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The relevance of the research topic is due to the high importance of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for increasing the presence of China in the markets of the countries of the New Silk Road. The topic becomes more relevant due to the ambiguous results of the BRI, although it was launched in 2013. On the one hand, the effect for China is growing. On the other hand, the effect for the participating countries has not yet reached the level initially declared.

The chapter aims to identify the main challenges and advantages of the BRI based on the involvement of countries and their markets in the trade and economic system formed by China.

The research novelty lies in studying the economic goals and objectives of the People's Republic of China (PRC) under the BRI and the possibilities of using the trade and economic system created by the PRC for developing the PRC and the BRI member countries.

The authors found that the initiative is designed to better integrate the economy of China at the regional and global level, promote the socio-economic progress of the less developed western territories of the country and stabilize foreign trade and domestic socio-economic processes in conditions of global instability. The authors justify that this initiative, uniting more than 80 countries in Asia, Africa and Oceania, will strengthen China's role in the world economy and trade, form a specific international trade and economic platform under the leadership of China and provide the country a leading position in at least three parts of the world.

The authors use traditional economic research methods, such as scientific abstraction, deduction, analysis and synthesis. Additionally, the authors use the method of visualization based on the application of the statistical method.

The main purpose of this research is to know the attitudinal displays of Kazakhstan companies towards corporate social responsibility. Apart from this, the paper also seeks to analyze the opinions of Kazakh employees, customers and the general public about their companies' socially responsible actions.

After a thorough revision of the relevant literature on corporate social responsibility, through well structured questionnaires and informal personal interviews with 50 Kazakh companies from both manufacturing and service sectors' concerned officials, the study analyzed CSR towards Kazakh owners or shareholders, employees, customers, creditors and suppliers, general public or community at large and government. To cross‐validate, the paper also carried out a separate survey to collect the opinions of 100 employees, 100 customers, and 100 members of the general public. These collected data were analyzed by using SPSS and Microsoft Excel software packages.

Kazakhstan companies conveyed a difference of opinion in almost every stakeholder area because of the present day economic crunch. Related to consumers, only 68 percent of companies recognized the provision of effective after‐sales service and 62 percent only promised to extend courteous service. Most importantly, only 58 percent of the Kazakh business community acknowledged following a fair trade policy. Related to the cross‐validation part, a meagre 8.57 percent of employees were not content with companies' policies, 12.86 percent of customers thought they were exploited and another 11.20 percent of the general public were not pleased with the social actions of Kazakh companies.

The study presents required information relating to Kazakhstan companies about the expectations of different stakeholders regarding revising their existing plans, policies, strategies and programs for maintaining healthy and affable relations.

The research paper provides a strong information base for both Kazakh companies and academicians to understand the various expectations of all the key interest groups in general and employees, customers and the general public in particular.

This paper aims to explain the development of the Siberian Trakt (Siberian Way) project and discuss methodological, instrumental and technological questions related to its implementation. The paper also aims to explore the project’s ability to form a collaborative tourism network that boosts tourism development in the unique Siberian regions of Russia located in the very center of the Eurasian continent.

A multidisciplinary view and case approach are the basic methods chosen to illustrate and analyze the prospects for tourist network development in Siberia within the framework of the Siberian Trakt project.

The findings reveal the opportunities arising from the project. The Siberian Trakt helps to combine the resources of surrounding territories, brings over external resources to the investment foundations of the project and thus adds to the development of settlements that are participants in the project.

The main output of this paper is confirmation of useful approaches in tourism network development along the Siberian Trakt, which historically connected Central Russia with Siberia and the Far East. On the basis of the experience of the Siberian Trakt project, the problems and prospects of Siberia as new tourism destinations are shown, as well as the role of small settlements as important nodes of the regional tourism network.

From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, China underwent a commercial revolution similar to the one in contemporaneous Europe. The rise of market did foster the rise of a nascent bourgeois and the concomitant rise of a liberal, populist version of Confucianism, which advocated a more decentralized and less authoritarian political system in the last few decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But after the collapse of the Ming Empire and the establishment of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) by the Manchu conquerors, the new rulers designated the late-Ming liberal ideologies as heretics, and they resurrected the most conservative form of Confucianism as the political orthodoxy. Under the principle of filial piety given by this orthodoxy, the whole empire was imagined as a fictitious family with the emperor as the grand patriarch and the civil bureaucrats and subjects as children or grandchildren. Under the highly centralized administrative and communicative apparatus of the Qing state, this ideology of the fictitious patrimonial state penetrated into the lowest level of the society. The subsequent paternalist, authoritarian, and moralizing politics of the Qing state contributed to China’s nontransition to capitalism despite its advanced market economy, and helped explain the peculiar form and trajectory of China’s popular contention in the eighteenth century. I also argue that this tradition of fictitious patrimonial politics continued to shape the state-making processes in twentieth-century China and beyond.

Pyrotechnic effects and spectacular death belong to the symbolism of terror and political assassination – bizarre techniques of miscommunication through fear practiced on the innocent and designed to effect social change. While focusing on the use of terror in 9-11, this article deals with both terror and political assassination as closely related communicative practices of death. It outlines a theory of terrorism that suggests September 11 may be an example of expedient terrorist destruction ordered from within the state, a macabre instance of a state protection racket. Commentators on the left tend to see terrorism as a blow extended by the oppressed against exploiters. However, terrorism is much less likely to be a manifestation of a revolt by – or on behalf of – the underprivileged than a demonstration of brute force by the state or its agents. Machiavellian state terrorism is terror/assassination performed for reasons different from the publicized ones; often initiated by persons or groups other than those suspected of the act; and – most important – secretly perpetrated by, or on behalf, of the violated state itself. Machiavellian state terror advances the ruling agenda, while disguising itself as the work of individuals or groups opposed to the state's fundamental principles. As an example, the article reviews a mysterious 1971 assassination in Paris that obliquely foreshadows some critical elements of the official story of 9-11. The article underlines the importance of oppositional theorizing: questioning government and looking for connections between events are critical features of what it means to be vitally active in the political universe.