F. William
Engdahl
 The proposed rail link would run from Kars on the easternmost border with Armenia, through the Turkish interior on to Istanbul where it would connect to the Marmaray rail tunnel now under construction that runs under the Bosphorus strait. Then it would continue to Edirne near the border to Greece and Bulgaria in the European Union. It will cost an estimated $35 billion. The realization of the Turkish link would complete a Chinese Trans-Eurasian Rail Bridge project that would bring freight from China to Spain and England.1 The Kars-Edirne line would reduce travel time across Turkey by two-thirds from 36 hours down to 12. Under an agreement signed between China and Turkey in October 2010, China has agreed to extend loans of $30 billion for the planned rail network.2 In addition a Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway connecting Azerbaijan's capital of Baku to Kars is under construction, which greatly increases the strategic importance of the Edirne-Kars line. For China it would put a critical new link in its railway infrastructure across Eurasia to markets in Europe and beyond.
Erdogan’s visit to Beijing was significant
for other reasons. It was the first such high level trip of a Turkish Prime
Minister to China since 1985. The fact that Erdogan was also granted a
high-level meeting with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, the man slated to
be next Chinese President, and was granted an extraordinary visit to China’s
oil-rich Xinjiang Province also shows the high priority China is placing on
its relations with Turkey, a key emerging strategic force in the Middle East.
Xinjiang is a highly sensitive part of China
as it hosts some 9 million ethnic Uyghurs who share a Turkic heritage with
Turkey as well as nominal adherence to the Turkish Sunni branch of Islam. In
July 2009 the US government, acting through the National Endowment for
Democracy, the regime-change NGO it finances, backed a major Uyghur uprising
in which many Han Chinese shop owners were killed or injured. Washington in
turn blamed the riots on Beijing as part of a strategy of escalating pressure
on China.3 During Uyghur riots in Xinjiang in 2009, Erdogan accused
Beijing of “genocide” and attacked the Chinese on human rights, a dicey issue
for Turkey given their Kurd ethnic problems. Clearly economic priorities from
both sides have now changed the political calculus.
Building
the world’s greatest market
Contrary to the dogma of Milton Friedman and
his followers, markets are never “free.” They are always manmade. The
essential element to build new markets is building infrastructure and for the
vast landmass of Eurasia railroad linkages are essential to those new
markets.
With the end of the Cold War in 1990 the vast
under-developed land space of Eurasia became open again. This space contains
some forty percent of total land in the world, much of it prime unspoiled
agriculture land; it contains three-fourth of the entire world population, an
asset of incalculable worth. It consists of some eighty eight of the world’s
countries and three-fourths of known world energy resources as well as every
mineral known needed for industrialization. North America as an economic
potential, rich as she is, pales by comparison.
The Turkish-China railway discussion is but
one part of a vast Chinese strategy to weave a network of inland rail
connections across the Eurasian Continent. The aim is to literally create the
world’s greatest new economic space and in turn a huge new market for not
just China but all Eurasian countries, the Middle East and Western Europe.
Direct rail service is faster and cheaper than either ships or trucks, and
much cheaper than airplanes. For manufactured Chinese or other Eurasian
products the rail land bridge links are creating vast new economic trading
activity all along the rail line.
Two factors have made this prospect
realizable for the first time since the Second World War. First the collapse
of the Soviet Union has opened up the land space of Eurasia in entirely new
ways as has the opening of China to Russia and its Eurasian neighbors,
overcoming decades of mistrust. This is being met by the eastward expansion
of the European Union to the countries of the former Warsaw Pact.
The demand for faster rail transport
over the vast Eurasian distances is clear. China’s container port activity
and that of its European and North American destinations is reaching a
saturation point as volumes of container traffic explode at double-digit
rates. Singapore recently displaced Rotterdam as the world’s largest port in
volume terms. The growth rate for container port throughput in China in 2006,
before outbreak of the world financial crisis was some 25% annually. In 2007
Chinese ports accounted for some 28 per cent of world container port
throughput. 4 However there is another aspect to the Chinese and, to an
extent, the Russian land bridge strategies. By moving trade flows over land,
it is more secure in the face of escalating military tensions between the
nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, especially China and
Russia, and NATO. Sea transport must flow through highly vulnerable narrow
passageways or chokepoints such as the Malaysian Straits of Malacca.
