China’s outsized latticework of global infrastructure is said to be rooted in a fierce sense of competitiveness which they claim they learned from 19th century America.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the sun famously never set on the British empire. A commanding navy enforced its will, yet all would have been lost if it were not for ports, roads, and railroads. The infrastructure that the British built everywhere they went embedded and enabled their power like bones and veins in a body.
Great nations have done this since Rome paved 55,000 miles (89,000 km) of roads and aqueducts in Europe. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Russia and the United States established their own imprint, skewering and taming nearby territories with projects like the Trans-Siberian and the Trans-Continental railways.
Now it’s the turn of the Chinese. Much has been made of Beijing’s “resource grab” in Africa and elsewhere, its construction of militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea and, most recently, its new strategy to project naval power broadly in the open seas.
Yet these profiles of an allegedly grasping and treacherous China tend to consider its ambitions in disconnected pieces. What these pieces add up to is a whole latticework of infrastructure materializing around the world. Combined with the ambitious activities of Chinese companies, they are quickly growing into history’s most extensive global commercial empire.
China views almost no place as uncontested. Chinese-financed and -built dams, roads, railroads, natural gas pipelines, ports, and airports are either in place or will be from Samoa to Rio de Janeiro, St. Petersburg to Jakarta, Mombasa to Vanuatu, and from the Arctic to Antarctica. Many are built in service of current and prospective mines, oilfields, and other businesses back to China, and at times to markets abroad.
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The story starts with a reimagined Silk Road…
In September 2013, newly anointed Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana. He was in town to seal the Chinese purchase of a $5 billion stake in Kashagan, one of the world’s largest oilfields. On that trip, he unveiled a plan ultimately dubbed “One Belt, One Road”—a land-and-sea version of the fabled East-West Silk Road trading route.
The idea is audacious in scope.
On land, Beijing has in mind a high-speed rail network (map 2). It will start in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, and connect with Laos and on into Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
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…extends into South America…
Xi has pledged $250 billion in investment in South America over the next 10 years. The centerpiece is a $10 billion, 3,300-mile, high-speed railroad (dotted red line above) that would start in Acu, near Rio de Janeiro, crossing the Amazon rainforest and the Andes Mountains, and terminate on the Peruvian coast. (NPR’s Tom Ashbrook conducted anexcellent hour-long program on the railroad.)
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…and also across Africa
In January, China agreed with the African Union to help build railroads (map 4), roads, and airports to link all 54 African countries. These plans are already under way, including a $13 billion, 875-mile-long coastal railroad in Nigeria; a $3.8 billion, 500-mile-long railroad connecting the Kenyan cities of Nairobi and Mombasa; a $4 billion, 460-mile railway linking the Ethiopian cities of Addis Ababa and Djibouti; and a $5.6 billion, 850-mile network of rail lines in Chad.
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The new Chinese empire is enveloping its neighbors …
In addition to its planned high-speed rail network into Malaysia and Singapore (map 2) and Laos (map 5) into southeast Asia (see map 5 for Laotian portion), China plans a canal across the Isthmus of Kra in Thailand, a deep-water container port and industrial park in Kuantan, Malaysia, and a $511-million expansionof Male airport in the Maldives.
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… as is Central Asia …
Central Asia has been an almost exclusively Russian playground for almost two centuries. It still is when it comes to pure muscle. But in matters of cash, China is fast moving in.
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… and Russia
Two years ago, Russia announced a pivot towards China. The centerpiece of the shift is two natural-gas pipelines (the larger of the two is the dotted red line in map 9) through which a fifth of China’s gas imports would flow. The deal had some snags, but they reportedly have been worked out, and construction is to begin soon. In addition, China is to build a $242 billion, 4,300-mile high-speed railway from Beijing to Moscow, a two-day trip compared with the current six-day Trans-Mongolian Express.
China is speeding up how fast goods get to Europe …
The Maritime Silk Road (the solid blue line in map 10) will enter Europe through a $260 million Chinese-funded upgrade of the Greek port of Piraeus. From there, rail service will continue into the Balkans. Ships from China will also make port in Lisbon, Portugal, and Duisburg, Germany. To take the network into the heart of Europe, Beijing has agreed to finance a 250-mile bullet train, costing up to $3 billion, from Belgrade to Budapest. Separately, China’s new 8,011-mile cargo railroad from Yiwu to Madrid is taking away business from far more time-consuming truck shipping.
… and has piled into US real estate
For now, the Chinese web of infrastructure does not extend to the US. Instead, what has been built elsewhere is serving as a jumping-off point to the gigantic US market. High-speed trains are only now starting to be planned in the US, and Chinese firms are front-runners to win contracts, including a $1 billion contest for the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles route, expected to be worth $68 billion. China’s CNR Corp. is already providing 284 passenger cars worth $566 million to the Boston subway system.
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Last but not least, China has polar ambitions
Though the closest Chinese territory gets to the Arctic Circle is a thousand miles away, China nonetheless calls itself a “near-Arctic state.” Chinese oil company Cnooc has a majority share in Iceland’s Dreki oil and natural gas field, and Beijing established the Arctic Yellow River Station, a permanent research facility on Norway’s Spitsbergen Island. In Antarctica, China has four research stations, structures that allow nations to stake a claim to the continent. Plans for a fifth station at a place called Inexpressible Island are under way. It is positioning itself to move for the continent’s resources when a 1959 treaty guaranteeing its wilderness status expires in 2048.
Full article: How China Is Building the Biggest Commercial-Military Empire in History (Defense One)
Global Geopolitics 
