[Highlights] Because of heavily unionised rail companies in Europe, trains take on average six days to travel the 1,300km from Brest on the Polish-Belarusian border to Duisburg, while the 10,000km from Chongqing to Belarus is often completed in five-and-a-half days.
A freight train leaves for Duisburg from Weihai port in Rongcheng, China. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images
For much of the 20th century, the city of Duisburg in Germany’s industrial west was a steel-and-coal town whose chimneys cloaked the skies in smoke. And yet there is something about this soot-stained spot in the Ruhr valley that seems to encourage a particularly clear-sighted view of the rest of the world.
In 1585, it was in Duisburg that Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published a book of maps of European countries – the first ever “atlas” to carry that name. And it was here that Mercator first presented his new world map, the “Mercator projection”, that was so revolutionary for maritime navigators keen to steer merchant vessels across the high seas in the straightest possible line.
If in 2018 Duisburg is slowly rediscovering its cosmopolitan past, it is not just because four centuries after Mercator, traders are still trying to find the most direct route from A to B. As the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and Brexit-related trade barriers is driving wedges between the EU and the Anglosphere, this former rust-belt town town allows one to see in real time how Germanyand China are intensifying their economic ties.
Every week, around 30 Chinese trains arrive at a vast terminal in Duisburg’s inland port, their containers either stuffed with clothes, toys and hi-tech electronics from Chongqing, Wuhan or Yiwu, or carrying German cars, Scottish whisky, French wine and textiles from Milan heading the other way.
In Duisburg’s port, where train tracks run straight to the edge of the Rhine River, goods are loaded straight on to ships, stored for further dispatch in one of several football pitch-sized storage units, or sent on by train or truck to Greece, Spain or Britain.
Duisburg was already regarded as the world’s largest inland port. But thanks to the Belt and Road infrastructure project – a revival of the Silk Road route that Mercator had read about in the travelogues of Marco Polo, this time subsidised with billions of dollars by the Chinese government – the port is fast becoming Europe’s central logistics hub. Around 80% of trains from China now make it their first European stop, with most using the northern silk road route via Khorgos on the China-Kazakhstan border and the Russian capital, Moscow.
How Duisburg connects to China’s Belt (red) and Road (blue) routes.
How Duisburg connects to China’s Belt (red) and Road (blue) routes.
Local politicians, while still proud of the city’s links to the 16th-century mapmaker, also like to compliment the perceptive eye of modern Chinese cartographers: in a map of Europe displayed at Shanghai airport, they point out, Duisburg’s name is printed larger than London, Paris or Berlin.
“We are Germany’s China city,” says Sören Link, Duisburg’s Social Democrat mayor. For years, his city has been a symbol of the challenges of long-term structural changes facing industry in the Ruhr region: in 1987, photographs of thousands of Krupp steelworkers barricading a bridge over the Rhine protesting against imminent factory closures travelled around the world.
In 2018, Duisburg’s unemployment rate of 12% is still almost four times as high as the German average, but at least the viral images are different: four years ago the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, made Duisburg one of the few stops on his state visit to Germany and was welcomed by an orchestra playing traditional mining songs. “There are signs that the city’s importance will keep growing,” says Link. “We could become China’s gateway to Europe – and vice versa.”
The trains’ return journeys, however, remain Duisburg’s achilles heel. For every two full containers arriving in Europe from China, only one heads back the other way, and the port only earns a fifth of the fee from empty containers that have to be sent back to China.
Krupp steelworkers occupying a bridge over the Rhine in 1987. Photograph: Ullstein
And while the west’s appetite for gadgets made in China shows no sign of abating, one of the main European products heading east is powdered milk – a result of low trust in domestic brands following a 2008 food safety scandal. If that trust returns, even fewer containers may be heading east from Duisburg.
While other German port cities such as Hamburg run their harbour “like a landlord”, Staake says, Duisburg has worked to court new trade, modernising its logistics infrastructure and even setting up its own railway company. He is building a new 20,000 sq metre storage unit where China Railways will be able to neatly stack 2,000 containers.
Chinese President Xi Jinping Visits Duisburg in 2014 and welcomes the arrival of the Yuxinou container train, linking Duisburg directly with Chongqing. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images
Staake’s aspiration doesn’t stop there. For Duisburg to permanently establish itself on the New Silk Road, he says, rail travel between China and Europe needs to outstrip other freight methods.
“Rail freight between Chongqing and Duisburg is almost twice as expensive as shipping, but takes 12 days instead of 45. Air freight is at least twice as expensive as rail freight, but takes on average five days. If we can reduce lead times even further, below 10 days on average, then that opens up a lot more potential.”
But in Germany, some have been quick to sound a note of caution. If the still-recovering industries in western Germany make themselves too reliant on China, they warn, it could provide economic leverage for an authoritarian regime that wants to project its geopolitical power into western Europe. “What’s good for Duisburg isn’t necessarily good for the world,” cautioned one recent article.
For now though, China’s soft power barely registers in the region. The number of Chinese citizens living in the city has doubled in the past eight years – but from a low base of 568. The local Duisburg-Essen University houses a Confucius Institute and attracts the largest number of Chinese students in Germany, most of whom study engineering and economic sciences. They support a growing network of relatively authentic Asian fast food joints which now compete with the kebab houses introduced by a previous generation of migrants.
The number of Chinese businesses in the city has risen, too – up 50% since Xi visited in 2014 – but, again, there are still only 90. Unlike other cities on the New Silk Road, the port remains German-run.
The reasons journey times from China are still far too long, as Staake sees it, lie mainly with the heavily unionised rail companies in Europe rather than their counterparts in Asia: trains take on average six days to travel the 1,300km (800 miles) from Brest on the Polish-Belarusian border to Duisburg, while the 10,000km from Chongqing to Belarus is often completed in five-and-a-half days.
“The Chinese and the Kazakhs drive thousands of kilometres a day, they really work hard. It’s ridiculous, really. Of course we are trying to work out why this is happening. You know how many train drivers’ unions we have, and the Poles are not much better,” says Staake.
At the Duisburg city museum, visitors can still listen to the chants and jeers of the workers who went on strike over the closure of the steelworks in the 1980s and early 90s. A button hidden inside a wall made of original Ruhr valley coal triggers a recording. The modern Duisburg port with all its modern marvel, however, has yet to find its place in the city’s memory.
In the entrance hall to the museum, a wall greets visitors with the words for “welcome” in the languages of all the migrant workers who have shaped the city, from Kurdish to Greek to Polish. For now, the Mandarin or Cantonese phrases for “welcome” do not feature.
Xi Jinping’s new “Belt and Road” initiative is designed to promote economic development and extend China’s influence. Bloomberg Markets reports on the massive project’s impact along the Silk Road.
Bloomberg News 2018年8月1日 GMT-4 下午5:00
From
China is building a very 21st century empire—one where trade and debt lead the way, not armadas and boots on the ground. If President Xi Jinping’s ambitions become a reality, Beijing will cement its position at the center of a new world economic order spanning more than half the globe. Already, China has extended its influence far beyond that of the Tang Dynasty’s golden age more than a millennium ago.
The most tangible manifestation of Xi’s designs is the new Silk Road he first proposed in 2013. The enterprise morphed into the “Belt and Road” initiative, a mix of foreign policy, economic strategy, and charm offensive that, nurtured by a torrent of Chinese money, is rebalancing global political and economic alliances.
Illustration: Bryan Christie Design for Bloomberg Markets; Sources: Hong Kong Trade Development Council, China's National Development and Reform Commission
Xi calls the grand initiative “a road for peace.” Other world powers such as Japan and the U.S. remain skeptical about its stated aims and even more worried about unspoken ones, especially those hinting at military expansion. To assess the reality of Belt and Road from the ground up, Bloomberg Markets deployed a team of reporters to five cities on three continents at the forefront of China’s grand plan.
What emerges is a picture of mostly poor nations—laggards during the past half-century of global growth—that jumped at the promise of Chinese-financed projects they hoped would help them catch up. And yet as some high-profile ones falter and the cost of their Chinese funding rises, would-be beneficiaries from Hambantota, Sri Lanka, to Piraeus, Greece, are questioning the long-term price. In Malaysia, one of the biggest recipients of Chinese investment in Southeast Asia, newly installed Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is pushing back. Expressing concerns about loan conditions and the use of Chinese laborthat limit benefits to the local economy, he’s put billions of dollars of Chinese-funded rail and pipeline projects on hold.
Xi intends a century-long enterprise. China has already outspent the post-World War II U.S. Marshall Plan, measured in today’s dollars. Within a decade, according to Morgan Stanley estimates, China and its local partners will spend as much as $1.3 trillion on railways, roads, ports, and power grids. “Economic clout is diplomacy by other means,” says Nadège Rolland, Washington-based senior fellow for political and security affairs at the National Bureau of Asian Research. “It’s not for today. It’s for mid-21st century China.”
Belt and Road is very much about politics at home, too. With the government and state-owned enterprises investing vast sums outside China, Xi is encouraging Chinese companies to channel their spending into domestic projects that will directly benefit the economy and, incidentally, the popularity of his regime.
Businesses aren’t exactly defying Xi, but they’ve adjusted their plans to fit his. With the Belt and Road project enshrined in the Communist Party’s constitution as of last year, Chinese companies are using it to help them navigate Xi’s restrictions on foreign investment and capital outflows. Many are sheltering their overseas projects under the umbrella of Xi’s pet project to get the state’s blessing. Belt and Road, says Michael Every, head of financial markets research for Rabobank Group in Hong Kong, is “a political special sauce. ... If you drizzle it on anything, it tastes better.”
At first, the sauce whetted the appetites of many developing countries in Asia and Africa. As the notion of a modern Silk Road gained traction, Belt and Road meandered into places that had never had any connection with ancient caravans. This year it reached South America, the Caribbean, and even the Arctic. In June it rocketed into space: Beijing announced that Belt and Road-participating countries will be among the first in line to plug into China’s new satellite-navigation services.
Most of the proposed plans are infrastructure-based, such as a new deep-sea port in Myanmar and power lines in the Maldives. But almost any overseas investment gets tagged as being part of the initiative: a freight train carrying Chinese sunflower seeds to Tehran, a new courthouse in Papua New Guinea, an irrigation system in the Philippines.
The growing web of trade routes, including the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road Initiative, now extends into at least 76 countries, mostly developing nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, together with a handful of countries on the eastern edge of Europe. With most global trade moving by sea, it’s no surprise that many of the first places to lock up major Chinese investments were ports along with pipelines and other transport links that connect shipping to markets.
China’s plans to build or rebuild dozens of seaports, especially around the Indian Ocean, have sounded alarm bells in Washington and New Delhi: How many of those docks will end up hosting Chinese warships? Just as mighty navies and global networks of military bases helped support trading empires for Britain in the 19th century and the U.S. in the 20th century, so China is building a fleet of submarines, aircraft carriers, and warships that will rival U.S. power.
China has said it has no intention of using Belt and Road to exert undue political or military influence and that the initiative is designed only to enhance economic and cultural understanding between nations. “In pursuing the Belt and Road initiative,” Xi said in 2015, “we should focus on the fundamental issue of development, release the growth potential of various countries, and achieve economic integration.”
If that’s the case, Xi will need to change the perceptions of people who live along the length and breadth of his latter-day Silk Road. And that can only happen in the towns and cities that are being transformed by China’s empire of money. —Adam Majendie, with Sheridan Prasso
Yiwu, China
Photographer: ImageChina/AP Photo
Nestled in the mountains of Zhejiang province, Yiwu is the embodiment of “Made in China.” The market here is unlike any other. A vast complex of five-story buildings houses 75,000 booths selling 1.8 million kinds of goods across an expanse the size of 650 soccer fields. If you’ve picked up cheap jewelry and toys in District 1, you may need to hop onto a motorcycle taxi to reach auto parts in District 5. Most of those thousands upon thousands of stalls specialize in single items—scissors, for example: scores and scores of different kinds of scissors.
An ancient market town about 180 miles southwest of Shanghai that’s grown into a city of 1.2 million people, Yiwu got a big boost from Belt and Road. People from Beirut to Seoul and beyond have come to start businesses. Some 13,000 traders from around the world now live here. More are arriving every day, says Mohanad Ali Moh’d Shalabi, a Jordanian businessman who owns the Beyti Turkish restaurant in the center of the city and a company that exports goods to the Middle East. “In my restaurant,” he says, “I have met people from countries I have never known of.”
It wasn’t always like this. When Bloomberg reporters visited in early 2014, business was so slow that bored shopkeepers played computer games, read newspapers, or slumped over in their chairs, asleep.
Janey Zhang, whose Zhejiang Xingbao Umbrella Co. employs about 200 workers, remembers the bad old days. In 2013 the vast, labyrinthine halls of Yiwu—a legacy of 1978, when it became one of Communist China’s first wholesale markets—were almost deserted. Wholesalers and producers struggled with soaring manufacturing costs and the rise of online marketplaces such as Alibaba.
Then came a glimmer of hope. On social media and television, Zhang started seeing reports about a new freight train that would roll west for thousands of miles, crossing China into Central Asia and on into Europe. This was part of the Xi government’s “New Eurasian Land Bridge,” a seemingly endless skein of stacked container wagons replicating ancient Silk Road camel caravans. “The impact of the railway was huge,” Zhang says. “I remember seeing pictures of it piled high with cargo. After the service started, our sales and customers quickly increased.”
The first Europe-bound train pulled out of here in November 2014, heading to Kazakhstan and Russia, then through Eastern Europe and on to Madrid—an 8,000-mile journey that supplanted the Trans-Siberian Railway as the world’s longest freight-train route. Since then, more routes have opened to destinations including London, Amsterdam, and Tehran.
Zhang’s dream is for her Real Star brand to become the Hermès of umbrellas. Europe has long been her biggest market. Since the new freight trains came to Yiwu, she’s picked up customers all along the route, from Kazakhstan to Russia to Iran.
Trains have cut the time to Europe by a third or more compared with ships. The return journeys bring European goods such as wine, olive oil, vitamin pills, and whiskey. China Railway Express Co. said the value of outbound freight from Yiwu in the first four months of 2018 jumped 79 percent from a year earlier, to 1.8 billion yuan ($268 million), while imports tripled to 470 million yuan.
Even so, rail freight accounts for less than 1 percent of China’s overall exports. While it can shorten journey times to Europe, it’s more expensive than seaborne trade and slower and less flexible than air cargo. But for cities such as Yiwu, and especially for those in western China even farther away from seaports, the train that Xi built has injected new life into their economies. —Kevin Hamlin and Miao Han
Hambantota, Sri Lanka
Photographer: Atul Loke/Bloomberg
In a southern Sri Lankan jungle, Dharmasena Hettiarchchi plucks green chile peppers that grow in the shade of banana trees. His grandfather tended the same patch of land when this island was the British colony of Ceylon. Hettiarchchi takes a break from the heat under a teak tree, removes his wide-brimmed hat, and says, “If a jeep with Chinese characters comes down the road, the whole village will gather in protest.”
Hettiarchchi’s village and the surrounding town of Hambantota have become a cautionary tale for Xi’s Belt and Road aspirations. The idea was to take an inconsequential harbor visited by fewer than one ship a month on average and turn it into a modern, bustling seaport adorning a southern Belt and Road maritime route. It hasn’t turned out so well.
After Sri Lanka elected Hambantota native Mahinda Rajapaksa as president in 2005, he began sprinkling development projects across the region, one of the least-developed parts of this nation of 21 million people. Even long before Belt and Road was officially embedded in Chinese government policy, Beijing was eager to lend a hand, and Chinese loans financed Rajapaksa’s munificence. Hambantota (population at the time 11,200) got a new port, an international conference center, a cricket stadium, and an airport that, despite all the staff on show, doesn’t service a single scheduled flight.
To fund the projects here and others all across Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa government fell deep into debt. The port at Hambantota, for example, was partly funded during the Rajapaksa administration by a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China. By the time Rajapaksa was voted out of office in 2015, more than 90 percent of Sri Lanka’s government revenue was going toward servicing debt.
Last year, with Xi’s Belt and Road plan in full flow, a new Sri Lankan government moved to ease the debt. In return for $1.1 billion, it basically handed the seaport over to China. Under a 99-year lease agreement, the government gave 70 percent ownership of the port to China Merchants Group, a state-owned company with revenue bigger than Sri Lanka’s economy.
China Merchants has promised to revive the port and turn it into a major regional trading hub. But some local people have had enough of promises. “All these huge projects are a waste,” says Sisira Kumara Wahalathanthri, a local politician who opposes the current Sri Lanka government. “No ships are coming to the port. No flights are coming to the airport.”
After 30 years of civil war, many Sri Lankans are glad to see investment, any investment. At the port and in a surrounding industrial zone, construction work continues, presaging change. Displaced from their normal habitats, wild elephants regularly trample the port’s perimeter fence. At a nearby ancient Buddhist temple, head monk Beragama Wimala Buddhi Thero says he began attending protests because the area’s way of life is under threat. While his temple will be spared, the nearby farms won’t, leaving him and his fellow saffron-robed monks without worshipers.
“It’s becoming a Chinese colony,” he says of Hambantota. In a darkened hall, reclining on a wooden throne decorated with elaborately carved lions and flowers, he complains that China has already despoiled its own rivers in the name of progress. “If that kind of pollution comes here,” he says, “it doesn’t matter if we’re developed.”
The chile farmer Hettiarchchi is wary of the surveyors who’ve begun to appear in his neighborhood, making measurements and leaving their telltale markers behind. He says the plan is for him to be relocated to a part of eastern Sri Lanka to make way for development. It’s all happening so fast, and what Hettiarchchi could be losing can’t be replaced easily or quickly. Gesturing to the towering teak above him, the 52-year-old says, “A tree like this cannot grow within my lifetime.” —Iain Marlow, with Sheridan Prasso
Gwadar, Pakistan
Photographer: Asim Hafeez/Bloomberg
Surrounded by desert in southwest Pakistan there’s a stone arch bearing a single name, Al-Noor. Farther along a desolate road, a black shipping container has been painted to tell you where you are: Gwadar Creek Arena.
Al-Noor and Gwadar Creek are planned housing developments—emphasis on “planned.” There’s nothing here yet. The same goes for White Pearl City, Canadian City, Sun Silver City, and other residential tracts on the drawing boards. What you see are billboards, lots of them, as speculators and developers carve out future projects on the sun-blasted outskirts of an old fishing village named Gwadar.
Gwadar is a city of dreams made in China. Beijing is pouring money into highways and roads, a hospital, a coal-fired power plant, a new airport, a special economic zone along the lines of Shenzhen, and, crucially, the port. The chain of events that led to Chinese involvement here fits a pattern repeated up and down Belt and Road routes: Local or national efforts to expand a port stumble; China comes in and saves the day.
In the case of Gwadar, a redevelopment project begun in the 2000s under then-military ruler Pervez Musharraf foundered. In 2013 the Chinese arrived. A deep-water port here would be a natural southern terminus for a key binational project started that year, the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, as well as an important component of Belt and Road. To that end, Beijing is financing the lion’s share of the $1 billion in spending on the port and infrastructure development elsewhere in Gwadar.
Gwadar, across the Arabian Sea from Oman, is so remote that its electricity comes from Iran, 60 miles down the coast. In recent years, the village has become a city of 100,000 or so. Although still mostly a gigantic building site flanked by highways and crisscrossed by roads, signs of change abound.
Photographer: Asim Hafeez/Bloomberg
Ghulam Hussain, 40, is a shopkeeper. Every month, he gets six to eight truckloads of rice, flour, sugar, and other groceries delivered to him from Karachi, an eight-hour drive to the east. Five years ago, three loads a month met his needs. “There was nothing in Gwadar before,” he says. “It was deserted. We were really backward. Since the Chinese came, our businesses are booming.”
Even so, it’s hard to imagine Gwadar as the sea terminus of a road-and-rail trade link stretching 3,000 miles to eastern China. Most of the route would traverse some of the world’s most inhospitable—and economically barren—mountains and deserts.
A rail line, says Andrew Small, a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a Washington-based public-policy think tank, “makes no economic sense in the foreseeable future. The economy of Pakistan and the economy of western China would need to look quite different.”
Some say that military expansion is the real driver of the activity in and around Gwadar. “The Gwadar Port shows that there is a close link to the Chinese military ambitions,” U.S. Congressman Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) said during Foreign Affairs Committee hearings on U.S.-Pakistan relations in February.
Zahid Ali, who used to run a small business topping up credit on mobile phones in Sindh province in eastern Pakistan, sees things very differently. Desperate to find a way to pay off 800,000 rupees ($6,300) in debts, he asked a client if there was any job in Pakistan that paid 50,000 rupees a month. Go to Gwadar, the customer replied.
That’s what Ali did. He started as a laborer, learned steel work, and was soon earning 55,000 rupees a month. Now, having learned a little Chinese, he’s been promoted to supervisor. “We’re getting good money, so people are coming from far away,” he says during his work shift on the six-lane East Bay Expressway. “It’s good that the Chinese came here. A lot of people have gotten jobs who were jobless.”
The Chinese who came here to work don’t mix much with the locals. Some of the 150 or so of them live in a guarded and gated compound where green shipping containers have been converted into living spaces.
One of the first things a visitor to Gwadar notes is that there are more soldiers on the streets than police—an added precaution against the threat of terrorism across Pakistan. Security is tight because Chinese wouldn’t come otherwise, says a Pakistani army officer who declined to be named because he’s not authorized to talk to the news media. He says there are checkpoints on all the roads leading into the city.
Good, says Naseem Ahmed, 25, who works for the provincial government. “Security is great here,” he says as he warms up before taking part in a soccer game at a local stadium. “You can be out at 3 a.m. in the morning, and there is no fear.” —Faseeh Mangi, with Chris Kay
Mombasa, Kenya
Photographer: Riccardo Gangale/Bloomberg
Astride his boda boda, or motorcycle taxi, at a crossroads in Mombasa, Simon Agina is counting containers on a passing train that’s heading to Nairobi: “… 82, 83, 84.”
There are plenty of freight containers back where those came from—and much more besides. The port of Mombasa, Kenya’s import lifeline, is a heaving mass of traffic of all sorts. Trucks line up quayside to move shipping containers from the docks to the railway. Three-wheeled tuk-tuks weave dangerously between other vehicles through hot, dusty streets filled with noise and litter.