The Turkish Kars-Edirne railway would form an
integral part of an entire web of Chinese-initiated rail corridors across the
Eurasian landmass. Following the example of how rail infrastructure
transformed the economic space of Europe and later of America during the late
19th Century, the Chinese government, which today stands as
the world’s most efficient railroad constructor, has quietly been extending
its rail links into Central Asia and beyond for several years. They have
proceeded in segments, one reason the vast ambition of their grand rail
infrastructure has drawn so little attention to date in the West outside the
shipping industry.
China builds
Second Eurasian Land Bridge
By 2011 China had completed a Second Eurasian
Land Bridge running from China’s port of Lianyungang on the East China Sea
through to Kazakhstan’s Druzhba and on to Central Asia, West Asia and Europe
to various European destinations and finally to Rotterdam Port of Holland on
the Atlantic coast.
The Second Eurasian Land Bridge is a
new railway connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic that was completed by
China to Druzhba in Kazakhstan. This newest Eurasia land bridge extends west
in China through six provinces--Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, and
Xinjiang autonomous region, which neighbors respectively with Shandong
Province, Shanxi Province, Hubei Province, Sichuan Province, Qinghai
Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Inner Mongolia. That covers about
360,000 square kilometers, some 37% of the total land space of China. About
400 million people live in the areas, which accounts for 30% of the total
population of the country. Outside of China, the land bridge covers over 40
countries and regions in both Asia and Europe, and is particularly important
for the countries in Central and West Asia that don’t have sea outlets.
In 2011 China’s Vice Premier Wang
Qishan announced plans to build a new high-speed railway link within
Kazakhstan, linking the cities of Astana and Almaty, to be ready in
2015. The Astana-Almaty line, with a total length of 1050
kilometers, employing China’s advanced rail-building technology, will allow
high-speed trains to run at a speed of 350 kilometers per hour.
DB Schenker Rail Automotive is now
transporting auto parts from Leipzig to Shenyang in northeastern China for BMW.
Trains loaded with parts and components depart from DB Schenker's Leipzig
trans-shipment terminal in a three-week, 11,000 km journey to BMW's Shenyang
plant in the Liaoning province, where components are used in the assembly of
BMW vehicles. Beginning in late November 2011, trains bound for Shenyang
departed Leipzig once each day. "With a transit time of 23 days, the
direct trains are twice as fast as maritime transport, followed by
over-the-road transport to the Chinese hinterland," says Dr. Karl-Friedrich
Rausch, member of the management board for DB Mobility Logistics'
Transportation and Logistics division. The route reaches China via Poland,
Belarus, and Russia. Containers have to be transferred by crane to different
gauges twice—first to Russian broad gauge at the Poland-Belarus border, then
back to standard gauge at the Russia-China border in Manzhouli.5
In May 2011 a daily direct rail freight
service was launched between the Port of Antwerp, Europe’s second-largest
port, and Chongqing, the industrial hub in China’s southwest. That greatly
speeded rail freight transport across Eurasia to Europe. Compared to the 36
days for maritime transport from east China’s ports to west Europe, the
Antwerp-Chongqing Rail Freight service now takes 20 to 25 days, and the aim
is to cut that to 15 to 20 days. Westbound cargo includes automotive and
technological goods, eastbound shipments are mostly chemicals. The project
was a major priority for the Antwerp Port and the Belgian government in
cooperation with China and other partners. The service is run by Swiss
inter-modal logistics provider Hupac, their Russian partner Russkaya Troyka
and Eurasia Good Transport over a distance of more than 10,000km, starting
from Port of Antwerp through to Germany and Poland, and further to Ukraine,
Russia and Mongolia before reaching Chongqing in China.6
The Second Eurasian Land Bridge runs 10,900
kilometers in length, with some 4100 kilometers of that in China. Within
China the line runs parallel to one of the ancient routes of the Silk Road.
The rail line continues across China into Druzhba where it links with the
broader gauge rail lines of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the largest inland
country in the world. As Chinese rail and highways have expanded west, trade
between Kazakhstan and China has been booming. From January to October 2008,
goods passing through the Khorgos port between the two nations reached
880,000 tons - over 250% growth compared with the same period a year before.
Trade between China and Kazakhstan is expected to grow 3 to 5 fold by 2013.
