To preface, I am not a specialist in medieval... well medieval anything really, but especially not medieval European economics and trade. But I am, for the time being, decently up to speed with some currents in Eurasian historiography, particularly around the 'Silk Road' concept, and wrote an answer relatively recently discussing the critique of the concept levelled by Scott C. Levi in The Bukharan Crisis (2020).

While the answer as a whole goes into more detail – and the book it is based on is a must-read – I do want to give a condensed position here as to why, in light of contemporary scholarship, the framing of the question is problematic. Simply put, the 'Silk Road' was never an intentional creation of any involved party. Rather, the phenomena that get grouped under the idea – movement of peoples, goods, and ideas between the more coastal portions of the Eurasian continent – were emergent properties of interlinked regional trading networks. These networks emerged organically out of regional economies, and while certainly bolstered by connections to neighbouring trade systems, they were never fundamentally reliant on them. In other words, even economies one step over from China, particularly those in Central Asia, were not fundamentally reliant on Chinese exports, so in turn, it stands to reason that South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European trade networks were themselves not reliant on re-exports of Chinese goods by intermediate parties. Critically, by the time you got to Europe, even Eastern Europe, nobody was really trading with China directly, except during the height of the Mongol Empire when movement from the Golden Horde to the Yuan was still reasonably possible. And it's no coincidence that Marco Polo got to China via Mongol-held lands. More importantly, Chinese states had neither the means nor the motive to leverage commerce as a tool for political control over Europe. For one, as noted, the 'Silk Road' trade wasn't a state initiative, it was Chinese merchants selling to other Chinese merchants and eventually to Central Asian merchants, selling to other Central Asian merchants and eventually Eastern European and/or Middle Eastern merchants, selling to other Eastern European and/or Middle Eastern merchants and eventually Western European merchants. For another, what Chinese interest was there in Europe?

It is true that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Great Qing did leverage threats of embargo as a mechanism for exercising control over the activities of European states and their subjects in coastal China. But this was at a time when these states and their subjects had an immediate and apparent presence in southern China, and were capable of travelling between Europe and China practicably in long-range, square-rigged sailing ships. It was a context in which European states served as guarantors for European merchants engaged in direct commerce, in contrast to being tenuously commercially connected to China via long chains of middlemen whose connections were fundamentally coincidental.