KHORGOS, Kazakhstan (NYTimes) — China’s largest shipping company has poured billions of dollars into buying seaports in Greece and other maritime nations around the world. But the location of its latest foreign investment has given a curious twist to the expanding ambitions of the China Ocean Shipping Co.: The nearest
KHORGOS, Kazakhstan (NYTimes) — China’s largest shipping company has poured billions of dollars into buying seaports in Greece and other maritime nations around the world. But the location of its latest foreign investment has given a curious twist to the expanding ambitions of the China Ocean Shipping Co.: The nearest ocean is more than 2,570 km away.
The state-owned Chinese shipping giant, known as COSCO, became the 49 per cent owner this past summer of a patch of frost-covered asphalt bisected by railway tracks and lined with warehouses in landlocked Kazakhstan. The barren wilderness close to the border with China stands near the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility, meaning that nowhere on the landmass of Europe and Asia is more distant from the sea.
But it is here, where huge, Chinese-made cranes load containers onto trains instead of ships, that China and Kazakhstan are embracing what they see as the new frontier of global commerce.
Forbidding as it is, the place is a central link in what President Xi Jinping of China trumpets as the «project of the century» — a US$1 trillion infrastructure programme known as «One Belt, One Road,» which aims to revive the ancient Silk Road and build up other trading routes between Asia and Europe to pump Chinese products to foreign markets.
The gamble is not only reshuffling global transport routes, but also shaking up Kazakh and global politics as China inserts itself deeper into a region that Russia considers squarely within its area of influence. Not least, it is testing the economic logic of China’s ability to carry out its grandest of ambitions.
Creating a transport hub — the Khorgos Gateway, a «dry port,» or terminal without water for handling cargo for trains rather than ships — in one of the world’s most remote places has involved an expensive exercise in social engineering.
NEW TOWN FROM SCRATCH
A new town, called Nurkent, has been built from scratch — with apartment blocks, a school, kindergarten and shops to serve the railway workers, and crane operators, customs officials and other staff needed to keep the dry port running. Free housing is provided. The town has only about 1,200 residents, but there are plans to expand it for more than 100,000.
Zhaslan Khamzin, the chief executive of the company operating the dry port with help from DP World of Dubai, acknowledged that the place seemed inhospitable but, implausibly describing it as an «oasis,» insisted, «This is the future.» The Chinese «are not fools,» he added. «Businessmen count their money. If they invest money here, they know that in five or 10 years they will get their money back with a profit.» Kazakhstan’s border area with China was a sealed military zone during the Cold War, when the armies of China and the Soviet Union clashed briefly in 1969 along their shared frontier just north of Khorgos.
The biggest and richest country in the part of Central Asia formerly ruled from Moscow, Kazakhstan has tried since independence in 1991 to stay on good terms with Russia but has also steadily eroded Moscow’s once overwhelmingly dominant position in the region by expanding ties with China.
The dry port is just the latest step in deeper ties. Completion of an oil pipeline between Kazakhstan and China in 2009 broke an export pipeline monopoly previously held by Transneft, Russia’s state-owned pipeline company.
It was Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, the country’s sole ruler since it broke from the imploding Soviet Union, who first proposed reviving old Silk Road trade routes.
