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Our bulldozers, our rules
China’s foreign policy could reshape a good part of the world economy
THE ECONOMIST | Jul 2 2016 | BEIJING
THE first revival of the Silk Road—a vast and ancient network of
trade routes linking China’s merchants with those of Central Asia, the Middle
East, Africa and Europe—took place in the seventh century, after war had made
it unusable for hundreds of years. Xi Jinping, China’s president, looks back on
that era as a golden age, a time of Pax Sinica, when Chinese luxuries were
coveted across the globe and the Silk Road was a conduit for diplomacy and
economic expansion. The term itself was coined by a German geographer in the
19th century, but China has adopted it with relish. Mr Xi wants a revival of
the Silk Road and the glory that went with it.
This time cranes and construction crews are replacing
caravans and camels. In April a Chinese shipping company, Cosco, took a 67%
stake in Greece’s second-largest port, Piraeus, from which Chinese firms are
building a high-speed rail network linking the city to Hungary and eventually
Germany. In July work is due to start on the third stage of a Chinese-designed
nuclear reactor in Pakistan, where China recently announced it would finance a
big new highway and put $2 billion into a coal mine in the Thar desert. In the
first five months of this year, more than half of China’s contracts overseas
were signed with nations along the Silk Road—a first in the country’s modern
history.
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