The end of the Belt-Road

Caroline Knowles

As the train pulls out of Budapest Keleti station I catch sight of an old man in a flat cap and ragged raincoat on platform 19 hungrily scoffing pastries from a brown paper bag. The train slides into the Hungarian countryside under a steely grey sky and a fine white mist. Because it is hard to see very much at all, I imagine I can see the end of the Belt-Road. Once, I thought this was the freight terminus in Barking on London’s eastern edge. This is what I was told. The first train to London from Yiwu in China arrived on January 18th, 2017, to great fanfare. The media made much of the fact that this trip through Russia took only eighteen days, bringing household goods to the UK’s pound shops. The train was the future. Xi Jinping seized the opportunity to announced that this was part of a multi-billion dollar investment in transport infrastructure, the ‘one-belt-one-road scheme’, a reincarnation of centuries-old silk road trade routes between China and the West.

During my conversation with them, officials at the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham optimistically suggest that this cash-starved East London borough with one of the UK’s highest rates of deprivation was now connected to the rest of the world, potentially boosting trade and with it GDP and local living standards. The freight terminal was ‘just sitting there unused’ one official told me. Now the UK’s socks, 90% of which come from Yiwu he suggests, would land there. Railway companies like German DB Rail and state run China Railway Corporation were equally hopeful and enthusiastic: the train inaugurated a new era in East-West commerce. It took some digging to discover that this train was one of only two test trains to ever arrive in London. The train from Yiwu to London never got going as a commercial proposition even though officials at the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham inexplicably believe it to still be running. Instead of freight, this train transports their hopes for better times. It is an imagined train, a ghost train perhaps, a vehicle for imagined prosperity like so much else along the Belt-Road. The end of the Belt-Road is in fact in Duisburg in Germany’s former industrial Ruhr.

As my train rolls through Hungary at a decent speed of around 150 kilometres per hour I can just make out a rural landscape dotted with logistics parks — the transit and transfer points from which stuff moves around. We pass stationary containers and freight trains. At the Austrian border a new crew board and we move across farmland resting for the winter under the blades of giant wind turbines. I change trains in Vienna. The ‘European New Silk Road Summit’ is to be held here in November 2024 demonstrating Vienna’s commitment to the Middle Corridor, the route I travelled all the way from China. The Vienna train crosses Austria to Wels where I change again, this time to the Frankfurt train and the German networks where, to my surprise, we take a step down in speed and reliability, arriving in Frankfurt an hour late after long pauses and go-slows, at 1 am. Waiting for this extended journey to end I exchange travel stories with a thirty-something woman from Baku avoiding COP29 by travelling to Amsterdam who tells me that Frankfurt is ‘dangerous’. As I walk her to her taxi I begin to understand why she might think that. Frankfurt station is part of the night hustle: migrant men — locally understood as drug dealers and mafias — try to make ends meet from activities that swirl around the arrivals and departures of trains through the night. I move quickly and warily clutching my bag along a road where there is no place to walk and into the lobby of a hotel where I planned to spend the night. My relief quickly fades as I am followed into reception by an ambulance crew and six armed police to ‘look after a guest’ as the man on reception put it, adding that this is ‘standard for Frankfurt’.

A painfully slow train journey the next morning lands me in Duisburg the dirty old steel and coal mining town in Germany’s former industrial Ruhr, rapidly reinventing itself with trees, with planting, with solar panels and other moves towards carbon neutral. ‘Duisburg (not London) is officially the end of the New Silk Road in Europe’ and the central hub for Chinese trains, explains the man in his thirties tasked with taking me on a tour of Duisport. For once I am inside the barriers thanks to him. Duisport is the world’s biggest inland port — a claim also made by Xi’an. Spread around this and adjacent cities like Oberhausen it covers 1,500 hectares and handles four million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units the metric used for measuring cargo) a year from all over the world. Duisport swallow the entire city and the areas beyond, so that sightings of cranes and containers appear unexpectedly from every angle as we drive between two of its six lock ports. It provides 50,000 jobs connected with the port’s operation too. Duisport is the city and makes the city.

The landscape we drive on narrow roads jammed with trucks is possibly the densest collection of warehouses and logistics centres — movers shifting what the makers make in China — on the planet. The Chinese train operator Yuxinou has 4 large warehouses, Khune Nagel has so many it has its own address and bus stop. We visit the newest port — DGT — a reconstruction of coal island with serious carbon neutral plans. It is so new it is not yet operational; the cranes, trucks and containers are silent and motionless. With a handling capacity of a million TEUs it stretches into the distance. DGT is ‘trimodal’ built for barges, trains and trucks. My guide says he hopes activity will pick up soon. Such investments are inevitably speculative, as in China they are built on the hope of future trade. This terminal is built on a shifting matrix of logistics routes that must steer round wars and other geopolitical obstacles and re-routings that are difficult to predict and build the right tracks for.

In contrast to DGT, the older port we visit — Lock Port One — is a hive of activity. The grabbers that seize the containers move at alarming speeds and we must dodge out of their way. Lock Port One is the main arrival area for trains from China and I am pleased to see containers marked with places I’d visited like Xi’an. Yiwu is an important source of trains too. ‘Every train goes to Duisburg’ says my guide’s boss. A train loaded with containers passes and we wait at the level crossing. Walls of colourful containers displaying the names and sometimes the starting point of logistics companies piled five and sometimes six deep dominate this landscape, announcing the obvious asymmetries between what arrives from China and what Europe sends back in the containers. While new stacking devices support ever higher walls of containers, some are sent back empty even though this is uneconomic. My guide says this situation is made worse by the decline of German car sales in China. VW, BMW and Mecedes were once prized in China. But now electric Chinese-made cars like BYD are better and cheaper. He says German manufacturers make cars and put computers in them. But Chinese manufacturers made computers with engines. The software in Chinese cars is more sophisticated and popular. He thinks German car manufacturers have much to learn from China now, instead of the other way around as it was in the past.

Is trade with China slowing down? ‘Is it less attractive than it was’ is my guide’s cautious reply. ‘During Covid we had sixty trains from China a week. Now we have only 15–20’ he tells me. I ask why. ‘The war in Ukraine’ he says. It’s a matter of ‘image’ and the ‘security of goods’. ‘A lot of customers have said they don’t want to use the route through Russia’. My guide’s boss points out that his contact with shippers means that they quickly ‘feel the temperature of the water’. Alternative to Russia are the routes I travelled through the Middle Corridor. Instead of the optimistic estimates of how long this journey took that I was used to, my guide actually has results from the test trains they run along this route. He says the train from Chongqing to Duisport take 45 days, which compares poorly with the (cheaper) Shanghai to Rotterdam sea route. The test shows that one of the trains they were tracking stayed motionless for 7–12 days in a container terminal he preferred not to name. I ask about the Middle Corridor’s choke points in order to compare his tests with my impressions. He says they are Poti in Georgia, which, as I saw when I visited is still being developed. The Caspian Sea — which works uncertain schedules and involves loading and unloading cargo — is another. He didn’t mention the China-Kazakh border or Turkey but I know from the stories of my route that these places too slow the trains.

I ask if the cooling in Europe’s geopolitical relations with China is also a cause of the decline in the number of trains arriving in Duisport. My guide’s boss only accepts this indirectly and replies: ‘We should review our relationship with China and try to find a way we can work together’ instead of ‘looking at China with old glasses’. He says, ‘You can’t work with someone you hate’. Logistics, he says, is all about ‘finding solutions’. It’s about pragmatics, not politics. I run the imaginary London train past him. He laughs. The UK is but a siding on this network because it is only connected to Europe by a tunnel and is no longer in the EU.