The New
Crossroads of Empire
Railroads
build empires. Beijing is building a new
one. China, now a world-class producer of high-speed rail technology, is in the
middle of a transportation boom unprecedented in history. 5,800 miles of domestic
high-speed rail lines have been built since 2008, at a cost of $640 billion. Three months ago, just in time for the
Chinese New Year, the Ministry of Railways celebrated the opening of their
longest route yet, running 1,200 miles between Beijing and Guangzhou, the
historic trading center on China’s southeast coast. In the annual spectacle of movement that was
the most recent Chinese New Year—the largest mass-migration on the planet—passengers
celebrated the upcoming year of the snake by slithering along the world’s
longest high-speed railway at speeds of over 200 miles per hour.[1] The overland journey from Beijing to
Guangzhou, the great route from the mountains to the heartland, now takes only
eight hours.
But
equally as important is Beijing’s use of high-speed rail as a tool of foreign
policy, a part of its twenty-year strategy to Go West and build connections across the Eurasian continent. In last month’s edition of Z, I touched on the recent growth in
relations between China and Turkey, where Chinese companies are in the process
of building a railroad across entirety of Turkey’s great east-west breadth,
connecting Asia to Europe at 200 mph.
But where Turkey is the future, the start of Beijing’s empire to the
west has already been built.
The
idea of a railroad has always been the dream for connecting global markets
going on two centuries now. The
Trans-Siberian railway, the original Eurasian land bridge from Moscow to the
Sea of Japan, was a two-decade project completed by the Russian Tsars in
1916. In the U.S., railroads settled the
west, and when they reached the Pacific, the U.S. moved across the ocean and
became an imperial power. But now the
American century is over, and China is taking her turn at the game. Working with Deutsche Bahn, the German
national railway company and largest rail company in the world, as well as RZD,
a subsidiary of Russian railways, Beijing has for four years now been operating
the “Second Eurasian Land Bridge,” as author
F. William Engdahl calls it, direct freight rail service from Germany to China.[2]
In
October 2008, Norbert Bensel, a top board manager at DB Schenker, the logistics
subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn that manages the service, aptly described the new
process of industry that was taking place.
“The introduction of
the regular timetable and fixed departure times,” he stated, will create “a new link in our global network” and “a new level of quality in the
trans-continental exchange of goods.”[3] Heady words, and ones that speak of a great
imaginary market coming to life.
Bensel was speaking at
the commercial launch of what was then called the Trans-Eurasia expressway, a
twice a week, 20 day freight shipping line from Beijing to the German ports of
Hamburg, Duisburg, and Nuremburg.
Describing itself as the first regular rail transportation service
between Europe and Asia, the line runs from Germany through Poland and Belarus
to Russia. From there, it can either go
across the continent on the Trans-Siberian to Manzhouli, on China’s Northeast
border, or south through Kazakhstan to Western China.
 |
| Source: The Transport Politic, March 2010. |
By October 2011, DB
Schenker had the service running five days a week, and a number of major
companies had bought into the route. Auto manufacturers like BMW, Audi, and
Volkswagen now ship parts overland from their German manufacturing plants to
their Chinese assembly plants, and computer companies like HP and Acer ship
from their Chinese factories to the European market. Since 2011, HP has shipped over four million
notebook computers from Chongqing to Germany.[4]
Beijing is also
developing the factory economy in Western China. Whereas the Southeast coast had been the
major growth market for Chinese factory development in the past, industry is
now moving inland and to the west. Chongqing, in Sichuan province, has become a
factory boomtown. During World War II,
Chiang Kai-Shek’s government fled to Chongqing, so remote that the Japanese
couldn’t get there. And now, with a
municipal population over 13 million, it is “the world’s biggest city” as Time Magazine
put it in 2005.[5] Two years ago, Beijing created two new
Special Economic Zones (SEZs), the free-market economic-framework that has
fueled the factory growth along the coast.
But the new SEZs are to be far from the coast, in fact as far from the
coast as possible, located in Kashgar on the far western border of Xinjiang. Beijing plans to invest billions of dollars
into the area and provide regulatory and tax breaks as well, aiming to attract
domestic and international investment.[6] Frederick Jackson Turner is not in China, and
for the first time since Xinjiang was conquered in the late 18th
century it is being industrially developed as a global trading hub.
