ABSTRACT
China’s relations with its immediate neighbours to the west, and to a certain extent with the states of the Islamic Middle East with which those states have close cultural and religious ties, were rekindled in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. Strictly speaking the states on the other side of the inner Asian frontier were not new neighbours because they had always been there, but during the Cold War and the Sino-Soviet dispute, China’s contact with them was so limited that when the borders reopened in the 1990s, diplomatic relationships had to be rebuilt almost from fi rst principles.