Kenya’s largest port is also its oldest. So in 2011, with the ancient British colonial-era Mombasa-to-Nairobi narrow-gauge railway falling into disrepair and Beijing in the market for African investments, Kenya made its move. It agreed to let China finance and build a standard-gauge railway at a cost of $3.8 billion. The Mombasa-Nairobi SGR, as it’s called, is the nation’s largest infrastructure project since independence from Britain in 1963.
Atanas Maina, managing director of Kenya Railways, says more than 30,000 Kenyans were employed directly on the project, which was run by China Road and Bridge Corp.; an additional 8,000 worked for subcontractors.
The first paying passengers rode the line in June last year. Along its 293-mile journey, the SGR rumbles across almost 100 bridges and viaducts, many designed to allow the lions, zebras, and other wildlife that inhabit two national parks, Tsavo East and Tsavo West, to cross under the tracks.
Freight trains like the one Agina saw from his boda boda began running in January. “Those are 84 trucks off the road,” he says as the containers whiz by. The railway cuts the Mombasa-Nairobi trip to five hours, down from more than eight by truck. Five freight trains a day were making the journey during spring. The number could eventually increase to 12, removing as many as 1,700 of the 3,000 trucks that currently ply the route.
Like any major infrastructure project, the rail line has its detractors. The economist and government critic David Ndii says it’s not commercially viable, while a Kenyan newspaper, the Standard, accused China Road and Bridge of “neo-colonialism, racism and blatant discrimination” in its treatment of local employees; Kenya Railways subsequently said it would investigate the allegations.
Environmental activists tried without success to block the SGR from going through Tsavo parkland and have taken legal action to try to stop the next phase of railway construction, which would run the line through Nairobi National Park on the edge of the capital.
Trucking companies, whose business grew steadily as the old railway decayed, are now worried about the loss of customers. Vanessa Evans, managing director of Rongai Workshop & Transport Ltd., says the SGR could have been a plus for the Kenyan economy in the long run, but poor coordination at the Mombasa and Nairobi rail terminals causes cargo backups and delays. The new rail line, she says, “has nearly destroyed our business because the turnaround time varies between not good and awful. We have been in agony for the past five months.”
The train that pulls out of Nairobi Railway Station each morning at 8 o’clock, with noteworthy punctuality, is called the Madaraka Express. In Swahili, “madaraka” means power or responsibility; Madaraka Day, a national holiday, celebrates self-rule. If the old railway was a relic of Kenya’s British colonial past, the new one, built with Beijing’s money, could be seen as a harbinger of a new kind of imperial reach.
It’s a blue-suited Chinese instructor who makes sure the female train attendants—uniformed in the colors of the Kenyan flag—are standing in a nice straight line as passengers board. China financed 90 percent of the SGR’s $3.8 billion cost. And the giant Chinese Communications Construction Co. will operate the rail line for its first decade.
The area around the station thrums with activity as construction pushes ahead on houses, container yards, and warehouses. Along the route to Mombasa, gleaming steel-and-glass stations stand out against clusters of tiny houses with rusty corrugated iron roofs and mud walls; the contrast encourages the locals “to dream big,” says Maina.
Michael Ndungu, 21, a student who studies in Mombasa and visits the capital on weekends, used to take the bus. “The SGR has made my life much better,” he says. “It is faster and definitely safer.” In Mombasa the surge in passengers—1.3 million during the first six months of the year—has been good for the economy. “Business is good,” says Stephen Kazungu, a 26-year-old taxi driver.
The newly laid track, the trains, the stations—“You don’t see that kind of infrastructure development in this part of the country,” says Agina, the 22-year-old boda boda driver, as the freight train fades into the distance. “This is amazing.” —Samuel Gebre
Piraeus, Greece
Photographer: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters
It was the spring of 2016. Greece was in the vise-grip of the European sovereign debt crisis. Its neighbors and creditors were pressuring the government to enforce austerity. So Greece sold control of Piraeus, the storied seaport once connected to Athens by fortified walls, to China Cosco Shipping Corp., a Chinese state-owned enterprise.
The deal bears many of the hallmarks of China’s biggest Belt and Road projects. It began years before Xi’s signature project was announced—in 2009, Cosco won a contract to run part of Piraeus’s container business—and was then handily folded into the initiative; it was geared largely toward enhancing the reach of China’s maritime trade; and it involved a host nation desperate for investment.
But unlike many of China’s high-priced Belt and Road investments, this isn’t a remote greenfield construction project in a developing nation. The port deal marked China’s gradual takeover of one of Europe’s oldest and most important sea gateways. Piraeus has been Athens’s port and shipyard for about 2,500 years, a perch on the Mediterranean that helped Athens become a naval superpower.
From his office, Ioannis Kordatos, managing director of the Hellenic Welding Association, can see the wall of containers stacked high at Pier II, Cosco’s original beachhead here. “If Cosco magically disappeared tomorrow, it would be a huge loss,” says Kordatos. “What matters isn’t that they are Chinese but that they are a private company doing serious business in the area.”
Very serious business. The 2016 deal gave Cosco a 67 percent share of Piraeus Port Authority SA for €368.5 million ($429.5 million). During PPA’s first full year under Chinese control, its net income jumped 69 percent, to €11.3 million, as revenue from its container terminal rose 53 percent. Since Cosco first became involved, Piraeus has risen to be Europe’s seventh-busiest container port; 10 years ago, it wasn’t in Europe’s top 15.
Piraeus is a bustling city in its own right. Marinas here are filled with Athenians’ yachts ready for weekend sailing. Passenger ferries dock near the town center to carry locals and tourists to Aegean islands. Farther west, in the repair yards, workers mend boats. Above all, giant gantry cranes loom over shipping containers.
These days, whether you arrive here by sea, by metro, or by road, you’re bound to run into construction, with chunks of the city boarded up as bulldozers work on a new subway station and public transportation connections.
In the heart of Piraeus, Cosco plans to upgrade the ferry and cruise ship terminals, adding a shopping mall and new hotels. Farther out, around the Gulf of Elefsina, Cosco’s investments could help revive Greece’s rust-belt industrial heartland in the Thriasio Plain west of Athens. There, a planned logistics center, linked to the port by rail, could become a staging area for goods headed north through the Balkans.
Not everybody in Piraeus shares Kordatos’s warm feeling toward Cosco’s purchase of PPA. “If I had the money, I’d buy it myself rather than let it go to foreigners,” says Evlampia Kavvatha, who owns a store selling shelving in the town center.
Perhaps Cosco’s presence here is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures. Like the rest of the country, Piraeus has been hit by a depression that’s wiped out a quarter of the nation’s economic output since the sovereign debt crisis. Away from the main shopping district street, Piraeus suffers from the blight of empty storefronts that afflicts cities across Greece.
Giorgos Gogos, general secretary of the Piraeus Dockworkers Union, says he’s worried about the impact of a Chinese state-owned enterprise on labor relations and the local community. “We think it’s a mistake for infrastructure like this to leave the state,” he says. “The Chinese have their own way of operating. [Cosco is] a state colossus backed by capital of the Chinese state. It has the characteristic of Chinese state capitalism.”
For all the concern about the potentially corrosive effects on Greece’s economy and sovereignty—and about Beijing’s ulterior motives—Cosco’s incursion into Piraeus has something in common with other investments by Beijing along the vast and meandering Belt and Road: China put its money where others wouldn’t. —Marcus Bensasson
Majendie is a senior editor in Singapore. Hamlin and Han cover the economy in Beijing. Marlow covers government in New Delhi. Mangi covers companies in Karachi. Gebre covers news in Nairobi. Bensasson covers the economy in Athens.
China Railway Express brings boom time to German port city
Xinhua | Updated: 2018-04-10 13:37
BERLIN - For centuries, river steamers have plied the Rhine River, and the sound of their whistles has been a symbol of the prosperity of the German city of Duisburg.
Today, the sound of those whistles converges here with the sirens of trains coming from thousands of miles away. Like a cheerful symphony, new vitality is being brought to the city.
Duisburg, Germany's biggest inland port and one of the important slots of China Railway Express, has witnessed fruitful results of the Belt and Road Initiative over the past few years and harvested its own urban economic growth.
Amelie Erxleben, of DIT Duisburg Intermodal Terminal, recently conducted a tour of the terminal, where containers labeled with "China Railway Express" were seen everywhere. Large equipment machines were busy loading and unloading.
"About one third of our business now is related to China," Erxleben said, adding that "around 25 west-and eastbound CRE trains are expected here every week".
DIT, one of the nine large freight yards, is also a main railway container-distribution center in the region. Only four years ago, DIT only handled seven to eight CRE trains weekly.
The soaring business volume makes DIT appear more crowded than ever. Even the road in front of its gate is often congested.
In order to deal with the growth, management of the terminal has recently bought an additional 200,000 square meters of land, according to Erxleben.
Duisburg is on one end of the Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe rail line, which started operation in 2011 from the southwest Chinese city of Chongqing. In recent years, more and more trains operated by CRE from Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Yiwu, Shenyang and other Chinese cities have been arriving here.
Statistics show that 78 Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe trains, a year-on-year increase of 66 percent, have been operated since this January. More than 1,000 trains are planned this year.
Chen Si, a native of China's western province of Sichuan, is exploring the huge market brought by CRE trains, together with her husband Klaus Hellmann, a member of the supervisory board of the German logistics company Hellmann.
The transport between Germany and China takes CRE trains approximately 14 days, much faster than by sea and much cheaper than by air. Therefore, it has certain comparative advantages, according to Chen.
"Last year, the total volume of our business by rail from Europe to China amounted to 160,000 metric tons, almost equaling the weight of Cologne Cathedral," said Matthias Magnor, chief operating officer of Road and Rail at Hellmann, during an interview with Xinhua.
CRE trains have made a great contribution to that volume. Meanwhile, the business is growing rapidly, Magnor added.
Many industries have benefited from the Europe-China freight trains.
"For example, the fashion industry - the sales would be very much affected by seasonal reasons. Before the operation of CRE trains, it would take around 40 to 50 days to transport. But now, 14 to 15 days are needed, which will sufficiently ensure the sales," Magnor said.
In fact, when Hellmann began its CRE train business five years ago, some German companies were not very optimistic.
"I managed to persuade them that it is a viable transport option," Hellmann said.
Facts speak louder than words. CRE trains under the Belt and Road Initiative have become the "third pillar" for transportation between Europe and Asia, besides air and sea shipping.
In recent years, Duisburg has also faced the problem of traditional growth momentum decline and is in search of new growth engines. And in this case, the arrival of CRE trains has been just like an old ship opening a new sail, triggering a new boom era in Duisburg.
Johannes Pflug, responsible for China affairs in the Duisburg municipality, said that the volume of the Port of Duisburg grew by 30 percent in 2017, making it the fastest growing port in Germany.
CRE trains play an important role in that growth, and in the more than 6,000 jobs in the area of logistics that have been created, Pflug said.
In Pflug's opinion, the CRE trains achieve a win-win situation for China and Europe. Not only Chinese goods, but also Chinese capital and companies are attracted to Duisburg. More than 100 Chinese companies have so far settled in the region.
"A Chinese company is constructing an 18-story hotel; Chinese company Huawei is responsible for the lighting project of the city," Pflug said.
Soeren Link, the mayor of Duisburg, said CRE trains have brought unlimited opportunities to the city. They bring not only the development of local logistics, but also the improvement of supporting services.
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"one of the main European products heading east is powdered milk – a result of low trust in domestic brands following a 2008 food safety scandal."
I donot know whether the Chinese like the taste of caramel. Milkpowder for human consumption it not suitable to be land transported over long distances. The temperature in the containers can become very high risking a maillard reaction (kind of caramelization of the milksugar called lactose).
Milkpowders better be shipped by ocean going vessel while the containers are stowed under hatch away from any heatsource.
It is recommendable for the EU to put more effort on the trade and relationship with Eur-asian countries. Please note that the USA policy always tried to make this Eur-asia trade difficult. Now Trump objected the gaspipeline between Russia and Germany, do you need more proof that the US is acting against the interest of the EU? Leave Trump his promise to make the USA great again and in the meantime the EU develops to the East. EU never got a better opportunity thanks to the "greatness" of Trump.
Its very difficult to decide whether this is a good thing or bad.
The positive side is: If some rich country is willing to spend their money developing infrastructure, its a good thing right? And the other great thing about this that as the Chinese gain more influence in Asia, the liberal left globalists are going to lose out big time. Because China simply cannot accommodate them. All of the liberal left policies to control foreign governments like Climate change policing, Human rights abuse warnings, Gender/ Women/ Children equality pressure groups, ideological grip over foreign country's judiciary/ media, Western lobbying, all these things will weaken because of Chinese influence. The foundations and the NGOs who treat Europe/ Asia as their playground, IMF elitism, EUs enforcement of its policies on poor countries, Socialistic revolutionaries, Communist revolutionaries, Islamic groups ALL are going to weaken, maybe even die. Mind you the Chinese will act as if they support all of these but it will be a lie. Because they simply cannot afford to empower any of these groups if their plan has to work. i personally also feel that the Chinese will covertly support breakup of the EU while shaking hands with Merkel on stage. So the Chinese investments is a good thing.
The negative side: is of course that China will put in its military assets all over the place to "protect" its investment. And the Chinese are bullies. They cheat, they deceive, they lie, they break international agreements at will, they refuse to accept international arbitration if they want to. Remember when the Guardian wrote an article some years back about those artificial islands Chinese were making by calling them just peaceful lighthouse islands. Well, the chinese have made it into a military base now anf the guardian has still not apologized for that error in reporting. They will bring Chinese workers and settle them there. Even the Americans cannot control the inner cities chinese gangs. Every financial institution in that country, every thing they can buy including houses, media, they will buy. So that country will become a quasi-colony. The Elites of the country will become super-rich. The poor will become more poor. Ultimately Dilution of Freedom and sovereignty is the price you will pay for investment.
Anyone else a little bit in awe over how the communist party is branching out to challenge America and enticing so many to sell out and surrender to its will? Even more worrying is a lot of people seem to think that we should sit back and say nothing because our governments arn’t so morally clean. So that’s it then, throw the ideas of freedom, democracy, human rights into the bin and now down to the rise of China? Because remember everybody - disagree with the communist party and you disagree with the Chinese people, so you muuust be a racist - isn’t that how it works? Frankly it’s insulting because on the contrary it’s beneficial for the rights of the Chinese people that we hold Beijing accountable for its human rights violations - particularly the long suffering Tibetans (because you can’t hop in no time machine and protest the yanks government for its treatment of native Americans, or British leaders for various colonisations - but you sure can open your eyes to what is going on in the world today!!)
Well I don t see a lot of incentive for Poland to spend billions to allow their cows to watch pass faster the chinese trains.... Even with the complex relation between Germany and them, we can imagine a kind of revenge for Nord Stream 2.
I would not wonder that a lot of Poles are fed up by the PIS -Party. ;-) Do they gain any advantage from to have 1000 years time after war? Not really. Younger generations are fed up by the clerical, nationalistic PIS guys. Wait and see.
Give the Chinese all the 99-year leases they want. Let them sink billions into roads and harbours. Then, expropriate them. Lots of precedent, in lots of scenarios. The roads don't go back to China. They stay in the Nation. The cost stays a Chinese problem.
Trump is a greater danger to Germany than China is. Trump is making Germany his punch bag, his villain. If he gets what he wants, soon Germany will lose its status as EU top dog. After that, trump's plan to split EU will succeed, and voila, another competitor to the US will be gone, and the top dog will turn into loyal lap dog.
For every two full containers arriving in Europe from China, only one heads back the other way, ... “The ratio used to be 4:1, so it has improved, but we still have an imbalance,” admits Erich Staake,
once we start to flood china with our cheap porsches and leberkäs. making them addicted toweizenbier, it will only be one-way traffic. the chinese might think in decades, but we germans think in centuries, so when the port was built 200 years ago, it was all part of a cunning plan. once we've build the gibraltar bridge ("thanks agent farage, here's your german passport". stroking my white cat), Mercosur, then latin-america, then canada and the usa have joined the single market, total world domination will be just the start for our inter-galactic trade surplus. so the EU is absolutely safe for the next one or two thousand years.
The EU is not safe; you must have forgotten Brexit because without the Brits everything will fall apart. The day after John Major became PM in the UK, he said he/they'd now lead the development of Europe, in 1990.
how nice to read something refreshingly different and informative, and not laden with boring comments about brexit and trump.
well, except for
"As the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and Brexit-related trade barriers is driving wedges between the EU and the Anglosphere,"
and how apt is that, considering that trump's tariff tiff is far more recent than the events chronicled in the story. and what the fuck is the 'Anglosphere'?
The sheer ignorance exhibited by Neo Liberalism, that allowing Capitalism to gain a foothold in China would somehow bring Liberty and Justice for All, is beyond belief. The economy of scale, made this a fool's errand from the beginning. China's militarization of the South China Sea, is the real evidence of China's strategic thinking. A billion and a half people reside in China, more than the EU and America put together. The Chinese in power cannot allow the "evolution" the West was dreaming of. China is an Anaconda, that will consume all it desires. Who can stop it?
The writer said the Mercator Atlas from mid 1500s was "the first ever Atlas". Incorrect. The first ever Atlas was a Majorcan map made by a Jewish cartographer that we know now as "the Catalan Atlas", around 1230s.
As AI and robotics advance, those unionized German train operators may make themselves redundant. Stevedores at ports in this country are rapidly being replaced by automation for similar reasons. Truckers are also on the endangered list.
Truck driving requires actual human intelligence The last mile may need that but 500 mile A2B mainly motorway trucking could be done by AI now. It is being done in some parts of the World. Given that more than 90% of motor vehicle related deaths are due to human error being a long distance trucker is going the way of Pyramid construction worker.
Motorways are not standardized enough for automatization, there are millions of different trees, mountains, clouds, vehicles. A computer can operate the subway without accident, because nothing unforeseen can show up in a tunnel. But as long as our roads aren’t underground tubes, autonomous driving will always fail.
"As the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and Brexit-related trade barriers is driving wedges between the EU and the Anglosphere,"
Seriously? blaming Trump for this when the tariffs were only spoken of a couple of months ago and the setup was obviously already accomplished into Germany.
A reporter has to justify the relevance of a story. If the trick works and he gets the green light from the editor-in-chief, freebie readers shouldn't complain.
So if the article is to be believed a driver travelling 1000Km in a 12 hour shift without a break would have to achieve an average speed of 52mph. So if the the Chinese are driving 'thousands of Kilometres a day' they're either driving far longer than a 12 hour shift without a break of at a speed considerably faster than an average of 52 mph. Shumfing surely not right here, let alone highly dangerous. No wonder unions resist it.
In Australia and even here sometimes lorries have two drivers. I guess the Russians, Kazaks and Chinese have figured out something similar. I would think they would almost certainly switch drivers anyway at the border and if they switch drivers every 8 hours would not even need a 2nd driver on the train.
Mind your if you have to visit and work at customers then with our broken road system you will be lucky to escape with less than a 12 hour shift. Taken me 15 hours today from leaving home to finishing evening meal in hotel which I had as soon as I arrived.
My partner is a truck driver, he rarely ever has 9-hour only shifts (which is the allowable limit), plus, even when they don't make you work past the legal limit, if you get stuck in traffic there's nothing to do. You can't just stop the truck and leave it in the middle of the road. The last company he worked for had him work a 17-hour shift before he quit...
Also, in most cases, it is very unsafe to drive a loaded truck over 90 km/h. The interwebs are full of spectacular accidents involving such careless truck drivers.
What a great idea the Chinese have: setting out to places in Africa and Asia, doing deals with the most competent/friendly/powerful local bigwigs, and setting up shop to sell the locals stuff, building railways and saying it is all to improve trade. I'm amazed no-one has tried this before.
As Europe only manages an average speed of under 6 mph for even its regular goods trains it would make no sense to train goods any further when lorries are so many times quicker. Looks like UK’s heritage train industry could make improvements everywhere.
Ah yes, lorries - the Queens of the Road. Lots of lovely profit for the motor industry, petrol, asphalt and rubber. That's why Thatcher never set foot on a train. Never mind the pollution, infesting children's brains, the noise, dust and fumes.
One of the most impressive things about UK trains is how tiny their freight trans are -- little things with a couple of dozen wagons. In the Real World where there's a need to move stuff over long distances economically you end up with trains that can be literally miles long (they're usually a bit shorter than that, maybe a half mile to a mile). There's no need to travel at high speed rail speeds; the key is predictability -- think "conveyor belt".
Sure he did so. But Ptolemy didn't collect all known maps of that time and improve them with the newest informations to form a real Atlas, that was sold as a big book. Ortelius was the first, who did that with maps from all over the world.
Beast of a train in the photo above, all mod cons for the drivers one would hope given the length of the journey. Similar no doubt to the one that pitched up at Barking a while back, chock full of all sorts Chinese and back loaded Scotch. Portillo's next must do .. , worth a belated entry in his Bradshaw's, eh?
The difference between Duisburg and parallel circumstances in Africa and Cambodia - Germany has already established/working infrastructure, while many African nations / Cambodia need the monies offered at attractive interest rates. Those interest rates, as presented in above article, are somewhat disingenuous in that the probability of default is high. When that eventually happens, those carrying the debt are able to assume ownership and governance - removing locals, bringing in Chinese workers, management, politicians and policy makers. May take a generation, but it will be the new colonialism of Africa and Cambodia.
I don't think it will go down well with the Chinese when the African nations pull on them what they did to the western countries and say they can't pay them. Everything they have will be swallowed whole and no one will complain as they have about us. China will never let the debt go.
China has also been providing debt relief to African countries on its own terms. At the first China-Africa Cooperation Forum in October 2000 in Beijing, the Chinese government pledged to write off in two years overdue obligations on 156 loans owed by African countries; these totaled 10.5 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion). The pledge was fulfilled ahead of schedule (He, 2007). In November 2006 China announced that it would cancel another 10 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion) in debt—168 interest-free government loans that had matured by the end of 2005 and were owed by 33 of the heavily indebted and least developed countries in Africa. By mid-May 2007 China had signed debt forgiveness agreements with 11 of these countries and expected to conclude agreements with the other 22 by the end of 2007. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2007/wp07211.pdf
the new silk road in action. I remember when the west used to take on such massive life changing projects, sadly no more, the west can't even look after its existing, crumbling infrastructure.
the EU only trades with germany, while germany trades with the world. soon germany will also trade with scotland, who will use its spaceport to trade with mars and other planets. so it's all sorted.
Not sure about the relevance, but in Northern Germany, tea is almost as popular as it is in Britain. Coffee is also popular, but there is a distinct tea culture as well.