**********
The other half of Beijing’s Go West strategy is creating overland
energy corridors, namely oil and gas pipelines from Iran and the Caspian region. The
developments started in 1997, when Kazakhstan and China agreed to a “project of
the century,” with China promising to invest nearly $11 billion in Kazakhstan’s
oil infrastructure and pipelines. Progress, however, was slow, and
it took until 2003 for China to begin making waves in Kazakh oil, when the
Chinese National Petroleum Company bought 100% of the shares in the Northern
Buzachi fields from a Chevron-Saudi consortium. Since then, Beijing
has worked steadily to acquire more production companies in the field, working
with Kazakh state owned companies like KazMunaiGaz. According to the
estimates of Kazakh government researcher Konstantin Syroezhkin, by 2012:
China’s share in oil
production in Kazakhstan amounts to around 25-27% and in gas production
to13-15%. Of course, these figures are far from those with which the
Kazakhstani opposition and some deputies “frighten” the Kazakhstanis (40%), but
they are quite considerable, particularly if we keep in mind the areas Chinese
companies are operating in the country and the fact that the oil and gas sector
is the basis of Kazakhstan’s economy and the main contributor of revenue to the
budget.[7]
In
order to transport the oil to China, a Western Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline
was also agreed to in 2003. Within a year construction on the first phase had
begun, and by 2005 a pipeline to the Kazakh-Chinese border was complete, at a
cost of over $800 million. In July 2006,
a mark of great geopolitical significance was reached, as an oil refinery in
the city of Dushanzi, located hallway between the border and Xinjiang’s capital
of Urumqi, received China’s first-ever overland imports of oil.[8] Construction
began on the second phase of the Kazakh pipeline in 2009, and again within 2
years the project was complete. Throughput of the overall pipeline
network, which started at 10 million tons of crude oil per year, was expected
to reach 20 million tons in 2012 and 50 million tons in 2020.[9]
A
second pipeline, for transporting natural gas, has also been constructed, running
from fields in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to Khorgos, at the southern end of
the Kazakh-Chinese border. The first stage of this pipeline, built
over two years and finished in 2009, runs from the Uzbek-Kazakh border through
Shykment to Khorgos. With a throughput capacity of 40 billion cubic meters
(bcm) of gas, the pipeline covered a distance of 1,333 km, and came at a cost
of $7.5 billion.[10] A
second phase within Kazakhstan has been planned as well, running from the
Caspian Sea to Shykment.
Uzbekistan
and Turkmenistan have also worked closely with the Chinese on energy deals. The
China-Uzbekistan relationship was solidified in 2005, when the Uzbek President visited
Beijing and signed agreements for the Chinese government to invest in Uzbek
energy resources. By 2010, the Uzbek section of the Central
Asia-China gas pipeline was complete, and agreements had been signed to export
10 bcm per year of Uzbek gas to China, with plans to increase this by 25
bcm. This figure, however, is a drop in the oil drum compared to
imports from Turkmenistan. Beijing has
agreements with Turkmenistan to import upwards of 40 bcm of gas per year, and
at dirt-cheap prices, making China by far the largest investor in
Turkmenistan’s gas sector.
A
2009 meeting in the remote Turkmeni desert symbolized the new petroleum reality
in Central Asia, with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Uzbek President Islam Karimov
and Kazakh President Nursaltan Nazarbayev all convening with their Turkmeni
colleague to inaugurate the new gas pipeline.
“The whole world is watching us right now,” Hu stated.[11] And once can be sure that Washington was
watching when the President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov (for
real) visited Beijing in November 2011 and agreed to increase gas exports to
China by 25 bcm per year. Soon, the
total gas trade between the two states will be 65 bcm per year, half of China’s
total gas consumption.[12]
**********
While
China is building her industrial connection to the west, the U.S. has been
establishing its own attempt at a trans-continental transport network as well. Known as the Northern Distribution Network
(NDN) and operated by the Pentagon’s Transportation Command, it has been pieced
together since 2009 to supply troops, weapons, and supplies for the war effort
in Afghanistan.
One
main path starts in the Latvian port of Riga, on the Baltic Sea. From
there it travels by rail through Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to Termez,
on the Afghan border. Another path
starts in the Georgia’s Black Sea port of Poti and runs across the Caucasus to
Baku, on the Caspian Sea. It then goes
through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and meets up with the first path in Termez. Sounds like a log jam? It is.
The NDN is not an efficient method of transport—“to Afghanistan, on the
slow train,"—as CNN put it. As of November 2011, the rail trip from
the Riga to Afghanistan takes about 10 days. This seems to be a best-case
scenario however, as many reports have stated that it can take up to 35 days
for goods to cross the Uzbek-Afghan border, due to myriad problems related to
congestion and corruption. This touches on the larger problem of the
network, namely that it requires the consent of the corrupt and dictatorial
governments of the region.
