Meaning and Update of the Historical Silk Road: Globalization from East to West

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 125-134
Author(s):  
Oleg Suša

Abstract The article analyzes the historical Silk Road in its long-term development. It entails reflections on the knowledge of Eastern global interactions providing a long-term contextual framework for Eurasia as a single continent. Eurasian globalization influenced the interactions of regions from China and India, through Western Asia, the Middle East, Eastern and Northern Africa and the Mediterranean, and the south of Europe. An important role was played by the Silk Road, as the main historical long-term network of global interactions and communication, which is now being echoed in the new current global initiatives, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative, which updates the historical Silk Road.

2021 ◽  
pp. 295-307
Author(s):  
Hans-Dietrich Haasis ◽  
Jianhui Du ◽  
Xuejun Sun

AbstractIn 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping advised to establish the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road,” also referred as the Belt and Road Initiative or the New Silk Roads Policy. The intention is to promote international and regional trade as well as cooperation in and between Asia and Europe. Consequently, international maritime and terrestrial freight transport corridors are either established or strengthened and operated. The purpose of this paper is to reflect the Belt and Road Initiative from the perspective of logistics. The aim is to identify and formulate circumstances, expectations, opportunities, and peculiarities of logistics along the New Silk Roads. For this purpose, four corresponding challenges will be considered and outlined after an introduction to the Belt and Road Initiative. The four logistics challenges concern the awareness of new freight transport corridors and the assessment of possibilities for opening new transport relations and new markets, the implementation of new and the adaptation of existing supply chains to increase strategic logistics flexibility, the availability and use of digital infrastructure and connectivity for improved communication and coordination of logistical processes, and the willingness to consider regional and cultural differences in the preparation and realization of supply chain decisions.


Author(s):  
Mirosław Antonowicz ◽  
Zbigniew Tracichleb

<p>The article presents the railway entity PKP LHS Sp. z o.o. and its role in the development of the New Silk Road. In consequence, the increase in traffic on the Silk Road with the participation of Polish companies translates into the economic development of the Lublin Province and the development of border crossings in that province. The importance of transport corridors and the participation of PKP LHS in the development of those corridors have been highlighted. Investment assumptions have been presented, the effects of which will be visible in a few years, strengthening the potential and economic capabilities of the province.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 795-802
Author(s):  
James D Sidaway ◽  
Simon C Rowedder ◽  
Chih Yuan Woon ◽  
Weiqiang Lin ◽  
Vatthana Pholsena

We introduce this symposium on the politics and spaces of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, locating the papers as concept explorations resting on case studies that contextualize and historicize Belt and Road Initiative. In the case of the first paper that follows, this includes an exploration of the historiography of one of Belt and Road Initiative’s conditions of possibility, the Silk Road idea. We chart a burgeoning field of debate about Belt and Road Initiative, most often operating at broad levels of geopolitical abstraction. The papers here encourage further investigations of Belt and Road Initiative’s dynamics. Such work holds promise for wider theorizing of the interfaces between culture, economy, place, space, politics and infrastructure. Our closing remarks sketch key research agendas in these domains in the light of Belt and Road Initiative.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. p7
Author(s):  
Che Zilong

Since ancient times, the two ancient civilizations of China and India have had a long history of trade exchanges, and such trade exchanges have left an important mark in the history of Sino-India relations. Chronologically,this article takes the Sino-Indian trade exchanges as a research perspective to outline two thousand years of trade history between two countries. From the Sino-Indian Business Road that began in the Qin Dynasty and Han Dynasty to the origin of the Silk Road on which Zhang Qian went to the Western Regions as an envoy, explored the Sino-India-Tibet Road and Maritime Silk Road trade; analyzed the opium trade between China, Britain and India in modern times. At the same time, it uses the founding of People’s Republic of China, the Sino-Indian War, the Belt and Road Initiative and the important events of the global epidemic as nodes to describe the development of Sino-Indian trade. In the long history, this kind of rich trade history also shows that China and India are more likely and should establish a better and more extensive trade cooperation relationship, and learn to effectively deal with the turmoil. This will provide reference for operating the trade activities between the two countries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-181
Author(s):  
Boris MANOV

