By BRUNO
MAÇÃES
A 21st century Silk Road
takes shape on Kazakh border, to Russia’s consternation and beyond EU’s
imagination.
KHORGAS,
China — The world’s lost cities have all been unearthed.
The modern-day equivalent — fulfilling an age-old desire to stand in a
place wholly unknown to others — is a city built so recently that few have even
heard of it.
The Chinese town of Khorgas, on the border
with Kazakhstan and a strategic crossroads along the new Silk Road, can’t be
found on printed maps. Built from scratch over the past three years, it
has quickly become a sprawling grid of broad avenues with the feel of a
Californian town. Tree-lined streets have wide, pristine sidewalks.
Construction crews are busy at work. Looking from a distance — better from the
Kazakh border — there is a nascent line of skyscrapers. Most street lights are
not yet operational. As the city’s amenities are installed, the
population already hovers around 100,000.
The Chinese conceive of Khorgas as a city linking the
East and West, and an extension of their global economic project, the Silk Road
Economic Belt, that seeks to link China with Central Asia and Europe by means
of fast transport infrastructure, trade, finance and cultural exchange. Young
people have been flocking here, not only from the Western Chinese province of
Xinjiang but from further afield. A shop selling Georgian wine on a commercial
side-street has signs in five different scripts: Chinese, Cyrillic, Roman,
Georgian and Arabic — used for Uighur, the language of the province’s dominant
ethnic group.
This must be
something of a world record, I can’t help but think. I have dinner at Fuyun, a
new and very busy restaurant that serves expensive fish and seafood.
Businessmen meet in private booths to conclude deals. The staff use my visit as
an opportunity to learn a few new English words. The place is buzzing, and the
feeling mirrors that in the town: Everyone is too busy making a fortune to care
about following the rules too strictly. China’s youngest city brims with
ambition. This is the new Wild West — quite literally, for the many young
people flocking to Khorgas from big Chinese mega-cities to the East.
On the Kazakh side of the border, the
atmosphere is more subdued. The Kazakh Khorgos (the two cities share
a name but it is pronounced slightly differently on either side of the
border) is still more or less what it has always been: a couple of dozen old
houses congregated around a pretty mosque. When I step off the night train at
the new Altynkol station, the handful of fellow passengers quickly
disappear and I am left alone, sand dunes on one side and a pasturing herd of
sheep on the other. The imposing train station and modern two-lane highway
stand in sharp contrast to the unshakable feeling that I am —
quite literally this time — in the middle of nowhere.
* * *
Around a bend in the road, three giant
yellow cranes shine in the morning sunlight. They are part of
the Khorgos dry port, an ambitious project to build one of the world’s largest
ports in what is likely the place furthest away from any ocean. Such are the
ironies of globalization.
The port
lies at a midway point between Europe and China, the world’s largest economies
alongside the United States. Here, freight trains will converge, cargo will be unloaded
and recombined according to the destination, with new trains quickly departing
(these giant cranes are capable of moving cargo between trains in just 47
minutes).
Once the port is fully operational, new
industrial areas and cities will start to emerge along the trade routes, taking
advantage of new infrastructure, low labor costs and growing industrial
specialization between different economic regions. The area is particularly
attractive to Chinese manufacturers, who are starting to settle in Kazakhstan
to avoid paying duties to enter the Russian market.
Karl Gheysen, a Belgian citizen who worked
in Dubai before moving to China, is in charge of the dry port. We sit down
to study the map of the port. The lack of infrastructure has been an
obstacle, Gheysen tells me. But there is also a psychological barrier to
tear down, he says: a sharp distinction between East and West; between Europe
and China, around which businesses and governments have organized all their
activities and planning. At some point, he assures me, this barrier will
collapse and that will change everything. We’ll no longer have Europe on one
side and Asia on the other, but one single continent, increasingly
interconnected.
On the face of it, a
network of railways, roads and energy and digital infrastructure linking Europe
and China through the shortest and most direct route makes a lot of sense.
Khorgas is fast becoming the border between China and Europe (after all,
Kazakhstan is a European as well as an Asian country by virtue of its
geography). It takes 36 days to ship goods from China’s ports to Europe; rail
freight service along new overland routes will soon take as little as 10 days.
But the new
Silk Road will do more than that. The project risks upsetting old geopolitical
dynamics and reigniting a 19th-century world of great-power rivalry, a race for
power at the heart of the greatest landmass on earth. Look carefully and you’ll
see that’s already happening.
Start with logistics and you will quickly
find yourself face-to-face with far more delicate issues. At a recent debate in
Astana, Kazakhstan, a number of Chinese policymakers discussed the challenges
of making the new Silk Road economically viable. How could they reassure
investors about the political risks involved? It wasn’t long before the idea of
a new security architecture and military units was floated as a means to
protect their brand new transport and communication networks. Cheng Fude, a
businessman working for state-owned China Datang Corporation, suggested
enlisting international peace-keeping units, prudently underlining that he was
not speaking for the Chinese government.
* * *
In Kazakhstan, the project has raised
fears of increased Chinese presence and these
fears sparked public protests that cast doubt over the stability of the
Nazarbayev regime. In Moscow it has been met with growing concern. Over
the last two years Russian analysts have suggested to me that the crisis in
Ukraine was ultimately a product of Russian anxiety about growing Chinese
power, which threatens to turn Russia into China’s junior partner, or worse. If
Moscow wants to rival Beijing, it will need Ukraine to be part of its rival
integration project, the Eurasian Economic Union.
The rewards
of China’s mammoth project are potentially great, but so are the risks — for
everyone. It begs the question of why the European Union has so far been left
on the sidelines. You’d think Europe would be interested in a project to revive
its land routes to Asia, but so far all the action is happening between China
and countries such as Kazakhstan, Iran and Turkey.
Recently a number of historians have made
the case that the ancient Silk Road — the complex maze of camel-powered caravan
routes that crossed Central Asia for centuries until the beginning of our
modern era — was less about trade in goods than it was about cultural
exchange. The former was always limited in size and mostly local. The movement
of ideas, religions and people changed the course of world history, not once
but many times over.
This will
also be the case with the new Silk Road — or, as the Chinese authorities prefer
to call it, “The Belt,” envisioning a densely occupied economic corridor for
trade, industry and people. The spillovers from infrastructure and trade into
politics, culture and security are not a side-effect of the project, but its
most fundamental feature.
Under Xi Jinping, China is shifting. The
government has realized it runs the risk of becoming an economic powerhouse
linked to the world through trade but itself a political island — and
ultimately dependent on a global system it did not create and cannot control.
China wants its political and cultural
influence to grow in line with its economy, starting with its periphery in
Southeast and Central Asia. In my conversations with Chinese students in
Beijing — where you can take a university course on the Silk Road initiative —
I was told the same thing time and again: China wants to give back to the world
what it received since economic reform started under Deng Xiaoping almost 40
years ago.
With the Silk Road Economic Belt, the
Chinese authorities intend to change China’s image from willing participant in
the global economy to a country that more actively influences and shapes it. By
expanding its influence outside its borders, China will be called upon to
develop new political concepts to rival those of the West. In the past, the
steppes of Central Asia were the place where new civilizations were born, and
where old ones would sometimes come to die. There’s a lot of history in
Khorgas. But no past. There are no ruins, no mazārs or mausolea. What
you’ll see there is the future.
Bruno Maçães, a former Portuguese minister
for Europe, is a nonresident fellow at Carnegie Europe and author of the
forthcoming book “The New Eurasian Supercontinent.” Follow him on Twitter @macaesbruno
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