Central Asia, between China and Europe, is bustling
The train called Yuxinou, hauling cargo between Germany and Chongqin, seen from the Almaty-Khorgos superhighway. Photo: Pepe Escobar / Asia Times
We are cruising on a pristine, 380 km-long four-lane superhighway from Almaty to Khorgos – finished in 2016 for $1.25 billion, 85% of the cost covered by a World Bank loan. And then, suddenly, riding parallel to us, there’s the real superstar of New Silk Road connectivity.
Meet Yuxinou, the container cargo train plying back and forth along the 11,000 km-long railway corridor connecting Chongqin in Sichuan province via Xinjiang and Kazakhstan to Russia, Belarus, Poland and finally Duisburg in the Ruhr valley. And all that in a mere 13 days.
Along the way, the Yuxinou stops in, among other places, Almaty, Bishkek, Tashkent, Tehran, Istanbul, Moscow and Rotterdam: a who’s who of Eurasian cities. It carries laptops, BMWs, spare parts, clothes, machinery, international post packages, chemical products, medicine and medical instruments – all manner of goods, made in China and made in Europe. And all that for only 20% of air freight cost.
This operation platform is called Yuxinou (Chongqing) Logistics Co., Ltd., a joint venture among the railways of China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Germany and the Chongqin municipal government, which is quite proud of its “seamless integration of multinational railway logistics” – complete with a fast custom clearance procedure called “single declaration and inspection on entire journey.”
The key Yuxinou crossroads is the intersection between Alashankou, on the Chinese side of the Kasakh border, and Khorgos, a special economic zone in Kazakhstan. The whole project may be in its infancy. After all, the Belt and Road Initiative is still, according to Beijing’s detailed timetable, in the planning stage.
So Khorgos may still be far from metastasizing into the new Dubai, as the hype claimed a few years ago. But watching Khorgos in action is a fascinating experience, unparalleled in its usefulness for gauging Belt & Road’s potential. As much as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the northern part of which I traveled a year ago, this is one of the jewels in Belt & Road’s crown.
Hitting the malls
There are actually three places to take care of border-crossing buisness at Khorgos. I arrived, via the superhighway, at the exclusive crossing for container trucks. Then I visited the border crossing used by Kazakhs and Central Asians from everywhere, leading to a collection of duty-free mega shopping malls officially called the International Center for Boundary Cooperation (ICBC). Then there’s the train station in Altynkol, where Yoxinou stops as do the Urumqi-Almaty cargo/passenger trains. The actual SEZ – many buildings still under construction – is in the periphery of Khorgos.
The ICBC – 5.3 square kilometers housing five multi-story shopping malls with over 2,000 shops – is a sort of neutral no man’s land. If you’re Kazakh or Chinese, no visa is needed. But people from all over Central Asia also come – by bus, eager to take advantage of unlimited Made in China bargains.
The procedure is quite straightforward. Customers arrive usually in the early morning at a huge bus parking lot. They walk a short distance toward the very modern Kazakh customs building (on the day I visited, because of the bitter cold, it was virtually empty). Then they take a shuttle bus to the Chinese border, cross it with little or no bureaucracy (although the Central Asians, other than Kazakhs, do need visas), and hit the malls.
They come back at the end of the day fully loaded – excellent business for an army of packagers and porters. Then they board their buses returning to all points Kazakhstan and other “stans”. On busy days, especially in summer, there may be as many as 8,000 shoppers hitting the ICBC.
China’s top connectivity access to Central Asia and West Asia markets, and farther on down the road to Europe, is via Kazakhstan, which counts China as its second-largest trading partner. At the same time, it’s essential to consider that Khorgos is smack on the Xinjiang border, which implies maximum Chinese security alert.
The Yuxinou at Altynkol station, in Khorgos. Photo: Pepe Escobar
The ADB also provided the financing for an alternative route from Bishkek to Osh, along with an $850 million loan from the EXIM Bank. This road is quite something, cutting through Kyrgyz mountains and passes and eliminating at least 220 km of travel in comparison with the ancient road. China Road and Bridge Cooperation was in charge of the construction, including a 3.3 km-long tunnel.
