Hedin and China’s 21st century Silk Road

In January 1933, Sven Hedin — a 67-year-old Swedish explorer, topographer and writer who had spent several years charting the heartland of Asia  — arrived in Beijing, a city threatened by the Japanese Army, which had recently seized Manchuria and was set on conquering China. Meanwhile, on the far side of the vast country, the government’s control of the northwestern province of Xinjiang was being contested by fighting generals. 

In June of that year, Hedin was invited to a dinner held at the German Embassy, at which he met China’s Assistant Foreign Minister, Liu Chung Chie, who, as Hedin writes in his book, “Through Asia,” subjected him to “a regular cross-examination” about his experiences and opinions. And he replied that, since the founding of the republic in 1912, “you have lost Tibet, Outer Mongolia, Manchuria and Jehol…, Xinjiang is still Chinese, but is split … by Mohammedan revolt and civil war. If nothing is done to defend the province, it too will be lost.”

Asked what steps he thought the government should take, Hedin replied that the first step should be “to make and keep up first-class motor roads between China proper and Xinjiang.” The second step should be a railway line into the heart of Asia.

The next day, Hedin was asked to draw up a memorandum and a map. In early August, he was commissioned to lead an expedition to Xinjiang, 2,700 miles from Beijing, and given the title, Adviser to the Ministry of Railways. Then, on Oct.  21, Hedin and his group of five Swedes, four Chinese, two Mongolian chauffeurs, and four boys took to the road in three trucks and a sedan, all Fords. The expedition, fraught with problems arising from the terrible terrain and extremes of weather, as well as from outlaw rulers like the rebel general who forcibly appropriated Hedin’s Fords for use by his own forces, took two years. During the expedition, the men and their vehicles covered more than 7,000 miles, on the return trip following a portion of the fabled Silk Road, which traders had crisscrossed for thousands of years in great camel caravans. 

Four-score years have passed since Hedin completed his arduous and astonishing expedition and laid out a map for highway construction. Now, the Chinese government has announced an ambitious, very costly ($1 trillion, for starters), and potentially transformative plan saddled with a clunky name, the Belt and Road Initiative, short for The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road – i.e., shipping lanes linking Chinese ports to ports in Indonesia and India and westward to Kenya and on to Cairo and Istanbul. 

The plan was first made public in the fall of 2013. On May 14 of this year, Chinese president Xi Jinping addressed the Belt and Road Forum held in Beijing, which was attended by representatives of more than 130 nations. Over the weekend, as Beijing correspondent for NPR reported, “Xi offered tens of billions of dollars for projects that are part of his signature foreign policy initiative linking China to much of Asia, Europe, and Africa.” 

This is a foreign policy that begins at home, providing the incentive and the funding for the construction of new roads, bridges, railways and ports. What effect the project will have on minority populations, like the Uyghers of Xinjiang, is impossible to predict. The Qinghai-Tibet railway, completed in 2006, which links Beijing with to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and which climbs to a dizzying height of more than 16,000 feet and required the construction of 675 bridges, has brought droves of tourists to Lhasa and sped the influx of Han Chinese settlers, threatening the fabric of traditional Tibetan life in a kind of slow cultural genocide. 

Meanwhile, if tracks can be laid across the Gobi, enabling trains to connect east and west at a high speed, like those that connect Beijing and Shanghai, the feat will be as impressive as the construction of the Great Wall.

It will also be seen as a striking contrast to the United States’ inability to stop talking about the need to modernize the country’s crumbling infrastructure and actually commit the billions of dollars needed for the job. Giving priority to the construction of a $70 billion Mexico-border wall will do nothing to improve the nation’s infrastructure or to enhance its image. China’s success — if the Chinese manage to accomplish their extraordinarily ambitious scheme — will inevitably be seen as marking the end of the America Era. 

Jon Swan is a poet, journalist and former senior editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Several years ago, after living in the Berkshires for 40 years, he and his wife moved to Yarmouth, Maine. His poems and several articles may be found at www.jonswanpoems.com.