Rethinking Emanational Politics in Inner Asia

Abstract

In 2013, Xi Jinping, the ambitious new president and Communist Party secretary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), launched his grand vision of a “new era” of cooperative globalization under the auspices of his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, Ch. Yidai yilu 一帶一路). Taking up previous campaigns that had urged Chinese corporations to “go out” and secure “win-win” investment partnerships around the world, state media touted the BRI as the seamless continuation across Eurasia of a millennia-old “Silk Road Spirit” of open, peaceful, and mutually beneficial trade.1 Chinese nationalist netizens in the PRC and abroad have