But it’s still a tricky road; on the last mountain pass before the final dash towards Bishkek, my driver Alex and I spent hours negotiating a cornucopia of lorries gone sideways in the snow and a myriad of clueless drivers stuck without tire chains.
China & the ‘stans
The other China-Kyrgyz border crossing is at the Irkeshtam pass, It used to be the main southern branch of the ancient Silk Road, coming straight from Kashgar. The road was resurfaced in 2013, adding to a connectivity integration net linking Kyrgyzstan, Xinjiang and the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan. I crossed a steady convoy of Chinese container trucks coming from Irkeshtam.
There’s only one China-Tajikistan border crossing, at the top of the Kulma pass, 4,363 meters high. The actual Chinese border is 14 km away from the Tajik border, very close to the Karakoram Highway: another instance of close connectivity. This road was opened in 2004 and also follows the ancient Silk Road.
The whole road between the Kulma pass and the Tajik capital Dushanbe, which includes the legendary Pamir Highway (the subject of an upcoming two-part special), is still a (slow) work in progress. It’s funded by a $254 million loan from China’s EXIM Bank with work by China Road and Bridge Cooperation.
Just outside Dushanbe, as I was leaving for the Pamir Highway, I saw a multi-level road intersection built with a loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and another from the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank.
What I saw was in fact history in the making; this was the AIIB’s first-ever development loan. There will be many others, as the connectivity between China and its neighboring ‘stans hits overdrive.
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/09/14/haaretz-israel-is-giving-china-the-keys-to-its-largest-port-and-the-u-s-navy-may-abandon-israel/
Haaretz: Israel Is Giving China the Keys to Its Largest Port – and the U.S. Navy May Abandon Israel
So let’s guess this right, China is spending $250M on building the stan’s and putting in new roads? Right
But in the meantime China is building the largest deep water port in Israel to be the shipping of Europe/Mena – aka “Greater Israel”, and China is paying over $2 BILLION USD, that’s 10x
China today is Israel’s second-largest trading partner after the U.S., responsible for $11.5 billion in annual transactions, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Israel’s relation only second to USA, but USA is going to collapse in economic output next year, then Israel will be China’s #1 trading partner.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-12/the-u-s-is-pressuring-israel-to-rethink-investment-from-china
Another great thing, is that China has promised Israel to protect its Nuclear Submarine Base at the new ports. So think about this, essentially Israel is a PRIME Partner in SCO.
China’s #1 trading partner will be Israel?? What is Israel’s gdp? This can’t be right.
The Bloomberg article is right there the link is posted, rather than disagree, why not read the sources?
Why do people have all these preconceived notions that aren’t true?
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Like showing mutilated body’s of Palestinian children who died of white-phosphorous, show them to an Israeli, first words out of their mouth is “This can’t be right, Israel is a nation of peace”.
Let’s see, our normal commenter narrative here,
1.) Israel is not the boss of China. Right? Yet China has pledged to protect all of Israel’s port’s and their fleet of nuclear submarines, in other words Israel is the “DOG with Teeth” for China in the Med.
2.) Israel is a TINY country who just gets penny’s from AIIB(CHINA). Fact is Israel is the biggest recipient of Chinese Cash, both ways.
3.) The USA is dying, therefore the HEGEMON is GONE. Not true, Israel(AIPAC) destroyed the USA, and now Israel is the HEGEMON, and “Greater Israel” is coming to you soon.
why not read the sources?
The source says:
China today is Israel’s second-largest trading partner after the U.S.
This isn’t the same as saying that Israel today is China’s second-largest trading partner after the US.
China MAY be Israel’s largest trading partner. Not vice versa.
Real outcome here?
The USA will deploy via Shell Oil to develop the oil fields off shore of Vietnam, e.g. USA will spend the money to develop. Then USA will default by 2022, and the USA people will get stuck with the debt.
This is a win-win for Israel-China.