“Rail freight between Chongqing and Duisburg is almost twice as expensive as shipping, but takes 12 days instead of 45. Air freight is at least twice as expensive as rail freight, but takes on average five days. If we can reduce lead times even further, below 10 days on average, then that opens up a lot more potential
This is kind of the problem in that rail falls between two stools. The majority of durable goods aren't time sensitive enough to merit paying double the cost of shipping, whereas most goods that need to arrive fast need to get there in much less than 12 (or even 10 days).
Also, it's hardly encouraging if the response to BRI is for European employers to start demanding that labour standards be lowered to the level of China or Central Asia.
whatever has happened to the Royal Albert Docks/ Kong Hong entropt? there's no up to date reporting that i can find anywhere. Or is it just another Cambourne unicorn put out to graze in Doggerland at the bottom of the North Sea (soon to be joined by HS2 and Hinkley Point C... and the post-Brexit UK economy?)?
“The Chinese and the Kazakhs drive thousands of kilometres a day, they really work hard. It’s ridiculous, really. Of course we are trying to work out why this is happening. You know how many train drivers’ unions we have, and the Poles are not much better,”
I hate the use of “not much better” here, clearly workers well-being is not very important for Mr Straach
When they need six days for 1.300kms a question of attitude is at stake; Mr. Staake's wording may be not quite the right one; his criticism is totally justified.
But we don’t know this, it’s not really explained why exactly it takes so long other than blaming “unions” with no further context, maybe it’s border controls or outdated infrastructure?
Duisburg is also home to a fab little music festival, Traumzeit: http://www.traumzeit-festival.de/ Regulars include The Real Tuesday Weld, Lambchop and Iggy Pop.
Gotcha! The Anglo-American imperium based on control of the seas was created over time for London (and later, NYC) banking houses to compete with Eurasian overland routes. It is now crumbling. Of note, Chinese adaptive re-use of 19th century Anglo-American railroad technology is a driver.
Interesting to see that Western thirst for Chinese consumer goods vastly outpaces Eastern thirst for Western-made product. Exactly the cause of the 18th-century Anglo bullion crisis that led to the Brits loss of the central portion of its North American empire (what became the US), what led to Britain (and eventually the US) to adopt political violence such as the Raj to enforce the rules of empire, and the forced use of opium as a method of payment to the Chinese for their goods thru the humiliation of the Opium Wars.
But the Chinese play the long game. What was lost during the 19th century has been regained in the 21st.
And should we really be scared of Chinese authoritarianism? In light of political violence unleashed by the Anglo-American world over the past 300 years ranging from police actions such as the Boston Massacre to the genocide of an estimated 45 million indigenous Americans, to the mass destruction of society and culture in Africa, the answer must be put in historical perspective.
I'm sure one day there will be plenty of Guardian readers stood holding their shopping bags and ranting about the opium wars as Chinese tanks roll towards them.
because to the chinese it is better than chaos, which brings famine and death. the relationship between the Chinese and power is fine and far less are interested in democracy than you imagine, theyre happy to do the work and let the politicians take care of the economy as long as everyone gets fed. in 5000 years china has never had democracy and it is more open now than its ever been, the student elite may concern themselves with political freedom but they make up far less than 5% of the population. people want food and less poverty voting choices won't change that.
It's the guardian. It's love for Germany, china,France, ireland(not the north) Nederlands in particular, and then most of the EU countries, not Hungary,Poland or Greece though, or the UK of course. The rest of the world doesn't have enough regulations, us inferior and racist,and they are desirable nationalists.
guardian is center-right on most issues these days, its die hard liberalism faintly whiffs of the left but it certainly isnt socialist or genuinely left leaning. Post Blairite lefty leaning means neoliberal right to me!
While Trump attempts to make America Great Again by isolation and humiliation of European allies, the EU-led by Germany- gets ready to share the new global wealth creation trade sphere of a rising China. Watching from far away Brazil, the US gives the impression of past and China of future.
Uh, no. German-led wealth sharing has its limits, and when Germany is ready to collapse because of debt and financial instability after years of consuming Chinese manufactured goods and producing few of its own, maybe Germany will wake up and fight for its own identity. Until then, prepare to pollute your environment with Chinese plastic.
Germany has a trade surplus with China. The EU - not so much. In fact, it has a significant deficit with China. The US is pushing back to claw back the billions and so should the EU.
Germany is rather slow when it comes to building railways, however.
Switzerland has constructed the Gotthard Basis tunnel to massively increase freight capacity across the Alps, opened 2016. Less than 20 years to have an operational rail line going through nearly 60km of mountain rock.
The problem? The line north out of Basel into Germany to take the freight in and out of Switzerland. Germany started building work on that in 1987 and it might be finished in 2030. Maybe. Not looking promising, however.
If freight could run on feasibility studies and complicated financing packaging, they'd be sorted, however.
This project (and the BER airport) don't reflect at all well on Germany's large-scale engineering capabilities.
Maybe finance, or lack of, played a part, the more so given the vast amounts needed for the infrastructure of a re unified Germany? The Base Tunnel however was paid for by road taxes levied principally on foreign registered commercial traffic that used Switzerland to transit between northern and southern Europe and into and out of the country itself.
The problem is not "engineering capabilities" (what a preposterous thing to say, as German engineers are heavily involved in large infrastructure projects all around the world, including Switzerland btw.), but the simple fact that the whole way how infrastructure projects are handled by the state in Germany desperately needs to be reformed.
Being forced to take the cheapest offer is total nonsense, for example. The incredibly bureaucratic obstacles small communities have to overcome to benefit from money intended for infrastructure projects is another example. The German state is offering billions for the modernisation of the telecommunications infrastructure, yet only very few projects have actually been realised yet, simply because it's way too time consuming and bureaucratic to get access to those funds.
Then there is the favourite German pastime of suing the crap out of everything and hence blocking big infrastructure projects for years. All these problems need to be addressed, all of them are a matter of organisation, not engineering.
Give China due credit. While the West, led by the US has been busy invading countries all over the globe, reducing whole nations to rubble (Iraq, Afghanistan etc) China has rolled up its sleeves and built up its economy, lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty and become an engine for growth. Even more importantly it has put a check on the growth of its population. In that sense alone it has rendered the world and the environment a great service. (The One Child Policy may have been cruel but imagine the planet having to cope with another billion Chinese to feed). Yes, yes I know China also polluted the atmosphere, trashed the countryside, trampled on the rights of its people, but on balance it has shown the world that there is an alternative to the continuous invasions of the American model.
And the US at the insistence of the UN entering "humanitarian" wars and America having been attacked most horribly by Islamists obviously had to go after them why wouldn't they?
Yes, except that in the past 30 years the West has used capitalism to make the rich richer at the expense of the middle class and the poor. China too has plenty of rich people but part of the wealth did go to lift the poor out of poverty.
HS1 hasn't, but what about HS2? that'll show 'em how it's done ...
Seriously though, consider the benefits of having a similar hub cunningly sited on this island, readily accessible for all, which had direct access to the Chunnel but which was predominantly focused on the thousands of daily RO/RO freight movements to and from mainland Europe.
Yes there would need to be re-alignments of actual tunnel transits; what a return though given drastically reduced pollution levels, congestion on southern motorways especially the M25, scant if any need for "Operation Stack", requisite custom clearances handled inland, suspect loads checked at leisure and more thoroughly, stowaway immigrants far more easily policed, Freeport facilities, shipments of perishable goods readily fast tracked and so on.
Ah well.
Has work re-started on HS2 btw, since Carillion's collapse?
To get to the UK a train would have to pass through France, which is more difficult than Germany because of its less open rail market. There is also the problem of how to deal with stowaways etc in France.
On the contrary, a security fenced, easily patrolled and enclosed hub in Northern France for freight to load /unload, do customs etc to connect with a similar hub in the UK would negate any issues with "rail markets" and all but eliminate stowaways. (as referred to in my post)
The only real problem would be doubling the current 4 (from memory) transits to 8 and transferring cars to using ferries.
On the contrary, a security fenced, easily patrolled and enclosed hub in Northern France for freight to load /unload, do customs etc to connect with a similar hub in the UK would negate any issues with "rail markets" and all but eliminate stowaways. (as referred to in my post)
You mean like the existing railway yard, which has had huge problems with stowaways?
The Mercator Projection was not "the straightest possible line" from A to B. It only dealt with compass bearings,not distance. Compass bearings were more important than actual distance in those days. That is why Greenland looks so enormous on the Mercator Projection. The quickest way from Japan to Britain? Fly over the North Pole. You would never guess THAT by looking at your Mercator Projection.
No, the shortest route, i.e the lowest distance in kms., from Japan to Britain, the Great Circle rote, is over the North Pole (or very close to it). The great property of the Mercator map projection, was that any straight line on the map, between any two points, was a true compass bearing, when read as an angular measurement against line of longitude, from A to B. You need another technique for tracing a Great Circle route, but that property was of little use for trade and travel over long distances until very late in the 20th century it is however very useful to be able to determine the compass bearing of A from B across a large bay or a reasonable stretch of open sea or ocean; that was the big plus of a Mercator map; and then came the million dollar challenge of how to determine the longitude of a place Rnough already -- bring on James Cook, and the Harrison chronometer some 200 years later. I spent 35 years trying to teach these basic principles to beginning college students -- plane and spherical geometry is tough for many to figure out.
So in other words, Duisburg is a dumbing ground for the Chinese consumerist garbage, produced and littered around the world only to serve an economic system which is killing the planet.
No, the stuff actually has a CE label. They'll dump the toxic stuff in Brexitannia, where they are more casual with standards an such. A chlorinated KFC chicken meal plus some toxic toys for the kids, what's not to like?
That doesn't mean it won't be cheap junk. Look at the amount of low quality goods that already make their way from China into the EU, including the UK.
The main issue with the speed of freight in Europe is line capacity.
Passenger trains go faster and make more frequent stops, which is not ideal for coexisting with slow, constantly moving freight.
Most of the lines from Belarus to Duisburg have relatively frequent passenger service, and freight just has to fit in the few remaining gaps, mainly at night.
Once you finally get a slot then things start moving, but again there can be speed limits to reduce noise through residential areas, delays due to engineering works that can only happen at night, etc.
so what is needed are separate rail trunk lines for freight and passengers, a fact recognized by France when the original LGV/TGV line -- Paris to Lyon was built in the late 1970s; why not build new freight rail lines across Europe ? Must be the money -- get the Chinese to pay for it; they are very experienced in building rail lines -- high speed in China, or more traditional ones in the 2nd or 3rd world. So, why not ?
Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan have broad gauge (1,520 mm), whereas Germany, Poland and China have standard gauge (1,435 mm). So twice on the journey the containers have to be moved by crane from one train to another. This is less time consuming than it sounds: 40+ containers can be transferred in under an hour.
It's a shame the article doesn't mention the self proclaimed Queen of Duisburg and 'her' efforts to raise the profile of the city via school exchange trips to Royston Vasey.
The benefits of the rail connection are obvious but the article pointed two issues:
1. Trade imbalance, for every 2 train loads from China there is one empty return. I believe it is a short term issue, eventually China’s wages will raise and more Chinese will come to like and afford European goods.
2. Germany will overly rely on China. It is a political opinion which is more noise than substance.
China's wages are already rising. This is causing them to have to focus on more European and US industries like aerospace, Nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, financial services, computing etc.( The more basic work is being farmed out to neighbouring countries fueling their growth) . This means even more competition for our industries.
Every week, around 30 Chinese trains arrive at a vast terminal in Duisburg’s inland port,
The containers might arrive from China, but it is unlikely that Chinese wagons get any further west than the boundary between the Chinese 4'8.5" standard gauge and former USSR 5' broad gauge railway networks at the China/Kazakhstan border. The containers are transferred to broad gauge wagons to pass through the former USSR, and these wagons in turn can only go as far west as transshipment points in Poland where the containers need to be transferred to more standard gauge wagons.
Wagon bases with adjusting bogeys on tapering track interchanges? As for competing with Chinese manufacturing...do the Europeans look for the niche products like milk powder? While also considering products that have high value and complexity. Are the bigger total profit margins are on the more commonplace mass produced goods from China in the ever growing global ubiquity of basic consumer goods? Will it always be more of a one way trade? As for recognising employee rights...which end of the line is preferable? These comments are free here; but definitely do not help employment prospects at either end of the line, in the age of high surveillance. Viz Ai Wei Wei's deft marble CCTV sculpture.
And some myopic Americans are fretting over a little train service that will, if it ever gets built, run a few hundred miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Pitiful.
"Don’t worry, the Koch brothers will prevent you from any railroads being build."
The high speed rail line in California is enjoying a lot of cost overruns, was bent and kinked to avoid any placement where the filthy rich blue coast Democrats eyes might see it.
Most of the public transit projects end up costing a fortune and for the majority of citizens do not go where they want to go.
no, no. this is of course german expansionism, we fooled the chinese into thinking they were in control. but in reality germany is just a few years away from world domination.
Just proves what a load of crap the Brexit crowd gave us. Here is Germany, the most pro EU nation in Europe, and they are trading their brains out with Beijing. What earthly need is there to leave the EU to set up more trade with China. My fear is that as China's economic might grows ever stronger, our ability to challenge their tendency to trample over other nations, grabbing territory in the South China Sea, Tibet etc and trashing the planets fragile biodiversity ( wholesale slaughter of sharks for their practically inedible fins, elephants for their ivory and rhinos for their horns ) will reduce to nothing.
Certainly, our ability as a country with 60 million inhabitants to challenge anyone - or even to negotiate and barter with anyone on a reasonably even footing - will become non-existent. I personally think all this trade with China is bad for the planet and also bad for anyone who exports to China, but it seems I am in a minority. I just think it will not be long before any technology we export to them is stolen and they will stop importing. There are plenty examples, like the magnetic high-speed railsystem and train of which China ordered billions of Euros worth from Germany and then cancelled the order after 1 train and 120kms of track.... and surprise, surprise, a couple of years later they had their own version....
And it was here that Mercator first presented his new world map, the “Mercator projection”, that was so revolutionary for maritime navigators keen to steer merchant vessels across the high seas in the straightest possible line.
Surely it was designed because dead white males want to make places nearer the equator look smaller, or something. I'm sure I've see this claimed on a fairly regular basis...
I do agree with most of the razz=ma-tass given to the international railway, and Yes I do see the rail stop at Duisburg being great for the town's people and Germany. But I do have a certain niggle that America won't like the thought of China encroaching on what they see as their patch.
The port of Duisburg is older than the United States of America, so I severely doubt they can do much about what shipping is done there. I bet they'd also be annoyed that he University Duisburg-Essen offers extensive studies in East Asia sciences and business including language studies both for Chinese and Japanese...
Of course, the other EU members will only be allowed to buy and receive German investment. Chinese investment for these countries will be blocked by some made up EU legal mechanism under "security concerns".
The biggest European port of the "New Silk Road" initiative is located in....
Greece.
Yes, Greece. The same Greece Brexiters never stop crying crocodile tears over, the same Greece that is recovering remarkably.
Instead of mind-numbing slogans and casual Germanophobia, maybe you start to learn a thing or two about the continent that you're supposedly part of. "The EU is not Europe!" you say. Yet it could be Mars and it wouldn't make a difference...
It's great that we all do our bit for the environment by not using plastic bags. whilst everything we consume gets shipped (trains,planes,lorries) around the world , wrapped in plastic and sent to us. Just don't think about carrying the stuff in a bag you environmental haters.
Tiny pedantic point but Mercator projection charts do not facilitate mariners sailing the shortest route from A to B. For that it is necessary to follow part of a great circle which, on Mercator, is a curve. Great circle navigation requires some form of orthodromic projection.
I have fond memories of helping to organise street parties amongst the dispossessed mining families of Duisberg in the late eighties. With hindsight, completely inappropriate but thats the joy of German politeness. I do recall that even though the houses were off the map - the police for example had no idea - the area was clean and tidy
Those ships sailing up and down the Rhine are huge and very frequent. I remember sitting by the river in Rheinhausen with a German friend and a few bottles of Köpi watching them go by. Duisburg's really well-placed for the Autobahns, too. Not the prettiest of places, but some excellent Turkish and Italian restaurants. And the best Pilsner in Germany. Nice to see some good news from there.
It definitely is not the prettiest place in Germany, but the people are amongst the nicest. Down to earth, friendly, warm and tolerant people. The Ruhrpott's real treasure are the people.
China's BRI is a Eurasian answer to the traditional Anglo-American policy of divide et impero. What is perhaps more important in the long run is the replacement of petro-dollars by yuans.
We Anglos are peripheral to the world island. We have dreamt of world conquest, but it is now time to check our hole card. Trump is a hate figure to those with vested interests in the foreign-policy elite, but at least he is inviting a re-examination of our policy -- NATO really is more of a social clique than a defensive armory -- without the suffocating influence of Beltway cognoscenti.
you can find them in Duesseldorf, where you really can get the original Bejing duck there : Restaurant Jinling, Königsallee 106. Prices are decent for e.g :Half duck 33 €, also Seczuan food. The cooks ( 4 ) had a qualification of several years of professional training in China, before working in Jinling. Hope my commet helped you. Wave from Germany with respect.
Well said, I agree but what you have to realise is that the on line version of the Guardian is aimed at the US which is why we have so many US based articles. My least favorite is "sports"
The author is the Berlin Bureau chief which in itself is another Americanisation. I have set my spell check to English/English but it still insists on changing s as in Americanisation into a z.
Are you not being a Little Englander? The English language has long since ceased to be a British preserve, and in any case few these days would think of 'the Rhine river' as an Americanism. It doesn't strike me as such (and I'm 74).
i support China because their the only one's investing in a long term future growth. while China pumps money into major new projects in places from Europe to Africa, with the aim of future markets for it's goods and services, we blow up places like Libya in the name of democracy. Who will prove smarter in the long term i don't know. But i'm pushing my kids to learn Mandarin as an odds on bet.
The problem is investment isn't that easy. If it were, then all countries would invest for growth, all economies would grow, and eventually the world's key economic issues would all be sorted. Personally, I'm sceptical. The Chinese Government might be staffed with geniuses that can reasonably calculate risks and economic return on the capital expended. But I doubt it. This is more about spending money to boost economic growth in the medium term. It all seems to be done on borrowed money, and eventually that will have to be paid back. China's other motivations are political. It will make smaller countries dependent upon China, it underscores China's economic strength, and belt and road makes it look like the Chinese government is doing something useful and creative. But ultimately, the idea could just run out of steam...and the amount of public debt in China is absolutely colossal. It is a huge risk, and really, china would be better off spending its cash on modernising its legal system. that would go some way to building trust with a world that has no real faith in this opaque country that appears to disdain normal legal and ethical norms
I fear China because deep down they see themselves as better than everyone else. Chinese see themselves as the "middle kingdom" between we mere mortals and the Gods in heaven. After a couple hundred years of being kicked around by Japanese and Europeans including we Brits they feel they have every right to trample on their neighbours, grabbing land and sea territory, hoovering up precious natural resources, buying farmland all over Africa and destroying precious habitat and rare species. With their ability to copy western military and civilian technology without heed of patents and copyright, they have quickly caught up with our technological advantage. Who will be around to stop them from their next land or sea grab? The USA? With Trump in charge don't make me laugh. They would just give him a hotel and a golf course ite and a few coeds to molest and he will roll over and let them tickle his tummy.
Seven whole trains per day? How many containers per train? What percentage of Chinese exports to Europe does that represent? I wonder if anyone has any stats on this? Anyway, it doesn't sound like much, especially as the price is almost certainly subsidised.
Time for the EU to become the new victorians, not building national rail routes but international ones. A super freight train should easily cover 100KM/h, stops included. 2000km a day doing the trip in under a week. A vision in 50 years, not just the EU but a super-continent of EA, Eu-asia. That vision will give farrago something to pee in his pants about.
You could start by sending the 35000 american soldiers home who are currently based in Germany along with the massive airforce that is saving Germany circa 40 to 60 billion Euros a year I suppose.
The north/south divide in Germany is now overtaking the east/west divide, with the 'rust belt' areas suffering particularly badly - look at that photo of the Krupp workers from 1987, and it's not got any better since then. Excellent article in the Economist:
But it's unclear that a distribution center is the answer. Moving containers, and driving freight trains, are not very high-tech jobs and can be automated. Rio Tinto in Australia have demonstrated driverless 10000-ton freight trains that are more fuel-efficient than ones with drivers.
Nowhere in the east of Germany is there such a large (existing) inland port. And while the Elbe is a navigable river, its shipping infrastructure does not match that of the Rhine.
The Volkswagen Audi Group already has eight factories in China, BMW two, and Mercedes one (with another under construction). How long will it be until it's 'German' cars coming off the rail transporters for European consumers, and what of the (oft vaunted) German automotive sector then?
They cannot come back from China as engines etc, are all old tech so will not meet EU standards. If ever the day comes when they do, say goodbye to Europe!
That's been happening for decades - plenty of South African and US-built BMWs etc. Most people don't have a problem with it - why should they? Trade works both ways and all car companies are multinational. You don't expect your Ford Fiesta to be built in Dearborn, or your Nissan in Yokohama?
"The (Mercedes) SLR sports car was built at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking. Brackley, Northamptonshire, is home to the Mercedes Grand Prix factory, and Brixworth, Northamptonshire is the location of Mercedes-Benz High Performance Engines."
Mercedes has factories in 27 countries across the World and is now a truly global brand.
The reasons journey times from China are still far too long, as Staake sees it, lie mainly with the heavily unionised rail companies in Europe rather than their counterparts in Asia: trains take on average six days to travel the 1,300km (800 miles) from Brest on the Polish-Belarusian border to Duisburg, while the 10,000km from Chongqing to Belarus is often completed in five-and-a-half days.
Indeed. Merkel is the Black Widow at the centre of the web. Macron is trying to court her but there's a better than even chance that he'll end up as a sucked dry husk
10,000km in 6 days to EU border, 1,300km next 6 days?
Customs? Change of rail gauges? No common train track the whole way? Seems odd seeing as you can get a train from Berlin to Moscow in about 24 hrs. Can't imagine its just unions, the usual scapegoat for inept managements.
Why should they put this in front of their own trains?
Strawman?