The research is carried out through the prism of geopolitics and reveals the "logic" and the essence of „The Belt and Road Initiative“. It outlines its basic ideas and goals. The study justifies and proves the (hypo)thesis that despite the apparent "leadership" of the economic events, the political and geopolitical aspects (vectors) of the project are linked to the economy. The economy does not function on its own way, but is formulated, supported by policy and used for political purposes, i.e., the project in its deep essence is political. The political nature of „The Belt and Road Initiative“ is expressed in the following: it is an attempt to find in internal policy a mechanism to preserve the political power of the Communist Party and to continue the existence of the dominant political system - the totalitarian (one-party) political system in the PRC. The geopolitical task is to find the „place“ of modern China in the global world. The goal is to restore the central ("middle") location of China in the 21st century world. „The Silk Road“ is one of the directions for its realization and the means for its achievement are complex - the „most obvious“ are the actions in the economic sphere, but equally important are the military, diplomatic, cultural factors and impacts. In conclusion, it is argued that „The Belt and Road Initiative“ will be realized as an optimal, reasonable balancebetween the „desired“ and the „possible“ and will be specified in the adoption of the formula „Great Eurasia“, i.e., in the transformation of China into a regional (regional-global, global-regional) center, the „middle empire“ of the Eurasian super-continent, the largest and most powerful geopolitical and geo-economic power center in the future „multipolar“ or more likely „bipolar“ („West-Sea“ - „East-Еarth“) world from the middle and the end of the 21st century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Georgina Higueras

The pendulum of History leaves the West to return to the East, as in the times of Marco Polo. China has found in the resurrection of the Silk Road the instrument for a more inclusive global economic growth and that is also in line with the multipolar world that the government proposes. In just five years, The Belt and Road Initiative, as it is formally referred to, has made great strides in its revolutionary global connection plan and added new followers, despite of the swiftness of the Chinese’s ascent is scaring many countries, especially its neighbors. The purpose of this article is to analyze the misgivings of Europe and the range of opportunities that Beijing is<br />offering to create together a model of sustainable<br />development and address the major challenges<br />that affect both: inequality, climate change and<br />protectionist drift. The New Silk Road is a unique<br />opportunity to bring closer the two extremes of<br />Eurasia, which today, more than ever, need to<br />understand each other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Baoxia Xie ◽  
Xianlong Zhu ◽  
Adam Grydehøj

This paper analyses the ancient Maritime Silk Road through a relational island studies approach. Island ports and island cities represented key sites of water-facilitated transport and exchange in the ancient Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Building our analysis upon a historical overview of the ancient Maritime Silk Road from the perspective of China’s Guangdong Province and the city of Guangzhou, we envision a millennia-long ‘Silk Road Archipelago’ encompassing island cities and island territories stretching across East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and East Africa. Bearing in mind the complex movements of peoples, places, and processes involved, we conceptualise the ancient Maritime Silk Road as an uncentred network of archipelagic relation. This conceptualisation of the ancient Maritime Silk Road as a vast archipelago can have relevance for our understanding of China’s present-day promotion of a 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. We ultimately argue against forcing the Maritime Silk Road concept within a binary perspective of essentialised East-West conflict or hierarchical relations and instead argue for the value of a nuanced understanding of relationality.


Author(s):  
Zhuolin Feng ◽  
Luyang Gao

International collaborations among higher education institutions have existed along the Silk Road for a long time. With the initiative of the Belt and Road, it is believed that cooperation among universities and colleges may be influenced in various respects. In this study, seventeen university consortia that have been formed in the last thirty years along the Silk Road were investigated, including the membership structure, their starting point, goals and developments of these consortia, and the roles of world-class universities. The findings showed: 1) these consortia share the similar goals of multinational collaboration to foster solutions to new global challenges; 2) the thirty-year development of these consortia was divided into three phases, and most of the member universities are from the EU, China, and the US; 3) world-class universities were, are and will be playing the leading roles in these consortia continuously.


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