The Breath of the Dragon

China is now a great power. It has surpassed Japan as the second largest economy and has become the world's biggest consumer of energy. It is the financer of an increasingly indebted US economy. With this financial leverage and continuing success in its planned mission to achieve comprehensive national strength vis-a-vis the US within coming decades, China has started flexing its diplomatic and military muscles both east and west, in air and on water, for resources and markets, to retrieve the glorious past and to build a magnificent future.

China is the largest country on the planet in terms of  population. One fifth of the global population is Chinese. China's majority population is of mostly  homogeneous Han ethnicity with only a small fraction of diverse population inhabiting its fringe border areas. The main Chinese Han population is unified by language as well as Confucian tradition. With such a huge population base and accelerated economic growth, the Chinese have rapidly begun to modernize their military.

From being an emerging economy, China is on a path to becoming a superpower. Its rapid modernization entails an appetite for more and more resources and a deepening international market. Historically, the US tailored its diplomacy to secure an uninterrupted supply of energy resources so as to perennially fuel its economy. Now China is in its turn striving to monopolise resources across Africa, Latin America, Australia, Myanmar, Central Asia and the Middle East. Chinese strategists feel that, without command of the ‘commons’ like intercontinental oceans, space and cyberspace, the geopolitics of resource supply cannot be practiced. Suddenly, China  is challenging US hegemony in Asian waters and space.

Reflecting this strategy, China has launched a plan to build a pan-Asian railway line by 2020 with an investment of 616 billion dollars. Having gained the initial regional advantage in building high speed railways, China aims to eventually seamlessly connect Asia to Europe and reduce the transit time on land to travel from Europe from China to a mere 11 days. 

This is part of a considered practice of geopolitics. China has always been considered a heartland land power with less strategic mobility than rim-land powers like the empire-building Britain or the US. By building high-speed railways, China aims to invert the old geopolitical equation. Moreover, this is a secure investment and adds to China’s strategic reach as well as influence across Eurasia. By building on its strategic advantages, it can avoid the pitfalls that caused the disintegration of another heartland power, the Soviet Union. Connectivity, infrastructure and Pan-Asianism is the three pronged strategy pursued by Chinese policy makers.

China is lending utmost support to make this rail network dream into a reality, especially in South- East Asia, which accounts for a major share of the 8,000 kilometers of "missing links". Accordingly, a high-speed rail link between Laos and southern China has long been mooted. In August 2010, senior railway officials from China visited Laos to discuss the project.

China and Laos have since signed an agreement to conduct a feasibility study on a medium high-speed (200-kilometre-per-hour) rail link between Boten, Luang Namtha province, and Vientiane, capital of Laos covering a distance of about 400 kilometers. This link would provide a connection for freight and passengers with Kunming, the capital of China's Yunnan province and eventually encompass Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Construction of the Boten-Vientiane link is now due to commence in late April, 2011.

(based on an article which appeared in 'Chanakya' magazine,November,2010)