{"id":49465,"date":"2026-09-09T02:43:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T00:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/?p=49465"},"modified":"2026-09-09T02:53:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T00:53:16","slug":"silk-road-paradigm-central-asia-china-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/politics\/silk-road-paradigm-central-asia-china-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silk Road Paradigm and the Dilemma of In-Between"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In August-September 2026, the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit took place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Initially conceived as a platform for regional security cooperation, the organization used its 2026 summit to reiterate demands for a multipolar international order through appeals to Eurasian connectivity. State-overseen media in some of the organization\u2019s authoritarian member states repeatedly invoked euphemistic terms such as \u201cSilk Road\u201d and \u201cDigital Silk Road<\/a>\u201d alongside declarations<\/a> of multipolarity. These references accompanied efforts by regional powers, particularly China and Russia, to secure recognition as global powers and challenge the predominance the United States has exercised since the end of the Cold War. For the post-Soviet states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, embracing the Silk Road paradigm presents a particular dilemma, as they seek greater international recognition through a framework that designates them primarily as intermediaries between larger powers.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: In Central Asia, China is taking advantage of Russia\u2019s isolation at war<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Making of the Silk Road Paradigm<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0Since the early 2010s, the Silk Road has become a pervasive framework for representing Central Asia and the South Caucasus in tourism, scholarship, current affairs, and policy analysis. Many hotels<\/a> and travel agencies in these regions bear the name or feature imagery of camels and caravans, while international tour operators market visits<\/a> to these countries as Silk Road journeys. Conferences and institutional associations, including the Tbilisi Silk Road Forum<\/a> and the Silk Road Universities Network<\/a>, adopt the same designation. American academic institutions have also embraced it, most notably the Silk Road Studies Program<\/a> formerly affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University\u2019s incipient Silk Road Studies program<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uyghur and Uzbek restaurants across Western Europe and North America operate under names such as \u201cSilk Road<\/a>\u201d and \u201cCaravan<\/a>.\u201d The Chinese-American cello virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma applied the same paradigm to musical performance through his Silk Road project<\/a>, conceived in 1998. Its eclectic ensemble reduces the rich musical traditions of various Eurasian nations to one or two representative performers, prioritizing national representation over demonstrating genuine historical musical connections across Eurasia. In a 2021 video<\/a> from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, the popular Emirati food blogger Khalid al-Ameri gleefully attributes the enormous portions of Tashkent-style pilaf (to\u2019y oshi<\/em>) to the appetites of merchants traversing the Silk Road, as if local culinary traditions existed chiefly to serve transient traders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Silk Road paradigm was popularized in the former Soviet space during late perestroika, almost a quarter-century before China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, as  late Soviet<\/a> and early post-Soviet<\/a> publications<\/a> attest. UNESCO provided institutional endorsement by launching a research program<\/a> dedicated to the \u201cSilk Roads\u201d in 1988. In 1994, the Samarkand Declaration on Silk Road Tourism established<\/a> a framework for international cooperation to promote the region\u2019s historical routes and cultural heritage. Four years later, Baku hosted a conference<\/a> on the restoration of the historic Silk Road under the EU\u2019s auspices. The United States adopted the designation for its own New Silk Road initiative<\/a> in 2011. Uzbekistan\u2019s 2009 postage stamps promoted the theme, followed by subsequent issues depicting mapped routes, camels, caravans, and other popular Silk Road imagery. Russia also issued a Silk Road commemorative coin<\/a> honoring the Eurasian Economic Community. The tourism expansion across post-Soviet Eurasia in the 2010s further encouraged Silk Road branding. For the newly independent states of Central Asia and the South Caucasus, the paradigm offered a means of asserting historical identities and international significance after the Soviet collapse amid the limitations of established Western regional classifications, as Central Asia and the South Caucasus fitted awkwardly within conventional definitions of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, or South Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Scholarship and popular historical writing in the English-speaking world have helped popularize the Silk Road as a framework for interpreting Central and Inner Eurasia. Valerie Hansen<\/a> and Susan Whitfield<\/a> have made substantial contributions to the study of underexplored communities and cultural encounters through works organized around this designation. Christopher Beckwith\u2019s monograph<\/a> applies the term to a broad history of Central Eurasia while emphasizing the historical agency of the region\u2019s vernacular communities. Peter Frankopan<\/a> adopts the pluralized Silk Roads<\/em> for an expansive Eurasian synthesis for a general readership. In their accounts of premodern Eurasia, these authors organize historical interpretation around a designation that did not exist during the periods under examination. Maps of the Silk Road and its supposed branches, now ubiquitous in tourist promotions and geopolitical analysis, further reinforce the impression that the term describes a coherent framework. References to the Silk Road also supply historical context in prominent Anglophone media outlets\u2019 reporting<\/a> on the dire human rights situation of the Uyghurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Silk