China and Europe: Reconnecting Across a New Silk Road
by Xiangming Chen and Julia Mardeusz
China and Europe have been closely linked since the Opium Wars, but the relative economic positions and power have reversed. Nothing illustrates this more symbolically than a stroll along the Bund in Shanghai: the low rise and old European-style buildings on the West side of the Huangpu River are dwarfed and eclipsed by the sparkling skyscrapers in Pudong on the east bank. The built environment of Shanghai, with its historic European-style buildings and modern China-built skyscrapers, is a physical manifestation of the reconfigured dynamic between China and Europe.
Since 2013, China’s connections with Europe have expanded since developing its official policy of building a westward economic corridor — a new Silk Road — along its ancient route. Most recently, in December 2014, China agreed with Hungary, Serbia, and Macedonia to build a rail link between Budapest and Belgrade, which will be financed by Chinese companies and completed by 2017. This rail line will then be connected to the Macedonian capital of Skopje and the Greek port city of Piraeus where COSCO, the Chinese shipping giant, operates two piers for container units. While the linked land-sea project will strengthen cross-border transport between Central and Southeastern Europe by reducing train travel times between Budapest and Belgrade from eight to three hours, it really is designed to enlarge and accelerate the movement of goods between China and Europe.
Having grown fivefold since 2003, trade between China and Europe reached $559 billion in 2013, solidifying the EU as China’s largest trading partner for the past 10 years. While the EU has invested more in China than the latter’s direct investment in the former, a US consulting company expects the EU to attract $250-500 billion more Chinese direct investment by 2020.1 A scenario likely to occur in the next few years is that China will invest more in Europe, instead of vice versa. This will be another telling sign that fortune and power are shifting in China’s favour.
These developments are not isolated and random. They represent a new structure of interactions between the older European economies and a rising Chinese power. We can understand this structure well by examining its conventional macroeconomic dimensions of bilateral trade and investment. In this essay, however, we make better sense of the new China-Europe relationship through a set of less used lenses: transport infrastructure, real estate, and tourism. They offer new insights into areas where China exerts a large and heavy footprint in Europe, via official channels and from the ground up.
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Since the C15th when, oceanic routes between western Europe , Asia and America were developed the world has been dominated by an imperial system based upon sea power: control of international trade through naval power.
The new Silk Road effectively undercuts the basis for the imperialsm which has ruled and shaped humanity for half a milllenium.
It is in this context that such current events as the US employment of terrorist proxies to impede the tendency towards Eurasian unity, its aggressive actions towards both Russia and China and its increased heavy handedness in its management of its satellites are best understood.
In Syria can be seen the long delayed, but inevitable implementation of a decision by Russia, on behalf of all non satellite nations, to call a halt to the United States’s Sampson Option: the deliberate wrecking of any region which will not kow tow to Washington.
I had expected this to take place when Libya was attacked. It was surprising that the No Fly scam passed the Security Council without being vetoed. Russia tried everything before it reluctantly confronted its US persecutor by coming to Syria’a aid. No doubt the adventure in Ukraine was the last straw.
Reblogged this on Siem Reap Mirror.