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The Maritime Dimension of “One
Belt, One Road” in Strategic Perspective
Remarks to a Center for Naval Analysis Workshop
with the Rajaratnam School of International Studies
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs
20 June 2016, Arlington, Virginia
“One belt, one
road” (OBOR) was a slogan before it became a concept in search of content. It is now evolving into many plans and
projects, some of them with huge implications.
It has become an operative policy framework that puts excess Chinese
savings and industrial capacity to work in China's national interest. OBOR is now a grand plan to reengineer
China’s strategic environment, project Chinese economic power, secure Chinese access
to energy and mineral supplies, and boost
economic growth in western China. OBOR
seeks to accomplish these objectives by fostering greater and faster
connectivity between China and Europe via intermediate points in Central, West,
and South Asia as well as Russia.
OBOR amounts to
a proposal to unite the Eurasian landmass[1]
economically under common rules and transport regulations. It envisages bilateral agreements with
sixty-five countries to reduce impediments to trade, the creation and endowment
of new financial institutions, and the execution of enormous infrastructure
projects. New roads, railroads,
pipelines, ports, airports, and inland telecommunications links are to boost
the efficiency of overland travel and economic transactions across
Eurasia. The vast space from the
Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Pacific to the Middle East and the Indian
Ocean is to be laced with industrial development corridors that draw on these
links to create centers of economic activity.
Network effects assure benefits not just to China as the leader of OBOR but
to every country touched by it.
If any
significant portion of this ambitious vision is accomplished, it will alter the
logistics of commerce and cultural intercourse between three-fourths of
humanity. It will facilitate multiple
forms of communication over an expanse even greater than that ruled by the
Great Khan. The 13th and 14th
century Pax Mongolica was -- till now -- the largest contiguous economic zone in
history. The Mongols used force to unite
China, Central Asia, Russia, and much of Western Asia in a single area with multinational
governance and no significant barriers to trade, travel, and cultural exchange. But China’s integration with the lands to its
west and south is to rely on peacefully negotiated commerce, trade, investment,
and construction, not military coercion or conquest. And it will leave Westphalian notions of
sovereignty intact.
Politico-military
power pressures and repels those to whom it is applied. Economic power assimilates
and entices others. It is attractive
rather than coercive. China will not
exercise politico-military dominion over the vast transnational domain created
by OBOR. But, given its size and
dynamism, it expects to be socioeconomically primus inter pares in an interconnected Eurasia. And all roads will lead to Beijing.
In the
aggregate, China’s “one belt, one road” development initiative constitutes the
largest and potentially the most transformative engineering effort in human history. At $1.4 trillion, China’s stated financial
commitment to these projects is eleven times the size of the Marshall Plan,
restated in current dollars. Most
projects will be overland. [2] Relatively few will be maritime.
But whether on
land or over water, these projects promise to have major strategic impact, not
least on the role of sea power in geopolitics.
They will greatly increase the speed and efficiency of land transport
from one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other. In peacetime, they will divert much air cargo
and some time-sensitive ship-borne cargo to railways. In time of war, trans-Eurasian railways and
roads will provide secure, if relatively expensive alternatives to transport by
sea, avoiding any risk of interdiction by foreign navies by traveling on
overland, interior lines of communication.
By the middle
of the next decade, passenger travel by train from London to Beijing is
projected to take less than three days while the transport of goods may take no
more than a week. Transport by sea will
continue to take four to five weeks.
Both the increase in overland mobility and the dramatic shrinkage of
travel times on land envisaged by OBOR amount to a revolution in military as
well as commercial logistics.
After OBOR's
build-out of land communications in Eurasia, sea power will no longer be able to
block commerce as thoroughly as it once could.
And at any point on the shores of Eurasia, a naval force will have to
expect prompt opposition from land forces with greatly shortened interior lines
of communication. One long-term effect
of OBOR will thus be to diminish the traditional strategic advantages of sea
power. For a primarily naval power like
the United States this is an unwelcome prospect. From the perspective of most of the countries
participating in OBOR, it is a welcome one.