Israel is now AIIB, and Israel is also SCO, you don’t sign an agreement having your nuclear fleet body-guard in the MED defending Israel by China, and not call this an SCO member, unless your a fool living in an occupied ANZ colony.
The other thing I speculate is that like Ahdod, Israel china will cooperate to build the largest deep sea port in east-asia, and the argument is “this is ok, because Israel is a friend of the USA”, so then Israel will have the largest deep-sea port in Mena/Africa ( ASIA-MINOR), and will have the largest deep-sea port on the asian-east coast.
Before 2025 USA completely bankrupts itself, and China-Israel via the ‘reset’ rule the world
What we see in Pepe’s report is the future. Belts and Roads is about connectivity and development (for example, raising the poor in Central Asia, Xinjiang, and along nodes of highways and rail systems.)
It is not driven simply by the Chinese. Funding, as he points out, for these infrastructure projects comes from World Bank (US dominated), Asia Development Bank (Japan dominated), and then various funds from China, EXIM (export-import bank), Chinese SEOs and AIIB (Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank).
Capitalists understand that Eurasia is the most favorable growth opportunity on Earth. Geopolitics aside, profits will drive this growth. And the cost-savings of what will result from BRI is undeniable. With a built in market population of 4.5 Billion, this is like 3x China’s domestic market. The bullseye is enormous, though at a very, very early stage of emerging development.
This is no longer a visionary dream. It is a shared mission to end poverty and create a developing market from the Asia-Pacific to the European Atlantic shores.
End poverty? You must be joking. 20% of the UK population live in abject poverty, old age pensioners receive the lowest income in Europe. There are umpteen greedy selfish billionaires in the UK, many of whom if they were living in their home countries like Russia, India etc would be in prison. Workers here have no rights and work on 24 hour contracts with no paid sickness. This is one of the largest economies in the world (7th or 8th).
(Insult removed by the moderator.)
Move the UK to Eurasia and you will have a chance to develop.
Location, location, location.
BINGO
Go travel in the USA urban city’s, you will see men 20-30 drugged out of their minds, living on the sidewalks and streets covered in feces, no where on earth do you see this, I can only imagine not in the UK, cuz its too cold and wet,
Just study the deagel report, the USA gross income will drop to the same as any and every 3rd world country and so will the UK by 2025, this has all been planned for years, +60 years to be exact.
http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx
Deagel report carefully lay’s out the GDP personal income for every country, today and 2025 you can carefully note that USA & UK incomes become comparable to any and all 3rd world shitholes.
It’s almost like the prime comenters here are hell bent on the pre-proposition that the ‘hegemon’ is dead, and that central asia ( “Greater Israel” ) will prosper and bring good-luck, peace and prosperity to all, just like they have done in Palestine, where everybody has a chicken in his pot, and happy beautiful children just like Ireland.
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UK is on the same same ‘austerity plan’ as USA, by 2022 Social Security cut, medicare cut, only the rich&old live, only the young that migrates out of UK-USA live, and find work to eat
Don’t need to build trump’s wall around UK, as its island property’s do the same, but trump’s wall around the USA, is to keep the remainders that live from escaping, as 10’s of millions of tax cows will be needed were robots can’t operate.
I find you are rather imaginative, satan will probably prevent your dreams from coming true, he is very powerful and doesn’t take to his depopulation lightly. He will resist, he will deny your claims, he will out live you, out fox you, out con you.
I doubt you have a snowballs chance in hell of stopping him like that.
Nothing to do with ‘satan’ that is an abstraction like Unicorn’s, or Trumps 4D chess. When people have to throw an intangible on the table to prove their point its a sad day in “Greater Israel”
The reality of Rockefeller and his planning going back to the 1910’s is very real.
All has come to pass.
