Global Courant 2023-05-10 04:10:27
The first freight train on the Lancang-Mekong Express will depart from Kunming in China on January 10, 2022, en route to a 26-hour journey to Vientiane, the capital of Laos.
Chinese news service | Chinese news service | Getty Images
BEIJING — In the past two years, China has announced the opening of new freight train lines, while cross-border railways have become a part of President Xi Jinping’s meetings with regional leaders.
It’s all part of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative, a complex network of infrastructure projects connecting China with its trading partners.
Here’s a look at where the railway lines are being built across the Asian continent.
The projects include high-speed passenger trains.
In April, China’s national train ticket app opened online bookings for a 10.5-hour train ride from Yunnan province to the capital of Laos. If all goes according to plan, that route will one day connect to the Thai capital of Bangkok and Phnom Penh, the river capital of Cambodia.
In the past six months, China has also opened freight train lines Laos, Thailand And Vietnam, state media said.
Far north, China last year opened a railway bridge between the remote province of Heilongjiang and Russia. New train routes to transport coal from Mongolian mines to China are underway, according to state media.
Those freight lines complement China’s relatively older rail network across Central Asia — connecting Yiwu in eastern China to London.
While it is difficult to verify how operational all rail lines are, official reports offer a glimpse of how China’s Belt and Road ambitions are developing.
CNBC analyzed the reports to create the following schematic diagrams of the railroads built and planned by region:
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Planned and built railways in the region south of China, based on official reports and state media.
CNBC
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Planned and built railways in the Southeast region of China, based on official reports and state media.
CNBC
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Railways built across the North China border with Russia, according to official reports and state media.
CNBC
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Planned and built railways across the northern Chinese border with Mongolia, based on official reports and state media.
CNBC
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Railways built in the region west of China, according to official reports and state media.
CNBC
China’s Belt and Road Initiative was launched in 2013 at the start of Xi’s presidency. The program is widely seen as Beijing’s attempt to increase global influence through the development of rail, sea and other transportation routes running from Asia to Europe and Africa.
“Splitting Europe from the US, at least as far as possible, is a key foreign policy goal for China and deeper economic integration fostered by stronger rail links would help,” said Stephen Olson, senior research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation.
Similarly, “part of China’s motivation in building rail links in ASEAN is to put China more at the heart of regional trade,” he said, referring to the 10-member bloc of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Olson said that while the rail could “break new ground” for a landlocked economy like Laos, it is also up to the destination country to develop logistics and other infrastructure to fully utilize the new rail lines for trade.
One third of China’s trade
Beijing says trade with Belt and Road countries accounts for about a third of China’s total imports and exports. In the first quarter, that trade grew 16.8% from a year ago – slower than last year’s pace of 19.4%, according to official figures.
The actual boost to trade from the rail lines is difficult to estimate, said Francoise Huang, senior economist at Allianz Trade. She pointed out that transporting goods by rail is significantly cheaper than air, and faster than road and sea.
She said her assessment of reports indicates that the railway lines are used more to transport Chinese exports to other countries than to import into China.
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Since 2013, Belt and Road related construction contracts a total of $573 billion, according to estimates released in January by Christoph Nedopil, founder and director of the Green Finance and Development Center at Fudan University in Shanghai. Including nonfinancial investments, that figure rises to nearly $1 trillion, the report said.
Critics say China’s massive infrastructure project has forced developing countries to take on huge debts while Chinese companies, often state-owned, benefit.
“Analysis of the impact of the freight lines will be inseparable from an analysis of the overall impact of closer trade relations with China,” Olson said.
“This may work out better for some countries than for others. The Chinese economy is much larger than any economy in ASEAN and that creates a leverage effect that can sometimes result in unbalanced and unsustainable trade relationships.”
In an annual report in March, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s main economic planning agency, highlighted progress in the construction of international railways. The committee also said it was aware of the risks.
“We developed major overseas projects while protecting against related risks, helped enterprises monitor and defuse foreign investment risks, and worked faster to build a comprehensive service platform for monitoring, assessment and early warning of risks associated with overseas projects.”
China will hold the third Belt and Road Forum at an undetermined time this year. Xi has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to attendstate media said.
— CNBC’s Bryn Bache contributed to this report.
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