As of 2008, only about 1% of the goods shipped from Asia to Europe were
delivered by overland routes, meaning the room for expansion is
considerable.7
From
Kazakhstan the lines go on via Russia and Belarus over Poland to the markets
of the European Union.Another line goes to Tashkent in Uzbekistan,
Central Asia’s largest city of some two millions. Another line goes west to
Turkmenistan’s capital Asgabat and to the border of Iran.8 With
some additional investment, these links, now tied to the vast expanse and
markets of China could open new economic possibilities in much-neglected
regions of Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could
provide a well-suited vehicle for coordination of a broad Eurasian rail infrastructure
coordination to maximize these initial rail links. The members of the SCO,
formed in 2001, include China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan,
Uzbekistan with Iran, India, Mongolia and Pakistan as Observer Status
countries.
Russia’s
Land Bridge
Russia is well positioned to benefit greatly
from such an SCO strategy. The First Eurasian Land Bridge runs through Russia
along the Trans-Siberian Railway, first completed in 1916 to unify the
Russian Empire. The Trans-Siberian remains the longest single rail line in
the world at 9,297 kilometers, a tribute to the vision of Russian Sergei
Witte in the 1890s. The Trans-Siberian Railway, also called the Northern
East-West Corridor, runs from the Russian Far East Port of Vladivostok and
links in Europe to the Port of Rotterdam some 13,000 kilometers. At present
it is the less attractive for Pacific-to-Atlantic freight because of
maintenance problems and maximum speeds of 55 km.
There are attempts to better use the
Trans-Siberian Land Bridge. In January 2008 a long distance Eurasian rail
freight service, the "Beijing-Hamburg Container Express" was
successfully tested by the German railway Deutsche Bahn. It completed the
10,000 km (6,200 miles) journey in 15 days to link the Chinese capital to the
German port city, going through Mongolia, the Russian Federation, Belarus and
Poland. By ship to the same markets takes double the time or some 30
days. This route, which began commercial service in 2010
incorporates a section of the existing Trans-Siberian Railway, a rail link
using a broader gauge than either Chinese or European trains, meaning two
offloads and reloads onto other trains at the China-Mongolia border and again
at the Belarus-Poland border.
Were the Trans-Siberian railway passage
across Russian Eurasian space to be modernized and upgraded to accommodate
high-speed freight traffic, it would add a significant new economic dimension
to the economic development of Russia’s interior regions. The Trans-Siberian
is double-tracked and electrified. The need is minimally to improve some
segments to insure a better integration of all the elements to make it a more
attractive option for Eurasian freight to the west.
There are strong indications the new Putin
presidency will turn more of its attention to Eurasia. Modernization of the
First Eurasian Land Bridge would be a logical way to accomplish much of that
development by literally creating new markets and new economic activity. With
the bond markets of the United States and Europe flooded with toxic waste and
state bankruptcy fears, issuance of Russian state bonds for modernization or
even a new parallel high-speed rail Land Bridge linking to the certainty of
growing freight traffic across Eurasia would have little difficulty finding
eager investors.
Russia is currently in discussion with China
and Chinese rail constructors who are bidding on construction of a planned
$20 billion of new high-speed Russian rail track to be completed before the
2018 Russian hosting of the Soccer World Cup. China’s experience in building
some 12,000 km of high speed rail in record time is a major asset for China’s
bid. Significantly, Russia plans to raise $10 billion of the cost by issuing
new railroad bonds.9
A
Third Eurasian Land Bridge?
In 2009 at the Fifth Pan-Pearl River Delta
Regional (PPRD) Cooperation and Development Forum, a government-sponsored
event, the Yunnan provincial government announced its intention to accelerate
construction of needed infrastructure to build a third Eurasian continental
land bridge that will link south China to Rotterdam via Turkey over land.
This is part of what Erdogan and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao discussed
in Beijing this April. The network of inland roads for the land bridge within
Yunnan province will be completed by 2015, said Yunnan governor Qin
Guangrong. The project starts from coastal ports in Guangdong, with the Port
of Shenzhen being the most important. It will ultimately go all the way
through Kunming to Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Iran, entering
Europe from Turkey.10
The route would cut some 6,000-km from
the sea journey between the Pearl River Delta and Rotterdam and allow
production from China’s eastern manufacturing centers to reach Asia, Africa
and Europe. The proposal is for completing a series of missing rail and
modern highway links totaling some 1,000 Km, not that inconceivable. In
neighboring Myanmar a mere 300 km of railways and highways are lacking in
order to link the railways in Yunnan with the highway network of Myanmar and
South Asia. It will help China pave the way for building a land channel to
the Indian Ocean.