Who said anything about putting any train "in front" (or "behind") other trains? Each train needs to be fitted into a timetable, and ideally in a way that none has to wait for the other.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who suffered from melancholia, expressed the sentiment – “how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me the workings of this world. It is an unweeded garden and things rank and gross in nature possess it merely”
trains take on average six days to travel the 1,300km (800 miles) from Brest on the Polish-Belarusian border to Duisburg, while the 10,000km from Chongqing to Belarus is often completed in five-and-a-half days.
10,000 km in 5 and a half days (132 hours) is only 76 km/h. So why does the European segment take so long? Is it customs controls?
Cargo trains mostly roll at night, since then the tracks are free. Breaks should not be a problem, some other driver takes over then for the next stretch.
So Mr. Know-it-all if you look at the picture above you might find that Duisburg is next to the river Rhine and we are speaking about Duisburg Rheinhafen...
From my many years of watching Thomas the Tank Engine, I always believed that the trains drove themselves with their servile obeisance to the fat man in the top hat.
Oh the irony... Hitler would almost be amused after his Blitzkreig autobahn ideology. At first glance I thought it was a bus on rails. Must be the Preston to Colne service, then...
They'll work with two train drivers on board and drive through the night (probably on for 8 hours, off for 8 hours) to cover the 10k at an average speed of 75kph.
It's feasible. Many high speed trains can do 1000km in 3 hours. I think the infrastructure in China and Western Europe could cope, the bit in the middle less so although I have no experience of rail in Turkey.
Engineering can and will solve problems of feasibility eventually.
If the still-recovering industries in western Germany make themselves too reliant on China, they warn, it could provide economic leverage for an authoritarian regime that wants to project its geopolitical power into western Europe.
Can one imagine the paragraph above, with the word «China» replaced by «the US» ? After all, the latter stations some 35000 troops in Germany, while, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the former has none. Just who is «project[ing] its geopolitical power into western Europe» ?...
What is the level of migration into China? Other than the some 260,000 Vietnamese during the 1990s virtually zero, where it will remain. Perhaps those empty freight cars could be used to export a commodity that Europe cannot utilise and which China is running out of, cheap labour.
Putting it another way, the mass displacement of peoples is a weapon and at the moment the liberal minded west is a sitting duck.
So, just for the sake of discussion - what is the massive benefit of importing cheaper goods from China? Is there some magic afoot that means Germans will be able to spend their time hiking and generally enjoying the great outdoors - while Chinese workers toil for low wages to send them cheap goods. Or, will Germans find their manufacturing sector goes into a long decline - as more and more people realise goods from China are high quality - and wages in Germany stagnate etc.
I bought a fan recently. Amazon. £16. Made in China. Been running almost 24/7 for the last month - almost silent, efficient, safe. Where will it end? The West out of work? Where will get the money from to buy even a £16 fan?
Where will get the money from to buy even a £16 fan?
It's the difference between what are sometimes called visible and invisible goods. China is currently doing very well on producing the visible goods and selling them to us at lower prices than we can produce such items for ourselves. We make our money from selling them invisible goods: education, financial services, films, music, etc.
Might I suggest that it is the fragmented state of rail companies and ownership that causes the slow trains., not unionisation. Although the EU is aggregated in many ways the railways are a mix of state owned monopolies and silly private franchises as in the UK.
Wrong. The problem is that rail transport is still largely regulated on national level. There isn't a common language like in maritime or aviation and train drivers need to be changed at the border. Couple of other quirks slow things down as well.
There are other things like different signalling and emergency systems that might require changing the locomotive together with the driver at the border. And then there might be some congestion along the way because freight trains have lower priority than passenger trains.
Well, you may suggest such. But I'll wager CEO's opinion is a little more informed. Thats not to say fragmentation and self interest of the state rail countries is not a factor, but agreeing multiple agreements with various unions who each want to use what the others are getting as bargaining chips is a nightmare. And when some see one union getting more than they thought the whole equation falls apart. Ugg, ...shudder... (I remember!)
This article dovetails in neatly with those regarding China's militarisation of the South China Sea and the Australian editions item on the future of Australian/US alliances. China is showing the refined skills of a global superpower without resorting to the projection of military power (yet?).....for 60 years the US has deployed its army, navy, marines and air force on China's doorstep (1000's of km. from the continental US). There have been periods when China's then fledgling merchant marine were interdicted by US forces and the US 7th Fleet .......... why am I raising this......China has become the worlds largest trading nation in the last decade..... it has relied on maritime transport that has been exposed to potential US/allied disruption by that nations overseas deployments, a situation no fledgling super power can counternance ........opening land based, high volume transport routes as this railway is only the start of, lessens the perceived "threat" for Chinese trade.......a smart move on so many levels.
Meanwhile in Australia we constantly hear of China's military occupation of islets in the South China Sea and their projection of military power and our need to support the US to keep the maritime routes "open" (they have never been shut)....maritime routes that China's massive trade is overwhelming dependent on.......our sinophobia is being constantly aroused/reinforced for domestic political reasons and to continue tying us to our assumed dependence on US defence/foreign policy.
I can only hope as many Australians as possible read this article, think about our geopolitical status quo and realise that whilst China is a rising superpower with hegemonic aims, it is also a nation looking to its best strategic interests after decades of "containment" and military encirclement. ....it is basing its hegemony on economics not military power.
Would you have been arrested if you didn't write that? What a sales pitch! Tell that to the 19 Australians who were arrested and imprisoned without trial. Read about the chinese military spies in the smh and ABC operating in australia. Enjoy your Chinese rule in the future, the average Australian will not bend over like you will.
Outside of Australia, you do know the Chinese are taking waters that belong to Vietnam. Ask the average Thai, Vietnamese, Hong kong person if they are worried about china on the charge. This is not scaremongering.
the 19 Australians who were arrested and imprisoned without trial
You mean the 19 Crown Resorts staff who were convicted under article 303 and 25 of Chinese criminal law, which relate to deriving profit from gambling as a main income and organising gambling parties? Only three were Australian, and two of those were of Chinese heritage. They pleaded guilty, as indeed they were, and Crown Resorts paid a A$1.7m fine.
Not to worry. Post Brexit the UK will be able to do its own trade direct with China, getting all its Chinese imports brought in by air or sea. Whether the deal they get will be as good as the deal the much bigger EU gets with China, we will have to wait and see.
I have really enjoyed reading these educational and fascinating articles about China's new trade routes. Great journalism Guardian. There's a whole big world out there.
Some recognised in the 1920s the rise of the industrial east and the potential for the west to be physically excluded from that maritime zone (nine dash line, island aircraft carriers). There were also warnings of the insanity for the west to withdraw from colonial Africa only to create the space for the east to move in (as reported in The G again only yesterday). Australia looks isolated.
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard, A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard)
There were also warnings of the insanity for the west to withdraw from colonial Africa
I thought Algerians lost over a million people kicking the French out. I thought the same about the Angolans, Mozambiquens, Zimbabweans etc. It's news to me that the Europeans left voluntarily out of the goodness of their heart, especially following their devastated countries and diminished power as result WW11.
The book I referred to was written recognising the devastation on Europe by Europe and the consequential detriment that would have on global capacity of western political influence (he finds the turning point to be the Port Arthur defeat of European Russia by a rising Japan) AND physical presence. The UK did of course have a policy of retreat with our "East of Suez" option and my brother served in both Borneo and Aden neither of which are beacons of civilization.
The point the book makes is that although all have a history different peoples have made very different contributions to development e g the ancient structured civilisations of the far east and that their renaissance was both inevitable and to be accepted in contrast with the much harder to define path of sub-Saharan Africa (influenced by extreme Islam) and South America, both of which today are pretty difficult areas, pretty prescient? It's worth a read.
Duisburg is a post-Industrial hell hole, in Rust belt Nord-Rhein Westfalia with staggeringly high unemployment rate, poverty, religious Extremism - you name it! This is last ditch attempt to revive the place.
Duisburg is still richer than those 9 out of 10 poorest regions in Northern Europe, all located in the UK. Who is doing something - anything - for them?
Why so harsh, to make some points here? Duisburg has, like many cities with a steel and coal history problems, yes. Nevertheless, Duisburg has also many opportunities and Duisburg is making progress. You can not change 150 years of history with one stroke - that is simply presumptuous.
But in the times of the internet, "hell hole" is the language of the Trumps and Rumps and other troublemaker - they never look for solutions of complex situations, just for scant evidence to prove the macho language they use.
Of course, if the largest 'inland port' was Birmingham, the header would read: "UK industry heads backwards, with polluting Chinese diesel-powered trains destroying jobs at Tilbury, Liverpool and Newcastle container ports....
Of course, if the largest 'inland port' was Birmingham, the header would read: "UK industry heads backwards, with polluting Chinese diesel-powered trains destroying jobs at Tilbury, Liverpool and Newcastle container ports....
Why do you map the Blue Route via Lake Victoria in E Africa? It should link Mombasa and Djibouti. Your GIS / Graphics unit may need to apply the Mercator projection
This will not last long. I bought a football from tesco express, a pair of adidas sneakers from sports direct and a picture frame from ikea. The first said made in India the second made in Indonesia and the third made in Poland. With growing wages in china and a demographic crisis they are becoming less and less competitive on price.
Chinese companies are producing in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and soon African countries will be on the list once they run out of cheap Asian labour.
This global trade thing - it seems to me to be a race to the bottom. The rich are getting richer from it - and the rest of us are pawns in their game. If Brexit throws us back on our own devices - as it were - I can't help thinking this would be a good thing.
The other proposed part of the Chinese rail project is to put high speed lines through most of Asia, effectively meaning that China is again the hub through which all this trade travels. At the moment there are no proper railway lines connecting Asian countries in a way that Europeans might recognise meaning that sea and air freight is the norm. If China can put in these railway lines they can control (and profit from) the vast majority of trade between Asia and Europe. A spur to and through Africa then becomes a distinct possibility too.
Interesting how yet again a two-way trade relationship is viewed in terms of a supposed assertion of power (even if "soft power") by China. But when it's western corporations descending like locusts on far-away places, it's always expressed as a hale and hearty dynamic of capitalism that brings progress to all.
The UK is boasting of the deals it is going to do with China once Brexit is completed, but the EU has more chance of getting fair deals with China than the desperate-for-cheap-goods UK does with its much smaller population and open trade ambitions.
Hahaha! Train lines direct from China, feee trade deals with Japan and Canada, it's amazing what the EU gets done once the Brits have shut the fuck up isn't it?
Meanwhile, on a damp island off the coast, a population, mainly over seventy and living on state benefits, twisted with hate and envy of all things foreign, slowly starves.
Meanwhile, on a damp island off the coast, a population, mainly over seventy and living on state benefits, twisted with hate and envy of all things foreign, slowly starves.
That made me laugh. We can put on Love Island matey! Oh yes!
It's funny how it seems that half the world would love to live on this not so damp island.
I have tried contorting myself with hate - but, it just won't work. With laughter at your comment, yes. With hate for all things foreign, no.
I will visit my neighbours at once and see if I can whip them up into a frenzy of contorted hate for all things foreign. It could be tricky - looking at my neighbour's cars … Audi, BMW, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Audi, Audi …
Looking at my neighbour's kitchen appliances … Bosch, Bosch, Bosch (all the same, living on a new estate at the moment. Don't you just hate (I'm contorted with it) that they all have German hobs and ovens?
One of the many joys of this green and pleasant land is the fact that we can grow food here. There is plenty of room to grow more - most of our fields are grass to provide feed for livestock. We can soon change that!
I have, more than once, wondered what the massive benefit of global trade is. Surely it is a race to the bottom for the workers of the world. We will buy wherever is cheapest. At the moment it's China. No doubt Africa will be next. And in 'developed countries' wages stagnate and living standards fall.
Nothing gets made in Africa for global export. Production gets shifted to every other low wage demographically vibrant part of the earth, but it never moves to Africa - which is a shame because industrialization is the only model to bring run away demographics under control. Mining and extraction does happen there, but that is a different story.
the port is fast becoming Europe’s central logistics hub.
What a nonsense. 80 trains a week-let that be 6000 TEUs. A single ocean carrier arriving in Rotterdam has 3times more on board. This claim is ridiculous.
I think if you check the geography you will notice Rotterdam is on the edge of Europe - its going to struggle to be the central hub of the EU regardless of how big its containers ships are
But how can Germany trade with China from within the EU? Surely this is impossible? Once we've caused all of our ports to grind to a halt with the motorways blocked by queing lorries the Chinese will see the far far greater benefits of a trade deal with the UK, we'll get a bigly great one, far far better than the loser EU will manage, just you wait and see.
C'mon! We in the Anglosphere can match this. We built the greatest empire ever!
I propose a rail link between the UK and the US. A series of bridges joining mainland Scotland, Orkneys, Shetland, Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and then to Canada. London to New York in 5-10 days. Easy.
That way, we can secure our supplies of succulent chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated antibiotic beef, and export our world-renowned warm beer. And all those marvellous jams.
That's the real rate. But you have to consider the cheating one, as dotter101 mentioned, because that's the one used by other countries, so you can compare apples to apples.
This is how you mow down all competitors, you draft up ambitious plans for years and years and then work very hard to make them a reality on the ground. Compared to that, we have in our country, a core cabal of MPs who for whatever precise reasons, loathe the EU. They've been loathing them for 35 years in some cases, but in all that time, they have never given more than 10 minutes thought to how to deal with the outcome of trashing our membership. That's how you don't plan a country's future. It's almost unbelievable that we have got to where we are, with the likes of cringeing mediocrities like Johnson, Gove, Mogg, Fox, IDS and Cummings, determining, but decidedly doing no planning, for a future that they have foisted upon us. It really is beyond belief.
I think they do have a plan, but for obvious reasons they do not speak of the plan in public. What they want is an economy based on no regulation, low taxes for businesses and the wealthy, and low spending on public services. If you work out what this would mean for the NHS, social care, schools, public transport etc, I don’t think you’d get 52% of the public to vote for it in an advisory referendum. Hence the secrecy and all the lies about the ‘non-democratic’ EU, Turkey joining the EU, the amount the UK pays the EU, uncontrolled immigration etc etc.
The ERG, a group of MPs who won’t even tell us their names, has no interest in democracy. Brexit has been taken over by extremists with a secret agenda. The ‘will of the people’ is the fig leaf phrase used by very wealthy people to completely screw the majority of the British population. Small wonder that these extremists have allied themselves with Trump, Bannon etc - and seem to have links to Russian oligarchs.
Surely if you hold an advisory referendum, you'd make clear to the people voting that it was an advisory referendum.
In the case of the EU referendum, no-one, not one person, ever mentioned that 'this is an advisory referendum and the government will take on board what you think but that's it.'
On the contrary, the government sent a document about the EU referendum to every address in the country and stated clearly and unequivocally 'THE GOVERNMENT WILL IMPLEMENT WHAT YOU DECIDE'
No mention of 'taking your advice on this one'. Weird eh?
You can't have a free market without Trust. Hence the eternal charges of cronyism against the absolute brextreemists. The closest they get to free markets is handing out contracts on government services. Here again, the EU is at least one move ahead. These people are perhaps the strongest reason for a European civil service and delegated department of trade - they help to keep Britain safe from Reagan-Thatcherism.
The little Englanders who are attempting to force Brexit on a half of the United Kingdom who will never stand for that, never travel outside of their safety Zone, Large as this inland port is, it is but a fraction of the size and volume of trade in the Europort which is the Rotterdam Schiedam area of the Netherlands.
On an Epic scale you can see the goods arrive from all over the World to feed the UK's appetite for consumer products not made in the UK.
After Brexit the extra paperwork and inspection times are going to cause a massive backlog of goods and HM Government are correct in planning for that as retail shops in the UK run empty.
When they call this project fear you know sensible debate has ended. No wonder many Brexit loons also support Trump. The author of Fake News it's self.
Possibly the new post Brexit customs delays might be the catalyst the finally finishes off the U.K. high street ... if there’s going be delays might as well have what ever it is delivered straight to home innit
On taking up a new role as chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership George Osborne said: “Chairing this new partnership will now be a major focus of my political energies. The Northern Powerhouse is here to stay.”
Does the Northern Powerhouse amount to anything more than that faintly embarrassing photo opwhere George Osborne unveiled its name stuck on the side of a clapped out train? Certainly don’t hear much about it any more.
CONFUSING: Map superimposed on the globe (blue dotted path) clearly shows the route bypassing Russia yet the second map "Die Neue Seidenstrasse" held up during the Chinese premier's visit clearly shows it going through Russia. Which is correct?
If the trade is predominantly one way what do we pay with? It cannot simply be a case of high value one way and low value the other because much of what we import from China is already high value high technology and the Chinese will soon be equal or superior to the Japanese in this regard. For a time our currency will good, but it will suffer relative devaluation if the situation persists. Already we see the USA paying partly in Government debt. Europe in the sale of key companies and assets. At some point unless there is a redress in the balance of trade Europe and North America will look like the Latin American economic Colonies which suffered so much from foreign ownership. Unions were cited as a problem but lack of ILO involvement in trade negotiations, the guarantee of workers' rights, minimum terms and conditions across borders, and gradual convergence of wages will always work against the type of society we should aspire to.
The Chinese and the Kazakhs drive thousands of kilometres a day, they really work hard. It’s ridiculous, really. Of course we are trying to work out why this is happening.
Ooh, let me guess why people in a country with no human rights, brutalist superiors, no welfare state, and rock-bottom pay rates are having to work really hard.
All true, yet it's still not acceptable that it takes six days (!) on average to travel 800 miles.
Again, this is likely not an issue of unions, but an issue that needs to be addressed on the European level, removing any kind of obstacles that make the transport of goods via rail so slow and inefficient. If you want to be serious about environment protection, rail is a pretty important factor.
You're right. They should rather zero hours contracts, depend on privatised monopolies for basic social services but while economically oppressed, enjoy phony theoretical human rights that the govt can ignore anytime by waving the words "national security around, and then "render" them to any choice of the type of country you mentioned...
Nice sting in the tail of the article on the threat to union protection of workers rights. "Look how the Chinese drivers can be exploited" "we should be allowed to do that here".
Perhaps it's time the Chinese workers demanded better pay and conditions? It is a concern that China will use the new trade deal to undermine EU workers, but we will have to make sure that doesn't happen. A big market like the EU will have more clout than a little one like the UK.
It would hardly be beyond the wit of man to create a single, single-purpose automated freight line across a large part of the route. Would the unions object to that? Obviously not. See the automated metro lines in Paris. No self-respecting railway unionist would advocate slower train services in the absence of management constraints, except as a manoeuvre over territory. You also see that in Paris, on the RER C, which is run by the SNCF* and is therefore an anomaly in Parisian public transport, and on the RER B, shared with SNCF north of Gare du Nord, where drivers switch from RATP** and back.
*National French Railway Company **Board of Parisian Public Transport
I'm now beyond hope for a reversal of or a sensible Brexit. So I hope it's an utter disaster in every way and the little England amoeba brains who voted for it suffer for their chest beating idiocy.
trains take on average six days to travel the 1,300km (800 miles) from Brest on the Polish-Belarusian border to Duisburg
if this is correct, that's ridiculous - that's 9 kmph or 5.5 mph. Germany and Poland use the same railway gauge so there's only one switch involved at the Poland - Belarus border.
Like the Japanese path from cheap copies to tech leadership, the Chinese have quickly moved beyond what you are talking about. Yes there is still cheap manufacturing, but they are moving their economy towards technology and engineering innovation and even beginning to own manufacturing companies and facilities located in other countries within Africa and Asia for example - and the US and Europe.
Hilarious! Another Brexit own goal. Let’s cut ourselves off from China. Why on earth would China do a deal with us and send stuff on a ship taking weeks? Jail farage, Gove, lying Boris Johnson and the rest for treason. Right wing selfish lunatics.
If the trains go through Russia what happens? Russia has a different track 'guage'. Do they unload the trains at one border then take the goods through Russia then load them onto a European standard guage train??
Or do they switch bogies?
Or what?
Are there any experts on the journey who know how it is done?
They do go through Russia (via Moscow, as the article says). There have been trains for decades that cross gauges by altering the width between the wheels, some of them without stopping entirely, as the Barcelona Talgo (Paris-Barcelona) used to do to transfer from standard gauge to Iberian gauge (which is similar to Russian gauge). That service no longer exists since the new Spanish high-speed tracks are standard gauge, so the TGV from Paris to Barcelona does not need this feature.
If traders are using Mercator charts to find the shortest route between China and Europe, no wonder they are having difficulty. It's ideal for travelling relatively short distances in a fixed direction. Think Brexit negotiation.
The Chinese and the Kazaks drive across thousands of kilometres across not a lot with not a lot of interaction with anything or anyone. Whereas Western Europe has very much a lot between a and b. It's not likely to be that the highest risk all day is hitting a stray yak.
Why send the containers back to China empty? I would have thought that the EU would have had a deal in place for them to be shipped back full of the unwanted. There's a historic precedent. Or is shipping them back to Libya and Turkey cheaper?
For decades the chicago boys propagated free trade and privatisation, the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism vs. the social-democratic continental European one.
Now, at the end of this movement, at least on the other side of it's pinnacle since the 2008 crash, of all countries USA and GB are going on nationalistic and protectionistic paths, while some of the biggest global players of logistics, communication, power supply are privatised former European state owned companies.
DHL Deutsche Post, Schenker Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Telekom T-Mobile, E-On to name some.
Is it a classic case of shooting in ones own foot, trying to expand into a competitors market by changing the rules, but in the end, taken over by those competitors, because they can handle and use those new rules at least as well?
So, are Brexit and America First factual expressions of a already lost competition against their own weapons?
The Anglo-Saxon model simply died in 2008 - "neo-liberalism" ate itself, especially the dogmatic idea that the market will always find the best solutions, that the state is obsolete and that you don't need strategic planning of industries.
I remember back in the 1990s, a lot of people, even in academic cycles, demanded that Germany had to follow the Anglo-Saxon model, get rid of its industries and focus on services instead. We can be very glad that the people in charge didn't listen to those fools. Nowadays, they talk about "reviving" industrial production in the UK and the US. How times have changed, indeed.
It i nice to see how a city that really ell down the economic ravene with the end of coal and the demise of steel making, is now having such a revival. Makes you wonder how much the "Northern Powerhouse" might have achieved, with strategic thinking, public support and smart on-the-ground collaboration. And an industrial strategy...
Another case of wishful thinking, that one was always going to go down the crapper once Osborne left office after being sacked by Treeza. It was his baby.
So far, the electrification of the Liverpool to Leeds line, promised within 5 years, has been postponed, as London Crossrail link and HS 2 has swallowed up any money for this.