OBOR envisions
the construction of fiber optic cable connections overland from China to Europe
and the Middle East. At present,
telecommunications between, say, Tokyo and London rely on undersea cables that
either cross the Pacific, the United States, and the Atlantic or transit the
Straits of Malacca, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean. The shorter distance overland across Eurasia will
shave a few milliseconds off transmission times, something that is worth a lot
of money to hedge funds and others trading in capital markets. It will also provide internet routings that
avoid vulnerability to interception on the sea bottom or in the United States
and that are less easy to sever in time of war.
The projects
under “one belt, one road” are not all new.
OBOR incorporates many preexisting Chinese activities. But the fact that these are now to be
implemented within an approved strategic policy framework makes a big
difference. Most projects under OBOR are
outside China, They are now included in
China’s five-year plans. This provides
authority for Chinese policy banks to finance them. The initiative also encourages the formation
of internationally co-financed funds and banks like the $40-billion Silk Road
Fund, the $100-billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the
$16-billion Maritime Silk Road Bank. And
it incentivizes countries with new projects to issue Renminbi bonds to pay for
them, thereby boosting the international role of China’s capital markets and
its currency.
OBOR
coordinates and rationalizes previously unconnected projects. It multiplies the utility of port projects by
insisting that these become intermodal transportation nodes connected to newly
industrializing hinterlands. Both Gwadar
and Djibouti illustrate this.
Gwadar is a
former Omani enclave with a deep-water port, located in Pakistani
Balochistan. It is strategically situated
on the Arabian Sea near the mouth of the Persian Gulf, just 300 miles from the
Strait of Hormuz. It will now become a
significant international commercial port, airport, and entrepôt, connecting
Pakistan to China as well as Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia by road, rail,
air, and oil and gas pipelines as well as fiber optic cable. The corridor from Kashgar [喀什] through the Khunjerab Pass to Gwadar is to absorb
about $33 billion in investment in new power plants and transmission lines in
addition to about $11 billion in infrastructure investment.
Once Gwadar's
planned land and air connections to western China are in place, it will also,
presumably, serve as a support facility for the Chinese navy in the Indian
Ocean. Gwadar and Djibouti illustrate an
OBOR focus on creating facilities that are much more than the modern-day
equivalent of coaling stations – fuel and supply dumps unconnected to the lands
behind them and dependent on foreign subsidies.
These are viable port operations as well places where the PLA Navy can
reprovision and, if necessary, repair its ships.
Two dozen
deployments of small People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy flotillas to the Gulf
Aden for anti-piracy operations have convinced China that its navy needs onshore
support facilities in Africa as well as elsewhere on the Indian Ocean littoral. The result is the establishment of a PLA Navy
logistics support base in Djibouti. Many
other foreign militaries, including the United States, are also based in
Djibouti. But only the Chinese have
looked beyond military support requirements to develop Djibouti as an economic
and commercial enclave for trade with the African interior.
The
Chinese-built railroad from Djibouti to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa
has just entered service. (About 70
percent of Ethiopia’s foreign trade goes through Djibouti. Now that China's labor costs have risen to
uncompetitive levels, its investors are putting a lot of money into Ethiopian
light industry, especially textiles and shoes, and Ethiopia's exports are
rapidly expanding.) Farther south, a
$13.8 billion project under a new
Chinese-developed East African Railway Masterplan is connecting the Kenyan port
of Mombasa to Nairobi as well as South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.
