Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, The New Great Game Between China and the U.S.
By Pepe Escobar
Posted on November 22, 2015, Printed on November 23, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176072/
In Washington, voices are rising fast and furiously. Freedom fries are a
thing of the past and everyone agrees on the need to support France (and on
more or less nothing else). Now, disagreements are sharpening over whether
to only incrementally intensify the use of U.S. military power in Syria
and Iraq or go to war big time and send in the troops. The editor of the
right-wing Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, is already calling for 50,000
American troops to take the Islamic States capital, Raqqa. Republican
presidential candidate Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been urging that
another 20,000 troops be dispatched to the region for months, offers this
illuminating analogy to sports: "I'm looking for an away game when it comes
to ISIL, not a home game. I want to fight them in their backyard."
And dont forget that increasingly angry sideline discussion about the Obama
administration's plan to let 10,000 Syrian refugees, carefully vetted for up
to two years, trickle into the country. Alternatives proposed include
setting up even harsher, more time-consuming vetting processes to insure
that few of them can make it, allowing only certified, God-fearing Christian
Syrians in while -- give a rousing cheer for the clash of civilizations --
leaving Muslims to rot in hell, or just blocking the whole damn lot of them.
In such an atmosphere of rancor and pure war-hawkishness, its increasingly
hard to remember what a more peaceable world looked and sounded like. Thats
why TomDispatchs peripatetic reporter Pepe Escobar, who roams Eurasia,
especially the region he long ago dubbed Pipelineistan, is like a breath of
fresh air. He reminds us that there are still places where people are
talking about -- gasp! -- building up infrastructure in a big way, not
defunding it and letting it crumble into dust; places where leaders are
intent on thinking about how to unify worlds through commerce and trade, not
smash them to smithereens via air power and drones. Maybe thats just what
it means to live in the heartland of a rising power, rather than a declining
one.
His focus is China and dont get me wrong, that countrys no bowl of
cherries. Even if not at American levels, its pouring money into its
military and elbowing its neighbors in nearby waters, as you might expect of
a bulking-up regional power. Still, its got a dream that its leaders are
actually happy to promote and its not a warlike one that highlights an
ever-more heavily militarized world either. That in itself should count for
something. But let Pepe Escobar fill in the details on a Chinese dream of
full-time construction across Eurasia that, transposed to this continent,
would once have sounded American indeed. Tom
Will Chess, Not Battleship, Be the Game of the Future in Eurasia?
Silk Roads, Night Trains, and the Third Industrial Revolution in China
By Pepe Escobar
The U.S. is transfixed by its multibillion-dollar electoral circus. The
European Union is paralyzed by austerity, fear of refugees, and now all-out
jihad in the streets of Paris. So the West might be excused if its barely
caught the echoes of a Chinese version of Roy Orbisons All I Have to Do Is
Dream. And that new Chinese dream even comes with a road map.
The crooner is President Xi Jinping and that road map is the ambitious,
recently unveiled 13th Five-Year-Plan, or in the pop-video version, the
Shisanwu. After years of explosive economic expansion, it sanctifies the
countrys lower new normal gross domestic product growth rate of 6.5% a
year through at least 2020.
It also sanctifies an updated economic formula for the country: out with a
model based on low-wage manufacturing of export goods and in with the shock
of the new, namely, a Chinese version of the third industrial revolution.
And while Chinas leadership is focused on creating a middle-class future
powered by a consumer economy, its president is telling whoever is willing
to listen that, despite the fears of the Obama administration and of some of
the countrys neighbors, theres no reason for war ever to be on the agenda
for the U.S. and China.
Given the alarm in Washington about what is touted as a Beijing quietly
pursuing expansionism in the South China Sea, Xi has been remarkably blunt
on the subject of late. Neither Beijing nor Washington, he insists, should
be caught in the Thucydides trap, the belief that a rising power and the
ruling imperial power of the planet are condemned to go to war with each
other sooner or later.
It was only two months ago in Seattle that Xi told a group of digital
economy heavyweights, There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides
trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the
mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for
themselves.
A case can be made -- and Xis ready to make it -- that Washington, which,
from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, has gained something of a
reputation for strategic miscalculation in the twenty-first century, might
be doing it again. After all, U.S. military strategy documents and top
Pentagon figures have quite publicly started to label China (like Russia) as
an official threat.
