«Go West!»: Pechino, la nuova via della seta e il "Cina-terraneo"

[Autom. eng. transl.] For some time, influenced also by what we read in the pages of newspapers and specialized magazines, we are used to thinking of China as a first-class economic actor. Many observers see in this, new, at times unprecedented, diplomatic-military dynamism in Southeast Asia the first manifestation of the strategic projection that runs parallel to the economic gigantism of the People's Republic. What happens at the antipodes of the Old Continent is not a 'local' and 'localized' issue, but has reflections on a transcontinental and therefore global scale. In this sense, the pressure that the communist government exerts in the South China Sea should not be seen only through the perspective of difficult relations with Taiwan and the other coastal counterparts, let alone as a 'physiological' projection of China over the waters bordering on its borders land. Instead it must be considered as a segment of a broader political strategy: the restructuring of the Eurasian rimland. A design that connects the Pacific to the Atlantic and in which an apparently unthinkable chessboard if associated with Beijing, the Mediterranean (enlarged), appears to assume an essential position.