Historically, China has sought its security by building dominant relationships with pliant states that accept its pre-eminence. Its expanding role and influence in Central Asia has been as incremental and piecemeal as it has been deliberate. Without firing a shot, China could potentially end the United States' international primacy to become the most consequential global power.

With its emergence as the leading power in Eurasia based on its inexorable economic rise and Putin's folly in Ukraine, China has been released from its past existential anxieties about land-based threats from Eurasia. It now has the chance to project its power globally, as the US did from the early twentieth century when it became the dominant power in the western hemisphere. What threats and risks must China address? And what happens when China becomes the established, stable, dominant power in Eurasia?

Australia's former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, takes the reader on a journey across Eurasia to understand the forces shaping its geopolitics. Raby enriches this analysis by weaving his own travel stories, experiences and adventures into the fabric of his narrative. This book is geopolitics on a grand canvas, written from the ground up.