Consider
the case of Uzbekistan, the most populous state in Central Asia and one ruled
with an iron fist by Islam Karimov since 1989. Karimov is of the Saddam
Hussein mold of dictator, a former Soviet secret policeman obsessed with power
and violence, famous for boiling prisoners alive. And like Iraq,
Uzbekistan is flush with resources, namely gas, copper, uranium, and gold. After gaining independence from the Soviet
Union in 1992, Karimov played Washington's imperial expansion game, signing up
for NATO military training programs like the Partnership for Peace. Then, after 9/11, it took Uzbekistan barely
one month to agree to host a U.S. military base at Khanabad airport. Within a week of the base opening in October
2001, more than 60 planes had dropped off supplies and 1,200 soldiers were on
the ground, primarily light infantry troops from Fort Drum’s tenth mountain
division, the first U.S. soldiers to ever be deployed to former Soviet
territory.
Months
later, Kyrgyzstan followed suit, and allowed the U.S. military to use the Manas
International Airport, located on the outskirts of the capital city of Bishkek.
Within months, Air Force engineers had built a thirty-acre compound at
Manas, the equivalent of six city blocks, to house 3,000 personnel. Located 7,000 miles away from Central Command
headquarters in Tampa, Florida, Manas is less than 300 miles from the Chinese
border.
Here,
it is worth quoting at length from a remarkable article, “Footprints in Steppes
of Central Asia,” written from Bishkek by Vernon Loeb and published in the
February 9th, 2002 edition of the Washington Post:
In
a remote corner of Central Asia in a country that didn't even exist a
decade ago, the U.S. Air Force is building a base that within months will be home to 3,000 personnel and nearly
two dozen American and allied aircraft. While
the intensity of the war in Afghanistan has slowed, the base going up outside Bishkek, the capital
of Kyrgyzstan, tells a much different story. It embodies what senior U.S.
defense officials say is a major commitment to maintain not just air operations
over Afghanistan for the foreseeable future but also a robust military presence in the region well after the war.
Just
how long the United States plans to remain is anyone's guess. Senior military
officials say they have no plans for a permanent American presence.
But if the construction here at Manas International Airport is any indication,
the Pentagon, rather than searching for an exit strategy for Afghanistan, is
focusing on the opposite: establishing a foothold…
"America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have
dreamed of before," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the House
International Relations Committee on Wednesday…
All
told, more than 50,000 U.S. military personnel now live and work on ships and bases stretching from Turkey to Oman and
eastward to the Manas airport, 19 miles outside of Bishkek and 300 miles from
the Chinese border. "The imperial
perimeter is expanding into Central Asia," Thomas
Donnelly, deputy executive director of the Project for the New American
Century, wrote in a recent e-mail circulated among leading military analysts.
The
full article is an amazing read on the bellicose optimism of American policy
makers in the wake of September 11th. Central Asia had been conquered, the war in
Afghanistan would soon be over, and Iraq was next in line. But in a sign of the peril that expanding
your "imperial perimeter" brings, relations with Uzbekistan soon
turned sour. In the summer of 2005, after Karimov's security forces
massacred hundreds of protesters in the city of Andijon, U.S. and other international
officials began making calls for a judicial inquiry. Angered at this, and
distrustful of the U.S. due to the recent "color revolutions"
Washington had sponsored in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, Karimov kicked
the Pentagon out of Khanabad.
Now,
with the growing importance of the Northern Distribution Network, the U.S. has
been crawling back to Karimov in order for him to open up his borders for U.S.
military transit. In late 2011, Washington lifted the last of the
arms-sales restrictions placed on Uzbekistan following the Andijon incident.
More importantly, after an official visit to the Uzbek capital of
Tashkent in November, Army Lt. General James L Brooks stated that transferring leftover or
old U.S. military equipment from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan was one of the key
points of discussion. "I think that there are ways that the excess
equipment could benefit both countries, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, with the
excess of US equipment from the war," he was quoted as saying.[13]
Although
it is ethically troublesome for the U.S. to kowtow to such an oppressive
government, it is simply a sign of the times.