Closer to home,
China has built a major port at Kyaukpyu in western Myanmar. Oil and gas pipelines now connect Kyaukpyu to
Kunming. This chops 700 miles off the
distance oil shipped from Africa or the Middle East must travel to China, cuts
delivery times by 30 percent, and avoids the need to transit the strategic
chokepoint of the Straits of Malacca. A
railroad is planned to parallel the pipelines, but not yet approved. Some Indian defense specialists speculate
that the PLA Navy plans a presence in the Bay of Bengal based at Kyaukpyu. (There is as yet no evidence of this, and much
previous Indian alarmism has proven groundless.)
Under a recent
agreement, a standard gauge railway is also to connect the sleepy but ice-free
Russian port of Zarubino, on the Sea of Japan, to Jilin Province and the
Chinese railroad network, beginning in 2018.
This $3-billion project aims to create a port that will ultimately be
capable of handling 60 million tons of cargo a year. By eliminating the need to circumnavigate the
Korean Peninsula, China can cut two days’ sailing time off shipping across the
Pacific to the west coast of North America or -- equally importantly -- to
Europe and the east coast of North America through the Bering Strait via Arctic
routes opened by global warming. In
time, the new Arctic passages will divert significant ship traffic between
China and Europe from traditional routes through the Straits of Malacca, the
Indian Ocean, and the Suez Canal. This
will add to the value of Chinese rail access to ports in Russia and Korea
(where Rason, in north Korea, and Busan, in the south, are both on offer), and
further diversify China's transportation options.
Seven of the
world’s ten largest ports are in China and China has emerged as a major
exporter of port management services.
The terminus of the “China-Europe land-sea express route” is the Greek
Port of Piraeus, now under Chinese management.
China aims to make Piraeus and a significantly upgraded Balkan railway
network its maritime gateway to Central Europe.
As part of this project, a Chinese-built high speed rail line from
Belgrade to Budapest will open next year.
As this and
other examples show, strategic competition in infrastructure investment can
have significant collateral benefits for those countries affected by it. Pakistan has finally persuaded China to
develop Gwadar. India has countered
Pakistan’s strategy of making landlocked Afghanistan and other Central Asian
states dependent on the Port of Gwadar by developing a rival outlet for
Afghanistan at Chahbahar in Iran.
Georgia has just undertaken to build a new deep-water Black Sea port at
Anaklia that takes advantage of China's investments in Eurasian land-bridge
projects to connect itself to China and Central Asia.
The
Chinese-built ports at Hambantota and Colombo in Sri Lanka, the China-Suez
Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone in Egypt, Kazakhstan's negotiation of the
right to clear its imports and exports through the Chinese port of Lianyungang,
and a new alliance between ports in China and Malaysia[3]
are further illustrations of China’s ability to leverage its new prowess as a
port modernizer and manager to support its strategy. The Sino-Malaysian alliance’s purpose is to
fast-track trade, reduce customs bottlenecks, attract Chinese investment in
Malaysian ports, and develop the Port of Malacca, which aims to be the largest
in Southeast Asia by 2025. This collaboration
with Malaysia also significantly mitigates the risk of closure of the Straits
of Malacca to Chinese trade.
Despite the
strategic implications of China’s development initiatives under OBOR, they have
attracted remarkably little attention in the United States. Perhaps this is because their geo-economic
nature does not conform to America's current, primarily military approach to
foreign policy. Whatever the reason, there
has been no significant American response to OBOR other than the rejection of
membership in the Chinese-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). That is widely regarded as having been a
mistake.
Japan also
stayed out of the AIIB but has put forward its own initiative to improve Asian infrastructure. In the main, these reactions have served to highlight
the limited capacities of China's strategic rivals in Asia. Japan's and India's efforts to imitate OBOR underscore
the fact that -- whoever their sponsor -- expanded connections between nations
benefit all who participate in them. In
practice, OBOR and similar programs facilitate healthy politico-economic
competition without predetermining its strategic outcome.
Elsewhere, in
Europe, Russia, Central and Southeast Asia as well as East Africa, attention
has focused only on those parts of OBOR that directly affect the commentator's own
country or region. There has been a
striking lack of analysis of the overall vision or its potential for the
commercial and geopolitical transformation of Eurasia and adjacent areas. This seems likely to change as the military relationship
between China and the United States continues its unhappy evolution from uneasy
coexistence to outright hostility.
