The Silk Roads, Past and Future

The world seems to be turning at a frantic pace. One minute, all eyes are on Syria and the U.S. launch of 59 Tomahawk missiles against the Shayrat air base near Homs; the next, it is all atwitter over American use of the giant GBU-43/B large yield bomb – better known as the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) or colloquially as the Mother of All Bombs – in eastern Afghanistan. Next up, it’s attempted missile launches in North Korea, the rumored deployment of a U.S. carrier strike group, and the regime in Pyongyang warning that thermonuclear war could break out “at any moment.”

Then it’s all about Turkey’s referendum, and the sweeping new powers that its passage gives President Erdogan, which look set to fundamentally change the country's relations with the European Union and the West. Just as things seem to be quieting down, a surprise general election is announced in London. It is all breathless stuff.

Amidst the high-stakes geopolitical poker, fears of the impending apocalypse and major power shifts, few would have been paying much attention to Stanford-le-Hope in Essex, an obscure town near the mouth of the Thames, whose main claim to fame is that it was the home of the writer Joseph Conrad. On April 10, as most were busy checking Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, a train pulled out of the station, heading for the Channel Tunnel. Its destination: Yiwu in eastern China.

The locomotive that set out was undertaking the return journey of a train that arrived in Essex in January, bringing electronic components, textiles, and garments; the 30 containers sent back were filled with whisky, soft drinks, and pharmaceuticals. The opening of a direct train link between China and the U.K. is more symbolic than it is a game-changer in the way the two countries trade with each other.

Nevertheless, it is another chapter in the rapid development of Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, which is seeing Chinese investment pouring into infrastructure projects across Asia and beyond. While much of the world seems to be in disarray, marked by discord, angry rhetoric, and both the threats and use of military action, OBOR brings an important undercurrent of collaboration and the deepening, rather than loosening, of ties between countries.

When President Xi Jinping first launched the One Belt, One Road initiative in Astana, Kazakhstan in 2013, he noted that the peoples living across the spine of Asia had been able to coexist, cooperate, and flourish despite “differences in race, belief, and cultural background.” It was a “foreign policy priority,” he went on, “for China to develop friendly cooperative relations with the Central Asian countries.”

The motivations and objectives behind the launch of OBOR and its development over the last three and a half years are complex, although three primary factors lie behind the idea and its unfolding.

First, with significant financial firepower at its disposal, China is looking to the future to assess and consider what it needs for its ongoing economic development. Inevitably, considerable attention has therefore been paid to energy, minerals, and other resources to secure supply and delivery through concessions and the construction of pipelines. Also high on the agenda are infrastructure projects that are either beneficial to Chinese economic growth or its geopolitical ambitions – or both. The most obvious example is the deep water port in Gwadar, Pakistan, which eases anxiety about territorial issues in the South China Sea and also over the Straits of Malacca. The Straits of Malacca are viewed by the Chinese military, in particular, in much the same way Russia views the Bosporus: a natural strangulation point and an Achilles’ heel. Gwadar’s location not only offers an alternative route for Chinese goods to reach markets in the Middle East and Europe, but also cuts the journey time and transportation costs too.

The second motivation lies in the growing recognition that China’s prospects will be improved by the development of prosperous neighbors. Many of China’s neighbors have large populations and long-term potential of their own that may be more quickly unlocked with infrastructure investment, such as in transportation links, upgrades of energy supplies, and improvements to other big-ticket items that are expensive to pull off without major support from a friendly source. China not only offers the fiscal ability and willingness to invest in major projects, but also has considerable technical expertise as a result of the economic transformation the country itself has gone through in the last three decades or so.

And third, underpinning OBOR is the realization that the world is changing, offering China a unique opportunity to step into a leadership role. There is a strong sense in Beijing, as there is in many other countries in Asia, that we are living in the Asian century.

If the 21st century is indeed the Asian century, then it is in some ways a return to the past: Europe’s rise from around 1500 was an anomaly and an exception. The global center of gravity once rested along the bridge between east and west; the connections that linked the ocean coasts of China and Southeast Asia by land and by sea to the Indian subcontinent, the Gulf, Africa, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and Europe were the veins and arteries that pumped goods but also languages, ideas, faiths, violence, and disease from one side of the world to another.

This is one reason why the leadership in China is intensely interested in the past. Understanding how the world used to look and function provides an important imprimatur for current policy by giving it a stamp not so much of authenticity but of logic and coherence.

In that, there is an obvious overlap between OBOR and the Silk Roads of the past. For many, the Silk Roads conjure up caravans of camels crossing the desert, transporting luxury items (chiefly silk) from China to the West. The term was always a clumsy one, as the geographer who coined it in the 19th century recognized. Ferdinand von Richthofen, who came up with the word “Seidenstraßen” to describe the web of networks that meshed Asia together, could equally have called it the spice roads; or the ceramics roads; or the roads of religion. Von Richthofen was also keen to avoid giving the impression that the networks were about long-distance trade: there was no single Silk Road, no highway from China to the west. Rather the term was intended to describe multiple connections and to allow the emphasis on local exchange as much as on long-distance trade, which was, of course, less intensive and focused only on high value items that were of interest to elites.

In fact, although OBOR has its own strengths and weaknesses as a label, it is striking to note that the initiative allows considerable flexibility when it comes to understanding which countries and regions fit within the umbrella of the wider initiative. In the recent weeks, new partnerships have been announced with Estonia, Belarus, and Serbia – not exactly the first names that come to mind when one thinks of the ancient Silk Roads. And in fact, just as the Silk Roads were multiple and useful mainly as a catch-all rather than a finite or fixed set of locations, so too are many variables within OBOR. The point of OBOR is not to create a belt or a road that is coherent, cohesive, and inter-linked; rather it’s an inclusive term for a series of places that do not need to fit within a fixed framework.

It is certainly true that OBOR is still in its early days. Some are cynical about what they see as a vision that promises more than it can and will deliver. And then of course there are voices – important, shrewd voices – in many of the countries closest to China that are worried about what sometimes seems to be a suffocating level of interest from Beijing. They are suspicious both of Chinese motives and the possible consequences of partnerships with Beijing that seem too one-sided for their liking.

The May OBOR summit in Beijing is a significant milestone in the evolution of the initiative, and will provide an important opportunity to iron out some of the concerns and problems – or, conversely, to aggravate them. Much depends on how well all sides are able to communicate, listen, and work together, and on the willingness to find ways through areas where mutual overlap is easier said than done.

That being said, the Silk Roads of the past really did work and function well. Goods really did find their way from one side of the world to the other, and not only from east to west. In the past, dynasties, regimes and states were keen to make sure roads were not only up to a high standard, but safe too. Stability, after all, is a prerequisite for growth and prosperity.

Therein lies the rub. Looking back over history, one cannot help but be struck by the ways that states lying between the Mediterranean and the Pacific really did work together in the past. There were, of course, many moments of upheaval, of rivalry, and of tension. But by and large, the rhythms along the Silk Roads were characterized by much less turbulence than marked the history of Europe.

There is a lot at stake in the coming months and years and it does not take much for best-laid plans to come under pressure or even be heavily revised. But OBOR has the potential to change the lives of billions of people. Reliable electricity, clean water, better transport, digital and communications links can have a dramatic impact. One only needs to see the change in China itself in recent decades, where the World Bank estimates some 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty. OBOR might just have an even more dramatic effect. It is worth following closely the summit in Beijing to see just what the next chapter has in store.