To grasp why Washington is starting to think of China that way, however, you
need to take your eyes off the South China Sea for a moment, turn off Donald
Trump, Ben Carson, and the rest of the posse, and consider the real
game-changer -- or threat -- thats rattling Beltway nerves in Washington
when it comes to the new Great Game in Eurasia.
Xis Bedside Reading
Swarms of Chinese tourists iPhoning away and buying everything in sight in
major Western capitals already prefigure a Eurasian future closely tied to
and anchored by a Chinese economy turbo-charging toward that third
industrial revolution. If all goes according to plan, it will harness
everything from total connectivity and efficient high-tech infrastructure to
the expansion of green, clean energy hubs. Solar plants in the Gobi desert,
anyone?
Yes, Xi is a reader of economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, who first
conceived of a possible third industrial revolution powered by both the
Internet and renewable energy sources.
It turns out that the Chinese leadership has no problem with the idea of
harnessing cutting-edge Western soft power for its own purposes. In fact,
they seem convinced that no possible tool should be overlooked when it comes
to moving the country on to the next stage in the process that Chinas
Little Helmsman, former leader Deng Xiaoping, decades ago designated as the
era in which to get rich is glorious."
It helps when you have $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves and massive
surpluses of steel and cement. Thats the sort of thing that allows you to
go nation-building on a pan-Eurasian scale. Hence, Xis idea of creating
the kind of infrastructure that could, in the end, connect China to Central
Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Its what the Chinese call One
Belt, One Road; that is, the junction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and
the Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road.
Since Xi announced his One Belt, One Road policy in Kazakhstan in 2013,
PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong estimates that the state has ploughed
more than $250 billion into Silk Road-oriented projects ranging from
railways to power plants. Meanwhile, every significant Chinese business
player is on board, from telecom equipment giant Huawei to e-commerce
monster Alibaba (fresh from its Singles Day online blockbuster). The Bank of
China has already provided a $50 billion credit line for myriad Silk
Road-related projects. Chinas top cement-maker Anhui Conch is building at
least six monster cement plants in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Laos. Work aimed
at tying the Asian part of Eurasia together is proceeding at a striking
pace. For instance, the China-Laos, China-Thailand, and Jakarta-Bandung
railways -- contracts worth over $20 billion -- are to be completed by
Chinese companies before 2020.
With business booming, right now the third industrial revolution in China
looks ever more like a mad scramble toward a new form of modernity.
A Eurasian War on Terror
The One Belt, One Road plan for Eurasia reaches far beyond the Rudyard
Kipling-coined nineteenth century phrase the Great Game, which in its day
was meant to describe the British-Russian tournament of shadows for the
control of Central Asia. At the heart of the twenty-first centurys Great
Game lies Chinas currency, the yuan, which may, by November 30th, join the
International Monetary Funds Special Drawing Rights reserve-currency
basket. If so, this will in practice mean the total integration of the yuan,
and so of Beijing, into global financial markets, as an extra basket of
countries will add it to their foreign exchange holdings and subsequent
currency shifts may amount to the equivalent of trillions of U.S. dollars.
Couple the One Belt, One Road project with the recently founded, China-led
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Beijings Silk Road Infrastructure
Fund ($40 billion committed to it so far). Mix in an internationalized yuan
and you have the groundwork for Chinese companies to turbo-charge their way
into a pan-Eurasian (and even African) building spree of roads, high-speed
rail lines, fiber-optic networks, ports, pipelines, and power grids.
According to the Washington-dominated Asian Development Bank (ADB), there
is, at present, a monstrous gap of $800 billion in the funding of Asian
infrastructure development to 2020 and its yearning to be filled. Beijing
is now stepping right into what promises to be a paradigm-breaking binge of
economic development.
And dont forget about the bonuses that could conceivably follow such
developments. After all, in Chinas stunningly ambitious plans at least, its
Eurasian project will end up covering no less than 65 countries on three
continents, potentially affecting 4.4 billion people. If it succeeds even
in part, it could take the gloss off al-Qaeda- and ISIS-style
Wahhabi-influenced jihadism not only in Chinas Xinjiang Province, but also
in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Imagine it as a new kind of
Eurasian war on terror whose weapons would be trade and development. After
all, Beijings planners expect the countrys annual trade volume with
belt-and-road partners to surpass $2.5 trillion by 2025.
