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The Silk Road once served as the vital artery of the ancient world, connecting China to societies across Eurasia, while providing China with immense wealth and prestige. Today, as China’s wealth and power is once again on the rise, China is attempting to reaffirm its place at the center of global trade, and to do so, they are undertaking one of the most ambitious projects of modern times. As it is planned, this New Silk Road will use rail lines, highways, pipelines and shipping routes across China, Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia, unifying a region that has been contested for millennia.

Journalist Wade Shepard has travelled the length and breadth of the future Road, from its planned starting point in Xi’an, China, to its outer reaches in Western Europe, and in On the New Silk Road he details his insightful observations. Shepard here provides an absorbing account of China’s efforts to make the New Silk Road a reality, and its implications for the world as a whole. He argues that the Road represents the focal point of China’s plans for an alternative economic order that China hopes will rival or even surpass that of the West. On the New Silk Road provides an essential and timely account of a crucial turning point in the history of Asia—and of the world.