China's relations with its neighboring countries

China’s geopolitical location is quite unique, surrounded as it has been over the past two millennia by numerous continental and maritime neighbors. Today the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has more neighboring countries than any other country in the world, sharing land borders with fourteen countries, and maritime borders with eight (two of them, North Korea and Vietnam, share both land borders and maritime borders with China). If we count states that do not share common borders with China but are geographically close to it—Singapore, Thailand and Cambodia in Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives in South Asia, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in Central Asia—then China today is surrounded by about thirty neighboring countries. Several of them are big powers, such as Russia, Japan, India, and even the United States, as a “special neighboring country,” because of it having been the only superpower in the post-Cold War world, exercising great influence and playing an important role in China’s surrounding areas. ¹