Amazing Reach

Incredible what $100-billion can buy. It goes a long, long way to reaching the moon in supplying state funding for space enterprise, sending astronauts into the atmosphere. It can also fund a series of tentacle-like approaches to geographies more familiar here on Earth, but fairly remote in distance from the country from whence the rail systems originate.

But China is determined more than ever to extend her reach over the Continent she straddles in no small part. The country has plans and has begun to see that those plans are realized, to open Central Asia to trade routes by road and rail that will modernize a human activity that has its genesis in the ancient, fabled Silk Toad route with its colourful caravans criss-crossing Eurasia in a constant commerce of trade.

The Silk Road traversed a series of routes from China to the Middle East. By the time of Alexander the Great it had expanded to the Mediterranean.

Modern shipping by sea routes and even by air have brought Chinese goods and products to the far reaches of the planet. There's nothing new about Chinese trade and enterprise; the country has picked up where it left off a thousand years ago.

There's construction to begin shortly for a rail link through Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan with lines running east from Xinjiang into Mongolia and then to the Qinghai plateau. Rail lines are destined to reach as far as Moscow and Tehran, with another direct route planned through the Hindu Kush to Kabul.

A giant engineering feat planned to dig rail tunnels under the mountain areas to bring goods to Afghanistan and well beyond. Energy pipelines for conveying oil and gas already exist from Russia and Kazakhstan, to provide the immense energy needs for Beijing and Shanghai.

Even with the current financial slowdown internationally threatening to damp down all modernization and infrastructure initiatives in the near future, it seems China will permit nothing to get in the way of its intended target; to dominate world trade.

A truly amazing renaissance of startling dimensions as China continues to emerge as a world power; economically, socially, politically.