Pentagon aid to NDN states, authorized in the yearly Defense
Authorization Act, has increased from $1.2 billion in 2008 to $1.6 billion in 2010 and $1.69
in 2011. Uzbekistan, as the hub of the NDN operations, receives the
lion share of these funds. In fact, in 2010 the U.S. added sweeping new
language to section 1233 of the annual Defense Authorization Bill, setting the
stage for untempered military aid to the region. Now, “key cooperating nations,” working in
support of the war effort would be given “specialized training”, “supplies”,
and “specialized equipment.” Moreover,
it was all to be a gift, provided on a “non-reimbursable basis.”[14] Trucks, spare parts, weapons, night-vision
goggles; it is all being provided by Washington (and London), easier to leave
behind than ship out. With the U.S. led
forces planning to retreat hightail out of Afghanistan after realizing that the
country cannot be occupied, the dictators and autocrats have the upper hand and
are demanding the world. The U.S. is
enabling region-wide corruption for the purpose of propping up a corrupt Karzai
government in Afghanistan.
 |
| Source: MoveOne Logistics |
Disregarding
the logistical and ethical problems, the entire effort is not a sustainable
plan, as it is a true fact that the U.S. will soon remove all its “combat”
soldiers from Afghanistan. What Washington
hopes to maintain is a Status of Forces Agreement and a small permanent base of
some 20,000 “non-combat” soldiers; whether the Afghans will allow this is a
different story. But regardless, why develop such an extensive military
supply network? For the U.S. State Department, the NDN is the first step in
creating what they term a "New Silk Road", with Afghanistan serving
as the heart of a Pentagon controlled Eurasian network. In November 2012, Dennise Mathieu, a former
Ambassador to Nigeria and top State Department advisor to Transportation
Command, laid the U.S. strategy out: “Eventually,
with continued cooperation, they will be able to go all the way from China into
Europe…You will have a whole new economic network, built upon the foundation of
this military logistics supply network.”[15]
Hilariously, the State
Department is also still pining for the famed TAPI pipeline, connecting
Turkmenistan to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Dreamt up in the 1990s, TAPI has approached
the territory of conspiratorial legend—the great pipeline behind the invasion
of Afghanistan—except for the fact that the State Department is still talking
about it. But as the war continues into
its 12th year, construction on the pipeline has still not
begun. And in the meantime, Turkmenistan
found its energy patron in China.
Highlighted here is the true difference between U.S. and Chinese foreign
policy. While China has embraced industrial
development, the U.S. has focused exclusively on the sword. Just read the above quote from Ambassador
Mathieu again. The Pentagon military network
will be the foundation of a new Eurasia?
It is laughable, but the same idea has driven U.S. policy around the
globe, from Columbia to Iraq to the Philippines.
**********
China’s
current policy of Going West, and expanding their economic influence into
western Eurasia—Central Asia, the Middle East, and eventually Western Europe—is
rooted in Beijing’s keen reading of the last 20 years of history. Economically, they watched the dissolution of
the Soviet Union, and the reality of Western-backed free-market “shock therapy”
being imposed on a nation of 150 million, and decided a different path was
needed. Beijing wants stability, not
shock. Militarily, they watched the U.S.
follow the Cheney plan of imperial expansion and privatization, fighting wars in
Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, all at a huge cost to the U.S. economic
balance sheet and public support. In
contrast, China’s military still does not have any overt foreign bases. In 2009, when a Chinese official suggested
that the People’s Liberation Army was thinking of building their very first
overseas military base, in the Red Sea area, the idea was quickly denied, and
no base was ever constructed.
Currently,
Beijing seems to be happy letting U.S. soldiers protect China’s foreign
investments, which more and more is the effective purpose of the American military. China is now the largest investor in the
Iraqi oil sector, as well as making the largest investment in the history of
Afghanistan, a $7 billion Copper Mine contract.
In Central Asia and the energy rich Caspian Basin, which U.S.
strategists have tried to control since the George H.W. Bush Administration,
China has built oil and gas pipelines to their Western province of Xinjiang. The arid mountains of Uzbekistan, where the
China-Central Asia gas pipeline intersects with NATO’s supply route for the
Afghanistan War, are the new crossroads of empire. While Washington strategists dream about
ending the war by turning the supply route into a Pentagon-designed “New Silk
Road” in the region, Beijing has built their own “New Silk Road.” As Zbigniew Brzezinski feared, the vassals
are now independent and the barbarians have come together, resulting in an
economic conquering of Eurasia.