The trains in our area have been given 20 year old trains from 'Darn Sarf' to replace the 30 odd year old ones previously servicing the schedule.
And I haven't begun to mention the current chaos of cancelled trains, due to the new timetable and lack of drivers, inflicting misery on Northern Train travellers. Oh, and I forgot the ongoing strikes over running trains without any guards.
I'm glad I'm lucky enough to not have to use these dubious 'services', other commuters aren't so lucky.
Quite. None of these issues are going to be properly addressed until the UK adopts some form of regional government. Northern parts of the UK deserve autonomy to make their own decisions about investment, job creation, regeneration, railways and road infrastructure. Leaving it to westminster is like asking teenagers to do the washing up; there will be a lot of "yeah, yeah...." but the job won't get done....
I used to work for a company with offices in Dusseldorf. I really miss those restaurants. Still, I now work for a company with its HQ in Copenhagen, so I still have good food choices! I don't miss the days of working for a company in Amsterdam, at least from a food perspective...
A fascinating article. Unions make the European section much slower but as a union supporter I understand the difficulty between making the journey times more competitive against flights and protecting workers' rights. On the European/Asian landmass however, it would be good if all freight were put back on the trains rather than ships or planes.
I don't even think that the unions are the problem per se, but the lack of a truly pan-European strategy for rail. There are unions for air travel and all other kinds of logistics and yet things work a lot more efficiently there.
I must agree even Kantstrasse in Berlin did not seem so well endowed with good Chinese restaurants whereas some of the Vietnamese joints in Berlin were fine when I visited last year (perhaps due to the long history of Vietnamese settlement in Eastern Germany?).
He pronounces it wrong, though, doesn't he? He calls it 'dweesburg', but when I went to watch MSV, the locals were calling it 'doucheburg'. Ruined the whole show for me.
Are China in the EU? Yet a train can leave China, cross other non-EU countries and arrive in the EU safely without China being a member of the EU, Single Market or Customs Union, and with several protectionism policies in place.
Re travel time: The Union arguments seems weird. You could keep the trains rolling by having more shifts of unionized engineers. Having longer shifts could increase the risc of accidents. The Chinese and Kazakh stretches of the railwais are probably much simpler than the European network.
Well, this problem is not special to the rail transport, the freight ships may sail back half empty too.
I think, rail is actually in favour, because once the sanctions about Russia have gone, those trains may collect freights for China throughout the whole route.
It's the greatest risk, yes. But what will the UK offer to the world? Or, has Liam Fox arranged some favourite deal with China? As you see in Duisburg, others are doing the business. Just because they rely on a safe framework. It's called the EU, the world's most powerful trade area.
Hamburg seems to get potshots from everybody, not sure why, as far as I can tell the port is well maintained and organised. Currentlythey are dredging and building new infrastructure to accomodate larger vessels.
Transport by train is in between air fright and ship, it is a different market. Hamburg is specialised in transport by ship. The issue of Hamburg is the limited size of the Elbe river, the largest ships are loaded/unloaded in Wilhelmshaven.
A point at the Rhine, not to far away from Rotterdam's huge sea port and in the heart of the European continent, at optimum connected to the European railway, motorway and river/channel shipping systems. Placed in one of the mayor global trade and manufacturing countries with stable and robust legal, political and economical conditions. Having already large freight yards and ports and, in favour of most other towns at the Rhine, can offer masses of idle facilities of former freight stations, ports, industrial plants from the steel and mining era, as well as European and German stuctural funding - seems to be picture-perfect for this occasion.
The main problem at the moment is it isn't just one train going the whole way. Russia and a few others use different gauge tracks so all the cargo has to be swapped over more than once to other trains.
"a few others use different gauge tracks so all the cargo has to be swapped over more than once to other trains." When I last passed through they just changed the wheels, not the trains.
isn’t that cowardly David Cameron working for the Communist Chinese on expanding the rail infra-structure across Europe so the Chinese can bring their goods in. Perhaps he can get his mate Boris Johnson to suggest building a bridge across the North Sea to make Britain more accessible for foreign imports.
make it their first European stop, with most using the northern silk road route via Khorgos on the China-Kazakhstan border and the Russian capital, Moscow.
Would be nice if the guardian editors could correct their map. The shown route goes nowhere near Moscow.
Right. The Guardian map and the map held up in the picture are awkwardly at odds with each other, and the mention of the stop-over at Brest on the Polish-Belurussian border proves it's the latter route that is being talked about, not the first one.
I noticed the same. The Moscow line seems like pretty obvious choice.
I hope my home town of Helsinki, Finland, would take a good piece of the China rail traffic. There is only one country between China and Finland, which should make things simpler. Also, the rail distance (or whatever) is the same as in Russia. And there is a proper seaport.
Sounds like it would be fairly easy to do the 11,000km in just 5-6 days once the unionized drivers are replaced with autopilot.
This is about 70-80kmph.
Imagine 50 years from now this route will be a hyperloop type technology capable of 500mph. Trains carrying 10,000's tonnes of freight will complete the journey in about 13 hours.
Unfortunately for me people like Staake are exactly the kind of people, that make the world a bad place. The way he talks about unions is worthy of an american republican. I think it is shameful.
I don‘t understand why people never learn from history and seem unable to understand, that there are things, that have the same value as profit. Things like respect, treating people good, tradition, not to exploit the people and the environment etc.. Why do these things have the same value? Because people can’t live without it. If they get forced to, they begin to revolt. The past and present shows us very clearly, that when profit is all people care about, when there is nothing they can believe in but money it ends in a horrible way.
Trade is never only about making money with autocrats like xi, putin or trump. Because they don’t respect the sovereignty of others. They use trade to leverage their way in. I am not very happy, that a city in Germany is so dependent on china.
The left make me laugh. You can’t bring yourself to discuss German conservatism as you see them as a global light, the perfect nation, against which U.K. and American may be critiqued. Call Staak what he is, a German Conservative who is part f the majority party in Germany. He is not a plip on their record he is pretty middle of the road.
So tell me oh economic sage, how an overland rail route from China to a large manufacturing country that imports a good deal of Chinese products is in any way related to Brexit?
"So tell me oh economic sage, how an overland rail route from China to a large manufacturing country that imports a good deal of Chinese products is in any way related to Brexit?" It's just a reminder that it's all happening out there, and Britain is being left behind on its fortress island behind the white cliffs of Dover.
Thanks for this article. It's fascinating to learn that trains are still competitive against ships (or planes) for marchandise transportation between China and Europe.
The reasons journey times from China are still far too long, as Staake sees it, lie mainly with the heavily unionised rail companies in Europe rather than their counterparts in Asia: trains take on average six days to travel the 1,300km (800 miles) from Brest on the Polish-Belarusian border to Duisburg, while the 10,000km from Chongqing to Belarus is often completed in five-and-a-half days.
Unions or not, but this most definitely has to improve. Rail is a pretty efficient and “green” way to transport goods, especially when compared to lorries and airplanes, and this is unacceptable. It’s not even just about the “new Silk Road”, this whole sector needs to be addressed by the EU. Rail travel for both goods and people going beyond the borders of member states has to be improved, become cheaper and less complicated.
Interesting article. For the sake of the people of Duisburg who have been suffering for some time, I hope that these new opportunities will help. Our very own “Rustbelt” here in Germany, the Ruhr area, has to reinvent itself and this is one promising way to do it.
Most of the local train services are long gone and don't look likely to return any time soon. Drive in to rural areas you can find remnants of old tracks and stations dotted around.
Surely creating a portal to Chinese manufacturers with their dirt cheap labour and horrendous working conditions will do nothing but destroy the Mittelstand within 20 years?
This train is merely a giant portal that will suck jobs from Germany to China. It will eat into your tax base and leave you with an aging population supported by an increasingly indebted and underskilled working age demographic.
Europe seems to be slow to catch on to globalisation. Possibly because China is yet to undercut their luxury manufacturers with cheaper equivalents.
This train is nothing but a modern day Trojan horse.
It will destroy your current account and leave you with a ballooning national debt that will demand an ever growing percentage of your tax revenue to service.
Most is transported by ship and has been transported by ship, your "argument" does not make sense. The Mittelstand lives and dies with aspects far beyond transport.
A few years back with most of the trade going via ship people spoke about Hamburg as the "european China City". Duisburg will have to do more if it wants to keep that title. And whether that is a smart thing to do is anyone's guess...
The smart thing is for Germany to have both ... the main train terminal and the main ship destination. The stupid thing to do is to Brexit when America First faces China First.
Isn't this always and everywhere the case? Business booms come and go.
For now, one can only say, that Duisburg has some headstart above other potential railway hubs to China and it has some tradition and experrience as freight yard hub between Rhine / Atlantic shipping, European continental railways and European rivers and channels shipping.
Germany are just so amazing aren’t they. The thing to do is to join a trade union, enforce political centrality, influence that political centrality and then shark all manufacturing from the South of Europe. Now that sounds like a great idea.
"one of the main European products heading east is powdered milk – a result of low trust in domestic brands following a 2008 food safety scandal."
I donot know whether the Chinese like the taste of caramel. Milkpowder for human consumption it not suitable to be land transported over long distances. The temperature in the containers can become very high risking a maillard reaction (kind of caramelization of the milksugar called lactose).
Milkpowders better be shipped by ocean going vessel while the containers are stowed under hatch away from any heatsource.
They have special wagons now, problem solved.
I'm growing old. Thanks for your info.
It is recommendable for the EU to put more effort on the trade and relationship with Eur-asian countries. Please note that the USA policy always tried to make this Eur-asia trade difficult. Now Trump objected the gaspipeline between Russia and Germany, do you need more proof that the US is acting against the interest of the EU?
Leave Trump his promise to make the USA great again and in the meantime the EU develops to the East. EU never got a better opportunity thanks to the "greatness" of Trump.
Its very difficult to decide whether this is a good thing or bad.
The positive side is: If some rich country is willing to spend their money developing infrastructure, its a good thing right? And the other great thing about this that as the Chinese gain more influence in Asia, the liberal left globalists are going to lose out big time. Because China simply cannot accommodate them. All of the liberal left policies to control foreign governments like Climate change policing, Human rights abuse warnings, Gender/ Women/ Children equality pressure groups, ideological grip over foreign country's judiciary/ media, Western lobbying, all these things will weaken because of Chinese influence. The foundations and the NGOs who treat Europe/ Asia as their playground, IMF elitism, EUs enforcement of its policies on poor countries, Socialistic revolutionaries, Communist revolutionaries, Islamic groups ALL are going to weaken, maybe even die. Mind you the Chinese will act as if they support all of these but it will be a lie. Because they simply cannot afford to empower any of these groups if their plan has to work. i personally also feel that the Chinese will covertly support breakup of the EU while shaking hands with Merkel on stage. So the Chinese investments is a good thing.
The negative side: is of course that China will put in its military assets all over the place to "protect" its investment. And the Chinese are bullies. They cheat, they deceive, they lie, they break international agreements at will, they refuse to accept international arbitration if they want to. Remember when the Guardian wrote an article some years back about those artificial islands Chinese were making by calling them just peaceful lighthouse islands. Well, the chinese have made it into a military base now anf the guardian has still not apologized for that error in reporting. They will bring Chinese workers and settle them there. Even the Americans cannot control the inner cities chinese gangs. Every financial institution in that country, every thing they can buy including houses, media, they will buy. So that country will become a quasi-colony. The Elites of the country will become super-rich. The poor will become more poor. Ultimately Dilution of Freedom and sovereignty is the price you will pay for investment.
Go figure whether its good or bad.
Anyone else a little bit in awe over how the communist party is branching out to challenge America and enticing so many to sell out and surrender to its will? Even more worrying is a lot of people seem to think that we should sit back and say nothing because our governments arn’t so morally clean. So that’s it then, throw the ideas of freedom, democracy, human rights into the bin and now down to the rise of China? Because remember everybody - disagree with the communist party and you disagree with the Chinese people, so you muuust be a racist - isn’t that how it works? Frankly it’s insulting because on the contrary it’s beneficial for the rights of the Chinese people that we hold Beijing accountable for its human rights violations - particularly the long suffering Tibetans (because you can’t hop in no time machine and protest the yanks government for its treatment of native Americans, or British leaders for various colonisations - but you sure can open your eyes to what is going on in the world today!!)
Well I don t see a lot of incentive for Poland to spend billions to allow their cows to watch pass faster the chinese trains....
Even with the complex relation between Germany and them, we can imagine a kind of revenge for Nord Stream 2.
I would not wonder that a lot of Poles are fed up by the PIS -Party. ;-)
Do they gain any advantage from to have 1000 years time after war?
Not really. Younger generations are fed up by the clerical, nationalistic PIS guys. Wait and see.
Give the Chinese all the 99-year leases they want. Let them sink billions into roads and harbours.
Then, expropriate them. Lots of precedent, in lots of scenarios.
The roads don't go back to China. They stay in the Nation.
The cost stays a Chinese problem.
(Who they gonna nuke? Who? Who? )
The only roads that I know of and are still usable after 99 years are the roads the Romans build about 2000 years ago. :)
Trump is a greater danger to Germany than China is. Trump is making Germany his punch bag, his villain. If he gets what he wants, soon Germany will lose its status as EU top dog. After that, trump's plan to split EU will succeed, and voila, another competitor to the US will be gone, and the top dog will turn into loyal lap dog.
We are the loyal lap dog now,... maybe we become the top dog! ;-)))
The Chinese are coming....what are we to do. Then again this myth only applies to Africans.
Makes a change from shouting the British , USA ,Germany ,France , Belgium, Russian , Japanese are coming , like these to say in China . Brain Fischer
the chinese might think in decades, but we germans think in centuries, so when the port was built 200 years ago, it was all part of a cunning plan.
once we've build the gibraltar bridge ("thanks agent farage, here's your german passport". stroking my white cat), Mercosur, then latin-america, then canada and the usa have joined the single market, total world domination will be just the start for our inter-galactic trade surplus.
so the EU is absolutely safe for the next one or two thousand years.
The EU is not safe; you must have forgotten Brexit because without the Brits everything will fall apart. The day after John Major became PM in the UK, he said he/they'd now lead the development of Europe, in 1990.
Swexit, Italexit, Austexit etc. coming up soon.
Triggering the rest. Putting an end to the EU elite's clowning.
Been watching
again, have you?how nice to read something refreshingly different and informative, and not laden with boring comments about brexit and trump.
well, except for
"As the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and Brexit-related trade barriers is driving wedges between the EU and the Anglosphere,"
and how apt is that, considering that trump's tariff tiff is far more recent than the events chronicled in the story. and what the fuck is the 'Anglosphere'?
The Anglosphere is the 5 eyes. They dominate the international organisations but probably not for much longer.
If they dominate, why do they leave? Be real, they want to dominate and fail.
The sheer ignorance exhibited by Neo Liberalism, that allowing Capitalism to gain a foothold in China would somehow bring Liberty and Justice for All, is beyond belief. The economy of scale, made this a fool's errand from the beginning. China's militarization of the South China Sea, is the real evidence of China's strategic thinking. A billion and a half people reside in China, more than the EU and America put together. The Chinese in power cannot allow the "evolution" the West was dreaming of. China is an Anaconda, that will consume all it desires. Who can stop it?
Perhaps this lot might step up.....
https://www.facebook.com/SunshineCoastSnakeCatchers/
You’re not in the position to allow or deny anyone anything.
forgive him for being delusional
Nice retro design of the train I must say !
it was an utterly futuristic design when it was build.
The writer said the Mercator Atlas from mid 1500s was "the first ever Atlas". Incorrect. The first ever Atlas was a Majorcan map made by a Jewish cartographer that we know now as "the Catalan Atlas", around 1230s.
"the first ever Atlas". Incorrect.
Let's correct it.
"the first ever useful Atlas".
Great to read a good news article on world trade.
As AI and robotics advance, those unionized German train operators may make themselves redundant. Stevedores at ports in this country are rapidly being replaced by automation for similar reasons. Truckers are also on the endangered list.
No they are not. Truck driving requires actual human intelligence while a lot of the knowledge jobs like doctor of medicine can be done by a computer.
Truck driving requires actual human intelligence
The last mile may need that but 500 mile A2B mainly motorway trucking could be done by AI now. It is being done in some parts of the World. Given that more than 90% of motor vehicle related deaths are due to human error being a long distance trucker is going the way of Pyramid construction worker.
Motorways are not standardized enough for automatization, there are millions of different trees, mountains, clouds, vehicles. A computer can operate the subway without accident, because nothing unforeseen can show up in a tunnel. But as long as our roads aren’t underground tubes, autonomous driving will always fail.
"As the threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and Brexit-related trade barriers is driving wedges between the EU and the Anglosphere,"
Seriously? blaming Trump for this when the tariffs were only spoken of a couple of months ago and the setup was obviously already accomplished into Germany.
A reporter has to justify the relevance of a story. If the trick works and he gets the green light from the editor-in-chief, freebie readers shouldn't complain.
As something happens, something else happens too. Correlation, not causality!
So if the article is to be believed a driver travelling 1000Km in a 12 hour shift without a break would have to achieve an average speed of 52mph. So if the the Chinese are driving 'thousands of Kilometres a day' they're either driving far longer than a 12 hour shift without a break of at a speed considerably faster than an average of 52 mph.
Shumfing surely not right here, let alone highly dangerous. No wonder unions resist it.
In Australia and even here sometimes lorries have two drivers. I guess the Russians, Kazaks and Chinese have figured out something similar. I would think they would almost certainly switch drivers anyway at the border
and if they switch drivers every 8 hours would not even need a 2nd driver on the train.
Mind your if you have to visit and work at customers then with our broken road system you will be lucky to escape with less than a 12 hour shift. Taken me 15 hours today from leaving home to finishing evening meal in hotel which I had as soon as I arrived.
My partner is a truck driver, he rarely ever has 9-hour only shifts (which is the allowable limit), plus, even when they don't make you work past the legal limit, if you get stuck in traffic there's nothing to do. You can't just stop the truck and leave it in the middle of the road. The last company he worked for had him work a 17-hour shift before he quit...
Also, in most cases, it is very unsafe to drive a loaded truck over 90 km/h. The interwebs are full of spectacular accidents involving such careless truck drivers.
What a great idea the Chinese have: setting out to places in Africa and Asia, doing deals with the most competent/friendly/powerful local bigwigs, and setting up shop to sell the locals stuff, building railways and saying it is all to improve trade. I'm amazed no-one has tried this before.
As Europe only manages an average speed of under 6 mph for even its regular goods trains it would make no sense to train goods any further when lorries are so many times quicker. Looks like UK’s heritage train industry could make improvements everywhere.
Ah yes, lorries - the Queens of the Road. Lots of lovely profit for the motor industry, petrol, asphalt and rubber. That's why Thatcher never set foot on a train. Never mind the pollution, infesting children's brains, the noise, dust and fumes.
Even Bonarparte's army moves 3 mph, when they were not running away from the Cossack.
One of the most impressive things about UK trains is how tiny their freight trans are -- little things with a couple of dozen wagons. In the Real World where there's a need to move stuff over long distances economically you end up with trains that can be literally miles long (they're usually a bit shorter than that, maybe a half mile to a mile). There's no need to travel at high speed rail speeds; the key is predictability -- think "conveyor belt".
The first atlas of the world was not made by Gerhard Mercator in 1585 but by Abraham Ortelius in 1570.
Ptolemy had a decent idea of what was going on a little earlier........
Sure he did so. But Ptolemy
didn't collect all known maps of that time and improve them with the newest informations to form a real Atlas, that was sold as a big book. Ortelius was the first, who did that with maps from all over the world.
According to the League of Gentlemen Duisburg is also well known for its gay choirmasters.
That would be an improvement.
Alles klar
Beast of a train in the photo above, all mod cons for the drivers one would hope given the length of the journey. Similar no doubt to the one that pitched up at Barking a while back, chock full of all sorts Chinese and back loaded Scotch.
Portillo's next must do .. , worth a belated entry in his Bradshaw's, eh?
apparently venice is just over run.
The difference between Duisburg and parallel circumstances in Africa and Cambodia - Germany has already established/working infrastructure, while many African nations / Cambodia need the monies offered at attractive interest rates. Those interest rates, as presented in above article, are somewhat disingenuous in that the probability of default is high. When that eventually happens, those carrying the debt are able to assume ownership and governance - removing locals, bringing in Chinese workers, management, politicians and policy makers. May take a generation, but it will be the new colonialism of Africa and Cambodia.
I don't think it will go down well with the Chinese when the African nations pull on them what they did to the western countries and say they can't pay them. Everything they have will be swallowed whole and no one will complain as they have about us. China will never let the debt go.
China will never let the debt go.
China has also been providing debt relief to African countries on its own terms. At the first China-Africa Cooperation Forum in October 2000 in Beijing, the Chinese government pledged to write off in two years overdue obligations on 156 loans owed by African countries; these totaled 10.5 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion). The pledge was fulfilled ahead of schedule (He, 2007). In November 2006 China announced that it would cancel another 10 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion) in debt—168 interest-free government loans that had matured by the end of 2005 and were owed by 33 of the heavily indebted and least developed countries in Africa. By mid-May 2007 China had signed debt forgiveness agreements with 11 of these countries and expected to conclude agreements with the other 22 by the end of 2007.
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2007/wp07211.pdf
This will make the EUs carbon numbers even better, and more likely to get to zero.
That is, by outsourcing production to China.
What a win for Global climate change
If it can replace air and sea travel, it could be better for carbon, and at least it can in principle be done with fully renewable energy.
Horses pulling the trains?
more cheap imports to flood in from china, putting all our jobs at risk, long live the EU !!!
Like the UK won't buy Chinese goods after Brexit!
Actually, you might be right. We won't be able to afford "luxury" Chinese merchandise.
Germany has a trade surplus. France has a minor deficit. UK has a large deficit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_China
we will flood china with cheap porsches and leberkäs.
the new silk road in action. I remember when the west used to take on such massive life changing projects, sadly no more, the west can't even look after its existing, crumbling infrastructure.
The infrastructure was mostly planned and built by Europeans (if you include the Russian and Soviet empires as being European).
The Chinese don't have to worry about losing by-elections to the LibDems, of course.
Democracy,law and NIMBY slows progress. China ignores these matters
Hmm. From "kazakhs" to Belarus they are doing a great job... There must be a Kazakhstani-Belarus border after all, in the author's Westworld
But the EU only trades amongst its members?