At the same time, another kind of binding geography -- what Ive long called
Pipelineistan, the vast network of energy pipelines crisscrossing the
region, bringing its oil and natural gas supplies to China -- is coming into
being. Its already spreading across Pakistan and Myanmar, and China is
planning to double down on this attempt to reinforce its
escape-from-the-Straits-of-Malacca strategy. (That bottleneck is still a
transit point for 75% of Chinese oil imports.) Beijing prefers a world in
which most of those energy imports are not water-borne and so at the mercy
of the U.S. Navy. More than 50% of Chinas natural gas already comes
overland from two Central Asian "stans" (Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) and
that percentage will only increase once pipelines to bring Siberian natural
gas to China come online before the end of the decade.
Of course, the concept behind all this, which might be sloganized as to go
west (and south) is glorious could induce a tectonic shift in Eurasian
relations at every level, but that depends on how it comes to be viewed by
the nations involved and by Washington.
Leaving economics aside for a moment, the success of the whole enterprise
will require superhuman PR skills from Beijing, something not always in
evidence. And there are many other problems to face (or duck): these include
Beijings Han superiority complex, not always exactly a hit among either
minority ethnic groups or neighboring states, as well as an economic push
that is often seen by Chinas ethnic minorities as benefiting only the Han
Chinese. Mix in a rising tide of nationalist feeling, the expansion of the
Chinese military (including its navy), conflict in its southern seas, and a
growing security obsession in Beijing. Add to that a foreign policy
minefield, which will work against maintaining a carefully calibrated
respect for the sovereignty of neighbors. Throw in the Obama
administrations pivot to Asia and its urge both to form anti-Chinese
alliances of containment and to beef up its own naval and air power in
waters close to China. And finally dont forget red tape and bureaucracy, a
Central Asian staple. All of this adds up to a formidable package of
obstacles to Xis Chinese dream and a new Eurasia.
All Aboard the Night Train
The Silk Road revival started out as a modest idea floated in Chinas
Ministry of Commerce. The initial goal was nothing more than getting extra
contracts for Chinese construction companies overseas. How far the country
has traveled since then. Starting from zero in 2003, China has ended up
building no less than 16,000 kilometers of high-speed rail tracks in these
years -- more than the rest of the planet combined.
And thats just the beginning. Beijing is now negotiating with 30 countries
to build another 5,000 kilometers of high-speed rail at a total investment
of $157 billion. Cost is, of course, king; a made-in-China high-speed
network (top speed: 350 kilometers an hour) costs around $17 million to $21
million per kilometer. Comparable European costs: $25 million to $39 million
per kilometer. So no wonder the Chinese are bidding for an $18 billion
project linking London with northern England, and another linking Los
Angeles to Las Vegas, while outbidding German companies to lay tracks in
Russia.
On another front, even though its not directly part of Chinas new Silk
Road planning, dont forget about the Iran-India-Afghanistan Agreement on
Transit and International Transportation Cooperation. This India-Iran
project to develop roads, railways, and ports is particularly focused on the
Iranian port of Chabahar, which is to be linked by new roads and railways to
the Afghan capital Kabul and then to parts of Central Asia.
Why Chabahar? Because this is Indias preferred transit corridor to Central
Asia and Russia, as the Khyber Pass in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands, the
countrys traditional linking point for this, remains too volatile. Built by
Iran, the transit corridor from Chabahar to Milak on the Iran-Afghanistan
border is now ready. By rail, Chabahar will then be connected to the Uzbek
border at Termez, which translates into Indian products reaching Central
Asia and Russia.
Think of this as the Southern Silk Road, linking South Asia with Central
Asia, and in the end, if all goes according to plan, West Asia with China.
It is part of a wildly ambitious plan for a North-South Transport Corridor,
an India-Iran-Russia joint project launched in 2002 and focused on the
development of inter-Asian trade.
Of course, you wont be surprised to know that, even here, China is deeply
involved. Chinese companies have already built a high-speed rail line from
the Iranian capital Tehran to Mashhad, near the Afghan border. China also
financed a metro rail line from Imam Khomeini Airport to downtown Tehran.
And it wants to use Chabahar as part of the so-called Iron Silk Road that is
someday slated to cross Iran and extend all the way to Turkey. To top it
off, China is already investing in the upgrading of Turkish ports.