Road paradigm often entails a teleological interpretation of Eurasian history by projecting the modern concept of globalization onto premodern exchanges. Conventional accounts describe a network of routes linking China with Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean from the period when the Han and Roman empires coexisted to the mid- or late fifteenth century, before the Age of Discoveries fundamentally reshaped global connections. Replacing a single road with a plurality of routes leaves largely intact the presumption that these exchanges constituted a coherent and enduring trans-Eurasian system. The term itself was a nineteenth-century coinage<\/a>, appearing in Carl Ritter\u2019s work in 1838 before the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen<\/a> gave it greater scholarly prominence in 1877. The existence of exchanges between distant regions does not establish that the people involved shared a conception of a unified system joining Eurasia\u2019s eastern and western extremities. Treating their activities as successive stages of globalization risks attributing a common direction to interactions shaped by distinct local circumstances and changing sociopolitical realities. The conventional fifteenth-century endpoint similarly obscures the continuation of overland exchange across the Eurasian landmass into the modern period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Silk Road has also acquired a geographical scope that encompasses entire regions of Central and Inner Eurasia. In this usage, Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia fall under a common designation derived from their association with routes connecting China with Europe. The term consequently covers the political, social, religious, and cultural histories of these territories, including developments whose significance extends well beyond commercial or cultural transmission. This usage conflates the history of connections among regions with the histories of the regions themselves. Establishing that a society participated in a network of exchange provides limited justification for treating that network as the principal framework for interpreting its historical development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between China and Europe<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Silk Road paradigm presents China and Europe as the principal cultural and commercial centers of premodern Eurasia, relegating the intervening lands and peoples to an intermediary position within a linear rather than territorial conception of space. This hierarchy obscures the development of local political institutions and intellectual traditions, assigning historical importance primarily according to a society\u2019s contribution to exchanges between the two endpoints. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mathematical scholarship of al-Khwarazmi, the philosophical and medical writings of Avicenna, the musical theories of al-Farabi, the astronomical discoveries of al-Biruni, the linguistic and ethnographic works of Mahmud al-Kashgari, and the poetry of Ferdowsi, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Ahmad Yasawi, Yusuf Balasaguni, and Ali-Shir Nawa\u2019i exemplify contributions whose significance exceeds the transmission of ideas between distant centers and deserves consideration in its own right. Even when exchange remains the principal subject of inquiry, emphasizing these two endpoints understates India\u2019s importance. During the Roman period, Mediterranean commerce with India<\/a>, often through Central Asia, was considerably more voluminous than commerce with China. The Seleucid Empire and the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms had sustained earlier political and cultural connections, whose Hellenistic legacies persisted beyond their rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Silk Road paradigm’s Sino-centrism and Euro-centrism often obscure the cultural agency of vernacular communities in Central Eurasia. Communities selectively adapted and appropriated cultural imports, changing their forms and significance before they circulated further. Scholars such as al-Khwarazmi elaborated the Indian system underlying Arabic numerals before it reached Europe. Chess acquired new rules, pieces, and social meanings as it spread from India through Persia and onward to Europe, with \u201ccheckmate<\/a>\u201d being a Persian loan. Christian communities adapted Syriac script<\/a> to write Sogdian and Old Uyghur. Regional variants of instruments such as the zurna, qanun, and kamancha differ in construction and performance practice, reflecting the musical traditions and preferences of the communities that developed them. Regional preparations of noodles (laghman<\/em>, lamian<\/em>), dumplings (chuchvara<\/em>, manti<\/em>), fried dough (\u00e7\u00e4k\u00e7\u00e4k<\/em>, tush<\/em>, sachima<\/em>), and fruit leathers (lavashak<\/em>, guodanpi<\/em>) also require attention to local specificities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exchange Beyond Trade<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Silk Road paradigm\u2019s emphasis on commerce often obscures the role of conquest, pastoral mobility, and permanent migration in facilitating cultural exchange across Eurasia. Scythian expansions and the Arab, Mongol, and Timurid conquests intensified cultural contacts through military service, imperial rule, and population displacement, frequently under conditions of extreme violence. Timur\u2019s deportation of artisans from conquered cities to Samarkand made forced migration a major source of the Timurid capital\u2019s architectural and artistic achievements. Similar developments followed Shah Abbas I\u2019s deportation of Armenians from Nakhichevan to Isfahan, where churches combined Armenian and Safavid architectural characteristics. Nomadic communities sustained other forms of exchange through seasonal movement and recurrent encounters with settled populations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research<\/a> on mountain routes through Inner Asia suggests that pastoral mobility helped establish some of the connections subsequently used by long-distance traders. The migrations of Qypchaqs, Seljuks, Kalmyks and other Oirat groups, and Alans carried military practices, oral literature, and material culture into new settings, where interactions with settled populations encouraged further adaptation. Jewish diasporic communities across Central Eurasia maintained connections