First stage of new Silk Road has arrived, but it remains slow going

The containers changed wagons and engines many times en route, partly to accommodate differing rail gauges, and were more symbolic than practical.

But it took to the outer limit of Europe Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambitions for a new Silk Road, the ancient network of trading routes that linked East and West and are a key part of Chinese history.

Officially called the One Belt, One Road Initiative, it was announced in 2013, ostensibly to allow China access to Asian and European markets for its excess production. It promises to be one of the most ambitious programmes since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

A combination of trade, economics and political ambition with a dose of soft power to bring prosperous Western Europe closer to China are the practical goals. But many observers see the underlying aim is to establish for Beijing a new empire harking back to the golden age of the Han dynasty which began in the first century BC.

The belt refers to land trade routes linking central Asia, Russia and Europe. The road, confusingly, is the maritime route linking China’s southern coast to east Africa and the Mediterranean that made China one of the world’s foremost powers many years ago.

It’s ambitious, covering about 65 per cent of the world’s population, about one-third of the world’s GDP, and about a quarter of all the goods and services the world moves.

Beijing has highlighted a number of achievements, including a $62 billion China-Pakistan economic corridor (Cpec), a network of motorways, power plants, wind farms, factories and railways, that backers say will spark an “economic revolution” and create up to one million jobs in Pakistan.

Other high-profile schemes include a $1.1bn port project in Sri Lanka, a high-speed rail link in Indonesia and an industrial park in Cambodia.

The new Silk Road as planned is expensive, with estimates of cost ranging up to tens of trillions of dollars.

How that will be funded and whether it is even realistic remains unclear.

An Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was founded in 2015 by China and 50 more countries. It was suspected of being a vehicle to help fund Beijing’s plans though it has imposed good governance akin to the World Bank.

China can of course tap its own China Development Bank and the Ex-Im bank though even with this combination the funding needs will be a strain.

Not least of China’s problems is the significant change in the financial landscape since the new Silk Road was conceived.

Then, China was keen to invest as it suffered an excess of productive capacity and growing foreign exchange reserves which encouraged overseas investment. It also wanted to extend export markets to the poorer areas of the country in the landlocked western provinces that would benefit from improved transport links.

China also wants to improve the lot of its western Xinjiang region which has some of the country’s largest oil and gas reserves but is inhabited by what to Beijing is a troublesome Muslim Uighur population with secessionist tendencies.

Since planning began, China has put in place capital controls, the renminbi has fallen sharply in value and Beijing is burning foreign exchange reserves to defend the exchange rate.

Four years after the initiative was launched most projects remain on the drawing board but given the long-term and strategic nature of Chinese foreign policy at the most negative it can be said the jury is still out.

Eurasia is a combination of Europe and Asia that stretches from the Atlantic in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, to the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Indian Ocean to the south. It is a critical part of the global geopolitical jigsaw.

As that most perceptive of political theorists and US President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, said: “Eurasia is the world’s axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world’s three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia... and would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa.

“What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and historical legacy,” he added.

The omens for Beijing are better than when the project began.

US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy that puts isolationism and America First at the forefront is a gift to Beijing few could have predicted as the project took shape.

Conventional theory holds that we have just left the Atlantic century. This century assumes the rise of Asia – or could it be an all-powerful Eurasia?