Infrastructure
Region ... One Belt / One Road

A NEW SILK ROAD ... China is investing billions in building pathways to Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

A NEW SILK ROAD ... Portfolio January 8, 2018 issue of the New Yorker
China is investing billions in building pathways to Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.



Photographs by Davide Monteleone

The Silk Road was established during the Han dynasty, beginning around 130 B.C. Markets and trading posts were strung along a loose skein of thoroughfares that ran from the Greco-Roman metropolis of Antioch, across the Syrian desert, through modern-day Iraq and Iran, to the former Chinese capital of Xian, streamlining the transport of livestock and grain, medicine and science. In 2013, President Xi Jinping announced that the Silk Road would be reborn as the Belt and Road Initiative, the most ambitious infrastructure project the world has ever known—and the most expensive. Its expected cost is more than a trillion dollars. When complete, the Belt and Road will connect, by China’s accounting, sixty-five per cent of the world’s population and thirty per cent of global G.D.P. So far, sixty-eight countries have signed on.

If bridges, pipelines, and railroads are the arteries of the modern world, then China is positioning itself as the beating heart. Since 2013, it has loaned about forty billion dollars a year to developing countries, according to David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some analysts worry that China is delivering the money without the World Bank’s required protections for the environment and for people uprooted by major infrastructure projects. Nevertheless, Lee Hsien Loong, the Prime Minister of Singapore, said that he and other leaders in the region embrace the benefits. “The Chinese are going to grow their influence,” he said, at a recent session of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And this is one coherent framework within which the Asian countries—Central Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian—can participate in this.”

Like most Chinese official-speak, the phrase “Belt and Road” obscures more than it clarifies: the “belt” will be composed of land routes running from China to Scandinavia, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Middle East; the “road” refers to shipping lanes connecting China to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In the fall, the photographer Davide Monteleone traced stretches of one of the land routes, travelling from Yiwu, in the southeastern province of Zhejiang, to Khorgos, home to one of the world’s largest dry ports, and to Aktau, in Kazakhstan, on the Caspian Sea. Few of the Chinese whom Monteleone encountered, from shopkeepers to restaurant owners to railwaymen, had much interest in the Belt and Road Initiative. “What concerns us is what puts money in our pocket tomorrow, not an abstraction three, five years from now,” a worker in Lanzhou New Area, in northwestern China, told Monteleone.

In Chongqing, an inland city of eight million, and “kilometre zero” of a new international railway, Monteleone rode a ferry on the Yangtze River, in order to capture a panorama of the city. “It’s dazzling, foggy, monstrous, compressed, and expansive,” he told me. Fifty-one towers have been built in the past three years. Looking at Monteleone’s photographs, I tried to find a familiar shape in the neon skyline of the city where I was born, but I recognized nothing, except the dark waters of the Yangtze, rippling in the foreground.

—Jiayang Fan
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Photographs by Davide Monteleone
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Chongqing, one of China’s fastest-growing cities, is the starting point of a seven-thousand-mile railway to Europe.


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The Lanzhou-Xinjiang railway required three hundred miles of windproof walls to shield it from gales in the Gobi Desert.


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The trade market in Yiwu, in eastern China, covers two square miles and contains more than seventy-five thousand mini-showrooms. Freight trains now carry goods from Yiwu across Central Asia to Tehran, Prague, Madrid, and London.


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An aerial view of the train station in Chongqing, in southwest China. It takes freight about two weeks to travel by rail from Chongqing to Duisburg, Germany—half the time it takes by sea.


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Lanzhou New Area was developed as part of China’s “Go West” initiative, an effort to bring some of the prosperity of the country’s eastern seaboard to its more impoverished inland regions.


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Ten years ago, Su Xiaolan moved to Turpan, China, an important trading post along the ancient Silk Road.


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Workers harvest cotton in Turkestan, in southern Kazakhstan. The city was an important stop for the ancient caravan trade, and its location puts it at the heart of the planned network of roads and rails connecting China to the West.


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Turpan sits in a fertile basin surrounded by desert in Xinjiang Province, in the northwest of the country. Summer temperatures in the nearby Flaming Mountains can reach a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit.


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A view from the window of a passenger train travelling between Aralsk and Aktau, in Kazakhstan.


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Rustem Imambekov sits in the locomotive of a train travelling to the city of Khorgos, which straddles the border between China and Kazakhstan. Khorgos aims to serve as a gateway for Chinese goods heading west.


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Workers outside Turpan, China, are constructing routes vital to the Belt and Road Initiative.


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Each day, around four thousand visitors from Kazakhstan and ten thousand from China enter a free-trade zone in Khorgos, hoping to buy duty-free goods.


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Thousands of people have moved to the once empty expanse of sand around Khorgos, Kazakhstan, to build a new trade hub.


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China hopes that by 2030 Lanzhou New Area will have a million full-time residents and an annual G.D.P. of forty-one billion dollars. But thus far relatively few pioneers have come to the development, and parts of the city still feel like a ghost town.


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China bulldozed mountains and razed villages to build the glittering skyscrapers of Lanzhou New Area, a city that has recently sprung up in western China. It features replicas of the Great Sphinx and the Parthenon, as well as a dinosaur-themed water park.


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For the past three months, Ma Wei, twenty-five, has been working in a noodle shop in Lanzhou New Area. The restaurant makes three hundred bowls of hand-pulled noodles every day, mostly for laborers at a nearby construction site.


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The Western Europe–western China expressway will run from the Baltic Sea in Russia to the Yellow Sea in China.


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An aerial view of the coastline of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan. In the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet government drained the surrounding rivers to irrigate cotton fields, and the sea shrank to a tenth of its previous size. Fish are just beginning to repopulate the sea.


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A train carrying Chinese goods leaves the dry port in Khorgos, heading west. The rail gauges in the former Soviet states are different from those in China, so freight has to be transferred between trains before it can continue on toward Europe.