China
China bets big on new global links
No tanks, no bullets, no boots on the ground, but a mix of money (a lot of money) and engineers. China and its companies are betting on geopolitical corridors to expand their international clout and business opportunities. Though it is grappling with a creeping economic slowdown, the government in Beijing seems to be keen to fund a string of new, innovative transport arteries around the world.
The first project under the spotlight is the overland corridor that should link up Kashgar, in China's western Xinjiang autonomous region, with the Pakistani port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea. In July, Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his Chinese counterpart, Li Keqiang, agreed to build the 2,000 kilometer road link that would pass through the troubled southwestern Pakistani province of Balochistan, the inaccessible Karakoram mountains and onwards to the Xinjiang, also an area of some unrest. The scheme, worth US$18 billion, provides for a parallel railway to be built later.
China has poured US$200 million into the construction of the currently underutilized Gwadar Port, which is being operated by Chinese state-owned China Overseas Ports Holding Co. If the Gwadar-Kashgar transport link were to materialize, Beijing could both cut the shipping time for its oil imports from African and Middle Eastern energy terminals and gain a trade hub for exports.
From a strategic perspective, China could exploit the new corridor to bypass the Malacca Strait, a bottleneck that the United States Navy could block in case of crisis, disrupting the most vital sea lane of communication for Chinese shipments to and from Africa and the Persian Gulf. It could also be an alternative to the oil and gas pipelines that Beijing is building from the coastal region of Rakhine in Myanmar to the landlocked Chinese province of Yunnan. The development of these infrastructure projects have sparked environmental protests in the country once known as Burma, notably in areas where ethnic armed militias demand more autonomy from the central government in Naypyidaw.