Raffaello Pantucci is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and author of the forthcoming "Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire (Oxford University Press, April 2022)."
When President Xi Jinping launched China's flagship Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, he chose to do it in the Kazakhstan capital of Astana, where the concept of connectivity with China has been playing out for years.