Who Lost Eurasia?
For Chinese leaders, the One Belt, One Road plan -- an economic partnership
map with multiple rings interconnected with one another -- is seen as an
escape route from the Washington Consensus and the dollar-centered global
financial system that goes with it. And while guns are being drawn, the
battlefield of the future, as the Chinese see it, is essentially a global
economic one.
On one side are the mega-economic pacts being touted by Washington -- the
Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership -- that would split Eurasia in two. On the other, there is the
urge for a new pan-Eurasian integration program that would be focused on
China, and feature Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, and India as major players.
Last May, Russia and China closed a deal to coordinate the Russian-led
Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) with new Silk Road projects. As part of their
developing strategic partnership, Russia is already Chinas number one oil
supplier.
With Ukraines fate still in the balance, there is, at present, little room
for the sort of serious business dialogue between the European Union (EU)
and the EEU that might someday fuse Europe and Russia into the Chinese
vision of full-scale, continent-wide Eurasian integration. And yet German
business types, in particular, remain focused on and fascinated by the
limitless possibilities of the New Silk Road concept and the way it might
profitably link the continent.
If youre looking for a future first sign of détente on this score, keep an
eye on any EU moves to engage economically with the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. Its membership at present: China, Russia, and four "stans"
(Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan). India and Pakistan are
to become members in 2016, and Iran once U.N. sanctions are completely
lifted. A monster second step (no time soon) would be for this dialogue to
become the springboard for the building of a trans-European one-belt zone.
That could only happen after there was a genuine settlement in Ukraine and
EU sanctions on Russia had been lifted. Think of it as the long and winding
road towards what Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to sell the Germans
in 2010: a Eurasian free-trade zone extending from Vladivostok to Lisbon.
Any such moves will, of course, only happen over Washingtons dead body. At
the moment, inside the Beltway, sentiment ranges from gloating over the
economic death of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa), most of which are facing daunting economic dislocations even
as their political, diplomatic, and strategic integration proceeds apace, to
fear or even downright anticipation of World War III and the Russian
threat.
No one in Washington wants to lose Eurasia to China and its new Silk
Roads. On what former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski calls
the grand chessboard, Beltway elites and the punditocracy that follows
them will never resign themselves to seeing the U.S. relegated to the role
of offshore balancer, while China dominates an integrating Eurasia.
Hence, those two trade pacts and that pivot, the heightened U.S. naval
presence in Asian waters, the new urge to contain China, and the
demonization of both Putins Russia and the Chinese military threat.
Thucydides, Eat Your Heart Out
Which brings us full circle to Xis crush on Jeremy Rifkin. Make no mistake
about it: whatever Washington may want, China is indeed the rising power in
Eurasia and a larger-than-life economic magnet. From London to Berlin, there
are signs in the EU that, despite so many decades of trans-Atlantic
allegiance, there is also something too attractive to ignore about what
China has to offer. There is already a push towards the configuration of a
European-wide digital economy closely linked with China. The aim would be a
Rifkin-esque digitally integrated economic space spanning Eurasia, which in
turn would be an essential building block for that post-carbon third
industrial revolution.
The G-20 this year was in Antalya, Turkey, and it was a fractious affair
dominated by Islamic State jihadism in the streets of Paris. The G-20 in
2016 will be in Hangzhou, China, which also happens to be the hometown of
Jack Ma and the headquarters for Alibaba. You cant get more third
industrial revolution than that.
One year is an eternity in geopolitics. But what if, in 2016, Hangzhou did
indeed offer a vision of the future, of silk roads galore and night trains
from Central Asia to Duisburg, Germany, a future arguably dominated by Xis
vision. He is, at least, keen on enshrining the G-20 as a multipolar global
mechanism for coordinating a common development framework. Within it,
Washington and Beijing might sometimes actually work together in a world in
which chess, not Battleship, would be the game of the century.
Thucydides, eat your heart out.
Pepe Escobar is an independent political analyst who writes for RT and
Sputnik, and is a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Empire of Chaos.
His next book, 2030, is out this month. Follow him on Facebook.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Pepe Escobar
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176072
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, The New Great Game Between China and the U.S.
