The long march of the Middle Kingdom

China's grand plan for New Silk Roads raises some uneasy questions, but it is a brave new strategy for trade and diplomacy, writes Ashis Chakrabarti

For centuries, it was a four-day camel ride through the dreaded Gobi desert. Last month, it took me less than half an hour to travel in a bus from the oasis town of Dunhuang to the Mogao Caves exhibition centre, from where another bus ferried me to the entrance to the caves. In less than three hours, the guides hurried the visitors through a few of the world's most famous Buddhist grottoes, telling the same old stories from their hoary past. The few of the 492 caves that are open to the public include Cave 17 or the Library Cave, from where Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and other "foreign devils", as the Chinese called them, "stole" thousands of centuries-old manuscripts in the early decades of the last century. Diamond Sutra, the world's oldest printed book, published in 868 A.D., was among Stein's booty from the Mogao Caves.

There are plenty of camels still to be seen around Dunhuang, carrying tourists on desert safaris. At dusk, when the last of the tourists have left the sand dunes around the Crescent Moon Lake on the edge of the town, it is common to see motorbike-riding camel drivers pulling the animals home.

For centuries, monks and merchants, soldiers and state officials stopped at this oasis town before venturing out into the Gobi or the Taklamakan deserts on their journey to the west, making it a bridgehead for the Silk Road of history. They trudged to the Mogao Caves to offer prayers to the Buddha for a safe journey and for the success of their trade and other missions. Now, the town's only lifeline is the stream of tourists, Chinese and foreign, who come to see what remains of the treasures at the grottoes. The rest is well and truly consigned to history.

But a brave new history may well be scripted on Asia's oldest camel caravan routes if China's ambitious plans about the New Silk Road and the Maritime Silk Road are a success. As it was with Chinese emperors in the past, a new idea floated by the reigning Chinese communist party boss must become the centre of gravity in Chinese statecraft. So it has been with Xi Jinping's New Silk Roads plan ever since he made it public. Two themes thus dominate official and public discourses in China these days - Xi's Silk Road diplomacy and his high-profile campaign against corruption.

The old Silk Road reached out from China to the Mediterranean. The new one is planned to do more - it will traverse the three continents of Asia, Europe and Africa. After months of speculation about the new overland road and the maritime route, Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, came up with the first concrete details. Last May, it published a map of the land-based New Silk Road and also of the maritime route.

According to the map, the New Silk Road will begin in Xian in central China's Shaanxi province. Famous in today's tourism circles as the site of the terracotta warriors, it was where the old Silk Road too started and from where Xuanzang, the celebrated 7th-century Chinese monk, set out on his 17-year tour of India in search of Buddhist learning and scriptures, many of which he translated into Chinese. In his day, however, the city was known as Chang'an and was the capital of China under the Tang dynasty.

The new route then runs west through Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, in which Dunhuang falls, to Urumqi, the capital of the restive Xinjiang province, where Uighur secessionists pose a major security threat to Beijing, and on to Khorgas near China's border with Kazakhstan. The road then runs southwest from Central Asia to northern Iran before turning west through Iraq, Syria and Turkey. In Istanbul, the New Silk Road crosses the Bosporus Strait and goes northwest through Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic and Germany. After reaching Duisburg in Germany, it turns north to Rotterdam and then south to Venice.

It is in Venice where the New Silk Road meets the other grand way, the Maritime Silk Road. The maritime road begins in Fujian province in southeast China. After cruising through Guangzhou and Haikou in China's southern tip, it heads south to the Malacca Strait. (As I passed Guangzhou during my trip through China last month, I heard about senior policymakers there holding a conference on the area's economic potential from the Maritime Silk Road.) From Kuala Lumpur it heads to our very own Calcutta and then crosses the Indian Ocean to Nairobi. It then goes north around the Horn of Africa and reaches the Mediterranean through the Red Sea. After a stop in Athens it ends in Venice where it meets the overland road.

It is a grand idea, which many are comparing with those that prompted the building of the Great Wall of China or of the 1,800-km Grand Canal that runs from Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south of the country.

But why has China planned it?

In September last year, Xi gave his answer to the question. In an address at Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev University, he set out five specific goals for the Silk Road Economic Belt: strengthening of economic cooperation, promotion of trade and investment, improvement of road connectivity, facilitating currency conversion and fostering people-to-people exchanges. A month later, Li Keqiang, the Chinese premier, outlined the idea on the maritime road during the 16th Asean-China summit in Brunei.

It is easy to see the economic vision prompting the plan. Analysts have suggested two main motives - it is a part of the economic expansionism that China has been aiming at in order to use its vast currency reserves and it reflects Beijing's strategy to tap energy and other resources of other countries, especially those in Central Asia, that it desperately needs. There is also the anxiety to look for new markets for Chinese goods and investment. The Xinhua article, which carried the map for the first time, however, says that the Silk Road project will bring "new opportunities and a new future to China and to every country along the road that is seeking to develop". The New Silk Road, it adds, could develop into a region of "more capital convergence and currency integration". Interestingly, the article mentions that the Chinese currency, the renminbi, is being more widely used in countries such as Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Thailand.

It is still unclear, though, how Beijing proposes to go about implementing the plan or how the countries along the proposed routes are reacting to it. Many of these countries have bilateral agreements with China on economic and security issues. However, the Silk Road Economic Belt has not been part of any such agreement so far.

But the evocation of history in launching the grand plan could make some countries rather wary of the Chinese plan. Two names from Chinese history have been invoked in order to link Xi's plan with the Silk Road of history. Xi himself referred to the role of Zhang Qian, an imperial envoy of the Western Han dynasty, in opening the door for China's contacts with countries to its west. And, during a trip to Jakarta, he recalled how Zheng He, the 15th century admiral of the Chinese navy, reached out to countries such as Indonesia during his many sea voyages.

"Not mentioned, however, are the backdrops of conflict and the push to spread a Sinocentric world order", says Tansen Sen, noted scholar of ancient Chinese history, in an article in the YaleGlobal online magazine. "The portrayal of Admiral Zheng He as an agent of peace and friendship is problematic. In reality, Zheng's seven expeditions between 1405 and 1433 included use of military force in what are present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and India to install friendly rulers and control strategic checkpoints of the Indian Ocean."

Zheng may be a new national hero to China's communist bosses, but he sometimes presents problems of other kinds as well. In 2008, I visited a park in Nanjing named after him, where a new statue of Zheng's was installed the previous year. The young university student who accompanied me was anxious to hide from me the fact that Zheng was a eunuch. I told him that I not only knew Zheng was a eunuch but had also spent a night at the old home of Wei Zhongxian, another famous eunuch in Chinese history, in Beijing. The young man was somewhat embarrassed. It was not his fault; Chinese history books do not mention the fact that Zheng was a eunuch.

Geopolitical conflicts of the present add to a problematic past to make some experts wary about the Chinese grand plan. Look at the territorial hegemony that China is attempting at the South China Sea, they say. But hopes of the future may prove stronger than the fears from the past. For all the distortions of history that he smells in Xi's New Silk Road diplomacy, Sen, author of Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400, a seminal work on the old Silk Road exchanges between the two countries, is not without optimism. "The Silk Roads initiative of the Chinese government, with substantial influx of money and investment", he writes, "could boost the economies of several countries in Asia and Europe that are willing to claim ancient links to the Middle Kingdom."