Read Carrol Quigley real all his books ( Chief Historian for CIA ), he carefully documents how Rhodes, Rockefeller, Bush, Ford, Rockefeller took over the world and created their NWO
Depopulation or culling has been ongoing and never ending and they always mix it up,
While in early china colonialism it was opium-wars, later it was outright murder under Mao ( Rockefeller )
In the USA its drugs like early ‘East India Company’, flood a country with cheap drugs and the let them OD, and kill each other, the other new culling in USA is to make health-care so affordable that people just die when they get the flu
The ANZ documents its plans, but most fail to study them, this has NOT a damn thing to do with ‘satan’ a non-existent ghost. Rockefeller, & CIA are very real mortals.
satans greatest trick was convincing people he didn’t exist, he does. And i’m not saying those offenders aren’t a big problem, just not as overwhelming a force as you describe.
As for your current depopulation formula, is this how we reached over 7 billion inhabitants on Earth, b/c they are being oped or by obtaining low cost health care? I dont see any countrys population growing smaller each day. We have reached the end of relevant people, but the population keeps growing and threatens to continue to do so.
‘Relevant’ people, huh?
poverty cannot be ended by infrastructure projects loaded down with capitalist banking inflationary and extractive interest charges all along the way..and credit for people loaded the same way with usurious interest charges to make ends meet and whatever investment purpose they may have in mind.
only big business will be properly financed leaving small people out in the cold with no option but to work for big business..and lean how to manage credit to make ends meet as salaries wont be calculated to do the trick. so in time the BRI is shaping up to be the same old same old all over again
that being the case the future is clear: poverty for the people right across the BRI supporting pockets of vast minority wealth. and especially where it is warm enough colonies of poverty replete with ‘Bag Ladies’..thousands of people going to the bathroom on the streets which would be good for the forests those regions will likely return in in time…fed by lots of good human manure
No offence, but I wonder if raising people up from poverty is another form of creating indentured servants? The bigger the pool to steal from, the less likely anyone will notice. How does one define poverty? Living on the street? Asking the gov’t for food? Begging at the rich mans door? I remember once watching a doc, a French adventurer in India. It was pouring rain, he and his cameraman were soaked. They approched a guy sitting inside a cardboard box at the edge of the Ghanges River. The conversation boiled down to the French guy asking about how sad it must be having nothing and living in a box. The guy in the box pointed to another fellow not far away, the other guy was sitting in the pouring rain. He turned to the camera and said “see that guy over there, he has no box.” Life is what one makes of it, as long as other humans are not diliberaltly interfering in your life, who or what defines poverty? It’s a little more complicated than just raising people from poverty but hopefully I live long enough to see the ‘experiment play out’ although I feel as long as the hegemon exists in the form of threat, the longer it will take to finish the project.
Raising people out of poverty means people have to learn about credit if they choose to use it as part of a middle class. Usually poor who climb out of poverty learn hard lessons quicker than those born into middle class. Look at all the college-educated buried in student loans.
Why dwell on the negatives that might or might not occur?
The BRI impact will be transformative and may in the end be the most successful ameliorate to quench the fire of terrorism in Islamic regions. People who see a future, have a job, can own a home, access quality medical care and create and innovate and build things have little interest in martyrdom for some 7th Century ideology.
Let’s see your argument here.
1.) Sell DEBT to the Muslims
2.) That the only way to the middle-class is DEBT
3.) That USURY is your friend.
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The USA students who took on debt were idiots. Enough Said.
Ton’s of people get rich all over the world, without seeking debt, hell look at Jack Ma, richest guy in CHINA, who created TAOBAO(BABA), he started his business with NO DEBT. He didn’t have a choice, nobody would loan him money, or give him a job because of his looks. The world is full of story’s like this.
This idea that DEBT is good is insane, for most people it only leads to POVERTY.
Very few humans have the discipline to pay off their loans, and this is why USURY is not permitted in classical muslim culture/history, because the parasites know all too well that most people are weak.
Rising people out of poverty means getting them into DEBT (SLAVERY) USURY
It means USA style education loans
It means USA style health-care
It means slavery, poverty, and USA lifestyle; Drugged out of your mind, sleep in feces, but you get to cut off your penis and make your self into a ‘woman’.
There fixed it. USA Model of Freedom and Prosperity. The freedom to cut off body parts. The freedom to get into debt. The freedom to have GOV monitor you 24/7/365. USA is a prison, and that model is intended for the world.
