‘Belt & Road’ gains momentum from Kunming till Mombasa

Bloomberg

China’s massive build programme to recreate trade routes stretching from Asia to Africa and Europe is gaining momentum.
Since President Xi Jinping’s flagship Belt and Road project was announced about five years ago, it gave impetus to billions of dollars of Chinese investment — some of which were already in the pipeline for several years — to build railways, roads, ports and power plants.
The programme isn’t without controversy: debt risk is rising, an influx of Chinese workers has fuelled tension with locals, and there are worries about China’s dominance in the region. And not all of the projects have succeeded.
“It’s been a mixed bag so far,” said Michael Kugelman, a senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “There have certainly been success stories, and there will be more of them too, but there have also been setbacks.”
With many projects in various stages of developments, measuring the success and potential benefits can be tricky. Here’s a list of projects that analysts who track China’s Belt and Road investments say will provide the most economic impact to countries by unlocking trade routes:
The $1.5 billion oil pipeline that runs from Kyaukpyu to Kunming began operations in 2017, allowing crude supplies from the Middle East and Africa to reach China faster as shipments no longer need to be transported through the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea. The pipeline is designed to carry 22 million tons of crude a year, representing about 5 percent of China’s annual oil imports. Talks are also ongoing about building a $7.3 billion deep-water port, which would be China’s largest investment in the Southeast Asian nation. Along with a natural gas pipeline, the project represents an alternative route for energy imports and an important access point for goods shipped via the Indian Ocean, said Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Sharing a border with China, Pakistan has projects that are among the most developed of the Belt and Road Initiative. The Gwadar deep sea port and a 3,000 kilometre-long corridor of roads and railways links China with the Arabian Sea. Transshipment from the port has begun, giving China’s western Xinjiang province closer access to a port than Beijing. It’s located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, just outside the Straits of Hormuz, near shipping routes that accommodate more than 17 million barrels of oil per day and a large quantity of bulk, break-bulk and containerised cargo. With China expected to increase oil imports from the Middle East, Gwadar is seen as a potential trade route, said Hasnain Malik, head of equities research at Exotix Capital in Dubai.
China has a plan to connect Southeast Asian countries with the southwest region of Yunnan through a series of high-speed railways.