New
Western frontier, conquered by China
A
21st century Silk Road takes shape on Kazakh border, to Russia’s
consternation and beyond EU’s imagination.
By BRUNO MAÇÃES
6/20/16, 6:03 AM CET
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.
The Ukraine crisis
was ultimately a product of Russian anxiety about growing Chinese
power. If Moscow wants to rival Beijing, it will need Ukraine to be
part of its rival integration project, the Eurasian Economic Union.
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.
Khorgas
Yellow cranes at
Khorgos dry port | Khorgas Gateway
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.
The project risks
reigniting a 19th-century world of great-power rivalry
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.
IMG_6724
A staff member waits
for an arrival at Khargos dry port | Khargos Gateway
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.
China wants to give
back to the world what it received since economic reform started
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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