Silk Road, New

The Silk Road, an ancient trade route that connected China with its trading partners in Asia and Europe, has emerged as a modern network of roads and rail links known as the Asian Highway. This new highway follows the route of the ancient Silk Road and plays a vital role in connecting the commercial centers in Asia. Hence, it is termed the New Silk Road. The New Silk Road (Asian Highway) is a pathway for globalization in Asia. This entry focuses on the implications of this trade network for Sino-Indian geopolitics in the Indian Ocean and South Asia.

The Asian Highway is a UN project that was originally conceived in 1959 to bring the countries of Asia closer together for economic cooperation and regional connectivity. Funded by multilateral aid organizations such as the Asian Development Bank, the highway in the 1960s and 1970s went through a slow development phase. However, by the 1980s, when the Asia-Pacific region, especially China, became dominant as a hub for economic growth, the highway received renewed attention for rapid development. Thus, “in 1992, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) endorsed the Asian Land Transport Infrastructure Development (ALTID) comprising of the Asian Highway and the Trans-Asian Railway network as well as facilitation of land transport” (ESCAP, 2003, p. 1).

According to the Asian Highway Handbook, 32 countries have agreed to allow the highway to pass through their sovereign borders to reach the European Road Network. Whereas the ancient Silk Road extended to 6,500 kilometers, the total length of the New Silk Road is 140,479 kilometers of road network. China is a key player in the highway construction. As the world's largest manufacturer of goods, China has the highest stake in the development of the highway. It has 25,579 kilometers of the highway in its territories, followed by the Russian Federation at 16,869, and India at 11,432 kilometers.

The highway is not only a crucial structure for the trading geography of the region but also a system of flows that generates new cultural and political dynamics in the region. It is a metaphor for the creation of new communities, social identities, globalized aspirations, the increased circulation of labor and traffic in women through the creation of truck routes, and environmental degradation as globalization flows into previously nonindustrialized areas.

In the context of South Asia, the Asian Highway has been theorized as generating regional connectivity through an increase in trade that will bring the peripheral regions (such as Bangladesh, Myanmar, and northeastern India) into greater cooperation with the two Asian giants, India and China. To meet this objective, in 1999, a conference on regional cooperation was held by Bangladesh, China, India, and Myanmar in Yunnan, China. The Kunming Initiative that came out of the conference was a proclamation to affirm regional cooperation and “to build appropriate road, rail, water and air links” (Indiresan, 2007). According to this plan, the Asian Highway would come down from Yunnan via Assam, India to the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, thereby bringing all of these isolated regions into greater connectivity.

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