Kashgar, a dusty city of 350,000 people in China’s remote northwestern corner, at the edge of the Taklimakan Desert, is only a few hours’ drive from the Afghan border.
Many people are unaware that China and Afghanistan even connect. But they do, just below the snow-capped Pamir Mountains, which rise to the west of Kashgar, and just above Pakistan. There, a long, narrow stretch of Afghan territory reaches out like a tentacle between Tajikistan and Pakistan to touch the People’s Republic. The Wakhan Corridor, as it is now called, stretches 140 miles through one of the most magnificent landscapes on Earth. The invisible lines marking it on the map were drawn in the nineteenth century to create a buffer zone between the former British and Russian empires. The corridor’s tip forms a jagged frontier with China only 47 miles wide, which has been largely closed off for more than a century.
Today, as U.S. forces prepare for gradual withdrawals through 2016, leaving behind over a decade of war and failed nation building, the country’s future hangs in the balance. U.S. intelligence assessments suggest it could face a power vacuum that would draw it back into civil war.
Beijing also is worried. Growing instability in the region could jeopardize its plan to resurrect a centuries-old trade network stretching from western China into Central and South Asia and onward to Europe.
Kashgar occupies an important position in that network. It sits at a key juncture of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is set to become a part of something much bigger: the new Silk Road Economic Belt.
The Silk Road Economic Belt, the creation of which is being championed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, will cover an area of some 3 billion people. “It represents,” Xi says, “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”
Once a bustling oasis town 2,000 years ago, Kashgar emerged as a way station for merchants on a caravan route that for centuries formed the world’s most lucrative trade artery, carrying Chinese silks, spices, and porcelain across the northern reaches of Central Asia as far west as Athens and Rome.
Xi wants to return Kashgar to its former glory, making it into a large industrial center and trading hub on the New Silk Road. Soon it will become one of two Special Economic Zones that the State Council is planning in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Horgos, a town on the border with Kazakhstan, will become the second, dedicated to pharmaceuticals and chemicals manufacturing, as well as farming and renewable energy.
Beijing aims to attract investment to the area with various incentives, including low interest rates, tax exemptions, and competitive land prices. It will also offer transportation and electricity subsidies.
Some say Xi’s vision is as ambitious as Deng Xiaoping’s call to reform and open up China’s economy in the late 1970s—and one that could prove as transformative for Kashgar and Horgos as it was for Shenzhen, the country’s first Special Economic Zone. Shenzhen quickly rose from little more than a fishing village before 1979 to one of the world’s fastest-growing cities and busiest shipping ports today.
Already Kashgar is being called the new Shenzhen of the northwest. Trans-Eurasian road, rail, and pipeline links will give Central Asian countries (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan) access to markets in China through Xinjiang, as well as North and South America via China’s eastern seaports. China in turn will gain access to Central Asia’s vast store of natural resources, especially much-needed oil and gas.
“Central Asia is the largest landlocked region in the world,” said Kazakhstan’s foreign minister, Erlan Idrissov, when he spoke at the Asia Society in New York in September. “When President Xi Jinping visited Kazakhstan last year to announce China’s new Central Asian policy,” he added, “the core of that policy was building the economic belt for the Silk Road,” which, “when fully implemented, will open up additional markets for our goods, boost our economic growth, and create opportunities for all the countries along these routes.”
According to some estimates, bilateral trade between China and Kazakhstan next year could reach close to $40 billion. China’s investment in a large oil field in Kazakhstan alone is worth $30 billion. And Beijing’s deals with other Central Asian countries, such as Uzbekistan, are expected to account for billions more in gas, oil, and uranium trade. These multibillion-dollar deals will cement political and economic relations between China and Central Asian countries. Inevitably, perhaps, they will also increase the importance of the RMB in the region, though Beijing has publicly expressed its hope that local currencies in the Silk Road Economic Belt will continue to flourish.
Beijing also hopes the New Silk Road can bring stability to Xinjiang, where the forces of separatism, extremism, and terrorism—dubbed the “three evils”—have gained momentum in recent years. Beijing believes that mounting political dissent and turmoil in Xinjiang is caused largely by poverty.
Xi’s vision to revive the Silk Road is not entirely new. It only caps decades of efforts to improve trade with Central Asian countries, which have already started bearing fruit. Since 1992 total trade between China and Central Asia has increased a hundred fold, reaching $46 billion in 2012.
To make the New Silk Road a reality, Beijing has pledged billions in fresh investment and financial support. It has also stepped up diplomacy to consolidate regional economic and security partnerships among countries in and around Central Asia, largely through the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). To promote cultural harmony and Chinese values along the New Silk Road, it plans to set up academic exchange programs and offer 30,000 government-sponsored scholarships to SCO member states through its Confucius Institutes.