By Pepe Escobar
Posted on November 22, 2015, Printed on November 23, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176072/
In Washington, voices are rising fast and furiously. Freedom fries are a
thing of the past and everyone agrees on the need to support France (and on
more or less nothing else). Now, disagreements are sharpening over whether
to only incrementally intensify the use of U.S. military power in Syria
and Iraq or go to war big time and send in the troops. The editor of the
right-wing Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol, is already calling for 50,000
American troops to take the Islamic States capital, Raqqa. Republican
presidential candidate Senator Lindsey Graham, who has been urging that
another 20,000 troops be dispatched to the region for months, offers this
illuminating analogy to sports: "I'm looking for an away game when it comes
to ISIL, not a home game. I want to fight them in their backyard."
And dont forget that increasingly angry sideline discussion about the Obama
administration's plan to let 10,000 Syrian refugees, carefully vetted for up
to two years, trickle into the country. Alternatives proposed include
setting up even harsher, more time-consuming vetting processes to insure
that few of them can make it, allowing only certified, God-fearing Christian
Syrians in while -- give a rousing cheer for the clash of civilizations --
leaving Muslims to rot in hell, or just blocking the whole damn lot of them.
In such an atmosphere of rancor and pure war-hawkishness, its increasingly
hard to remember what a more peaceable world looked and sounded like. Thats
why TomDispatchs peripatetic reporter Pepe Escobar, who roams Eurasia,
especially the region he long ago dubbed Pipelineistan, is like a breath of
fresh air. He reminds us that there are still places where people are
talking about -- gasp! -- building up infrastructure in a big way, not
defunding it and letting it crumble into dust; places where leaders are
intent on thinking about how to unify worlds through commerce and trade, not
smash them to smithereens via air power and drones. Maybe thats just what
it means to live in the heartland of a rising power, rather than a declining
one.
His focus is China and dont get me wrong, that countrys no bowl of
cherries. Even if not at American levels, its pouring money into its
military and elbowing its neighbors in nearby waters, as you might expect of
a bulking-up regional power. Still, its got a dream that its leaders are
actually happy to promote and its not a warlike one that highlights an
ever-more heavily militarized world either. That in itself should count for
something. But let Pepe Escobar fill in the details on a Chinese dream of
full-time construction across Eurasia that, transposed to this continent,
would once have sounded American indeed. Tom
Will Chess, Not Battleship, Be the Game of the Future in Eurasia?
Silk Roads, Night Trains, and the Third Industrial Revolution in China
By Pepe Escobar
The U.S. is transfixed by its multibillion-dollar electoral circus. The
European Union is paralyzed by austerity, fear of refugees, and now all-out
jihad in the streets of Paris. So the West might be excused if its barely
caught the echoes of a Chinese version of Roy Orbisons All I Have to Do Is
Dream. And that new Chinese dream even comes with a road map.
The crooner is President Xi Jinping and that road map is the ambitious,
recently unveiled 13th Five-Year-Plan, or in the pop-video version, the
Shisanwu. After years of explosive economic expansion, it sanctifies the
countrys lower new normal gross domestic product growth rate of 6.5% a
year through at least 2020.
It also sanctifies an updated economic formula for the country: out with a
model based on low-wage manufacturing of export goods and in with the shock
of the new, namely, a Chinese version of the third industrial revolution.
And while Chinas leadership is focused on creating a middle-class future
powered by a consumer economy, its president is telling whoever is willing
to listen that, despite the fears of the Obama administration and of some of
the countrys neighbors, theres no reason for war ever to be on the agenda
for the U.S. and China.
Given the alarm in Washington about what is touted as a Beijing quietly
pursuing expansionism in the South China Sea, Xi has been remarkably blunt
on the subject of late. Neither Beijing nor Washington, he insists, should
be caught in the Thucydides trap, the belief that a rising power and the
ruling imperial power of the planet are condemned to go to war with each
other sooner or later.
It was only two months ago in Seattle that Xi told a group of digital
economy heavyweights, There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides
trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the
mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for
themselves.
A case can be made -- and Xis ready to make it -- that Washington, which,
from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, has gained something of a
reputation for strategic miscalculation in the twenty-first century, might
be doing it again. After all, U.S. military strategy documents and top
Pentagon figures have quite publicly started to label China (like Russia) as
an official threat.
To grasp why Washington is starting to think of China that way, however, you
need to take your eyes off the South China Sea for a moment, turn off Donald
Trump, Ben Carson, and the rest of the posse, and consider the real
game-changer -- or threat -- thats rattling Beltway nerves in Washington
when it comes to the new Great Game in Eurasia.