Turkey
is the newest and perhaps largest key to this new political order. To put it
bluntly, if China can steal Ankara from under NATO's nose, they will have won
the geopolitical Great Game. The "Pan-Turkic world" dreamt up as a
NATO sword striking into China will have instead been flipped into a new silk
road for the benefit of a China dominated Asia. Herein lies the failure of U.S.
Post Cold War global strategy, what the Pentagon calls an attempt at "Full
Spectrum Dominance." After spending the last two decades pouring money
into militarizing Central Asia, the U.S. is now seeing their influence slip
away as China rushes in with industrial development. And now Turkey, a
NATO member since the beginning of the Cold War, could go the same way.
The
last the 40 years of U.S. foreign policy have been devoted to gaining hegemony
over the Middle East and Southwest Asia. U.S. leaders have made this an entirely
military project, fighting multiple wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan and
constructing hundreds upon hundreds of military bases and installations. But within a decade, China implemented an
economic strategy and trumped the U.S. attempt.
Political leaders across Eurasia are beginning to disregard the
longstanding U.S. policy of gunboat diplomacy—using arms sales and military
threats to control international economic and geopolitical policies. The guns are still there, but the resources
and industrial infrastructure is being developed and controlled by China. To go back to the beginning, here is the reasoning
behind the CFR's thesis that the U.S. needs a "new strategic
partnership" with Turkey.
Sitting in New York City and Washington, they see a Turkey that is
having it both ways, forging an independent path using both the American
military machine and the Chinese economic model. Now the question becomes
whether the CFR and its associated think-tank warriors will tolerate this
independence, or if they want Ankara exclusively to themselves. For it is not as if Turkey is spurning U.S.
military advances. In terms of NATO,
Syria, and Missile Defense, Turkey has been a willing partner in American war
making. However, it may be that this is
not enough. A battle of grand strategy
is taking place in the heartland of the world, and the U.S. plans seem to be
falling to pieces.
**********
Whether the Chinese people are benefitting from these
developments is a different question altogether, and one that cannot be fully examined
in this space. Corruption and scandals have
plagued the upper levels of the Chinese Communist Party as of late, and top
leaders have been exposed as amassing giant fortunes from grift. In 2011, Liu Zhijun, railroad minister for
eight years, was dramatically fired from his post, accused of netting $152
million in bribes. One wonders if
China’s high-speed railroad boom will be a repeat of the Gilded Age, the famous
phrase used in 1873 by Mark Twain to describe the veneer of conspicuous wealth
associated with the U.S. westward expansion.
However, perhaps there is also a Eugene Debs or Jane Addams or William
Jennings Bryan somewhere in China, someone willing to work for radical change
and reform in the face of moneyed industrialization. Will the Communist Party allow them to speak? With such vast geopolitical shifts occurring,
the moment is ripe for action on both sides of the equation. As fast as freight and oil crosses the
continent, people and ideas can move faster.
And while a move away from war and militarization in favor of industrialization
should be applauded, there is no joy in seeing one form of imperialism replaced
by another.
[1] “China Opens
Longest High-Speed Rail Line,” Keith Bradshar, New York Times, Dec. 26th, 2012.
[2] F.
William Engdahl, “China’s Land Bridge to Turkey Creates New Eurasian
Geopolitical Potentials,” April 28th, 2012. Available at: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net
[3] “Trans-Eurasia
Express to Launch next year,” Railway
Gazette, Oct. 6th, 2008.
[4] “The Silk
Railroad of China-Europe Trade,” Bloomberg
Business Week, Dec. 20th 2012.
[5] “China: the
worlds largest city,” Time Magazine,
April 18th, 2005.
[6] “Xinjiang to
set up two special economic zones in 2011,” Peoples
Daily, Feb. 14th, 2011.
[7] “Chinas presence in the energy sector of
Central Asia,” Konstantin Syroezhkin, Central Asia and the Caucasus (Sweden),
Jan. 2012.
[8] “Crude Oil Imports Reach PetroChina Dushanzi
Refinery via China-Kazakhstan Pipeline,” PetroChina Press
Release, 7/29/06.
[10] Ibid.
[11] “China extends influence into Central Asia with
Pipeline,” Reuters, Dec. 14th, 2009.
[13]
Dierdre Tynan, “Uzbekistan: U.S. Mulls giving military equipment to Tashkent,” Eurasianet.org, Dec. 15, 2011.
[14]
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, Sec. 1233. http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/pdfs/military_act_2009.pdf
[15]
“Afghanistan Supply Route Provides Economic Opportunity,” Nov. 28th,
2012, Defense.gov. http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=118653
No comments:
Post a Comment