through kinship, religious institutions, and scholarship, sustaining exchanges that extended beyond the activities of merchants, best exemplified by the Moroccan-born rabbi Yosef Maimon<\/a>\u2019s efforts to promote religious education and Sephardic liturgical practices among Bukharan Jewish communities in Central Asia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Commerce itself often depended on the routes and social relationships established through these movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silk Without China<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of silk production further undermines the Silk Road paradigm\u2019s Sino-centrism. Sericulture had spread into Central Asia and Iran well before the thirteenth century, and tenth-century geographical accounts describe silk production across much of Iran. Communities developed their own practices of silkworm breeding and textile manufacture, while Shaki and Shamakhi in modern-day northern Azerbaijan became important centers of silk production and trade in the Caucasus. Before Azerbaijan took control of the city in late 2023, one of the main streets of Stepanakert (Khankandi), the de facto capital of Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh, was called Silk Weavers\u2019 Street (Metaqsagorts\u2019neri poghots<\/em>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The smooth, colorful khan atlas<\/em> (\u201croyal silk\u201d), produced most famously in the ancient city of Margilan<\/a> in the Ferghana Valley, is widely regarded as a national symbol of Uzbekistan. The expansion of production diversified the sources of silk entering regional and distant markets while sustaining its commercial importance. Raw silk remained a major export of Safavid Iran<\/a> in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Iranian workshops produced luxury fabrics for domestic consumption and foreign buyers. In Shaki<\/a>, wealth from silkworm breeding and cocoon sales supported urban development in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as reflected in the magnificent summer palace of the Shaki khans. These economies depended on local agricultural conditions and commercial institutions and could sustain production and exchange without continuous input from China. The association of silk with China, therefore, provides little justification for assigning a subordinate historical role to societies that became substantial producers and exporters themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Historical Metaphor to Geopolitical Strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Silk Road paradigm\u2019s retrospective Sino-centrism also lends historical legitimacy to the Chinese government\u2019s contemporary geopolitical ambitions. China\u2019s position among the largest premodern economies provides an insufficient basis for assuming comparably extensive political influence, cultural ties, or transit connections with the principal centers of Central Eurasia and beyond. The extent and character of these connections varied considerably across periods, depending on changing political arrangements and networks sustained by communities and Eurasian land empires with their own interests and institutions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: China in Central Asia: Fact-checking and myth-busting<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Official Chinese presentations of BRI invoke<\/a> the pluralized historical Silk Roads to portray contemporary transit investments as the renewal of historical connections. This presumed continuity frames the expansion of Chinese interests as restoring a lost position, encouraging acceptance of Beijing\u2019s ambitions to reshape Eurasia\u2019s political and economic development. Central Asia and South Caucasus states embrace the same framework to attract Chinese investment, promote transit infrastructure centered around China, and secure greater international recognition. Their self-presentation as intermediaries risks making that recognition contingent on their usefulness to larger powers, while reinforcing a historical hierarchy that privileges China\u2019s geopolitical objectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway: Who wins from Central Asia\u2019s new trade route?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marco Polo and the Politics of Eurasian Space<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Silk Road paradigm\u2019s anachronistic Sino-centrism also appears in bestselling American author Robert Kaplan\u2019s use of Marco Polo\u2019s travels to interpret contemporary geopolitics. In The Return of Marco Polo\u2019s World<\/em><\/a>, Kaplan uses the Venetian traveler\u2019s itinerary to explain the strategic significance of China\u2019s expanding connections across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. The itinerary of a single traveler offers limited grounds for establishing either the density of historical exchange or a common geopolitical orientation among the societies he encountered. Polo\u2019s journeys depended on Mongol imperial arrangements and networks maintained by merchants, religious communities, and local authorities, whose activities served numerous purposes beyond connecting Europe with China. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kaplan explicitly presents Kublai Khan\u2019s empire as a guide to contemporary Chinese strategy, encouraging the interpretation of Mongol-era connections as precedents for China\u2019s present ambitions, although Chinggisid imperial domains encompassed much of Eurasia and included political centers well beyond China. This analogy risks attributing a continuous geopolitical agenda to distinct political entities and subordinating other Eurasian societies to a narrative of Chinese resurgence. Kaplan\u2019s advocacy<\/a> of a sustained American naval presence also exposes a tension in his emphasis on Chinese centrality: American naval power helps sustain the maritime trading system on which China depends, while US military positions and alliances along the First and Second Island Chains constrain China\u2019s pursuit of predominance in the western Pacific.