Xis Bedside Reading
Swarms of Chinese tourists iPhoning away and buying everything in sight in
major Western capitals already prefigure a Eurasian future closely tied to
and anchored by a Chinese economy turbo-charging toward that third
industrial revolution. If all goes according to plan, it will harness
everything from total connectivity and efficient high-tech infrastructure to
the expansion of green, clean energy hubs. Solar plants in the Gobi desert,
anyone?
Yes, Xi is a reader of economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, who first
conceived of a possible third industrial revolution powered by both the
Internet and renewable energy sources.
It turns out that the Chinese leadership has no problem with the idea of
harnessing cutting-edge Western soft power for its own purposes. In fact,
they seem convinced that no possible tool should be overlooked when it comes
to moving the country on to the next stage in the process that Chinas
Little Helmsman, former leader Deng Xiaoping, decades ago designated as the
era in which to get rich is glorious."
It helps when you have $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves and massive
surpluses of steel and cement. Thats the sort of thing that allows you to
go nation-building on a pan-Eurasian scale. Hence, Xis idea of creating
the kind of infrastructure that could, in the end, connect China to Central
Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Its what the Chinese call One
Belt, One Road; that is, the junction of the Silk Road Economic Belt and
the Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OYVYD3G/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&c
reative=390957&creativeASIN=B00OYVYD3G&linkCode=as2&tag=tomdispatch-20&linkI
d=5UE45I5VQNIHAVTN
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OYVYD3G/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&c
reative=390957&creativeASIN=B00OYVYD3G&linkCode=as2&tag=tomdispatch-20&linkI
d=5UE45I5VQNIHAVTNSince Xi announced his One Belt, One Road policy in
Kazakhstan in 2013, PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong estimates that the
state has ploughed more than $250 billion into Silk Road-oriented projects
ranging from railways to power plants. Meanwhile, every significant Chinese
business player is on board, from telecom equipment giant Huawei to
e-commerce monster Alibaba (fresh from its Singles Day online blockbuster).
The Bank of China has already provided a $50 billion credit line for myriad
Silk Road-related projects. Chinas top cement-maker Anhui Conch is building
at least six monster cement plants in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Laos. Work
aimed at tying the Asian part of Eurasia together is proceeding at a
striking pace. For instance, the China-Laos, China-Thailand, and
Jakarta-Bandung railways -- contracts worth over $20 billion -- are to be
completed by Chinese companies before 2020.
With business booming, right now the third industrial revolution in China
looks ever more like a mad scramble toward a new form of modernity.
A Eurasian War on Terror
The One Belt, One Road plan for Eurasia reaches far beyond the Rudyard
Kipling-coined nineteenth century phrase the Great Game, which in its day
was meant to describe the British-Russian tournament of shadows for the
control of Central Asia. At the heart of the twenty-first centurys Great
Game lies Chinas currency, the yuan, which may, by November 30th, join the
International Monetary Funds Special Drawing Rights reserve-currency
basket. If so, this will in practice mean the total integration of the yuan,
and so of Beijing, into global financial markets, as an extra basket of
countries will add it to their foreign exchange holdings and subsequent
currency shifts may amount to the equivalent of trillions of U.S. dollars.
Couple the One Belt, One Road project with the recently founded, China-led
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Beijings Silk Road Infrastructure
Fund ($40 billion committed to it so far). Mix in an internationalized yuan
and you have the groundwork for Chinese companies to turbo-charge their way
into a pan-Eurasian (and even African) building spree of roads, high-speed
rail lines, fiber-optic networks, ports, pipelines, and power grids.
According to the Washington-dominated Asian Development Bank (ADB), there
is, at present, a monstrous gap of $800 billion in the funding of Asian
infrastructure development to 2020 and its yearning to be filled. Beijing
is now stepping right into what promises to be a paradigm-breaking binge of
economic development.
And dont forget about the bonuses that could conceivably follow such
developments. After all, in Chinas stunningly ambitious plans at least, its
Eurasian project will end up covering no less than 65 countries on three
continents, potentially affecting 4.4 billion people. If it succeeds even in
part, it could take the gloss off al-Qaeda- and ISIS-style
Wahhabi-influenced jihadism not only in Chinas Xinjiang Province, but also
in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Imagine it as a new kind of
Eurasian war on terror whose weapons would be trade and development. After
all, Beijings planners expect the countrys annual trade volume with
belt-and-road partners to surpass $2.5 trillion by 2025.
