Chinese Grand Strategies in Central Asia:The Role of Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Belt and Road Initiative

摘要

Central Asia has long emerged as a hotspot for both the regional and extra-regional powers for two main reasons:its geopolitical location in the middle of Eurasia between Europe,South Asia,the Middle East,Russia and China,and their abundant and mostly unexplored natural resources.Sitting on huge untapped hydrocarbon potentials the Central Asian geographical entity in recent years has offered enormous opportunity and appeal for global countries and emerged as a grand chessboard for regional and extra-regional players.China is one such new pole in the new great game without which any geopolitical and geo-economic debate on Central Asia would be incomplete.With this prelude,this article attempts to analyse China''s rise in Central Asia and its strategies to strengthen its position in the heartland region by discarding the much-hyped great game thesis and argues that China’s rise is unparallel and unmatched as testified by the recent Belt and Road Initiative of Beijing.