China now
imports very large volumes of oil, gas, and raw materials by sea from the
Persian Gulf and Africa. Despite (or
perhaps, in part, because of) "one belt, one road," this trade seems
certain to continue to grow. To date, China
has intervened against pirates in the Gulf of Aden who interfered with it. But --
like all other countries since World War II -- China has depended on the U.S.
Navy's stewardship of the global commons to defend its freedom of navigation
and thereby assure the overall security of its supply lines in the Indian Ocean
and adjacent areas.
Now China has
no choice but to contemplate the possibility of armed conflict at sea with the
United States. In the event of various
contingencies that might trigger war in the Taiwan Strait or the East and South
China Seas, it is widely expected that the U.S. Navy would attempt to interdict
China's trade and deny it freedom of navigation in both the South China Sea and
the Indian Ocean. Japan is becoming more
assertive in the maritime arena. There is
also a lot of talk in India about Indian Navy operations against China's energy
supply lines should conflict break out along the two countries' disputed Himalayan
frontiers. In the event of a repeat of the 1962
Sino-Indian war, it seems likely that the United States would side with India
against China, as it did the last time.
China now sees
itself as left with no alternative to becoming able to defend its strategic
lines of communication at sea against American, Indian, or Japanese
interference. So, once the Chinese have
the capacity to do so, we can confidently expect them to establish a permanent
and growing naval presence of their own in the Indian Ocean. The same logic will drive them to deploy
their navy along newly opened shipping
routes through the Arctic. In its
broadest strategic sense, OBOR represents implementation by China of a decision
to reject its historic status as a land power only and to become a maritime
power as well.
OBOR is a set
of civilian projects. Ultimately, however,
it is intended to serve China's interest in protecting its economic lifelines in times of war as well
as in peace and to offset the threat it perceives from the United States and
Japan. If OBOR works, it will
significantly reduce the vulnerability of China's economy to foreign disruption
of its trade. It will add to China's
sense of security, though not enough to cause it to refrain from developing independent
naval capabilities. China's inevitable
naval expansion will have the effect of diluting the global dominance of the
United States Navy and devaluing its self-appointed role as the sole guardian
of freedom of navigation on the high seas.
The irony in
this should be obvious. China and the
United States share a vital interest in the uninterrupted flow of global
commerce and hence in freedom of navigation.
For seven decades, the U.S. Navy has borne the sole burden of defending
this common interest. Americans have become
accustomed to this monopoly and the honors, rights, and responsibilities it
confers. The deployment of China's navy to
protect commerce and assure the unimpeded transit of shipping of concern to it beyond
its near seas will -- in China's view -- support the U.S. Navy's mission, while
also hedging against possible American transgressions. Many in the United States will not see it that
way.
China's
assumption of the mission of assuring freedom of navigation for shipping of
direct concern to it will challenge the two countries to find ways to work
together rather than at cross purposes.
It will also require the U.S. Navy to adapt to a world in which, for the
first time since World War II, it is no
longer the only significant conventional naval power in every region. China and the United States must work out a
mutually agreeable modus vivendi and a relationship -- even a partnership -- that
reflects both the realities OBOR is creating and the enhanced role of China in
global and regional affairs.
[2]Planned corridors run from Kunming to Singapore and to
Kolkata; from Kashi [Kashgar] to Gwadar, to Tashkent, and to Tehran; from Xi’an
to Istanbul and to Moscow, Rotterdam, and Lisbon.
[3] Ten Chinese ports – Dalian, Shanghai, Ningbo, Qinzhou,
Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Haikou, and Taicang will collaborate with
six Malaysian ports – Port Klang, Malacca, Penang, Johor, Kuantan and Bintulu.
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