At the same time, another kind of binding geography -- what Ive long called
Pipelineistan, the vast network of energy pipelines crisscrossing the
region, bringing its oil and natural gas supplies to China -- is coming into
being. Its already spreading across Pakistan and Myanmar, and China is
planning to double down on this attempt to reinforce its
escape-from-the-Straits-of-Malacca strategy. (That bottleneck is still a
transit point for 75% of Chinese oil imports.) Beijing prefers a world in
which most of those energy imports are not water-borne and so at the mercy
of the U.S. Navy. More than 50% of Chinas natural gas already comes
overland from two Central Asian "stans" (Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) and
that percentage will only increase once pipelines to bring Siberian natural
gas to China come online before the end of the decade.
Of course, the concept behind all this, which might be sloganized as to go
west (and south) is glorious could induce a tectonic shift in Eurasian
relations at every level, but that depends on how it comes to be viewed by
the nations involved and by Washington.
Leaving economics aside for a moment, the success of the whole enterprise
will require superhuman PR skills from Beijing, something not always in
evidence. And there are many other problems to face (or duck): these include
Beijings Han superiority complex, not always exactly a hit among either
minority ethnic groups or neighboring states, as well as an economic push
that is often seen by Chinas ethnic minorities as benefiting only the Han
Chinese. Mix in a rising tide of nationalist feeling, the expansion of the
Chinese military (including its navy), conflict in its southern seas, and a
growing security obsession in Beijing. Add to that a foreign policy
minefield, which will work against maintaining a carefully calibrated
respect for the sovereignty of neighbors. Throw in the Obama
administrations pivot to Asia and its urge both to form anti-Chinese
alliances of containment and to beef up its own naval and air power in
waters close to China. And finally dont forget red tape and bureaucracy, a
Central Asian staple. All of this adds up to a formidable package of
obstacles to Xis Chinese dream and a new Eurasia.
All Aboard the Night Train
The Silk Road revival started out as a modest idea floated in Chinas
Ministry of Commerce. The initial goal was nothing more than getting extra
contracts for Chinese construction companies overseas. How far the country
has traveled since then. Starting from zero in 2003, China has ended up
building no less than 16,000 kilometers of high-speed rail tracks in these
years -- more than the rest of the planet combined.
And thats just the beginning. Beijing is now negotiating with 30 countries
to build another 5,000 kilometers of high-speed rail at a total investment
of $157 billion. Cost is, of course, king; a made-in-China high-speed
network (top speed: 350 kilometers an hour) costs around $17 million to $21
million per kilometer. Comparable European costs: $25 million to $39 million
per kilometer. So no wonder the Chinese are bidding for an $18 billion
project linking London with northern England, and another linking Los
Angeles to Las Vegas, while outbidding German companies to lay tracks in
Russia.
On another front, even though its not directly part of Chinas new Silk
Road planning, dont forget about the Iran-India-Afghanistan Agreement on
Transit and International Transportation Cooperation. This India-Iran
project to develop roads, railways, and ports is particularly focused on the
Iranian port of Chabahar, which is to be linked by new roads and railways to
the Afghan capital Kabul and then to parts of Central Asia.
Why Chabahar? Because this is Indias preferred transit corridor to Central
Asia and Russia, as the Khyber Pass in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands, the
countrys traditional linking point for this, remains too volatile. Built by
Iran, the transit corridor from Chabahar to Milak on the Iran-Afghanistan
border is now ready. By rail, Chabahar will then be connected to the Uzbek
border at Termez, which translates into Indian products reaching Central
Asia and Russia.
Think of this as the Southern Silk Road, linking South Asia with Central
Asia, and in the end, if all goes according to plan, West Asia with China.
It is part of a wildly ambitious plan for a North-South Transport Corridor,
an India-Iran-Russia joint project launched in 2002 and focused on the
development of inter-Asian trade.
Of course, you wont be surprised to know that, even here, China is deeply
involved. Chinese companies have already built a high-speed rail line from
the Iranian capital Tehran to Mashhad, near the Afghan border. China also
financed a metro rail line from Imam Khomeini Airport to downtown Tehran.