Nice one ;-)
The EU provides preferential tariff protection amongst trading partners within the Union - it trades outside, but with a different set of rules.
the EU only trades with germany, while germany trades with the world.
soon germany will also trade with scotland, who will use its spaceport to trade with mars and other planets. so it's all sorted.
In my experience the Germans don't really like tea. They seem much more inclined to espresso
Not sure about the relevance, but in Northern Germany, tea is almost as popular as it is in Britain. Coffee is also popular, but there is a distinct tea culture as well.
Indeed there is. Tea department at KdW in Berlin better than anywhere I've seen in the UK outside of London
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostfriesische_Teekultur
People in Friesia consume 300 l tea per year and capita. :-)
This is kind of the problem in that rail falls between two stools. The majority of durable goods aren't time sensitive enough to merit paying double the cost of shipping, whereas most goods that need to arrive fast need to get there in much less than 12 (or even 10 days).
Also, it's hardly encouraging if the response to BRI is for European employers to start demanding that labour standards be lowered to the level of China or Central Asia.
whatever has happened to the Royal Albert Docks/ Kong Hong entropt? there's no up to date reporting that i can find anywhere. Or is it just another Cambourne unicorn put out to graze in Doggerland at the bottom of the North Sea (soon to be joined by HS2 and Hinkley Point C... and the post-Brexit UK economy?)?
“The Chinese and the Kazakhs drive thousands of kilometres a day, they really work hard. It’s ridiculous, really. Of course we are trying to work out why this is happening. You know how many train drivers’ unions we have, and the Poles are not much better,”
I hate the use of “not much better” here, clearly workers well-being is not very important for Mr Straach
When they need six days for 1.300kms a question of attitude is at stake; Mr. Staake's wording may be not quite the right one; his criticism is totally justified.
But we don’t know this, it’s not really explained why exactly it takes so long other than blaming “unions” with no further context, maybe it’s border controls or outdated infrastructure?
Poland has been the largest recipient of EU infrastructure funds and Germany has decent infrastructure. The human factor is likely responsible.
Duisburg is also home to a fab little music festival, Traumzeit: http://www.traumzeit-festival.de/
Regulars include The Real Tuesday Weld, Lambchop and Iggy Pop.
Next you'll tell me Duisburg has birding reservations...
Gotcha! The Anglo-American imperium based on control of the seas was created over time for London (and later, NYC) banking houses to compete with Eurasian overland routes. It is now crumbling. Of note, Chinese adaptive re-use of 19th century Anglo-American railroad technology is a driver.
Interesting to see that Western thirst for Chinese consumer goods vastly outpaces Eastern thirst for Western-made product. Exactly the cause of the 18th-century Anglo bullion crisis that led to the Brits loss of the central portion of its North American empire (what became the US), what led to Britain (and eventually the US) to adopt political violence such as the Raj to enforce the rules of empire, and the forced use of opium as a method of payment to the Chinese for their goods thru the humiliation of the Opium Wars.
But the Chinese play the long game. What was lost during the 19th century has been regained in the 21st.
And should we really be scared of Chinese authoritarianism? In light of political violence unleashed by the Anglo-American world over the past 300 years ranging from police actions such as the Boston Massacre to the genocide of an estimated 45 million indigenous Americans, to the mass destruction of society and culture in Africa, the answer must be put in historical perspective.
Yes. We should be scared of all authoritarianism, and the Chinese do have a certain enthusiasm for it.
I'm sure one day there will be plenty of Guardian readers stood holding their shopping bags and ranting about the opium wars as Chinese tanks roll towards them.
because to the chinese it is better than chaos, which brings famine and death. the relationship between the Chinese and power is fine and far less are interested in democracy than you imagine, theyre happy to do the work and let the politicians take care of the economy as long as everyone gets fed. in 5000 years china has never had democracy and it is more open now than its ever been, the student elite may concern themselves with political freedom but they make up far less than 5% of the population. people want food and less poverty voting choices won't change that.
This article seems to be supportive of German and Polish union breaking. Why?
It's the guardian. It's love for Germany, china,France, ireland(not the north) Nederlands in particular, and then most of the EU countries, not Hungary,Poland or Greece though, or the UK of course. The rest of the world doesn't have enough regulations, us inferior and racist,and they are desirable nationalists.
No. It is not. When unions result in a train journey of 800 miles lasting six days, however, they are killing the cow, they want to milk.
guardian is center-right on most issues these days, its die hard liberalism faintly whiffs of the left but it certainly isnt socialist or genuinely left leaning. Post Blairite lefty leaning means neoliberal right to me!
While Trump attempts to make America Great Again by isolation and humiliation of European allies, the EU-led by Germany- gets ready to share the new global wealth creation trade sphere of a rising China. Watching from far away Brazil, the US gives the impression of past and China of future.
Uh, no. German-led wealth sharing has its limits, and when Germany is ready to collapse because of debt and financial instability after years of consuming Chinese manufactured goods and producing few of its own, maybe Germany will wake up and fight for its own identity. Until then, prepare to pollute your environment with Chinese plastic.
BTW, Americans have begun to have its fill of cheap Chinese goods and have begun to stand up to being taken advantage of by Chinese and Europeans.
Germany has a trade surplus with China. The EU - not so much. In fact, it has a significant deficit with China. The US is pushing back to claw back the billions and so should the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_China
Germany is rather slow when it comes to building railways, however.
Switzerland has constructed the Gotthard Basis tunnel to massively increase freight capacity across the Alps, opened 2016. Less than 20 years to have an operational rail line going through nearly 60km of mountain rock.
The problem? The line north out of Basel into Germany to take the freight in and out of Switzerland. Germany started building work on that in 1987 and it might be finished in 2030. Maybe. Not looking promising, however.
If freight could run on feasibility studies and complicated financing packaging, they'd be sorted, however.
This project (and the BER airport) don't reflect at all well on Germany's large-scale engineering capabilities.
Maybe finance, or lack of, played a part, the more so given the vast amounts needed for the infrastructure of a re unified Germany?
The Base Tunnel however was paid for by road taxes levied principally on foreign registered commercial traffic that used Switzerland to transit between northern and southern Europe and into and out of the country itself.
The problem is not "engineering capabilities" (what a preposterous thing to say, as German engineers are heavily involved in large infrastructure projects all around the world, including Switzerland btw.), but the simple fact that the whole way how infrastructure projects are handled by the state in Germany desperately needs to be reformed.
Being forced to take the cheapest offer is total nonsense, for example. The incredibly bureaucratic obstacles small communities have to overcome to benefit from money intended for infrastructure projects is another example. The German state is offering billions for the modernisation of the telecommunications infrastructure, yet only very few projects have actually been realised yet, simply because it's way too time consuming and bureaucratic to get access to those funds.
Then there is the favourite German pastime of suing the crap out of everything and hence blocking big infrastructure projects for years. All these problems need to be addressed, all of them are a matter of organisation, not engineering.
Don't get me wrong - we agree on where the problem lies.
But converting technical know-how into realised projects is also a capability, one Germany appears to be struggling with recently.
I believe legal problems are the main issue for the problems on the Basel to Offenburg Line.
Give China due credit. While the West, led by the US has been busy invading countries all over the globe, reducing whole nations to rubble (Iraq, Afghanistan etc) China has rolled up its sleeves and built up its economy, lifted hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty and become an engine for growth. Even more importantly it has put a check on the growth of its population. In that sense alone it has rendered the world and the environment a great service. (The One Child Policy may have been cruel but imagine the planet having to cope with another billion Chinese to feed).
Yes, yes I know China also polluted the atmosphere, trashed the countryside, trampled on the rights of its people, but on balance it has shown the world that there is an alternative to the continuous invasions of the American model.
Sounds like you are making a strong case for capitalism. Well done.
And the US at the insistence of the UN entering "humanitarian" wars and America having been attacked most horribly by Islamists obviously had to go after them why wouldn't they?
Yes, except that in the past 30 years the West has used capitalism to make the rich richer at the expense of the middle class and the poor. China too has plenty of rich people but part of the wealth did go to lift the poor out of poverty.
Pah, amateurs!!
HS1 hasn't, but what about HS2? that'll show 'em how it's done ...
Seriously though, consider the benefits of having a similar hub cunningly sited on this island, readily accessible for all, which had direct access to the Chunnel but which was predominantly focused on the thousands of daily RO/RO freight movements to and from mainland Europe.
Yes there would need to be re-alignments of actual tunnel transits; what a return though given drastically reduced pollution levels, congestion on southern motorways especially the M25, scant if any need for "Operation Stack", requisite custom clearances handled inland, suspect loads checked at leisure and more thoroughly, stowaway immigrants far more easily policed, Freeport facilities, shipments of perishable goods readily fast tracked and so on.
Ah well.
Has work re-started on HS2 btw, since Carillion's collapse?
To get to the UK a train would have to pass through France, which is more difficult than Germany because of its less open rail market. There is also the problem of how to deal with stowaways etc in France.
On the contrary, a security fenced, easily patrolled and enclosed hub in Northern France for freight to load /unload, do customs etc to connect with a similar hub in the UK would negate any issues with "rail markets" and all but eliminate stowaways. (as referred to in my post)
The only real problem would be doubling the current 4 (from memory) transits to 8 and transferring cars to using ferries.
Whatever though, the money's being spent on HS2.
You mean like the existing railway yard, which has had huge problems with stowaways?
The Mercator Projection was not "the straightest possible line" from A to B.
It only dealt with compass bearings,not distance.
Compass bearings were more important than actual distance in those days.
That is why Greenland looks so enormous on the Mercator Projection.
The quickest way from Japan to Britain?
Fly over the North Pole.
You would never guess THAT by looking at your Mercator Projection.
No, the shortest route, i.e the lowest distance in kms., from Japan to Britain, the Great Circle rote, is over the North Pole (or very close to it). The great property of the Mercator map projection, was that any straight line on the map, between any two points, was a true compass bearing, when read as an angular measurement against line of longitude, from A to B. You need another technique for tracing a Great Circle route, but that property was of little use for trade and travel over long distances until very late in the 20th century it is however very useful to be able to determine the compass bearing of A from B across a large bay or a reasonable stretch of open sea or ocean; that was the big plus of a Mercator map; and then came the million dollar challenge of how to determine the longitude of a place Rnough already -- bring on James Cook, and the Harrison chronometer some 200 years later. I spent 35 years trying to teach these basic principles to beginning college students -- plane and spherical geometry is tough for many to figure out.
So in other words, Duisburg is a dumbing ground for the Chinese consumerist garbage, produced and littered around the world only to serve an economic system which is killing the planet.
No, the stuff actually has a CE label. They'll dump the toxic stuff in Brexitannia, where they are more casual with standards an such. A chlorinated KFC chicken meal plus some toxic toys for the kids, what's not to like?
Hello, mister UNA bomber!
That doesn't mean it won't be cheap junk.
Look at the amount of low quality goods that already make their way from China into the EU, including the UK.
The main issue with the speed of freight in Europe is line capacity.
Passenger trains go faster and make more frequent stops, which is not ideal for coexisting with slow, constantly moving freight.
Most of the lines from Belarus to Duisburg have relatively frequent passenger service, and freight just has to fit in the few remaining gaps, mainly at night.
Yes, but even with only nightime freight operation 1200 km should be possible in 2-3 nights.
Assuming there is enough capacity.
There is more demand than there are slots.
Once you finally get a slot then things start moving, but again there can be speed limits to reduce noise through residential areas, delays due to engineering works that can only happen at night, etc.
so what is needed are separate rail trunk lines for freight and passengers, a fact recognized by France when the original LGV/TGV line -- Paris to Lyon was built in the late 1970s; why not build new freight rail lines across Europe ? Must be the money -- get the Chinese to pay for it; they are very experienced in building rail lines -- high speed in China, or more traditional ones in the 2nd or 3rd world. So, why not ?
Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan have broad gauge (1,520 mm), whereas Germany, Poland and China have standard gauge (1,435 mm). So twice on the journey the containers have to be moved by crane from one train to another. This is less time consuming than it sounds: 40+ containers can be transferred in under an hour.
That's why Khorgos.
It's a shame the article doesn't mention the self proclaimed Queen of Duisburg and 'her' efforts to raise the profile of the city via school exchange trips to Royston Vasey.
Not to forget the sighting of two Pink-footed goose at Rheinaue Duisburg in March.
I suppose the irony of suggesting weakening the unions to help a communist economy is entirely lost on Staake.
Right on. Still, it's good that Duisburg workers have jobs.
And we seem to think that we can buy from and sell to China more cheaply than Europe !
The benefits of the rail connection are obvious but the article pointed two issues:
1. Trade imbalance, for every 2 train loads from China there is one empty return. I believe it is a short term issue, eventually China’s wages will raise and more Chinese will come to like and afford European goods.
2. Germany will overly rely on China. It is a political opinion which is more noise than substance.
Europe and Asia, neighbours, natural partners - it's inevitable. Forget the noise, the facts speak for themselves.
China's wages are already rising. This is causing them to have to focus on more European and US industries like aerospace, Nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, financial services, computing etc.( The more basic work is being farmed out to neighbouring countries fueling their growth) . This means even more competition for our industries.
First rule of transportation: volume does not equal value.
The containers might arrive from China, but it is unlikely that Chinese wagons get any further west than the boundary between the Chinese 4'8.5" standard gauge and former USSR 5' broad gauge railway networks at the China/Kazakhstan border. The containers are transferred to broad gauge wagons to pass through the former USSR, and these wagons in turn can only go as far west as transshipment points in Poland where the containers need to be transferred to more standard gauge wagons.
Isn't that the whole point of "BUILDING a belt and road"?
No. Not least because the road in question is is the sea(!). Maybe it sounds better in Chinese, but "Belt and Road" it is very confusing in English.
Wagon bases with adjusting bogeys on tapering track interchanges?
As for competing with Chinese manufacturing...do the Europeans look for the niche products like milk powder? While also considering products that have high value and complexity. Are the bigger total profit margins are on the more commonplace mass produced goods from China in the ever growing global ubiquity of basic consumer goods? Will it always be more of a one way trade?
As for recognising employee rights...which end of the line is preferable?
These comments are free here; but definitely do not help employment prospects at either end of the line, in the age of high surveillance.
Viz Ai Wei Wei's deft marble CCTV sculpture.
And some myopic Americans are fretting over a little train service that will, if it ever gets built, run a few hundred miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Pitiful.
Don’t worry, the Koch brothers will prevent you from any railroads being build.
"Don’t worry, the Koch brothers will prevent you from any railroads being build."
The high speed rail line in California is enjoying a lot of cost overruns, was bent and kinked to avoid any placement where the filthy rich blue coast Democrats eyes might see it.
Most of the public transit projects end up costing a fortune and for the majority of citizens do not go where they want to go.
So it's HS2?
Chinese expansionism - their long game for centuries.
No, Eurasian cooperation and mutual prosperity, the worst nightmare of the Anglo-Saxon imperialists.
You forgot the *muhahaha* while stroking your white cat...
Just proves what a load of crap the Brexit crowd gave us. Here is Germany, the most pro EU nation in Europe, and they are trading their brains out with Beijing. What earthly need is there to leave the EU to set up more trade with China.
My fear is that as China's economic might grows ever stronger, our ability to challenge their tendency to trample over other nations, grabbing territory in the South China Sea, Tibet etc and trashing the planets fragile biodiversity ( wholesale slaughter of sharks for their practically inedible fins, elephants for their ivory and rhinos for their horns ) will reduce to nothing.
Certainly, our ability as a country with 60 million inhabitants to challenge anyone - or even to negotiate and barter with anyone on a reasonably even footing - will become non-existent.
I personally think all this trade with China is bad for the planet and also bad for anyone who exports to China, but it seems I am in a minority.
I just think it will not be long before any technology we export to them is stolen and they will stop importing. There are plenty examples, like the magnetic high-speed railsystem and train of which China ordered billions of Euros worth from Germany and then cancelled the order after 1 train and 120kms of track.... and surprise, surprise, a couple of years later they had their own version....
Surely it was designed because dead white males want to make places nearer the equator look smaller, or something. I'm sure I've see this claimed on a fairly regular basis...
I'm sure dead males (white or other) don't want much at all, anymore....
I do agree with most of the razz=ma-tass given to the international railway, and Yes I do see the rail stop at Duisburg being great for the town's people and Germany. But I do have a certain niggle that America won't like the thought of China encroaching on what they see as their patch.
does anyone care if america likes the idea or not? US approval of european activities is pretty low down on the list. Germany first.
The port of Duisburg is older than the United States of America, so I severely doubt they can do much about what shipping is done there. I bet they'd also be annoyed that he University Duisburg-Essen offers extensive studies in East Asia sciences and business including language studies both for Chinese and Japanese...
China plans for the long term whereas the United States barely plans for next week
Typical EU-era Germany: do as I say, not as I do.
Of course, the other EU members will only be allowed to buy and receive German investment. Chinese investment for these countries will be blocked by some made up EU legal mechanism under "security concerns".
*sigh*
The biggest European port of the "New Silk Road" initiative is located in....
Greece.
Yes, Greece. The same Greece Brexiters never stop crying crocodile tears over, the same Greece that is recovering remarkably.
Instead of mind-numbing slogans and casual Germanophobia, maybe you start to learn a thing or two about the continent that you're supposedly part of. "The EU is not Europe!" you say. Yet it could be Mars and it wouldn't make a difference...
WHOOOSHHHH....!
Where did you get that from? Please state sources.
It's great that we all do our bit for the environment by not using plastic bags. whilst everything we consume gets shipped (trains,planes,lorries) around the world , wrapped in plastic and sent to us. Just don't think about carrying the stuff in a bag you environmental haters.
Tiny pedantic point but Mercator projection charts do not facilitate mariners sailing the shortest route from A to B. For that it is necessary to follow part of a great circle which, on Mercator, is a curve. Great circle navigation requires some form of orthodromic projection.
I have fond memories of helping to organise street parties amongst the dispossessed mining families of Duisberg in the late eighties. With hindsight, completely inappropriate but thats the joy of German politeness. I do recall that even though the houses were off the map - the police for example had no idea - the area was clean and tidy
Those ships sailing up and down the Rhine are huge and very frequent. I remember sitting by the river in Rheinhausen with a German friend and a few bottles of Köpi watching them go by. Duisburg's really well-placed for the Autobahns, too.
Not the prettiest of places, but some excellent Turkish and Italian restaurants. And the best Pilsner in Germany. Nice to see some good news from there.
It definitely is not the prettiest place in Germany, but the people are amongst the nicest. Down to earth, friendly, warm and tolerant people. The Ruhrpott's real treasure are the people.
Dont be so silly the best pils comes from rothaus in the black forest
Good article.
China's BRI is a Eurasian answer to the traditional Anglo-American policy of divide et impero. What is perhaps more important in the long run is the replacement of petro-dollars by yuans.
We Anglos are peripheral to the world island. We have dreamt of world conquest, but it is now time to check our hole card. Trump is a hate figure to those with vested interests in the foreign-policy elite, but at least he is inviting a re-examination of our policy -- NATO really is more of a social clique than a defensive armory -- without the suffocating influence of Beltway cognoscenti.
Could this be the one place in Germany where you can find some authentic Chinese food? Just one decent Sichuanese restaurant is all I ask...
Never found one myself but a chinese woman took us to a very nice Korean restaurant in heidelberg.
you can find them in Duesseldorf, where you really can get the original Bejing duck there : Restaurant Jinling, Königsallee 106. Prices are decent for e.g :Half duck 33 €, also Seczuan food. The cooks ( 4 ) had a qualification of several years of professional training in China, before working in Jinling.
Hope my commet helped you. Wave from Germany with respect.
Great, thanks for the tip, will try to check it out when I’m next in that neck of the woods!
I am trying to protest at every thoughtless attempt to Americanise our language. It is not "the Rhine River": it is the River Rhine or "the Rhine".
Well said, I agree but what you have to realise is that the on line version of the Guardian is aimed at the US which is why we have so many US based articles. My least favorite is "sports"
The author is the Berlin Bureau chief which in itself is another Americanisation. I have set my spell check to English/English but it still insists on changing s as in Americanisation into a z.
Are you not being a Little Englander? The English language has long since ceased to be a British preserve, and in any case few these days would think of 'the Rhine river' as an Americanism. It doesn't strike me as such (and I'm 74).
Those who know how allied with those who can do. Excellent.
Another great success for China . Honest hard work with free and fare trade - they perfect antidote to the vile USA and it’s egomania
Yes, your insight is surpassed only by your vocabulary.
i support China because their the only one's investing in a long term future growth. while China pumps money into major new projects in places from Europe to Africa, with the aim of future markets for it's goods and services, we blow up places like Libya in the name of democracy. Who will prove smarter in the long term i don't know. But i'm pushing my kids to learn Mandarin as an odds on bet.
Yes, they are doing a great job for the future by being the worlds biggest polluter year on year and building endless coal power stations.
The problem is investment isn't that easy. If it were, then all countries would invest for growth, all economies would grow, and eventually the world's key economic issues would all be sorted. Personally, I'm sceptical. The Chinese Government might be staffed with geniuses that can reasonably calculate risks and economic return on the capital expended. But I doubt it. This is more about spending money to boost economic growth in the medium term. It all seems to be done on borrowed money, and eventually that will have to be paid back. China's other motivations are political. It will make smaller countries dependent upon China, it underscores China's economic strength, and belt and road makes it look like the Chinese government is doing something useful and creative. But ultimately, the idea could just run out of steam...and the amount of public debt in China is absolutely colossal. It is a huge risk, and really, china would be better off spending its cash on modernising its legal system. that would go some way to building trust with a world that has no real faith in this opaque country that appears to disdain normal legal and ethical norms
I fear China because deep down they see themselves as better than everyone else. Chinese see themselves as the "middle kingdom" between we mere mortals and the Gods in heaven. After a couple hundred years of being kicked around by Japanese and Europeans including we Brits they feel they have every right to trample on their neighbours, grabbing land and sea territory, hoovering up precious natural resources, buying farmland all over Africa and destroying precious habitat and rare species.
With their ability to copy western military and civilian technology without heed of patents and copyright, they have quickly caught up with our technological advantage. Who will be around to stop them from their next land or sea grab? The USA? With Trump in charge don't make me laugh. They would just give him a hotel and a golf course ite and a few coeds to molest and he will roll over and let them tickle his tummy.
d-d-ch!
Seven whole trains per day? How many containers per train? What percentage of Chinese exports to Europe does that represent? I wonder if anyone has any stats on this? Anyway, it doesn't sound like much, especially as the price is almost certainly subsidised.