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The simple fact is the “CHINA” paid road “BIG Road from China to Israel”, needs people to maintain the road, and haul the cargo-cult crap to the people who want to consume.
Like FORD who with Rockefeller created our current NWO, like he said “I need my people who work for me to make just enough to buy my products”.
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Poverty, well in Buddhism we define poverty as not having
1.) Shelter
2.) food
3.) health-care ( medicine & talent to care for the sick )
4.) family ( every man should have a wife & child for happiness )
5.) healthy responsible work that contributes to your people ( work that doesn’t involve crime – stealing from the poor )
If your lacking in these 4, then your are said to be in a state of poverty.
Except that mule is going to pay a high price at the end of the day.
what am I missing?
after centuries of zionist financial activists or international bankers on planet earth wreaking havoc on the human population particularly over the last century just completed..why are they integral to supposedly Chinese driven driven global development activities under the acronym BRI?
doesn’t such zionist involvement ensure the ultimate bleeding to death of such development. no sustained development of the people in any way the produces citizens not no-brained consumer automatons, capable only of call and response to consumer catch phrases, who have been taught how to use credit to get out of poverty?
interesting
Well i’m sure its plenty, no offensive but I couldnt make heads nor tails out of your statement to intellectually respond, perhaps you could elaborate, or isolate further what you are missing.
Ben, its been flipped, in days of old we shuned debt, were taught to, now we yern for credit………..just another inverse form of debt through usury. “Credit out of poverty,” you’ve seen the ads, yes,………..spend, spend, spend………and you get money back……….and that’s how you get out of poverty…………..and I’m joking, black humor all day long.
Cheers, M
The days of walking to Tashkurgan by pursueing the Vakhan corridor and manuvering our miscievous yak-oxen seem so gone days — departed never to–oo re-etern.
Heavy concentration of PROGRESSFOREVERniki commenters on this post. Have you guys never heard of ‘The Limits To Growth’ and ‘TLTG – The Thirty-Year Update’? Do you imagine the rising Russia/China duopoly somehow isn’t subject to the global eco-geo-physical crunch-down processes described there? Of course they are. There’s nowhere on Earth that’s exempt. But I guess denialism, anaesthetised by eegabeeva techno-narcissism (Jim Kunstler’s pungent coinage), is a more comfortable state of delusion in which to hide.
When you get re-born later this century, go and take a look in 2100 to see whether BRI is still flying high; or going down under The Limits, just like everywhere else. (Hint: on the TLTG projections, the serious, big crunch-downs are due to start really laying about the Earth in the middle decades of this century.)
It isn’t possible for economies to growforever on a finite planet. That was always a childishly-silly, innumerate, wilful delusion of standard-issue ‘economists’. “…man’s greatest shortcoming may be his inability to understand the exponential function.” – Albert Bartlett
And no, we won’t be running an interplanetary, expansionist empire by then, “mining the asteroids”, and other such fantasies, just as we weren’t in 2000, despite all the techie-eegabeeva prophecies of the 20th Century. The Limits will put down that impossible daydream. Indeed, they have already begun doing so, clearly enough for those who actually want to look; BRI-delusion-fever notwithstanding.
There’s a mild, pleasant schadenfreude to be had from watching the vile Anglozionist empire implode itself, whilst the clearly more admirable polities of Russia and China rise and shine so spectacularly. But don’t let that run away with your sober judgement: this can’t last.
My speculations wont be posted up apparently..too wild and unfounded for the Saker?
this by Larchmonter 445 I take some exception to in a comparative sense:
“The BRI impact will be transformative and may in the end be the most successful ameliorate to quench the fire of terrorism in Islamic regions. People who see a future, have a job, can own a home, access quality medical care and create and innovate and build things have little interest in martyrdom for some 7th Century ideology.”
this is less worse than Judaism which Ron Unz established as the most murderous creed among all that is and has been human, in all of human history. and Islam is the direct descendant of its line progenitor Judaism. and Judaism/Jews can easily be read as a major source of, or indeed the source of what threatens the very existence of humanity currently..not Islam