Since the 1980s China’s regional integration with Asia has taken a back seat to commercial dealings with the West, particularly the United States, with which it has formed the largest bilateral trading relationship in human history. But Beijing reckons that cheap exports to America cannot sustain economic growth indefinitely. New models must emerge to help it complete the journey from an economic backwater in the early 20th century to a fully developed nation over the next three decades—if not to restore the country to its bygone imperial stature as one of the world’s most potent economies.
As China contemplates how best to achieve this task, it looks at Japan and sees a nation whose reemergence from the devastation of the Second World War was cut short by an inability to integrate regionally. Beijing has no intention of making the same mistake, or of allowing other nations to force it into that position. As the U.S. firms up a containment strategy in the South China Sea, Beijing has turned westward, building a more formidable transcontinental alliance with Eurasia that includes Russia, which now has its own reasons for wanting a closer economic and strategic alliance with the Middle Kingdom.
Work is already well underway to revitalize the New Silk Road’s northern segment. Infrastructure has been built up in key western Chinese cities, including Kunming, Chongqing, Chengdu, Xi’an, and Xining. New rail lines have been laid to connect these cities with the country’s eastern coastal ports. In the other direction, westward across the expansive Eurasian Land Bridge, new lines extend to Moscow and on to Duisburg, Germany, the world’s largest inland port and one of Europe’s most important transshipment points. Pipelines have also been constructed from China to Kazakhstan and other countries in Central Asia to carry oil and natural gas.
He Yiming, who heads Xinjiang’s regional commerce bureau, confirmed that most of the infrastructure projects in the region have been completed, and says key industries will be established within the next 5 years.
“This area, with more than 50 countries and 3.8 billion people, is one of the most promising regions in the world,” said Wang Yang, China’s vice premier, at the forth China-Eurasia Expo in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi in September. “As long as we take a long-term perspective and work in unison, we will make the pie of regional economic cooperation bigger.”
Intriguingly, to gain that long-term perspective, Beijing appears more and more willing to look back in time for inspiration to help it envision new models to help move the country’s economy forward on a new and politically critical leg of its development.
Paul Nash is Senior Editor at Diplomatic Courier. Lucrezia Seu is the Asia-Pacific Producer for RAI Italia, Italy’s national public broadcasting company, based in Beijing. She previously worked for CNN’s Beijing bureau and is a graduate of Tsinghua University, China, and the University of Westminster, England.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's November/December 2014 print edition.
a global affairs media network
Resurrecting the Silk Road
December 1, 2014
Kashgar, a dusty city of 350,000 people in China’s remote northwestern corner, at the edge of the Taklimakan Desert, is only a few hours’ drive from the Afghan border.
Many people are unaware that China and Afghanistan even connect. But they do, just below the snow-capped Pamir Mountains, which rise to the west of Kashgar, and just above Pakistan. There, a long, narrow stretch of Afghan territory reaches out like a tentacle between Tajikistan and Pakistan to touch the People’s Republic. The Wakhan Corridor, as it is now called, stretches 140 miles through one of the most magnificent landscapes on Earth. The invisible lines marking it on the map were drawn in the nineteenth century to create a buffer zone between the former British and Russian empires. The corridor’s tip forms a jagged frontier with China only 47 miles wide, which has been largely closed off for more than a century.
Today, as U.S. forces prepare for gradual withdrawals through 2016, leaving behind over a decade of war and failed nation building, the country’s future hangs in the balance. U.S. intelligence assessments suggest it could face a power vacuum that would draw it back into civil war.
Beijing also is worried. Growing instability in the region could jeopardize its plan to resurrect a centuries-old trade network stretching from western China into Central and South Asia and onward to Europe.
Kashgar occupies an important position in that network. It sits at a key juncture of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is set to become a part of something much bigger: the new Silk Road Economic Belt.
The Silk Road Economic Belt, the creation of which is being championed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, will cover an area of some 3 billion people. “It represents,” Xi says, “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”
Once a bustling oasis town 2,000 years ago, Kashgar emerged as a way station for merchants on a caravan route that for centuries formed the world’s most lucrative trade artery, carrying Chinese silks, spices, and porcelain across the northern reaches of Central Asia as far west as Athens and Rome.
Xi wants to return Kashgar to its former glory, making it into a large industrial center and trading hub on the New Silk Road. Soon it will become one of two Special Economic Zones that the State Council is planning in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Horgos, a town on the border with Kazakhstan, will become the second, dedicated to pharmaceuticals and chemicals manufacturing, as well as farming and renewable energy.
Beijing aims to attract investment to the area with various incentives, including low interest rates, tax exemptions, and competitive land prices. It will also offer transportation and electricity subsidies.
Some say Xi’s vision is as ambitious as Deng Xiaoping’s call to reform and open up China’s economy in the late 1970s—and one that could prove as transformative for Kashgar and Horgos as it was for Shenzhen, the country’s first Special Economic Zone. Shenzhen quickly rose from little more than a fishing village before 1979 to one of the world’s fastest-growing cities and busiest shipping ports today.