I think you almost certainly missed my point! ;-)
Time for the EU to become the new victorians, not building national rail routes but international ones. A super freight train should easily cover 100KM/h, stops included. 2000km a day doing the trip in under a week. A vision in 50 years, not just the EU but a super-continent of EA, Eu-asia. That vision will give farrago something to pee in his pants about.
As a dedicated European it gives me something to shit my kegs over actually.
Like a big EU empire guy verhofstadt style yeah?
Finally the superentity Eurasia is beginning to materialize - hopefully this will also benefit Russia where a lot of it geographically is located.
Eventually, China will have to legalize weed like eveyone else and all this frenzied hive activity will abate.
Then Europe will be able to ship them train-loads of munchies-- Doritos, potato chips (crisps), salitines, ...
Saltines...
Die Chinesen kommen.Gott sei Dank!
Now we can all sleep well.
謝謝歐洲。
Europe needs to face towards the East and put two fingers up at Trump. Well done Germany.
Two fingers up on one hand and one special finger up on the other hand, please-
You could start by sending the 35000 american soldiers home who are currently based in Germany along with the massive airforce that is saving Germany circa 40 to 60 billion Euros a year I suppose.
I think Trump is already supposed to be planning that
I think it's a shame this couldn't have been in the East of Germany where economic activity is still far more needed than it is in the West.
Rhine is the magic word.
The north/south divide in Germany is now overtaking the east/west divide, with the 'rust belt' areas suffering particularly badly - look at that photo of the Krupp workers from 1987, and it's not got any better since then. Excellent article in the Economist:
https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/08/19/germanys-new-divide
But it's unclear that a distribution center is the answer. Moving containers, and driving freight trains, are not very high-tech jobs and can be automated. Rio Tinto in Australia have demonstrated driverless 10000-ton freight trains that are more fuel-efficient than ones with drivers.
Nowhere in the east of Germany is there such a large (existing) inland port. And while the Elbe is a navigable river, its shipping infrastructure does not match that of the Rhine.
It's great that China is developed because the world is becoming more and more competitive.
The Volkswagen Audi Group already has eight factories in China, BMW two, and Mercedes one (with another under construction). How long will it be until it's 'German' cars coming off the rail transporters for European consumers, and what of the (oft vaunted) German automotive sector then?
They cannot come back from China as engines etc, are all old tech so will not meet EU standards. If ever the day comes when they do, say goodbye to Europe!
That's been happening for decades - plenty of South African and US-built BMWs etc. Most people don't have a problem with it - why should they? Trade works both ways and all car companies are multinational. You don't expect your Ford Fiesta to be built in Dearborn, or your Nissan in Yokohama?
.
Unsprung dung sputnik ?
"The (Mercedes) SLR sports car was built at the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking. Brackley, Northamptonshire, is home to the Mercedes Grand Prix factory, and Brixworth, Northamptonshire is the location of Mercedes-Benz High Performance Engines."
Mercedes has factories in 27 countries across the World and is now a truly global brand.
.
The reasons journey times from China are still far too long, as Staake sees it, lie mainly with the heavily unionised rail companies in Europe rather than their counterparts in Asia: trains take on average six days to travel the 1,300km (800 miles) from Brest on the Polish-Belarusian border to Duisburg, while the 10,000km from Chongqing to Belarus is often completed in five-and-a-half days.
Says it all!
Why should the Poles give favourable track timetabling to this?
The trains contain all the things to create unemployment in Europe. The longer they take, the better!
45 days by ship
says it all
portent for Brexit?
Nope, just shows how the Germans manipulate the EU for their own benefit!
Indeed. Merkel is the Black Widow at the centre of the web. Macron is trying to court her but there's a better than even chance that he'll end up as a sucked dry husk
Nope, it shows that the Germans have the enterprise, not to mention industrial relations, which we so badly lack.
10,000km in 6 days to EU border, 1,300km next 6 days?
Customs? Change of rail gauges? No common train track the whole way? Seems odd seeing as you can get a train from Berlin to Moscow in about 24 hrs. Can't imagine its just unions, the usual scapegoat for inept managements.
Again why should the Poles give favourable rail passage to this? Why should they put this in front of their own trains?
Why? Because I am sure they will be open to a deal...
Who said anything about putting any train "in front" (or "behind") other trains? Each train needs to be fitted into a timetable, and ideally in a way that none has to wait for the other.
And Jeremy Hunt meanwhile stepped well into BJ´s boots with his Japanese wife gaffe.
No reason to feel "uncoupled" from China completely yet.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who suffered from melancholia, expressed the sentiment – “how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me the workings of this world. It is an unweeded garden and things rank and gross in nature possess it merely”
He obviously needed Nutrax for his nerves.
10,000 km in 5 and a half days (132 hours) is only 76 km/h. So why does the European segment take so long? Is it customs controls?
Traffic, not be allowed to drive at night due to noise, mandatory breaks I suppose.
Why should it not? Polish traffic comes first!
Cargo trains mostly roll at night, since then the tracks are free. Breaks should not be a problem, some other driver takes over then for the next stretch.
“Alles klar...!!”
and what happens if rasputin wants to tax the trains going thru russia
Nuke him. Job done.
Meanwhile the UK who invented railways, can't even run raillines between Leeds to Manchester (50miles) without major delays or cancellations
Stop saying 'inland port' or 'dry port'. It's not a port if it's inland, is it.
So Mr. Know-it-all if you look at the picture above you might find that Duisburg is next to the river Rhine and we are speaking about Duisburg Rheinhafen...
It's on the Rhine. You do have ports on rivers.
whats an air"port" then
Train drivers? I'm surprised there are any.
From my many years of watching Thomas the Tank Engine, I always believed that the trains drove themselves with their servile obeisance to the fat man in the top hat.
Servile obeisance? Quite a few stories centered on the misdoings of Thomas and Friends did they not, "Troublesome Trucks" springs to mind?
but they always learned their lesson and tried their best to be really useful engines.
Oh the irony... Hitler would almost be amused after his Blitzkreig autobahn ideology. At first glance I thought it was a bus on rails. Must be the Preston to Colne service, then...
Hitler wanted to build a super broad gauge system at I think around 8'.
The author seems to accept, uncritically, that driving "thousands of kilometres a day" is either feasible or desirable.
Where's the problem?
They'll work with two train drivers on board and drive through the night (probably on for 8 hours, off for 8 hours) to cover the 10k at an average speed of 75kph.
It's feasible. Many high speed trains can do 1000km in 3 hours. I think the infrastructure in China and Western Europe could cope, the bit in the middle less so although I have no experience of rail in Turkey.
Engineering can and will solve problems of feasibility eventually.
Henri
The US system is much closer to the german system.
What is the level of migration into China? Other than the some 260,000 Vietnamese during the 1990s virtually zero, where it will remain. Perhaps those empty freight cars could be used to export a commodity that Europe cannot utilise and which China is running out of, cheap labour.
Putting it another way, the mass displacement of peoples is a weapon and at the moment the liberal minded west is a sitting duck.
hmm Justin, alles klaar ?
Do you want to see my pink pomplet?
So, just for the sake of discussion - what is the massive benefit of importing cheaper goods from China? Is there some magic afoot that means Germans will be able to spend their time hiking and generally enjoying the great outdoors - while Chinese workers toil for low wages to send them cheap goods. Or, will Germans find their manufacturing sector goes into a long decline - as more and more people realise goods from China are high quality - and wages in Germany stagnate etc.
I bought a fan recently. Amazon. £16. Made in China. Been running almost 24/7 for the last month - almost silent, efficient, safe. Where will it end? The West out of work? Where will get the money from to buy even a £16 fan?
It's the difference between what are sometimes called visible and invisible goods. China is currently doing very well on producing the visible goods and selling them to us at lower prices than we can produce such items for ourselves. We make our money from selling them invisible goods: education, financial services, films, music, etc.
My German is fan is silent and has lasted 8 yrs.
Germanys economic model is selling China the factories that produce such fans. And China`s wages increase, they are not a low wage country anymore.
Do you prefer buying more expensive products of lower quality, but made at home? That is the result of protectionist behavior.
Might I suggest that it is the fragmented state of rail companies and ownership that causes the slow trains., not unionisation. Although the EU is aggregated in many ways the railways are a mix of state owned monopolies and silly private franchises as in the UK.
Wrong.
The problem is that rail transport is still largely regulated on national level. There isn't a common language like in maritime or aviation and train drivers need to be changed at the border. Couple of other quirks slow things down as well.
There are other things like different signalling and emergency systems that might require changing the locomotive together with the driver at the border. And then there might be some congestion along the way because freight trains have lower priority than passenger trains.
Well, you may suggest such. But I'll wager CEO's opinion is a little more informed. Thats not to say fragmentation and self interest of the state rail countries is not a factor, but agreeing multiple agreements with various unions who each want to use what the others are getting as bargaining chips is a nightmare. And when some see one union getting more than they thought the whole equation falls apart. Ugg, ...shudder... (I remember!)
Has the author ever heard of the Greek port of Piräus where Cosco is handling around 3.7 million TEU a year? THAT is Chinas Gateway to Europe.
It said Xi Jinping's as you quoted yourself. So please explain your comment further to make more sense.
ahh but they aren't German, and recently all things are about the Great Germany!!
Minor hub. Nobody ships Chinese goods to the EU main markets through Piraeus. Most goes directly to Rotterdam or Hamburg.
This article dovetails in neatly with those regarding China's militarisation
of the South China Sea and the Australian editions item on the future of
Australian/US alliances.
China is showing the refined skills of a global superpower without resorting
to the projection of military power (yet?).....for 60 years the US has deployed
its army, navy, marines and air force on China's doorstep (1000's of km. from
the continental US). There have been periods when China's then fledgling merchant
marine were interdicted by US forces and the US 7th Fleet .......... why am I raising
this......China has become the worlds largest trading nation in the last decade.....
it has relied on maritime transport that has been exposed to potential US/allied
disruption by that nations overseas deployments, a situation no fledgling super
power can counternance ........opening land based, high volume transport routes
as this railway is only the start of, lessens the perceived "threat" for Chinese
trade.......a smart move on so many levels.
Meanwhile in Australia we constantly hear of China's military occupation of islets
in the South China Sea and their projection of military power and our need to support
the US to keep the maritime routes "open" (they have never been shut)....maritime
routes that China's massive trade is overwhelming dependent on.......our sinophobia
is being constantly aroused/reinforced for domestic political reasons and to continue
tying us to our assumed dependence on US defence/foreign policy.
I can only hope as many Australians as possible read this article, think about our
geopolitical status quo and realise that whilst China is a rising superpower with
hegemonic aims, it is also a nation looking to its best strategic interests after
decades of "containment" and military encirclement. ....it is basing its hegemony
on economics not military power.
Would you have been arrested if you didn't write that?
What a sales pitch!
Tell that to the 19 Australians who were arrested and imprisoned without trial.
Read about the chinese military spies in the smh and ABC operating in australia.
Enjoy your Chinese rule in the future, the average Australian will not bend over like you will.
Outside of Australia, you do know the Chinese are taking waters that belong to Vietnam. Ask the average Thai, Vietnamese, Hong kong person if they are worried about china on the charge.
This is not scaremongering.
You are so blind.
You mean the 19 Crown Resorts staff who were convicted under article 303 and 25 of Chinese criminal law, which relate to deriving profit from gambling as a main income and organising gambling parties? Only three were Australian, and two of those were of Chinese heritage. They pleaded guilty, as indeed they were, and Crown Resorts paid a A$1.7m fine.
All innocent.
Not to worry. Post Brexit the UK will be able to do its own trade direct with China, getting all its Chinese imports brought in by air or sea. Whether the deal they get will be as good as the deal the much bigger EU gets with China, we will have to wait and see.
As someone who does business in China (which I doubt you do), I can assure you, you are talking out of your arse.
That's the spirit!
There is a train from Yiwu, China to Barking in London.
I have really enjoyed reading these educational and fascinating articles about China's new trade routes.
Great journalism Guardian. There's a whole big world out there.
and getting smaller all the time.
Some recognised in the 1920s the rise of the industrial east and the potential for the west to be physically excluded from that maritime zone (nine dash line, island aircraft carriers). There were also warnings of the insanity for the west to withdraw from colonial Africa only to create the space for the east to move in (as reported in The G again only yesterday). Australia looks isolated.
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
by
Lothrop Stoddard, A.M., Ph.D. (Harvard)
There were also warnings of the insanity for the west to withdraw from colonial Africa
I thought Algerians lost over a million people kicking the French out. I thought the same about the Angolans, Mozambiquens, Zimbabweans etc. It's news to me that the Europeans left voluntarily out of the goodness of their heart, especially following their devastated countries and diminished power as result WW11.
I don't think I actually said they did.
The book I referred to was written recognising the devastation on Europe by Europe and the consequential detriment that would have on global capacity of western political influence (he finds the turning point to be the Port Arthur defeat of European Russia by a rising Japan) AND physical presence. The UK did of course have a policy of retreat with our "East of Suez" option and my brother served in both Borneo and Aden neither of which are beacons of civilization.
The point the book makes is that although all have a history different peoples have made very different contributions to development e g the ancient structured civilisations of the far east and that their renaissance was both inevitable and to be accepted in contrast with the much harder to define path of sub-Saharan Africa (influenced by extreme Islam) and South America, both of which today are pretty difficult areas, pretty prescient? It's worth a read.
Duisburg is a post-Industrial hell hole, in Rust belt Nord-Rhein Westfalia with staggeringly high unemployment rate, poverty, religious Extremism - you name it!
This is last ditch attempt to revive the place.
Duisburg is still richer than those 9 out of 10 poorest regions in Northern Europe, all located in the UK. Who is doing something - anything - for them?
Only one man can 'revive' the place - Herr Lipp...
Why so harsh, to make some points here? Duisburg has, like many cities with a steel and coal history problems, yes. Nevertheless, Duisburg has also many opportunities and Duisburg is making progress. You can not change 150 years of history with one stroke - that is simply presumptuous.
But in the times of the internet, "hell hole" is the language of the Trumps and Rumps and other troublemaker - they never look for solutions of complex situations, just for scant evidence to prove the macho language they use.
Of course, if the largest 'inland port' was Birmingham, the header would read:
"UK industry heads backwards, with polluting Chinese diesel-powered trains destroying jobs at Tilbury, Liverpool and Newcastle container ports....
no it wouldn't. stop being silly.
"Of course, if the largest 'inland port' was Birmingham"
if asses had spikes on their head we would call them unicorns
Or mono horned ass or a unihorn. Many alternatives actually.
Of course, if the largest 'inland port' was Birmingham, the header would read:
"UK industry heads backwards, with polluting Chinese diesel-powered trains destroying jobs at Tilbury, Liverpool and Newcastle container ports....
no it wouldn't. stop being silly.
"Of course, if the largest 'inland port' was Birmingham"
if asses had spikes on their head we would call them unicorns
Or mono horned ass or a unihorn. Many alternatives actually.
Why do you map the Blue Route via Lake Victoria in E Africa? It should link Mombasa and Djibouti.
Your GIS / Graphics unit may need to apply the Mercator projection
This will not last long. I bought a football from tesco express, a pair of adidas sneakers from sports direct and a picture frame from ikea. The first said made in India the second made in Indonesia and the third made in Poland. With growing wages in china and a demographic crisis they are becoming less and less competitive on price.
Chinese companies are producing in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and soon African countries will be on the list once they run out of cheap Asian labour.
This global trade thing - it seems to me to be a race to the bottom. The rich are getting richer from it - and the rest of us are pawns in their game. If Brexit throws us back on our own devices - as it were - I can't help thinking this would be a good thing.
The other proposed part of the Chinese rail project is to put high speed lines through most of Asia, effectively meaning that China is again the hub through which all this trade travels. At the moment there are no proper railway lines connecting Asian countries in a way that Europeans might recognise meaning that sea and air freight is the norm. If China can put in these railway lines they can control (and profit from) the vast majority of trade between Asia and Europe. A spur to and through Africa then becomes a distinct possibility too.
Interesting how yet again a two-way trade relationship is viewed in terms of a supposed assertion of power (even if "soft power") by China. But when it's western corporations descending like locusts on far-away places, it's always expressed as a hale and hearty dynamic of capitalism that brings progress to all.
Well put - I noticed that spin immediately in the article...
But China is a communist state, bullying all others in the S.China Sea, and claiming numerous islands from other nearby countries such as Vietnam...
One needs to be watchful.
Thank god not like the UK claiming overseas territories
What a great idea. Let's import even more cheap stuff from China. Another reason to get out of the EU and embrace the new anti-globalist world
Definitely. Our economy can be based on taking in each other’s laundry. That’s a great way to compete in the 21st century.
Do you prefer hangers or folded, by the way?
The UK is boasting of the deals it is going to do with China once Brexit is completed, but the EU has more chance of getting fair deals with China than the desperate-for-cheap-goods UK does with its much smaller population and open trade ambitions.
And where are you going to get your stuff from?
Duisberg... mmm alles klar. Those naughty Chinese
meanwhile in britain we are being buried in the flowerbed of Brexit, kept alive by a breathing tube
Hahaha! Train lines direct from China, feee trade deals with Japan and Canada, it's amazing what the EU gets done once the Brits have shut the fuck up isn't it?
Meanwhile, on a damp island off the coast, a population, mainly over seventy and living on state benefits, twisted with hate and envy of all things foreign, slowly starves.
Are you on drugs?
That made me laugh. We can put on Love Island matey! Oh yes!
It's funny how it seems that half the world would love to live on this not so damp island.
I have tried contorting myself with hate - but, it just won't work. With laughter at your comment, yes. With hate for all things foreign, no.
I will visit my neighbours at once and see if I can whip them up into a frenzy of contorted hate for all things foreign. It could be tricky - looking at my neighbour's cars … Audi, BMW, BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Audi, Audi …
Looking at my neighbour's kitchen appliances … Bosch, Bosch, Bosch (all the same, living on a new estate at the moment. Don't you just hate (I'm contorted with it) that they all have German hobs and ovens?
One of the many joys of this green and pleasant land is the fact that we can grow food here. There is plenty of room to grow more - most of our fields are grass to provide feed for livestock. We can soon change that!
Not possible as those are being rationed for Brexit day.
If we have to follow the "right" thinking of the comments it is fobidden to do business with the worlf, except the US and UK.
I have, more than once, wondered what the massive benefit of global trade is. Surely it is a race to the bottom for the workers of the world. We will buy wherever is cheapest. At the moment it's China. No doubt Africa will be next. And in 'developed countries' wages stagnate and living standards fall.
Nothing gets made in Africa for global export. Production gets shifted to every other low wage demographically vibrant part of the earth, but it never moves to Africa - which is a shame because industrialization is the only model to bring run away demographics under control. Mining and extraction does happen there, but that is a different story.
Damn Nestlé and its clean drinking water!
What a nonsense. 80 trains a week-let that be 6000 TEUs. A single ocean carrier arriving in Rotterdam has 3times more on board. This claim is ridiculous.
If you read the article you might grasp that the freight is not limited to a few dozen trains coming from China
And half the price too!
I think if you check the geography you will notice Rotterdam is on the edge of Europe - its going to struggle to be the central hub of the EU regardless of how big its containers ships are
But how can Germany trade with China from within the EU? Surely this is impossible?
Once we've caused all of our ports to grind to a halt with the motorways blocked by queing lorries the Chinese will see the far far greater benefits of a trade deal with the UK, we'll get a bigly great one, far far better than the loser EU will manage, just you wait and see.
Germany was one of the first countries into China - to make cars!
It's EU trade and they are EU goods, dumbo. Did you bother reading the article?
Whoooosh... bigly
C'mon! We in the Anglosphere can match this. We built the greatest empire ever!
I propose a rail link between the UK and the US. A series of bridges joining mainland Scotland, Orkneys, Shetland, Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and then to Canada. London to New York in 5-10 days. Easy.
That way, we can secure our supplies of succulent chlorinated chicken and hormone-treated antibiotic beef, and export our world-renowned warm beer. And all those marvellous jams.
#MAGA #MGBGA
;-)
Please can you include unicorn lanes? At least as far as the border....which the unicorns can't cross, of course.
Perhaps we can get the Chinese to pay for it as well
Are you sure you want the Chinese subtly assert their power onto you?
The German average is 5.1%
it's 3.5%
That's the real rate. But you have to consider the cheating one, as dotter101 mentioned, because that's the one used by other countries, so you can compare apples to apples.
This is how you mow down all competitors, you draft up ambitious plans for years and years and then work very hard to make them a reality on the ground.
Compared to that, we have in our country, a core cabal of MPs who for whatever precise reasons, loathe the EU. They've been loathing them for 35 years in some cases, but in all that time, they have never given more than 10 minutes thought to how to deal with the outcome of trashing our membership.
That's how you don't plan a country's future. It's almost unbelievable that we have got to where we are, with the likes of cringeing mediocrities like Johnson, Gove, Mogg, Fox, IDS and Cummings, determining, but decidedly doing no planning, for a future that they have foisted upon us. It really is beyond belief.
I think they do have a plan, but for obvious reasons they do not speak of the plan in public. What they want is an economy based on no regulation, low taxes for businesses and the wealthy, and low spending on public services. If you work out what this would mean for the NHS, social care, schools, public transport etc, I don’t think you’d get 52% of the public to vote for it in an advisory referendum. Hence the secrecy and all the lies about the ‘non-democratic’ EU, Turkey joining the EU, the amount the UK pays the EU, uncontrolled immigration etc etc.
The ERG, a group of MPs who won’t even tell us their names, has no interest in democracy. Brexit has been taken over by extremists with a secret agenda. The ‘will of the people’ is the fig leaf phrase used by very wealthy people to completely screw the majority of the British population. Small wonder that these extremists have allied themselves with Trump, Bannon etc - and seem to have links to Russian oligarchs.
Surely if you hold an advisory referendum, you'd make clear to the people voting that it was an advisory referendum.
In the case of the EU referendum, no-one, not one person, ever mentioned that 'this is an advisory referendum and the government will take on board what you think but that's it.'
On the contrary, the government sent a document about the EU referendum to every address in the country and stated clearly and unequivocally 'THE GOVERNMENT WILL IMPLEMENT WHAT YOU DECIDE'
No mention of 'taking your advice on this one'. Weird eh?
