ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter reflects on the Yugo-Chinese normative encounters, and their layered legacies, afterlives, and alterlives. The chapter draws on the insights of the volume to show how the Yugo-Chinese past is not only remembered or misremembered, but reactivated, refracted, and strategically deployed in the present context. Advancing the pericentric framework of the whole project, the chapter critically interrogates how these past normative encounters persist as spectral cues in Global China’s engagement with the post-Yugoslav space which is still dealing with unfinished post-socialist transition. The often forgotten past, as shown, reverberates in present-day imaginaries and practices, illuminating contradictions between globalisation and sovereignty; high-speed and high-quality economic development; and developmental and liberal peace. The Yugo-Chinese past, as the chapter posits, then informs open-ended, non-teleological futures in uncertain times, pointing to choices made from what is possible in the here and now.