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What the Eurasian Frame Leaves Out<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Silk Road paradigm\u2019s Eurasian frame also erases the Western Hemisphere when used to interpret contemporary global power dynamics. The United States, which emerged from the Cold War as the sole superpower, lies outside this paradigm\u2019s geographical space. The postwar economic order still depends on financial arrangements shaped by American power, with the US dollar retaining its central role in international transactions, banking, and reserve holdings. The scale of the US economy and the global operations of US corporations sustain commercial relationships that cannot be adequately represented through routes joining China and Europe. American corporations, especially those based in Silicon Valley, occupy leading positions in the global high-technology industry. US military deployments and alliances, including a naval presence along major shipping routes, remain integral to the security arrangements within which much of this commerce occurs. Interpreting Chinese infrastructure expansion primarily through a Eurasian historical frame risks overstating China\u2019s capacity to displace American dominance by discounting the United States\u2019 pivotal role on the global stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Influence Ran East<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The history of China\u2019s Tang dynasty (618\u2013907) challenges Sino-centric accounts<\/a> of Eurasian exchange that portray China primarily as a source rather than a recipient of cultural influence<\/a>. Conventionally celebrated as an apogee of Chinese cultural achievement, the Tang period coincided with extensive political and cultural engagement with Central Asia. The Tang capital, Chang\u2019an (Xi\u2019an), maintained close ties with the region, where Tang campaigns and protectorates established a substantial, though uneven, presence. Turkic soldiers and commanders contributed significantly to Tang military power, while Uyghur allies provided crucial assistance during the eighth century. Central Asian music and dances shaped Tang court entertainment, notably through Sogdian dances, while the pipa<\/em><\/a>, often called the Chinese lute, developed from Middle Eastern and Central Asian prototypes. Elite men and women adopted Central Asian clothing and equestrian fashions; Crown Prince Li Chengqian dressed as a Turkic khan, established a tent camp within the palace grounds, and ate mutton cut with his sword. Sogdian communities in Chang\u2019an and other urban centers contributed to commercial, artistic, and religious life, with manuscripts recovered from the caves of Dunhuang preserving evidence of their activities and beliefs. Imported fruit varieties, vegetables, and livestock, including peaches<\/a> from Samarkand and prized Central Asian horses, further demonstrate the material significance of these contacts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christianity and Manichaeism reached Tang China through networks connecting Iran and Central Asia. Translations of Buddhist and Christian scriptures expanded Chinese religious literature, while Buddhist translation continued an earlier process of incorporating Sanskrit terms into Chinese. Li Bai (Li Bo), among China\u2019s most celebrated poets, may have been born in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. Popular narratives<\/a> about the battle of Talas in 751, fought between the Tang dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate, often obscure the political agency of Central Eurasian communities by crediting the Abbasid victory with bringing Chinese westward expansion to a definitive end. The conflict emerged from regional rivalries involving Ferghana and Chach, whose ruling families sought allies to advance their own interests. Karluk forces played an important part in the Tang defeat, with Chinese accounts attributing the outcome partly to their defection to the Abbasid side. Tang expansion depended heavily on Turkic troops and commanders and alliances with Sogdian rulers. Tang garrisons remained in the Tarim Basin after Talas, while An Lushan\u2019s rebellion in 755 and subsequent Tibetan advances led to Tang\u2019s decline. An Lushan<\/a> (Rokhshan in Sogdian), a general of Sogdian and Turkic ancestry, captured two Tang capitals and forced the emperor to flee, while the prolonged conflict severely weakened the dynasty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the Silk Road<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Prominent historian of Central Asia Scott Levi has advocated<\/a> the scholarly embrace of the Silk Road paradigm despite its conceptual laxity. However, its acceptance in Western academia would inevitably lend greater legitimacy to the expansive agenda of an authoritarian dictatorship whose repressive policies have actively destroyed the communities and cultural legacies that have long formed the backbone of Western imaginations of the Silk Road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Diego Benning Wang. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Diego Benning Wang is a historian of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Having received a PhD in history from Princeton University, an MA in Russian studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Russian studies from New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In August-September 2026, the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit took place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Initially conceived as a platform for regional security cooperation, the organization used its 2026 summit to reiterate demands for a multipolar international order through appeals to Eurasian connectivity. State-overseen media in some of the organization\u2019s authoritarian member states repeatedly invoked euphemistic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2268,"featured_media":49476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4670,4,3,4665,5],"tags":[2970,4087,470,5051,4585,3974],"coauthors":[5052],"class_list":["post-49465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-sports","category-kazakhstan","category-kyrgyzstan","category-politics","category-uzbekistan","tag-belt-and-road-initiative","tag-central-asia","tag-kazakhstan","tag-shanghai-cooperation-organization","tag-silk-road","tag-uzbekistan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2268"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49465"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49475,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49465\/revisions\/49475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49465"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=49465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}