You can't have a free market without Trust. Hence the eternal charges of cronyism against the absolute brextreemists. The closest they get to free markets is handing out contracts on government services. Here again, the EU is at least one move ahead. These people are perhaps the strongest reason for a European civil service and delegated department of trade - they help to keep Britain safe from Reagan-Thatcherism.
The little Englanders who are attempting to force Brexit on a half of the United Kingdom who will never stand for that, never travel outside of their safety Zone, Large as this inland port is, it is but a fraction of the size and volume of trade in the Europort which is the Rotterdam Schiedam area of the Netherlands.
On an Epic scale you can see the goods arrive from all over the World to feed the UK's appetite for consumer products not made in the UK.
After Brexit the extra paperwork and inspection times are going to cause a massive backlog of goods and HM Government are correct in planning for that as retail shops in the UK run empty.
When they call this project fear you know sensible debate has ended. No wonder many Brexit loons also support Trump. The author of Fake News it's self.
Possibly the new post Brexit customs delays might be the catalyst the finally finishes off the U.K. high street ... if there’s going be delays might as well have what ever it is delivered straight to home innit
First came the Polish.
Great read thanks.
However you seem to have missed out the part that most of this trade is destined for the UK.
That is correct isn't it?
Yes. The whole continent is your oyster and only exists to satisfy the needs of the UK.
No
Sarcasm does often get lost on Cif
http://www.infrastructure-intelligence.com/article/sep-2016/george-osborne-launches-northern-powerhouse-think-tank
On taking up a new role as chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership George Osborne said: “Chairing this new partnership will now be a major focus of my political energies. The Northern Powerhouse is here to stay.”
There you go Duisburg... read it and weep
Does the Northern Powerhouse amount to anything more than that faintly embarrassing photo opwhere George Osborne unveiled its name stuck on the side of a clapped out train? Certainly don’t hear much about it any more.
Yup and Hornby are going to lay the track straight to Bejing.
CONFUSING: Map superimposed on the globe (blue dotted path) clearly shows the route bypassing Russia yet the second map "Die Neue Seidenstrasse" held up during the Chinese premier's visit clearly shows it going through Russia. Which is correct?
The The Chinese Great Road project involves numerous routes, by land and sea.
They are both correct.
(The original Silk Road was actually a network of roads.)
If the trade is predominantly one way what do we pay with? It cannot simply be a case of high value one way and low value the other because much of what we import from China is already high value high technology and the Chinese will soon be equal or superior to the Japanese in this regard.
For a time our currency will good, but it will suffer relative devaluation if the situation persists. Already we see the USA paying partly in Government debt. Europe in the sale of key companies and assets. At some point unless there is a redress in the balance of trade Europe and North America will look like the Latin American economic Colonies which suffered so much from foreign ownership.
Unions were cited as a problem but lack of ILO involvement in trade negotiations, the guarantee of workers' rights, minimum terms and conditions across borders, and gradual convergence of wages will always work against the type of society we should aspire to.
Ooh, let me guess why people in a country with no human rights, brutalist superiors, no welfare state, and rock-bottom pay rates are having to work really hard.
All true, yet it's still not acceptable that it takes six days (!) on average to travel 800 miles.
Again, this is likely not an issue of unions, but an issue that needs to be addressed on the European level, removing any kind of obstacles that make the transport of goods via rail so slow and inefficient. If you want to be serious about environment protection, rail is a pretty important factor.
You're right. They should rather zero hours contracts, depend on privatised monopolies for basic social services but while economically oppressed, enjoy phony theoretical human rights that the govt can ignore anytime by waving the words "national security around, and then "render" them to any choice of the type of country you mentioned...
Are you referring to the working conditions at Amazon and Walmart?
Nice sting in the tail of the article on the threat to union protection of workers rights. "Look how the Chinese drivers can be exploited" "we should be allowed to do that here".
yeah, those poor german and polish train drivers, having to travel 133 miles per day.
Perhaps it's time the Chinese workers demanded better pay and conditions?
It is a concern that China will use the new trade deal to undermine EU workers, but we will have to make sure that doesn't happen. A big market like the EU will have more clout than a little one like the UK.
It would hardly be beyond the wit of man to create a single, single-purpose automated freight line across a large part of the route. Would the unions object to that? Obviously not. See the automated metro lines in Paris. No self-respecting railway unionist would advocate slower train services in the absence of management constraints, except as a manoeuvre over territory. You also see that in Paris, on the RER C, which is run by the SNCF* and is therefore an anomaly in Parisian public transport, and on the RER B, shared with SNCF north of Gare du Nord, where drivers switch from RATP** and back.
*National French Railway Company
**Board of Parisian Public Transport
I'm now beyond hope for a reversal of or a sensible Brexit. So I hope it's an utter disaster in every way and the little England amoeba brains who voted for it suffer for their chest beating idiocy.
Calm down. Keep on topic for once FFS and no I didn’t vote Brexit but I despair of fuckwits who Brexitise every thread.
Hmm, let's see - I made a connection between global trade, Europe and Brexit. How obtuse of me.
It might only look like a disaster in forty or fifty years time, when people remember what you could buy with €1.45.
The "Anglosphere"??
The ‘anglosychosis’
A pedantic point I know, but surely the Chinese characters for welcome are the same in Mandarin and Cantonese- they just say them differently.
"Look! The EUSSR join the Soviet Russia & Communist China!! We told you so! Time for GREAT Britain to join GREAT USA! Trump is our savior!"
#ATrueBrexiterReadsTheDailyMail
Jawohl Kamerad!
What's GREAT about it?
if this is correct, that's ridiculous - that's 9 kmph or 5.5 mph. Germany and Poland use the same railway gauge so there's only one switch involved at the Poland - Belarus border.
More poorly made cheap junk from China, made in sweat shops and by people who are little more than slave labour.
Fantastic eh?
I think you will find this is not the 70s or 80s anymore.
Cor blimey, the world shouldn´t be surprised about Brexit anymore lookig at your silly comment.
Like the Japanese path from cheap copies to tech leadership, the Chinese have quickly moved beyond what you are talking about. Yes there is still cheap manufacturing, but they are moving their economy towards technology and engineering innovation and even beginning to own manufacturing companies and facilities located in other countries within Africa and Asia for example - and the US and Europe.
Get up to speed on things, before you comment.
Hilarious!
Another Brexit own goal. Let’s cut ourselves off from China.
Why on earth would China do a deal with us and send stuff on a ship taking weeks?
Jail farage, Gove, lying Boris Johnson and the rest for treason.
Right wing selfish lunatics.
South Korea has an FTA with China, it took three years to negotiate.
Because there are only two countries in the world with a higher GDP per capita (PPP) that have a population of 50 million plus.
Yes certainly, because history chronicles Britain as an insignificant little backwater until nurtured by the EU.
Yes. History. Very apt.
If the trains go through Russia what happens? Russia has a different track 'guage'. Do they unload the trains at one border then take the goods through Russia then load them onto a European standard guage train??
Or do they switch bogies?
Or what?
Are there any experts on the journey who know how it is done?
See the map above - the trains don't go through Russia.
Look at the handy map above - the train route avoids Russia and seems to go through Turkey to get to Europe.
They do go through Russia (via Moscow, as the article says). There have been trains for decades that cross gauges by altering the width between the wheels, some of them without stopping entirely, as the Barcelona Talgo (Paris-Barcelona) used to do to transfer from standard gauge to Iberian gauge (which is similar to Russian gauge).
That service no longer exists since the new Spanish high-speed tracks are standard gauge, so the TGV from Paris to Barcelona does not need this feature.
If traders are using Mercator charts to find the shortest route between China and Europe, no wonder they are having difficulty. It's ideal for travelling relatively short distances in a fixed direction. Think Brexit negotiation.
The Chinese and the Kazaks drive across thousands of kilometres across not a lot with not a lot of interaction with anything or anyone. Whereas Western Europe has very much a lot between a and b. It's not likely to be that the highest risk all day is hitting a stray yak.
Why send the containers back to China empty? I would have thought that the EU would have had a deal in place for them to be shipped back full of the unwanted. There's a historic precedent. Or is shipping them back to Libya and Turkey cheaper?
Let them get on with it - we're going to have a fabulous Brexit future! *
*satire obvsly
It is fascinating in a way.
For decades the chicago boys propagated free trade and privatisation, the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism vs. the social-democratic continental European one.
Now, at the end of this movement, at least on the other side of it's pinnacle since the 2008 crash, of all countries USA and GB are going on nationalistic and protectionistic paths, while some of the biggest global players of logistics, communication, power supply are privatised former European state owned companies.
DHL Deutsche Post, Schenker Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Telekom T-Mobile, E-On to name some.
Is it a classic case of shooting in ones own foot, trying to expand into a competitors market by changing the rules, but in the end, taken over by those competitors, because they can handle and use those new rules at least as well?
So, are Brexit and America First factual expressions of a already lost competition against their own weapons?
The Anglo-Saxon model simply died in 2008 - "neo-liberalism" ate itself, especially the dogmatic idea that the market will always find the best solutions, that the state is obsolete and that you don't need strategic planning of industries.
I remember back in the 1990s, a lot of people, even in academic cycles, demanded that Germany had to follow the Anglo-Saxon model, get rid of its industries and focus on services instead. We can be very glad that the people in charge didn't listen to those fools. Nowadays, they talk about "reviving" industrial production in the UK and the US. How times have changed, indeed.
Remember Prof. Sinn in almost every political talk-show? Nowadays he can be found on the Guardian, phantasizing of a doomed euro currency.
Ah yes, Hans-Werner Sinn aka Papa Schlumpf aka Mr. TARGET2. The Brexiter's second favourite economist after Patrick Minford.
It i nice to see how a city that really ell down the economic ravene with the end of coal and the demise of steel making, is now having such a revival.
Makes you wonder how much the "Northern Powerhouse" might have achieved, with strategic thinking, public support and smart on-the-ground collaboration. And an industrial strategy...
Yes.
Another case of wishful thinking, that one was always going to go down the crapper once Osborne left office after being sacked by Treeza. It was his baby.
So far, the electrification of the Liverpool to Leeds line, promised within 5 years, has been postponed, as London Crossrail link and HS 2 has swallowed up any money for this.
The trains in our area have been given 20 year old trains from 'Darn Sarf' to replace the 30 odd year old ones previously servicing the schedule.
And I haven't begun to mention the current chaos of cancelled trains, due to the new timetable and lack of drivers, inflicting misery on Northern Train travellers. Oh, and I forgot the ongoing strikes over running trains without any guards.
I'm glad I'm lucky enough to not have to use these dubious 'services', other commuters aren't so lucky.
I think the class 319s you mention are from c1988 - so 30 years old too, not 20!
All good points tho
Quite. None of these issues are going to be properly addressed until the UK adopts some form of regional government. Northern parts of the UK deserve autonomy to make their own decisions about investment, job creation, regeneration, railways and road infrastructure. Leaving it to westminster is like asking teenagers to do the washing up; there will be a lot of "yeah, yeah...." but the job won't get done....
Nearby Dusseldorf has long had a large Japanese population due to industrial links (and thus some of the best Japanese restaurants in Europe).
True, it's one of the best things about Düsseldorf.
A bit of a distance to go out for a meal at night though, you admit that, especially if you live in the UK?
My favourite Indian restaurant is actually Bengali owned, it's near Kirkham, Lancashire.
Unfortunately, it's around 40 miles away from where I lived in North Manchester, so I only get to go infrequently.
I used to work for a company with offices in Dusseldorf. I really miss those restaurants. Still, I now work for a company with its HQ in Copenhagen, so I still have good food choices! I don't miss the days of working for a company in Amsterdam, at least from a food perspective...
A fascinating article. Unions make the European section much slower but as a union supporter I understand the difficulty between making the journey times more competitive against flights and protecting workers' rights.
On the European/Asian landmass however, it would be good if all freight were put back on the trains rather than ships or planes.
I don't even think that the unions are the problem per se, but the lack of a truly pan-European strategy for rail. There are unions for air travel and all other kinds of logistics and yet things work a lot more efficiently there.
French air traffic control??
For "workers' rights" read "workers' safety". And the safety of everyone in proximity to a railway line.
If a Kazak train derails, the deaths and injuries are going to be limited to the crew and a surprised yak. If one derails in Western Europe......
And here was me convinced it was going to be Southampton. Dagnabbit.
“relatively authentic” Asian food? Finally! Maybe one day, we will even get fully authentic grub!
I must agree even Kantstrasse in Berlin did not seem so well endowed with good Chinese restaurants whereas some of the Vietnamese joints in Berlin were fine when I visited last year (perhaps due to the long history of Vietnamese settlement in Eastern Germany?).
We certainly will - cockroaches, crickets, etc. are a protein source of the future here in Europe, and have been eaten since forever in Asia.
I hear of Duisburg and I just think of Herr Lipp :)
He pronounces it wrong, though, doesn't he? He calls it 'dweesburg', but when I went to watch MSV, the locals were calling it 'doucheburg'. Ruined the whole show for me.
This is a fascinating series. I'm learning so much through it. Thankyou.
Me too. Its really top notch journalism.
Sino the times
"We want Brexit so we can be global Britain and not just trade with the EU."
Are China in the EU? Yet a train can leave China, cross other non-EU countries and arrive in the EU safely without China being a member of the EU, Single Market or Customs Union, and with several protectionism policies in place.
It doesn't make sense....
Just quaking in their Addidas shoes, the Germans, at the thought of Britain leaving the EU. What. Will. They. Do without us, honestly.
You're right. They love dead weight.
They'll survive...as will everyone else.
What will they do without you? Make Europe great again™.
;)
Re travel time: The Union arguments seems weird. You could keep the trains rolling by having more shifts of unionized engineers. Having longer shifts could increase the risc of accidents. The Chinese and Kazakh stretches of the railwais are probably much simpler than the European network.
I imagine Staake has a better idea of what is going on that random, uninformed, idle speculation.
(just random uninformed idle speculation on my part)
My guess is there's a lot less 'congestion' by passenger trains.
Unions are notoriously famous for not speeding anything up if they can squeeze more out of rail companies. Happens every day on the ports.
What exactly will Europe be sending to China? Blueprints?
Probably luxury goods; high-end cars, chocolate, that sort of thing.
Well, this problem is not special to the rail transport, the freight ships may sail back half empty too.
I think, rail is actually in favour, because once the sanctions about Russia have gone, those trains may collect freights for China throughout the whole route.
It's the greatest risk, yes. But what will the UK offer to the world? Or, has Liam Fox arranged some favourite deal with China? As you see in Duisburg, others are doing the business. Just because they rely on a safe framework. It's called the EU, the world's most powerful trade area.
Hamburg seems to get potshots from everybody, not sure why, as far as I can tell the port is well maintained and organised. Currentlythey are dredging and building new infrastructure to accomodate larger vessels.
Hamburg represents competition, don't expect Staake's views to be neutral.
Transport by train is in between air fright and ship, it is a different market. Hamburg is specialised in transport by ship. The issue of Hamburg is the limited size of the Elbe river, the largest ships are loaded/unloaded in Wilhelmshaven.
Hamburg really doesn't need to get its ego stroked...it is one of the riches states in Germany after all.
China is the new boss
...same as the old boss...!
Not if we don’t allow them to be
Good luck. The uk can't even build adequete infrastructure for it's citizens, let alone drive a project like this.
A point at the Rhine, not to far away from Rotterdam's huge sea port and in the heart of the European continent, at optimum connected to the European railway, motorway and river/channel shipping systems.
Placed in one of the mayor global trade and manufacturing countries with stable and robust legal, political and economical conditions.
Having already large freight yards and ports and, in favour of most other towns at the Rhine, can offer masses of idle facilities of former freight stations, ports, industrial plants from the steel and mining era, as well as European and German stuctural funding - seems to be picture-perfect for this occasion.
The main problem at the moment is it isn't just one train going the whole way. Russia and a few others use different gauge tracks so all the cargo has to be swapped over more than once to other trains.
"a few others use different gauge tracks so all the cargo has to be swapped over more than once to other trains."
When I last passed through they just changed the wheels, not the trains.
Both could be done. Sometimes it's cheaper and faster to just transfer containers from one train to the other.
YEs, especially if they are standing side by side. And where does that occur, I'd really like to know..
isn’t that cowardly David Cameron working for the Communist Chinese on expanding the rail infra-structure across Europe so the Chinese can bring their goods in. Perhaps he can get his mate Boris Johnson to suggest building a bridge across the North Sea to make Britain more accessible for foreign imports.
Boris would prefer a zip line.
A garden bridge, maybe? "Boris' Chinese Tea Garden Bridge" ?
Maybe he could be the cargo in one of those empty return trains ?
make it their first European stop, with most using the northern silk road route via Khorgos on the China-Kazakhstan border and the Russian capital, Moscow.
Would be nice if the guardian editors could correct their map. The shown route goes nowhere near Moscow.
Right. The Guardian map and the map held up in the picture are awkwardly at odds with each other, and the mention of the stop-over at Brest on the Polish-Belurussian border proves it's the latter route that is being talked about, not the first one.
Very well watched.
I noticed the same. The Moscow line seems like pretty obvious choice.
I hope my home town of Helsinki, Finland, would take a good piece of the China rail traffic. There is only one country between China and Finland, which should make things simpler. Also, the rail distance (or whatever) is the same as in Russia. And there is a proper seaport.
Sounds like it would be fairly easy to do the 11,000km in just 5-6 days once the unionized drivers are replaced with autopilot.
This is about 70-80kmph.
Imagine 50 years from now this route will be a hyperloop type technology capable of 500mph. Trains carrying 10,000's tonnes of freight will complete the journey in about 13 hours.
Sorry to break it to you, but in 50 years everything will be teleported just like StarTrek predicted.
Seriously doubt it...
You think we'll be able to build an 11000km vacuum tube, spanning mountains and earthquake zones in fifty years? I thought I was optimistic...
Unfortunately for me people like Staake are exactly the kind of people, that make the world a bad place. The way he talks about unions is worthy of an american republican. I think it is shameful.
I don‘t understand why people never learn from history and seem unable to understand, that there are things, that have the same value as profit. Things like respect, treating people good, tradition, not to exploit the people and the environment etc.. Why do these things have the same value? Because people can’t live without it. If they get forced to, they begin to revolt. The past and present shows us very clearly, that when profit is all people care about, when there is nothing they can believe in but money it ends in a horrible way.
Trade is never only about making money with autocrats like xi, putin or trump. Because they don’t respect the sovereignty of others. They use trade to leverage their way in. I am not very happy, that a city in Germany is so dependent on china.
What are you even talking about? Every person with a job profits from that job in the form of their take home pay. Why is this in anyway shameful?
Should we all stop working and return to subsistence farming? Making our own medicine and clothing? All in the name of respect and tradition?
Money is just a means of exchange. People work for money so they can exchange that money for useful things. There is nothing to ashamed about.
The left make me laugh. You can’t bring yourself to discuss German conservatism as you see them as a global light, the perfect nation, against which U.K. and American may be critiqued. Call Staak what he is, a German Conservative who is part f the majority party in Germany. He is not a plip on their record he is pretty middle of the road.
Atrocious spelling on my IPad. Apologies!
the madness of "brixit" becoming clearer will the one legged bulldog (city) survive in new world order job will gravitate to central europe.
So tell me oh economic sage, how an overland rail route from China to a large manufacturing country that imports a good deal of Chinese products is in any way related to Brexit?
"So tell me oh economic sage, how an overland rail route from China to a large manufacturing country that imports a good deal of Chinese products is in any way related to Brexit?"
It's just a reminder that it's all happening out there, and Britain is being left behind on its fortress island behind the white cliffs of Dover.
Duisburg is further north on that globe. The dot is somewhere near Mannheim or Karlsruhe
Hahaha!
Thanks for this article. It's fascinating to learn that trains are still competitive against ships (or planes) for marchandise transportation between China and Europe.
Marchandise? You're German, aren't you?
No, French rather.
Unions or not, but this most definitely has to improve. Rail is a pretty efficient and “green” way to transport goods, especially when compared to lorries and airplanes, and this is unacceptable. It’s not even just about the “new Silk Road”, this whole sector needs to be addressed by the EU. Rail travel for both goods and people going beyond the borders of member states has to be improved, become cheaper and less complicated.
Interesting article. For the sake of the people of Duisburg who have been suffering for some time, I hope that these new opportunities will help. Our very own “Rustbelt” here in Germany, the Ruhr area, has to reinvent itself and this is one promising way to do it.
Most of the local train services are long gone and don't look likely to return any time soon. Drive in to rural areas you can find remnants of old tracks and stations dotted around.
Surely creating a portal to Chinese manufacturers with their dirt cheap labour and horrendous working conditions will do nothing but destroy the Mittelstand within 20 years?
This train is merely a giant portal that will suck jobs from Germany to China. It will eat into your tax base and leave you with an aging population supported by an increasingly indebted and underskilled working age demographic.
Europe seems to be slow to catch on to globalisation. Possibly because China is yet to undercut their luxury manufacturers with cheaper equivalents.
This train is nothing but a modern day Trojan horse.
It will destroy your current account and leave you with a ballooning national debt that will demand an ever growing percentage of your tax revenue to service.
Most is transported by ship and has been transported by ship, your "argument" does not make sense. The Mittelstand lives and dies with aspects far beyond transport.
A few years back with most of the trade going via ship people spoke about Hamburg as the "european China City". Duisburg will have to do more if it wants to keep that title. And whether that is a smart thing to do is anyone's guess...
The smart thing is for Germany to have both ... the main train terminal and the main ship destination. The stupid thing to do is to Brexit when America First faces China First.
Isn't this always and everywhere the case? Business booms come and go.
For now, one can only say, that Duisburg has some headstart above other potential railway hubs to China and it has some tradition and experrience as freight yard hub between Rhine / Atlantic shipping, European continental railways and European rivers and channels shipping.
Germany are just so amazing aren’t they. The thing to do is to join a trade union, enforce political centrality, influence that political centrality and then shark all manufacturing from the South of Europe. Now that sounds like a great idea.
This is what's happening in Khorgos, where the train changes gauges at the Kazakhstan-China border (paywall but 30-day free access with registration):
https://www.euromoney.com/article/b181cffs1klk2d/kazakhstan-belt-and-road-initiative-the-road-to-somewhere
Duisburg is above all a bankrupt city. But the people there, they keep going. It's not a beautiful place by any means, but not a bad place either.
Absolutely. It falls in the shadow of Dusseldorf. But it certainly isn't a bad place. And it's much cheaper than Duss!
Just one word: Schimanski
But the first few minutes of the first episode prove swanpride's point. :-)