China's Eurasian Century is very much about gravity: political gravity, economic gravity and geographic gravity. The book, like the policy, is not about Eurasia at all. It is about the gravity of power, and how that gravity is being fundamentally altered by power dynamics on China's periphery. Nadège Rolland frames China's Belt and Road as a concerted domestic policy attempt to shift regional and global political and economic gravity, and considers where China's strong and weak forces will either pull or push peripheral economies into or away from their current geo-economic orbits.
Rolland argues that much commentary on the Belt and Road is still blinded by maritime East Asia and Pacific Ocean analyses which weigh maritime over land power. Rolland instead tries to capture the institutional development of an international financial architecture to fund the Belt and Road and explores China's changing of the rules of international trade. Behind the pan-Eurasian dream that captures the imagination in maps and lines is an economic and financial integration reality, which is a serious challenge to the post-Bretton Woods global financial order.
There is a lot here for the generalist, though less for the specialist. Chapter three is the strongest, covering the institutional drivers of China's grand strategy. Though the following chapter on the intellectual foundations of the policy feels like only scratching the surface. Rolland identifies and engages with New Confucianism and neo-tianxia, as well as the civilizational ring and the neo-tributary state-system. But the research gets pulled into the gravity of the military–security nexus, leaving many questions on the underlying contemporary political philosophy unasked.
The macroscope of Rolland's work, the dialectic of land–maritime power in contemporary China, is a good one. However there remain many connections to China's imperial history that should be explored. For example, Rolland identifies the contemporary domestic policy debate between the maritime school of Zhang Wenmu and Ni Lexiong and the continental school of Ye Zhicheng. But this debate is not placed in relation to what was essentially the same debate in 1874 between Li Hongzhang's maritime defence and Zuo Zongtang's frontier defence against Ya'qub Beg. There is a huge space for connecting the Han, Tang and Qing threads of historical institutionalism in contemporary Chinese geo-economic policy. Yet they remain loose.
The study also feels like it is looking over an ocean towards China, where Eurasia itself is then lost over the horizon. It seems not so much a study of China's Eurasian policy but rather a study of the United States’ perceptions of China's Eurasian policy.
Eurasia itself is barely touched and not even defined for the purposes of study. A book squarely focused on Central Asia or Eurasia as the prism with the impact of China's domestic policy as the variable would have been preferable. Eurasia as the focal point, rather than American global interests, may have made for better primary source data collection and ultimately a study more focused on the China–Eurasia relationship. The people and states of Central Asia are not empty vessels waiting to be filled by China, though this is China's foreign policy failing, not the author's.
The book tackles a huge foreign policy with massive implications and it is only natural that there be some omissions. However, the reliance on English-language sources ultimately lets it down. Rolland also somewhat misses the opportunity to range out from geo-politics and geo-strategy to untangle the domestic geo-political, geo-economic, geo-industrial policy nexus. It is also disappointing to not see any Chinese characters. The Romanization trend in publishing feels quite old-fashioned when writing for a China-literate audience. And no index for a very broad book touching on multiple geographies and multiple economic sectors is a little frustrating.
Overall though, this is an engaging work of geo-politics, well written and produced, and it is exciting to see full-length works being published by the National Bureau for Asian Research in Seattle. Rolland adeptly applies geo-political and geo-economic theories of control of Eurasia to the contemporary global economy. His book is a very solid attempt to holistically engage with the geo-economic institutions that will shape the coming decade, and an early attempt to square a Chinese foreign policy circle that itself has not yet been drawn.
Rolland's study is focused on a reconception of the gravity formed in the continental negative space of the Eurasian steppe and what this means for China's Belt and Road geo-economic strategy. But ultimately, the book's takeaway is the implication for US foreign policy in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. As Rolland argues, the Pacific Century is over before it has begun and the Belt and Road, nominally redefining a land–power axis on the Eurasian New Silk Road, is really a counterweight to rebalance the maritime power of the 21st century's international economic order.
