There’s no other imperial tradition like it. For two millennia, dynasty after dynasty rose and fell, spread and shrank, reaching into Southeast Asia and far out into the steppes of Eurasia, its commercial fleets — 3,500 ships in the fourteenth century — voyaging as far as Africa. It’s true that ours is a remarkably westernized and, more recently, Americanized version of history that has left little place for the tale of imperial China, but what a history it had. It wasn’t known as the “Middle” or “Central Kingdom” for nothing. And now, of course, it’s back, a new “dynasty,” even if it goes under the more modern rubric of a “communist” state. The latest version of imperial China has a growing military and plans to create a trillion dollar “One Belt, One Road” infrastructural grid of pipelines, rail lines, highways, and other links of every sort across significant parts of Southeast and South Asia, as well as the former Central Asian “stans” of the Soviet Union and Iran, a future grid that’s meant to reach all the way to Europe. At least in the expansive dreams of China’s new rulers, such a network of infrastructure would bind a vast world of trade and wealth to Beijing.
It’s a vision that should take your breath away and, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare writes today, it has indeed done so in at least one key precinct of this world of ours: the Pentagon. There, China’s One Belt, One Road vision is being greeted not with enthusiasm but with anxiety and consternation.
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