Amidst the prolonged face-off among Indian and Chinese militaries on the country’s northern borders, China’s announcement on the side-lines of its parliamentary annual session about the building of the $48-billion, 1,011-km new railway line to connect Chengdu (the capital of its Sichuan province) with Linzhi or Nyingchi (close to Tibet’s border with Arunachal Pradesh) is not without having a strategic intent. Be it road, railway or maritime hyperlinks along and inside Pakistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, China is busy building in depth multi-modal connectivity all along India’s neighbourhood, viewed, not completely without having purpose, as India’s containment.
Realising the strategic significance of the railways as a lifeline of its financial and military may, transcontinental railway connectivity has been China’s exceptional stratagem of statecraft. At a pace and extent unknown in history, China has channelled incredibly big investments in the expansion and revitalisation of its railways, such as the new Eurasian Land Bridge akin to the fabled Silk Route via its Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany.
All about India, China shares land borders with the 5 SAARC nations, appears more than the Chicken’s Neck at a sixth, and has a lengthy border with Myanmar. China’s formidable presence in terms of railway and road projects in India’s north is typified by the world’s highest 1,142-km Golmud-Lhasa railway line, opened in July 2006. A new 252-km line from Lhasa to Xigaze, Tibet’s second biggest city, opened in 2014 is but a precursor to a 400-km extension not only to Nyalam, on the border with Nepal, and a probable additional 120-km hyperlink to Kathmandu, but also to Dromo, close to Bhutan and Sikkim, and additional on to Linzhi/Nyingchi on the doorsteps of Arunachal Pradesh.
Myanmar represents a very important missing hyperlink among the attainable land-bridge connecting South Asia and South-West China, onwards to Europe. The 232-km Lashio-Muse/Ruili railway line that China builds would provide a strategic hyperlink via an in depth railway network across Myanmar. Beset with its Malacca dilemma, China has feverishly constructed a 1,one hundred-km-lengthy pipeline to tap the wealthy Shwe gas fields from the Kyaukpyu deep sea port on Myanmar’s Arakan coast to Kunming in Yunnan province. China’s improvement help to Bangladesh is probably to contain building of the second Padma Bridge and a 130-km railway line from Chittagong to Gundam on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border.
On India’s eastern flank, as Professor Wang Mengshu at the Beijing Jiaotong University explained, China keenly plans to rail-connect Kunming to Yangon in Myanmar via a 1,920-km-lengthy railway line, although pursuing the ambitious SKRL (Singapore-Kunming Rail Line) operating via Thailand and Laos to Singapore. The 414-km Vientiane-Boten railway line due commissioning in 2022 is estimated to price $6 billion, just about one-third of Laos’s GDP! China is assisting Thailand have a 250-km higher-speed railway connecting Bangkok and Nakhon Ratchasima, and extended to Nong Khai to hyperlink to Laos as aspect of the SKRL.
In the south, as aspect of its ‘String of Pearls’ approach of hyperlinks with regional maritime nations, China financed practically all of Sri Lanka’s massive infrastructure projects—a new seaport at Hambantota, an oil storage facility, a new airport, a thermal energy plant, an expressway, and a unique financial zone at Mirigama close to Colombo, apart from rebuilding the most important roads in the war-ravaged north and east.
On India’s western flank, China has planned strategic linkages to Pakistan, Iran and all across the Central Asia, incorporating the Gilgit-Baltistan tract in the PoK into its Xinjiang’s logistics grid for an unfettered road and rail access to the Gulf, expanding the Karakoram highway and preparing a 900-km railway line from Gwadar port in Balochistan on Pakistan’s south-west coast close to the Straits of Hormuz to join the line along Koh-e-Taftan (on the Iranian border) to Spezand-Quetta-Chaman (on Afghanistan border) onwards via the Khunjerab Pass in the Karakoram to Kashgar in China, which is connected to Xigaze, currently rail-linked to Lhasa.
China’s frenetic improvement of infrastructure in Central Asian Republics (Automobiles) signifies its lengthy-term strategic and financial stakes in the area, aptly described by Chinese General Liu Yazhou as “the thickest piece of cake given to the modern Chinese by the heavens.” Extensive railway infrastructure has revolutionised Eurasian transit regime, in particular across Kazakhstan, and the 268-km hyperlink from Kashi in western China via southern Kyrgyzstan to Andizhan in Uzbekistan, not to speak of the eight new lines in Iran, such as the 370-km Qazvin-Rasht-Astara line forming a north-south corridor to Azerbaijan and Russia. Today, China operates standard containerised freight trains to quite a few European destinations by means of Automobiles, Iran and Turkey.
Chinese footprints extend to most of the ASEAN railway systems. Indonesia has the $5.5-billion 150-km ‘high-speed’ railway hyperlink becoming constructed among Jakarta and Bandung. The 257-km railway line from Bat Doeng close to Phnom Penh to the border close to Loc Ninh is proposed to meet the 128-km line to Ho Chi Minh City. China is currently linked by the railways to Vietnam by the 195-km dual-gauge (1,435-mm/1,000-mm) line among Hanoi and Dong Dang. The $27-billion East Coast Rail Line project in Malaysia promoted in the course of the Najib Razak regime, annulled by his successor Mahathir Mohamad, is becoming renegotiated.
Most of China-assisted railway projects in the area, like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in common, have been extensively described as China’s ‘debt-trap diplomacy’, binding building nations to China via accumulated infrastructure-associated debt. In no way can the higher price China-aided railway lines becoming constructed in Laos, Cambodia or Thailand be financially viable. Beijing pressured a debt-trapped Tajikistan to hand more than 1,158 sq-km territory as it owed China $1.2-billion out of a total $2.9-billion debt. The ultimate takeover by China of Hambantota port complicated in Sri Lanka is nicely recognized.
Like its trains clocking the world’s highest speeds, China has sprinted ahead in a bid to plant its footprints on building nations and influence peoples. Pursuing President Xi Jinping’s ‘grand political-economic project’, the BRI, China has been dangling sweet terms with a fistful of dollars enticing nations exactly where it preferred to bulk up its presence and stimulate demand for its goods, capital and labour. Be it the $60-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or myriad infrastructure projects in India’s neighbourhood, these provide China icing on the cake, serving as they do the PRC’s vaulting approach to include and intimidate India.
The author is senior fellow, Asian Institute of Transport Development, Delhi. Views are individual