Already Kashgar is being called the new Shenzhen of the northwest. Trans-Eurasian road, rail, and pipeline links will give Central Asian countries (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Afghanistan) access to markets in China through Xinjiang, as well as North and South America via China’s eastern seaports. China in turn will gain access to Central Asia’s vast store of natural resources, especially much-needed oil and gas.
“Central Asia is the largest landlocked region in the world,” said Kazakhstan’s foreign minister, Erlan Idrissov, when he spoke at the Asia Society in New York in September. “When President Xi Jinping visited Kazakhstan last year to announce China’s new Central Asian policy,” he added, “the core of that policy was building the economic belt for the Silk Road,” which, “when fully implemented, will open up additional markets for our goods, boost our economic growth, and create opportunities for all the countries along these routes.”
According to some estimates, bilateral trade between China and Kazakhstan next year could reach close to $40 billion. China’s investment in a large oil field in Kazakhstan alone is worth $30 billion. And Beijing’s deals with other Central Asian countries, such as Uzbekistan, are expected to account for billions more in gas, oil, and uranium trade. These multibillion-dollar deals will cement political and economic relations between China and Central Asian countries. Inevitably, perhaps, they will also increase the importance of the RMB in the region, though Beijing has publicly expressed its hope that local currencies in the Silk Road Economic Belt will continue to flourish.
Beijing also hopes the New Silk Road can bring stability to Xinjiang, where the forces of separatism, extremism, and terrorism—dubbed the “three evils”—have gained momentum in recent years. Beijing believes that mounting political dissent and turmoil in Xinjiang is caused largely by poverty.
Xi’s vision to revive the Silk Road is not entirely new. It only caps decades of efforts to improve trade with Central Asian countries, which have already started bearing fruit. Since 1992 total trade between China and Central Asia has increased a hundred fold, reaching $46 billion in 2012.
To make the New Silk Road a reality, Beijing has pledged billions in fresh investment and financial support. It has also stepped up diplomacy to consolidate regional economic and security partnerships among countries in and around Central Asia, largely through the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). To promote cultural harmony and Chinese values along the New Silk Road, it plans to set up academic exchange programs and offer 30,000 government-sponsored scholarships to SCO member states through its Confucius Institutes.
Since the 1980s China’s regional integration with Asia has taken a back seat to commercial dealings with the West, particularly the United States, with which it has formed the largest bilateral trading relationship in human history. But Beijing reckons that cheap exports to America cannot sustain economic growth indefinitely. New models must emerge to help it complete the journey from an economic backwater in the early 20th century to a fully developed nation over the next three decades—if not to restore the country to its bygone imperial stature as one of the world’s most potent economies.
As China contemplates how best to achieve this task, it looks at Japan and sees a nation whose reemergence from the devastation of the Second World War was cut short by an inability to integrate regionally. Beijing has no intention of making the same mistake, or of allowing other nations to force it into that position. As the U.S. firms up a containment strategy in the South China Sea, Beijing has turned westward, building a more formidable transcontinental alliance with Eurasia that includes Russia, which now has its own reasons for wanting a closer economic and strategic alliance with the Middle Kingdom.
Work is already well underway to revitalize the New Silk Road’s northern segment. Infrastructure has been built up in key western Chinese cities, including Kunming, Chongqing, Chengdu, Xi’an, and Xining. New rail lines have been laid to connect these cities with the country’s eastern coastal ports. In the other direction, westward across the expansive Eurasian Land Bridge, new lines extend to Moscow and on to Duisburg, Germany, the world’s largest inland port and one of Europe’s most important transshipment points. Pipelines have also been constructed from China to Kazakhstan and other countries in Central Asia to carry oil and natural gas.
He Yiming, who heads Xinjiang’s regional commerce bureau, confirmed that most of the infrastructure projects in the region have been completed, and says key industries will be established within the next 5 years.
“This area, with more than 50 countries and 3.8 billion people, is one of the most promising regions in the world,” said Wang Yang, China’s vice premier, at the forth China-Eurasia Expo in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi in September. “As long as we take a long-term perspective and work in unison, we will make the pie of regional economic cooperation bigger.”
Intriguingly, to gain that long-term perspective, Beijing appears more and more willing to look back in time for inspiration to help it envision new models to help move the country’s economy forward on a new and politically critical leg of its development.
Paul Nash is Senior Editor at Diplomatic Courier. Lucrezia Seu is the Asia-Pacific Producer for RAI Italia, Italy’s national public broadcasting company, based in Beijing. She previously worked for CNN’s Beijing bureau and is a graduate of Tsinghua University, China, and the University of Westminster, England.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's November/December 2014 print edition.
