China has struggled to gain support from its Central Asian neighbors to build the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway since the 1990s. The CKU railway is crucial to China for two interconnected purposes—to advance its geopolitical interests and to secure favorable relations with Central Asian elites for their support over Chinese legitimacy in Xinjiang (East Turkestan). Originally signed in 1997 with Kyrgyzstan […]

The Tsushima Strait, also known as the Eastern Channel of the Korea Strait, sits at a critical crossroads of Northeast Asia, which is home to some of the world’s largest economies, such as Japan, South Korea, and China. The 243-kilometre-long Tsushima Strait is a narrow waterway that connects South Korea and Japan, two key middle powers in the Indo-Pacific, and […]