Review | Globalisation, the ‘heartland’ and China’s New Silk Roads – an accessible primer by British historian
- Author of acclaimed history of the Silk Roads returns to the topic in guide to China’s economic advance into the ‘heartland’ of Eurasia and further afield
- The word ‘empire’ barely appears in Peter Frankopan’s book, but the concept is pervasive; so what will the rules of a China-led global order look like?
The New Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan, Bloomsbury, 4 stars
At the beginning of the 20th century, when the British empire spanned a sixth of the world, the geographer Halford Mackinder gave a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society laying out a theory of global power.
“The pivot region of the world’s politics” was not in Britain or its seaborne empire, he said, but “the vast area of Euro-Asia” that stretched from the River Volga to the Yangtze. He called it the “heartland”, and whoever controlled it, he argued, controlled the world.
Mackinder’s vision stood at odds with the political map of his times. Britain, notably, did not control the heartland; nor did the next biggest territorial empire, that of the French; nor did the emerging rivals Britons were worried about, Germany and the United States. A century later, Mackinder has enjoyed a revival for his apparently prescient insights into today’s power politics.
It cannot be a surprise to many readers that the balance of economic power today is tilting east – or that relative decline is having disruptive, polarising effects on the West. (Though just in case you have missed the news for the last couple of years, Frankopan quotes liberally from Donald Trump to make the point.) What The New Silk Roads contributes is a concise illustration of this shift from a Eurasian vantage point. Breezy and accessible, it seems perfectly pitched for a young student curious about globalisation, or for a passenger flying to China for the first time on business.
After a long preamble on how the world has changed over the past 25 years, Frankopan travels to central Asia to explore its economic salience today. Iran provides a third of India’s oil, Azerbaijan pumps gas to southeastern Europe, Afghanistan is building a pipeline into Pakistan and India. A “dry port” at Khorgos, on the Chinese border with Kazakhstan, acts as a giant dispatch centre for goods shipped in from coasts well over 1,500km (900 miles) away, while a spanking new seaport sits on Turkmenistan’s Caspian Sea coast.
In contrast to the secessionist drive of Trumpians and Brexiters, Frankopan shows how nations along the old Silk Road have been busily cultivating cross-border cooperation. A Eurasian Economic Union already reaches from Belarus through Russia to Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and has engaged in trade talks with Iran. Then there’s “the Bright Road initiative of Kazakhstan, the Two Corridors, One Economic Circle initiative of Vietnam, the Middle Corridor initiative of Turkey, the Development Road initiative of Mongolia” – all echoes, of course, of the biggest connective project of all, China’s Belt and Road initiative
Breathtakingly ambitious and “breathtakingly ambiguous”, he writes, the Belt and Road Initiative – Beijing’s initiative to link economies into a China-centred trading network – embodies China’s ambition to build land and sea connections to its neighbours. Much of The New Silk Roads is about how China’s “road” has come to ring the world. “Over 80 countries are now part of the initiative,” Frankopan points out, encompassing more than 63 per cent of the world’s population and 29 per cent of its global economic output.
Because of the genuinely global sweep of Chinese investment, Frankopan’s “new Silk Road” is often less an account of what’s happening in the heartland itself than it is a chronicle of the latest stage in modern globalisation. The terms of globalisation as most of us know it today have been laid down over the last 40 years or so by Western neo-liberals. The interesting question is what the rules of a China-led global order will look like. Frankopan cites Xi Jinping on China’s desire to “boost mutual understanding, mutual respect and mutual trust” and promote “peace and development”.
As critics will swiftly note, such principles sit alongside Chinese government practices including sabre-rattling in the South China Sea; predatory loan practices in sub-Saharan Africa; pressure placed on commercial airlines to change in-flight maps “to reflect Beijing’s views of the status of Taiwan”; and, most disturbingly, the detention of hundreds of thousands of Uygurs in “re-education camps”. A glance at the history of modern imperialism will show that the holders of global power live in glass houses, and there are plenty of stones to go around.
The term “empire” scarcely appears in this book, but the concept is pervasive. From the Atlantic-Pacific canal in Nicaragua to the Cape-to-Cairo railway in Africa, Chinese-led infrastructure projects mirror those undertaken by Western investors and engineers 150 years ago.
These may well be purely economic ventures, at least at their inception, rather than bids for territorial or political control: Xi has insisted that China’s investments in sub-Saharan Africa are guided by a policy of “no interference in African countries’ internal affairs; no imposition of our will on African countries; no attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa; and no seeking of selfish political gains”. Yet it was often to secure economic assets – the trading posts of Bengal and Canton, the mines of the Rand, the Suez Canal – that the British empire advanced across Africa and Asia, despite professed intentions to the contrary.
We are at the beginning of an epochal shift, but the forces disrupting the world order now are far bigger than specific nation states. They are the digital revolution and, pre-eminently, climate change. To modify Mackinder, whoever controls water supplies will control the world – and China’s rulers seem to know it.
