Circling the Zone in Xi’an
*Caroline Knowles
Back on the Belt-Road and another train — Yiwu to Xi’an — more than 1500 kilometres and 9 hours gazing out of the window at the landscape, this time heading northwest. Xi’an is famous for the Terracotta Warriors: 8000 life sized statues in battle formation, funerary art buried with Emperor Qin Shi Huang for 2200 years until they were discovered by local famers. Making and trading silk made Xi’an an important junction on the silk road. And today, Xi’an has become a significant junction on the Belt-Road too. In fact, Xi’an isn’t just on the Belt-Road, it is a part of its substance and the mechanisms that make it work.
Deciding to explore what makes the Belt-Road work in Xi’an felt like a vague and daunting task. Xi’an is part of the Shaanxi Free Trade Zone (FTZ) established in 2017 and covers just under 120 square kilometres. Even just the Xi’an bit of the FTZ is 90 square kilometres. Too far to walk — my preferred method of urban exploring. My second difficulty is that FTZs are rarely close to city centres. This one is northeast of the city beyond the third ring road, more than an hour’s drive away. Leo, who organises the transport at the hotel, is amused by my mission and its logistical challenges. Which bit do I particularly want to visit? It’s big. Why not go shopping or visit the Terracotta Warriors instead? But he arranged my transport anyway to ‘somewhere where there is nothing at all to see’ and I set out in a taxi with Hassan, an elderly Hui driver, in a fine drizzle of rain.
I learned from my stay in Yiwu that the Belt-Road is about making and trading all kinds of stuff; and, along with giant wholesale malls, FTZs are one of the Belt-Road’s more expensive and ambitious projects. FTZs kick-start and cluster investment and international trade with tax breaks and other inducements in the hope of creating innovative future facing industries, jobs and profits. But what do these FTZs actually look like? Hassan is determined to get me as close as possible so I can have a look. We drive past the Xi’an Expo Park and the Olympic Sports Centre. Past low-lying commercial buildings on both sides of the new highway. We pull in at the ‘Cross Border Shopping Centre’ but there is no sign of shopping, just back offices. We drive across bland landscapes that could be anywhere — the industrial parks outside of Barking or Reading in the UK for example, only on a much grander scale.
It is only the signage that marks-out this insipid architecture of indecipherable commerce and hints at its purpose in the vaguest possible way. A high arch over the highway with large signs in Chinese and English tells us that we are in the International Trade and Logistics Park. Local people and visitors alike are left to imagine what this means and what actually happens here. I catch fleeting glimpses from the highway and the barriers of Xi’an’s state of the art inland port. The inland port is an idea that disentangles ports from their usual connections with the sea, shifting significant Belt-Road junctions inland, closer to Europe and away from China’s busy coastal areas. I can see in the distance that the inland port is full of containers and lifting equipment that shifts the containers between trains and between trains and trucks. Of course logistics, one of the main activities of the park, is all about shifting stuff to markets. To my delight we manage to find the freight train station nearby — the bit of Belt-Road infrastructure I am hopefully shadowing — although its barriered entryway prevents us from taking a closer look. Hassan pleads my case but the guard understandably refuses. Ports the world over are high security areas.
Despite driving around for several hours, we haven’t managed to get close to any part of the zone at all. It remains elusive. Closed off. Just on the horizon. A bland set of buildings in the distance which might or might not do the things we imagine its signs suggest. The bottom line is that the zone is about making stuff and shifting it globally as a way of expanding the money invested in it. Above all the zone is the creation of political decisions and provincial party and government sponsorship of the Belt-Road. It is imagined as a place of seamless ‘intermodal’ connection — movement and money — folded into the kinds of architecture that is unlikely to attract attention. And so we drive on through this zone of endless possibilities of economic might and centrality in the global economy.
To Hassan’s relief I eventually give up on the zone and ask him if he can take me to see the Terracotta Warriors. They are extraordinary. This is my first encounter with Chinese tourism, which operates on an industrial scale with thousands of bodies crowd into the exhibition halls. Outside is a more visible and frenetic kind of commerce than whatever happens in the zone, selling snacks and souvenirs. I meet the last remaining farmer who discovered the Terracotta Warriors who is posing for photographs and signing books. Would I like a fridge magnet. I don’t think so.
*Caroline Knowles is an urban sociologist and the author of Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, published by Penguin (2022) https://seriousmoneybook.com and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.
