Silk Road II It’s quite the thing to retrace Marco Polo’s route to China. Most recently this was done in the early 80s by a couple of hardy adventurers and it was all captured on obsolete video tech. Nevertheless it was released and I was very impressed. For one thing, they took the part of the route that the Citroen Expedition was unable to (this is the one Jack Reid hitched a ride on in his search for his father). Amazingly the Russian railway from Tbilisi had barely changed since the 1930s when Jack and his mysterious friend Hesperus rode on it. No doubt was left in my mind that the trip was really gnarly. One of the few bits of worthwhile news to emerge from the APEC Summit in Beijing was about the serious commitment that China was making towards a project dubbed, The New Silk Road. The original trade route called the Silk Road ran from about 115 BCE until 1450 CE so this is hardly a new idea. The original route went out of business because of competition from sea traffic. The new link is often thought of as the rail route between Chongqing China, the largest city in the world and Duisburg Germany, world’s largest inland port. Rail shipments are twice as fast as transport on the sea route, but only half as expensive as air freight (see: Think Railways: Further development of the modern Silk Road linking Germany and China).¹ The big news is that China is about to spend real money on infrastructure outside its border. And while the mainstream press pretty much ignored this story, the business press found it at least a little interesting. Examples include: • Reuters: China to create bank to fund New Silk Road: official media² • Bloomberg: China Planning $16.3 Billion Fund for ‘New Silk Road’³ • The Economist: Hardly an oasis, Kazakhstan turns geography to advantage as China builds a “New Silk Road”⁴ Of course, none of this might not mean all that much to the bigger economic picture. Why? The world may have maxed out on trade. There are finite advantages to more concentrations of production facilitated by hyper-efficient transportation methods. Seriously? Do we really need better methods for shipping auto parts from China to Germany. Maybe some of that production would be better sourced in Germany. Besides, sea transportation is already very efficient—so efficient we in central USA can easily afford to buy blue jeans assembled in Vietnam or Bangladesh because shipping costs are measured in pennies. Just remember, it was called the Silk Road because it mostly trafficked in luxury goods like silk. It had to—those old transportation methods were very expensive. One of the more interesting things I learned from my brushes with city planning issues was that transportation decisions drive a great deal of economic development. Part of the attraction of the Silk Road idea is that big links like this change the way people interact with each other. Not only do they tend to bring peace and prosperity, they change the cultures that touch them. The original Silk Road certainly did. And so part of the promotion of this idea is that a hard link between China and Central Europe will bring these people closer together—especially if that hard link include high-speed rail and fiber-optic communications. Because of my enthusiasm for big infrastructure projects, I have been running into Silk Road partisans since the 1990s. I met one in Stockholm (1995) who gave me an impromptu hour+ lecture on why the world needed a new Silk Road. In his telling, a new Silk Road would certainly foster world peace. He was so enthusiastic, it was quite infectious. Such folks must be very happy these days.⁵ ¹ think-railways/development-new-silk-road-linking-germany-china/ ² reuters/article/2014/11/13/us-china-silkroad-idUSKCN0IX01320141113 ³ bloomberg/news/2014-11-04/china-said-to-plan-16-3-billion-fund-to-revive-silk-road.html ⁴ economist/news/asia/21632595-kazakhstan-turns-geography-advantage-china-builds-new-silk-road-hardly-oasis ⁵ larouchepub/other/2014/4136hzl_tour_china.html
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 23:06:20 +0000
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