And it wants to use Chabahar as part of the so-called Iron Silk Road that is
someday slated to cross Iran and extend all the way to Turkey. To top it
off, China is already investing in the upgrading of Turkish ports.
Who Lost Eurasia?
For Chinese leaders, the One Belt, One Road plan -- an economic partnership
map with multiple rings interconnected with one another -- is seen as an
escape route from the Washington Consensus and the dollar-centered global
financial system that goes with it. And while guns are being drawn, the
battlefield of the future, as the Chinese see it, is essentially a global
economic one.
On one side are the mega-economic pacts being touted by Washington -- the
Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership -- that would split Eurasia in two. On the other, there is the
urge for a new pan-Eurasian integration program that would be focused on
China, and feature Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, and India as major players.
Last May, Russia and China closed a deal to coordinate the Russian-led
Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) with new Silk Road projects. As part of their
developing strategic partnership, Russia is already Chinas number one oil
supplier.
With Ukraines fate still in the balance, there is, at present, little room
for the sort of serious business dialogue between the European Union (EU)
and the EEU that might someday fuse Europe and Russia into the Chinese
vision of full-scale, continent-wide Eurasian integration. And yet German
business types, in particular, remain focused on and fascinated by the
limitless possibilities of the New Silk Road concept and the way it might
profitably link the continent.
If youre looking for a future first sign of détente on this score, keep an
eye on any EU moves to engage economically with the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization. Its membership at present: China, Russia, and four "stans"
(Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan). India and Pakistan are
to become members in 2016, and Iran once U.N. sanctions are completely
lifted. A monster second step (no time soon) would be for this dialogue to
become the springboard for the building of a trans-European one-belt zone.
That could only happen after there was a genuine settlement in Ukraine and
EU sanctions on Russia had been lifted. Think of it as the long and winding
road towards what Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to sell the Germans
in 2010: a Eurasian free-trade zone extending from Vladivostok to Lisbon.
Any such moves will, of course, only happen over Washingtons dead body. At
the moment, inside the Beltway, sentiment ranges from gloating over the
economic death of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa), most of which are facing daunting economic dislocations even
as their political, diplomatic, and strategic integration proceeds apace, to
fear or even downright anticipation of World War III and the Russian
threat.
No one in Washington wants to lose Eurasia to China and its new Silk
Roads. On what former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski calls
the grand chessboard, Beltway elites and the punditocracy that follows
them will never resign themselves to seeing the U.S. relegated to the role
of offshore balancer, while China dominates an integrating Eurasia. Hence,
those two trade pacts and that pivot, the heightened U.S. naval presence
in Asian waters, the new urge to contain China, and the demonization of
both Putins Russia and the Chinese military threat.
Thucydides, Eat Your Heart Out
Which brings us full circle to Xis crush on Jeremy Rifkin. Make no mistake
about it: whatever Washington may want, China is indeed the rising power in
Eurasia and a larger-than-life economic magnet. From London to Berlin, there
are signs in the EU that, despite so many decades of trans-Atlantic
allegiance, there is also something too attractive to ignore about what
China has to offer. There is already a push towards the configuration of a
European-wide digital economy closely linked with China. The aim would be a
Rifkin-esque digitally integrated economic space spanning Eurasia, which in
turn would be an essential building block for that post-carbon third
industrial revolution.
The G-20 this year was in Antalya, Turkey, and it was a fractious affair
dominated by Islamic State jihadism in the streets of Paris. The G-20 in
2016 will be in Hangzhou, China, which also happens to be the hometown of
Jack Ma and the headquarters for Alibaba. You cant get more third
industrial revolution than that.
One year is an eternity in geopolitics. But what if, in 2016, Hangzhou did
indeed offer a vision of the future, of silk roads galore and night trains
from Central Asia to Duisburg, Germany, a future arguably dominated by Xis
vision. He is, at least, keen on enshrining the G-20 as a multipolar global
mechanism for coordinating a common development framework. Within it,
Washington and Beijing might sometimes actually work together in a world in
which chess, not Battleship, would be the game of the century.
Thucydides, eat your heart out.
Pepe Escobar is an independent political analyst who writes for RT and
Sputnik, and is a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Empire of Chaos.
His next book, 2030, is out this month. Follow him on Facebook.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Pepe Escobar
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176072