The third Eurasian Land Bridge will cross 20
countries in Asia and Europe and have a total length of about 15,000
kilometers, which is 3,000 to 6,000 kilometers shorter than the sea route
entering at the Indian Ocean from the southeast coast via the Malacca
Straits. The total annual trade volume of the regions the route passes
through was nearly US$300 billion in 2009. Ultimately the plan is for a branch
line that would also start in Turkey, cross Syria and Palestine, and end in
Egypt, facilitating transportation from China to Africa. Clearly the
Pentagon’s AFRICOM and the US-backed Arab Spring unrest directly impacts that
extension, though for how long at this point is unclear. 11
The geopolitical dimension
Not every major international player is
pleased about the growing linkages binding the economies of Eurasia with
western Europe and Africa. In his now famous 1997 book, “The Grand
Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives”, former
Presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski noted,
“In brief, for the United States, Eurasian
geo-strategy involves the purposeful management of geo-strategically dynamic
states…To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of
ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to
prevent collusion and to
maintain security dependence among the
vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians
from coming together.” 12
The “barbarians” that Brzezinski refers
to are China and Russia and all in between. The Brzezinski term “imperial
geo-strategy” refers to US strategic foreign policy. The “vassals” he
identifies in the book as countries like Germany, Japan and other NATO
“allies” of the US. That Brzezinski geopolitical notion remains US foreign
policy today. 13
The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian
economic boom lasting into the next Century and beyond is at hand.
The first sinews of binding the vast economic
space have been put in place or are being constructed with these rail links.
It is becoming clear to more people in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and
Eurasia including China and Russia that their natural tendency to build these
markets faces only one major obstacle: NATO and the US Pentagon’s Full
Spectrum Dominance obsession. In the period prior to World War I
it was the decision in Berlin to build a rail land link to and through the
Turkish Ottoman Empire from Berlin to Baghdad that was the catalyst for
British strategists to incite the events that plunged Europe into the most
destructive war in history to that date. This time we have a chance to avoid
a similar fate with the Eurasian development. More and more the economically stressed
economies of the EU are beginning to look east and less to their west across
the Atlantic for Europe’s economic future.
**********************
*F. William
Engdahl is
author of several books on contemporary geopolitics including A
Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. He
is available via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net
Notes:
1 Sunday’s Zaman, Turkey, China mull $35 bln joint high-speed railway project, Istanbul, April 14, 2012, accessed in
2 Ibid.
3 F. William Engdahl, Washington
is Playing a Deeper Game with China, Global Research, July 11, 2009,
accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14327.
4 UNCTAD, Port and
multimodal transport developments,2008, accessed inhttp://www.thefreelibrary.com/Chapter+5%3a+Port+and+multimodal+transport+developments.-a0218028142.
5 Joseph O’Reilly, BMW
Rides Orient Express to China, Global Logistics, October 2011, accessed
in http://www.inboundlogistics.com/cms/article/global-logistics-october-2011/.
6 Aubrey Chang, Antwerp-Chongqing
Direct Rail Freight Link Launched, May 12, 2011, accessed in
7 CNTV, Eurasian land
bridge, March 12, 2011, accessed in http://english.cntv.cn/program/china24/20111203/108360.shtml.
8 Shigeru Otsuka, Central
Asia’s Rail Network and the Eurasian Land Bridge, Japan Railway &
Transport Review 28, September 2001, pp. 42-49.
9 CNTV, Russian rail
official: Chinese bidder competitive, November 21,2011, accessed in
10 Xinhua, Yunnan
accelerates construction of third Eurasia land bridge, 2009, accessed
in http://www.shippingonline.cn/news/newsContent.asp?id=10095
11 Li Yingqing and Guo
Anfei, Third land link to Europe envisioned, China Daily, July 2,
2009, accessed in
12 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The
Grand Chessboard, 1997, Basic Books, p. 40. See F. William Engdahl, A
Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,
Wiesbaden, 2011, edition.engdahl, for details of the role of the German
Baghdad rail link in World War I.
13 Zbigniew Brzezinski, op.
cit. p.40.
|
F. William Engdahl is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl |
Copyright
© F. William Engdahl, Global Research, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment