Hunchun: China has taken several steps in recent months to pursue its ambitious trade goals transportation hub Of Asia.
To its west, China has agreed to build a rail line across Central Asia. Beijing also said it would help Vietnam plan three rail lines running across the countries’ shared border. And China is trying to persuade Russia and North Korea to reopen a long-closed port on the Sea of Japan.
If successful, the plans will provide China with closer ties to the economies of the Northeast Southeast Asiathe Middle East and even the Arctic, the latest step in its 11-year-old Belt and Road Initiative To create a more China-centric global order.
Each endeavor faces obstacles in different ways. The country’s top leader Xi Jinping will need close cooperation with border countries, some of which are politically unstable, such as Kyrgyzstan, or internationally isolated, such as North Korea. Neighboring countries like Vietnam that have long been wary of China will need to be reassured.
A similar venture, a 3-year-old rail line that China has built across Southeast Asia to landlocked Laos, has been welcomed by some there as a way to bring an influx of Chinese mining investment and tourism to the country. But others have warned about Chinese dominance of the Laotian economy.
“They ended up with a lot of land, or at least they used a lot of land and squeezed out some of the locals,” said Professor Ja Ian Chong of the National University of Singapore.
The new initiatives will also be expensive, and China has begun emphasizing smaller Belt and Road projects elsewhere.
A central factor in the country’s moves is its geopolitical relationship with Russia, whose invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has both helped and hurt China’s efforts to build regional transportation links.
Russia is now dependent on China for trucks, drones and other supplies for the war, and has become inferior to China in the struggle for regional influence. As relations between the two countries have warmed, even including several recent joint military exercises in the Sea of Japan and elsewhere, Moscow has been giving more diplomatic support to Chinese projects, particularly smaller ones with North Korea. On the Russian border.
Yet the war in Ukraine has created a severe labor shortage in Russia, drawing workers from Central Asia. In particular, there are too few skilled workers left in Kyrgyzstan to build the rail line that China wants to build across its mountains towards Afghanistan and Iran.
“The problem is not just having enough engineers and workers, but also having enough people with the right technical training and background to live and work in Kyrgyzstan,” said Niva Yau, a country expert at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington. “
But the collective scope of the projects shows how Xi is using infrastructure to strengthen China’s role as the trade and geopolitical hub of Asia.
The most difficult project for China, but with the potentially biggest payoff, lies in trying to secure access to the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean. Tumen River,
In the mid-19th century, Russia annexed a large area of Siberia from China, including a coastal strip of land that runs south to North Korea and cuts off northeastern China’s access to the sea. The Tumen River flows over 300 miles of China’s border with North Korea, but the last 9 miles of it lie between Russia and North Korea. A low railroad bridge over the river, which was hastily built by the Soviet Union to carry supplies during the Korean War, has since been blocked to all boat traffic except small boats.
Building a higher bridge in place of that bridge that would allow ships to use the river has long been a dream of Chinese leaders. The goal is to connect the Pacific Ocean to a port at Hunchun, an otherwise landlocked Chinese city a few miles up the river. Some Hunchun residents, such as real estate investor Zhao Hongwei, share that dream.
“If there is a port, trade can happen and we can prosper,” said Zhao, 49.
For Beijing, opening the Tumen River to traffic would ease trade with Russia, northern Japan and the northeastern coast of the Korean Peninsula and even create new shipping lanes to Europe as the Arctic ice cap shrinks due to climate change. Has been.
“As the only direct route to the Sea of Japan, the Tumen River has immense strategic importance,” said Li Lifan, executive director of Russian and Central Asian Studies at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
With Russia expressing new willingness to replace the bridge in recent months, the big question now is North Korea’s stance. Russian and North Korean officials signed their agreement on June 20 to build a highway bridge over the Tumen River.
Some analysts doubt that North Korea will agree to remove the lower bridge. The country has long tried to pit China against Russia when it suits its geopolitical needs. North Korea, which already faces China along almost its entire northern border, may not want to see Chinese influence on the final stretch with Russia.
“Even if China and Russia reach an agreement, they will still have to convince North Korea,” said Hu Chiw Ping, a Korea expert at the East Asian International Relations Caucus in Malaysia.
