China's Eurasian Ambitions: Ground Realities of Great-Power Competition

Much of recent academic and policy literature on China and its global ambitions has focused on the country's activities abroad, its motivations, and U.S. response options. Western analysts have largely emphasized the component projects of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), analyzing their viability, risk, and potential security implications while seeking to understand how this expanded reach will affect China's rise through the lens of great-power competition. When third countries are mentioned, they are typically invoked as cautionary tales, such as Sri Lanka's Hambantota port, which was leased to China for 99 years by local authorities desperate for debt relief. BRI's eastward-facing maritime projects have received relatively more attention than its westward continental aims, given their immediate impact on U.S. allies and interests in the Indo-Pacific. Works that have examined China's growing involvement across its western periphery have tended to concentrate on individual countries or subregions rather than provide a broader, comparative analysis.

Daniel Markey's remarkable and timely new book, China's Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia, helpfully supplements these approaches in three key ways. First, Markey situates local actors at the center of his analysis, recognizing their roles as agents able to shape the scope and impact of Chinese regional investment. By placing these third-country powerbrokers and the ground-level dynamics in which they operate in the foreground, he is able to effectively trace the trajectories of China's relationships across the region and better assess the implications and likely future directions of Beijing's engagement. This approach provides a deeper understanding of how local actors direct and exploit Chinese resources for their own personal and political aims, which in turn affects the course of individual projects and BRI in the aggregate. This focus also allows Markey to assess the complex ways in which China's role is likely to develop in individual states and subregions and across Eurasia as a whole. Situating Chinese engagement in the context of pre-existing governance, economic, and security challenges reveals how Beijing could accelerate or upset existing trends with concerning implications for regional, Western, and, indeed, Chinese security interests going forward.

Second, Markey centers his analysis on Eurasia, a region less frequently studied in the context of Chinese engagement and one often artificially divided by Western analysts into its constituent parts—South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East.¹ In so doing, he does not make the claim that the United States should treat Eurasia as equally vital to its interests as it does the maritime Indo-Pacific. Rather, he recognizes the historical and geopolitical importance that Eurasia holds from Beijing's perspective as the "greater Middle East" (da Zhong Dong) and makes a compelling case for its study as a broader unit. The book argues that China has historically understood itself as a western-looking continental power over and above its maritime role, a tendency that today is accentuated by security concerns in Xinjiang. With this focus in mind, Beijing seeks to both encourage stability in its restive west through economic development across Eurasia and mitigate external threats that could further stoke domestic insecurity.

Third, Markey takes a comparative approach that helpfully pulls together threads from existing state- and regional-level studies of Chinese engagement to reveal common trends across these linked contexts.² Without arguing that these domestic and subregional dynamics necessarily align, he demonstrates where and how China has more or less successfully navigated local and regional realities. This approach is particularly useful for local officials seeking to learn from the experiences of similarly situated states along this new Silk Road as well as for Western policymakers calibrating an appropriate response to China's Eurasian overtures. Accordingly, Markey calls for greater tailoring of U.S. policy responses based on a deep understanding of both local and regional dynamics and of perceptions of China and its engagement in each country. A one-size-fits-all approach would risk overcommitting the United States in areas where it lacks a clear national interest, under-engaging in other areas more...