neighbours in Eurasia.

The Belt and Road Initiative is considered the most influential framework for Chinese– Eurasian interactions today. Following the historic Silk Road, the Belt and Road was originally established as an initiative for Chinese cooperation in Asia, Europe and East Africa through the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21^st Century Maritime Silk Road, with various economic corridors and projects. Later, it was expanded across Africa (organized by the FOCAC) and subsequently in Latin America (China–CELAC Forum). The Digital Silk Road was also set up, and there may well be a Polar Silk Road. As China began working intensively with the USA and then other Western countries since 1978, it now has a truly global cooperation network. Moreover, some Western countries have intensified cooperation with China thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative, although the trade frictions with the USA run counter to this. The Initiative serves as an overarching framework for China’s new global interactions now.

As China is an essential global player, the Belt and Road Initiative can be considered a new form of globalization, Globalization 2.0. This form of global interaction is different from the Western form of globalization that has been promoted since the 1980s and became the dominant model on a global scale after the fall of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s. China is continuing its rich historical civilization in a modernized way as the world’s largest developing country. It focuses much more on developing the infrastructure required to meet the basic needs and interests of ordinary people. Over the past four decades, 800 million Chinese citizens have gradually been lifted out of poverty. This is appreciated and followed by other developing countries.

The first part of the Symposium deals with the preconditions of Chinese interactions in Eurasia. My article analyses the historical resources of China’s model and shows how they are necessary to understanding China’s development in the global frame of multiple civilizations in recent decades. Then, it explains how the historic Silk Road is being updated to a modern global version. Břetislav Horyna focuses on the intellectual history, and sheds light on the origins of the European modern intercultural understanding of Chinese philosophy and culture. In his paper, Richard Sťahel analyses China’s concept of environmental civilization, which has played an important role in China’s development.

The second part of the Symposium focuses on interactions between China and Russia. Here we need to clarify what the concept of Eurasia is. Seen in purely geographic terms, it is a continent interconnecting Europe and Asia, but the political, economic and cultural intentions of the contemporary main protagonists of Eurasia point to something more precise, although the wider geographical meaning remains valid as well. Cooperation between Russia and China is essential here. Alexander Lukin, in his article, analyses existing Sino-Russian cooperation and its potential as a basis for a Greater Eurasia. The article by Wang Li, Zhou Dongchen and Anna Kolotova examines the consensus and divergence in cooperation between China and Russia within the influential Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Ladislav Zemánek analyses China–Russia relations within the Belt and Road Initiative, showing how relations have progressively developed from uncertainty to cooperation.

The third part of the Symposium explores China’s interactions with other major partners, namely Pakistan, India, and Central Asian countries. Kiran Hassan looks at China’s cooperation with its major Asian partner, Pakistan, primarily on the basis of the China-Pakistan Economic Belt (CPEC). Their cooperation is sometimes referred to as an “all-weather friendship”. It is not just one of the economic belts in the Belt and Road Initiative but is a unique example of bilateral cooperation that has enabled connectivity, bridging a vast stretch of Asia by providing a shortcut from China through Pakistan to the Gulf States and back. China’s relations with India should not be overlooked either, although India’s cooperation with China is not intensive. They are not two ordinary countries but very old civilizations, large macro-regions, with 1.4 billion citizens each, and important economic, cultural and security centres. Igor Denisov, Ivan Safranchuk and Danil Bochkov explore how cooperation between China and India is likely to develop in the changing global context. Significantly, India recently joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which is now a major organization in terms of population. Another article, by Lea Melnikovová, analyses China’s economic cooperation in the area between China and Russia, specifically in Central Asia.

Therefore, the Symposium focuses on a specific understanding of Eurasia, which enables the authors to capture the intentions of the main players promoting Eurasian cooperation. Of course, there are other partners as well but we cannot map everything in the limited space of a single journal issue. We do not consider Western Europe in our analyses, for example, because it is the usual focus in European and, more generally, Western journals and books. Neither do we explore the Central European perspective on the cooperation with China, which is also important, but it is addressed in our analysis in a coming separate book.

Authors from several Eurasian countries contributed to the Symposium. As the Guest Editor of the Symposium from the Czech Republic, I am happy that several respected Czech and Slovak colleagues contributed. I also invited contributions from distinguished authors from countries that play a key role in Chinese cooperation in Eurasia, particularly China, Russia, and Pakistan. I thank all of them for a wonderful cooperation.

I hope the Symposium brings readers greater insight into this important topic. The Chinese interactions in Eurasia and the world will be probably an important incentive to transform the global arrangement. Nevertheless, there will be a number of external and internal pitfalls that will have to be dealt with. Just as China managed the 2008 global financial crisis in a better way than many other countries, we can ask about the long-term effects of the ability of China’s model to resist the problematic organizational and economic consequences of the coronavirus outbreak compared to other models in the world.