Ghost Ports, Bridges & Tunnels: China’s Georgia
*Caroline Knowles
In the cause of cutting travel time from Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi to its Black Sea coast, a 51.6-kilometre section of the Rikoti Highway built by Chinese construction companies (China Road and Bridge and China State Construction Engineering among them), needed ninety-six bridges and fifty-three tunnels cut through rugged mountains. This expensively remade the geomorphology of an already fragile area of landslides. Described as a ‘crucial link for transit between Europe and Asia’ intended to boost trade and investment, this new ‘modern artery’ is part of the Belt-Road’s middle passage. In addition to refashioning Georgia’s geomorphology, the road bypasses gorges and villages disrupting existing social relationships and commerce, for example in the village of Shrosha which relies on selling handmade pottery to passers-by.
Taking the Belt-Road route from Tbilisi to the Black Sea city of Batumi by train and pausing before travelling on to the Turkish border city of Kars, I decide to stop for a while in Batumi and snoop around. Because Tbilisi railway station has done its best to look like a shopping mall I had to search for platforms one and two — its only platforms — for a late-night departure to Batumi on a modern train. Batumi is a Black Sea holiday resort that attracts Russian and Middle Eastern tourists. From a street-level perspective its main industries are sex-work, gambling and rampant property speculation. I run into the last of these when the taxi driver can’t find my hotel in the Orbi City end of town. He couldn’t find it because it wasn’t a hotel and because the person who owned this tower block room hadn’t given me the full address. Eventually the taxi driver gets bored and throws me out of his cab. This is how I ended up sitting next to a play area for kids in a scraggy bit of Black Sea coast watching early morning bathers and stragglers who had not yet made it back to their hotels from a night out. I cancelled the so called ‘hotel’ in Orbi City: the purchase of individual rooms is, I suspect, a starter kit for wouldbe property speculators. Somehow, these new towers are already dilapidated with no thought to the spaces in-between them which are left rough and unwalkable. Instead, I opt for something unaffordably grander in the centre of town. When I get there, it turns out to be a casino with a lobby that smells of stale smoke. I ask if I can cancel this too, but the receptionist says all the hotels are casinos and it’s not so bad upstairs.
Batumi is just a staging post. I’m visiting the ghost port in Anaklia which a Chinese consortium is reportedly rebuilding into a major container and transport hub. I’ve seen YouTube videos of it in a state of eerie abandonment and it looks spectacular. Travelling to Anaklia from Batumi meant finding the unmarked the car park from where minibuses leave. I found it on my third attempt and squeeze into the back as we set off, but not before adding a local musician with several instruments once we are officially full. The bus only goes part of the way to Anaklia — at Zujiji I have to switch to another minibus. We pass through Poti Free Industrial Zone the Belt-Road port being dredged to take bigger ships. CFC China Energy acquired a 75% stake (2016) in Poti, a scheme later engulfed in corruption scandals. I see brightly coloured walls built 5 containers high on both sides of the road. It’s not clear how Poti would fare with Anaklia just up the road. Anaklia is scheduled to be deeper and take bigger ships. As it turns out I needn’t have worried.
The second minibus drops me in Anaklia; dubbed ‘Georgia dream’ by the Georgian Government. The contract to rebuild the port is awarded to a Chinese-Singaporean consortium with substantial involvement by the Chinese state to make it a major trading hub between Georgia and Europe. Much of the Anaklia sea front is derelict as I can see this from the Russian café where I stop for coffee. After chatting with the waitress, I set off on the road to the port. On the way I pass a large modern hotel; the gate locked, it is clearly abandoned and falling into disrepair. Along an unmade road I pass a tiny tumbled-down wooden house, caving in on itself. The manager at the next hotel, built in white Moorish style, lets me onto the roof, so that I can see the port. The hotel is scruffy, its few guests using its sadly neglected swimming pool. From the roof, I can’t see the port of the You Tube video, so I walk on towards it. I pass a grand derelict house on the way and an empty space on the coast — another Chinese hole — where the ghost port would have been before it was demolished. Fenced, it is guarded by a single armed policeman who can’t be bothered to deny me entry. There is nothing to se anyway. There it is. A large empty space on the coast. The construction signs at the gate are misleading. There is absolutely no construction going on here and I wonder if there ever will be, or whether the rest of Anaklia will fall into disrepair too. It’s hard to know how these ragged bits or urban landscape will turn out.
Outside the Russian café, I find a minibus heading back to Zujiji hoping I hadn’t missed the last bus to Batumi. A Russian woman in a sequinned denim jacket, bleached blond hair and glitzy jewellery climbs aboard and starts flicking through a website on her phone displaying men naked to the waist showing off their six packs — presumably a dating site. Eventually we get to Zujiji, and I find the car park from where minibuses go to Batumi. It’s just me and a couple of Georgians aboard, when eight young Israeli men, heading for the army when they get home they tell me, jump in and challenge me immediately on the justification for Israeli miliary manoeuvres in Gaza. The geopolitics of now pop up when you least expect it, and we spend a tense three hours disagreeing loudly about Middle Eastern politics. Back in Batumi, I decide it’s time to move on.
*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.
