Moving in Slow motion through Belt-Road Turkey

*Caroline Knowles

The so-called high-speed railway line and Caspian crossing connecting Baku and Tbilisi with Kars in northeastern Türkiye stitched Türkiye into the Belt-Road story. More than just a hinge between Asia and Europe, Türkiye is the Belt-Road’s ‘middle passage’, a corridor connecting Chinese manufacture with European markets. Routes passing through Russia to the north, and a southern matrix of transport through Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia, all pose their own ‘security’ issues and underline the strategic importance of Türkiye as an alternative route to Europe. I know from my travels along earlier sections of the Belt-Road that Baku to Tbilisi is much slower than advertised. But maybe rail travel picks up speed in Türkiye.

Leaving the Black Sea resort of Batumi in Georgia I head to Kars intending to take the train all the way to Istanbul. It’s hard to believe the stories that Chinese and Turkish authorities tell about Kars as a major logistics portal and transit railway line to Europe. Kars has a small rather quiet out-of-town logistics centre, set among rolling green hills, cleverly concealed in a dip in the landscape. Maybe it has yet to grow into the claims made in its publicity, but I can see no containers, gantries or freight trains. In fact, I can see no activity of any kind, though to be fair I was kept at the entrance, where I might at least expect to witness arrivals and departures of freight. Downtown Kars — population 60,000 — is a small, perfectly pleasant town where people go about their daily life with no conception of the middle passage and no Chinese presence of any kind, not even a restaurant.

The train from Kars to Istanbul — change in Ankara — is modern and spacious with none of the proximities and conviviality I experienced on the train from Almaty to Aktau. It sets off on time at 8am and should reach Ankara eighteen hours later. Here I intended to transfer to the high-speed train that would reach Istanbul in three and a half hours. The high-speed train line is a Türkiye — China collaboration, built by the Ankara branch of China Railway Construction Corporation. Trains are said to travel at two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour — a revolution in Turkish rail travel as I was about to discover. The scenery on this slower part of the journey from Kars to Ankara is beautiful. Rolling green hills and sunflowers; the other passengers are friendly, telling stories about where they are heading and why. But. The train stops for long periods to wait for other trains — some of them freight trains — to pass, suggesting that much of the route is single track. Sometimes the train slows to walking pace. Where the track runs alongside the road the train is easily overtaken by heavily loaded trucks. We travel through Horasan and Ezrum, Erzincan and Sivas.

We pass the day. People get on and off. A woman with a budgie in a cage takes the seat on the opposite side of the isle from mine. We admire the bird. At prayer time some of the men try to pray in a constrained way from their seats. We keep going. And going. Past beautiful lakes as night falls. By 2.30am we are supposed to have reached Kayseri — still some distance from Ankara — but what we reach is the limit of my patience that day for slow travel. As the train pulls into Kayseri, not at 2.30am but 6am, three and a half hours late, I get off. It’s only eight hundred and thirty-seven kilometres from Kars and Kayseri but it has taken twenty-two hours, an average travelling speed of less than thirty-two kilometres an hour. Hardly the speedy and seamless journey suggested in Chinese and Turkish announcements of this route.

I decide to take a break in Uschisar to stop moving for a while and catch up with research and blog-writing. Uschisar proves a good choice. My hotel has Chinese package tourists passing through on tours that include Istanbul and coastal resorts like Bodrum. How do the tourists like Türkiye? They say they like it a lot. I check with hotel staff. Chinese group tours are not easy to host, they say. They want the rooms to all be the same and modern. In Uschisar the rooms are built from old stones, sometimes extending caves. They are all different and there is no marble — the surface of modern luxury in Chinese hotels.

Moving on some days later, I decide on a hack. Rather than return to Kayseri and wait for a train at the station through the night that might be three and a half hours late causing me to miss my connection in Ankara, I take a fast bus to Ankara so that I can take the fast train to Istanbul. From Ankara the train is as fast as advertised — it moves at two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour — just a little slower than trains in China. It arrives in Istanbul on time. I want to check out Chinese investments. But this proves to be more complicated than I thought.

The Belt-Road habit of future-facing announcements conceal Chinese contributions to Türkiye’s infrastructure. When these contributions concern complicated financial and refinancing schemes they are still more opaque. A good example is the third Bosporus Bridge. An Italian Company — Astaldi — built the bridge and took a 33% share. But it got into financial difficulties and then into widely reported talks with a Chinese Consortium that included China Merchants. No one outside of a circle of business and political elite knows what happened to these talks. The local news-following public have no idea. Bloomberg reports speculate that the talks failed. Similarly, refinancing deals for Istanbul’s new airport might at one stage have involved Chinese investors in building the ‘silk road in the sky’. But this quickly turned into a ‘China Friendly Airport’ initiative instead, focussed on opening new routes to more Chinese cities to encourage Chinese tourists to visit Türkiye; at the same time serving nationalist ambition to make Istanbul airport a global hub. Initiatives like these are anyway quickly overtaken by new announcements — an electrical vehicle (EV) car plant here, a new telecoms scheme involving Huawei there. China-Türkiye connection is a difficult and shifting landscape to read.

I learned that ‘no one really talks about China’, from a local Istanbul activist. Her interest in the Belt-Road followed from her involvement in collective opposition to the third Bosporus Bridge and the airport. She describes this as ‘an immense but hopeless resistance’ against the interests of a local financial elite with good connections to the Erdogan Government. Although she takes a keen interest in these matters, she too is unable to work out whether China is a partner in them or not. ‘And of course, Türkiye is saying that, OK, if China is investing in something like this, we will try to benefit. We will piggyback on it and invest in (upgrading) existing rail infrastructure.’ She says there are few reports in the Turkish media about China and even the Uyghur issue has gone quiet, despite there being a sizeable Uyghur community in Istanbul. Opposition to big schemes like these is about trying to stop environmental damage and the redirection of state resources onto the balance sheets of private investors, she calls ‘favoured companies’ and not about Chinese investments directly. But indirectly it is nevertheless conceivable that China acts as a catalyst of some kind in local financial and political arrangements like these.

*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.