21st CENTURY MARITIME SILK ROAD: PORT INFRASTRUCTURE AS ITS BUILDING BLOCK

He who commands the sea, commands the trade routes of the World
He who commands the trade route, commands the trade
He who commands the trade, commands the riches of the world
                                                                                   [Sir Walter Raleigh, late 16th Century]

He who rules the sea will shortly rule on the land also.
                                                                               [Khaireddin Barbarossa, 1520 A.D.]

Since the Belt and Road (yidai yilu,一带一路) Initiative was first proposed in 2013, the rationale and objective governing this initiative has expanded and undergone profound changes. An initiative, which was limited to Eurasia at its inception, has today expanded to include Latin America, Africa and the Arctic along with a digital Silk Road, and a Silk Road in outer space. The Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road Initiative proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, taking ancient land and maritime silk road as a symbol, aimed to build a community with political mutual trust, regional connectivity and a network of high-standard free trade. The overland Silk Road, which originated in the Western Han Dynasty, is 1400 years older than the Maritime Silk Road which prospered during the Ming Dynasty and had to await advancements in nautical science. 

In his speech delivered at Nazarbayev University on September 07, 2013 Xi Jinping stated, “We will in no circumstances interfere in the internal affairs of Central Asian countries. We do not seek to dominate regional affairs or establish any sphere of influence. We stand ready to enhance communication and coordination with Russia and all Central Asian countries to strive to build a region of harmony”. The strategic objectives outlined in this speech were - create even more space for development, build a major transportation route connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea, and transportation networks connecting East Asia, West Asia and South Asia. In the following month, on October 03, Xi Jinping delivered a speech titled, Working Together to Build a 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road at the People’s Representative Council of Indonesia. Unlike his speech in Kazakhstan, where Xi Jinping stressed on economic development, while announcing the 21st century maritime silk road the stress was on security. President Xi stated, “We should cast away the Cold War mentality, champion the new thinking of comprehensive security, common security and cooperative security, and jointly uphold peace and stability in our region”. Within a decade of mooting this initiative, the Cold War mentality persists and the strategic security environment has led to a situation where Japan is contemplating an Asian version of NATO. In an article published by the Hudson Institute (September 25, 2024), Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba stated, “The geopolitical crisis surrounding our country has risen to the point where war could break out at any moment”. This remark was a reference to the role of extra-regional powers in the region, which was also part of Xi Jinping’s speech in 2013 where in he stated, “welcome countries outside the region to play a constructive role in promoting development and stability in the region”.

Clearly, the strategic rationale is not limited to the development of economic collaboration relations and partnerships with countries along the belt and road, economic integration and cultural inclusion. According to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, BRI is an international economic cooperation initiative, with military, political, social, cultural, and other exchanges revolving around an economic core. The BRI initiative – project of the century - is a means to a desired end state of achieving the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation (zhonghuaminzu weida fuxing, 中华民族伟大复兴 ) by the centenary of the People’s Republic of China in 2049. The concept of national rejuvenation (民族复兴) announced by Xi Jinping at an exhibition titled -The Road Toward Renewal - soon after his appointment as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, was, in fact, a concept in vogue since the 13th Party Congress in 1987 and echoes the nationalist revolutionaries who overthrew the Qing Dynasty at the cusp of the modern era. This enterprise of national rejuvenation is deeply rooted in a sense of uneasiness and fear in China’s national subconsciousness – “never forget national humiliation” (勿忘国耻). In a statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Henry Kissinger defined BRI as China’s “quest to shift the world’s center of gravity”, hence acknowledging that China wants that center to shift away from the Pacific and the Transatlantic towards Asia and itself. From a Chinese perspective, however, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road initiative, as part of the BRI, holds historical significance and marks the end of a phase of reform and opening up. The goal is to stimulate new drivers for global economic growth and to create new platforms for international economic cooperation. 

While Chinese strategists call this a ‘new era’ or innovation of a process that began in 1980, according to President Ursula von der Leyen (European Commission), “China has now turned the page on the era of ‘reform and opening' and is moving into a ‘new era of security and control’…. and the imperative for security and control now trumps the logic of free markets and open trade”. Clearly, the maritime silk road is aimed at a systemic change of the international order with China at its center which until now is maritime in nature and led by the West in a process that began with the Columbian Epoch at the tail end of 15th century. Put simply, the maritime silk road initiative is a geo-political project for the 21st century and invokes Halford Mackinder’s concept of ruling the Heartland and Nicholas John Spykman’s contradictory concept of ruling the Rimland and was not the very first put forward by a nation. In 2006, Japan proposed to build an arc of freedom and prosperity that lined the outer rim of the Eurasian continent in support and preservation of an order based on ‘universal values’ – democracy, peace, freedom and human rights. Also, in 2007 Japan declared the coming into being of ‘confluence of the two seas’ – the Pacific and Indian Ocean. Geo-politics, as a branch of political science developed in the late 19th century, is primarily concerned with the pivot area – Eurasian landmass. China’s BRI initiative which followed Japan’s initiative of creating an arc of freedom and prosperity (2007), and the US pivot to Asia initiative (2012) is similar, if not same, when viewed from the prism of geo-politics.

As a consequence, China’s initiative has triggered the idea of defending a ‘rules-based order’ in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, a concept that owes its birth to China’s obligation to seek a change in global system of governance. According to the former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken - a rules-based international order is a -  “system of laws, agreements, principles and institutions that the world came together to build after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people”. In other words, a rules-based order is in defense and promotion of a capitalist system – free market and open trade - put in place by the West through prosecuting organized violence in the mid-20th century and China sees a chance for itself to end this motion that has been in the making since the Columbian Epoch – a period of extensive European exploration and colonization – which transformed towards political appropriation by early 20th century.

This ‘rules-based world order concept’ is opposed to the universal principles of international law and lacks in clarity as to what these rules are and why are they needed. According to Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov – this concept creates a strategic framework within which whoever acts against the will of the West is immediately, and without any evidence, accused of being a rule breaker. Along with Russia, China understands the 21st century geo-strategic landscape to be the one where a 500-year old era of Western imperialism and colonial domination is being replaced by a multipolar world. The idea of multipolar world was put forward by former President of China, Jiang Zemin and in 1997 formed the basis of determining the fate of the 21st century in an alliance with Russia, according to former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. At the 61st Munich Security Conference (2025), Foreign Minister Wang Yi carefully avoided the term ‘rule’ and stated, “Whether it is the colonial system or the core-periphery structure, unequal orders are bound to meet their demise…. as an old Chinese saying goes, circles and squares cannot be drawn without compasses and rulers, which means nothing can be accomplished without following norms and standards”. No matter how you put it, the idea of rule – both literally and figuratively – persists and reinforces the centrality of ‘authority’ in global governance and security architecture. Within a multipolar world the idea of authority is contested.

In 2025, Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, was the first to admit that - U.S. dominance is over, and we now live in a multipolar world. However, the US pivot to Asia under the Obama administration in 2012 and acknowledgment of the return of great power competition under Trump administration in 2017 were early recognitions of a transition from unipolar to multipolar world which is now an undisputed fact. There is no general consensus or an accepted definition of multipolarity. While the US along with others understand it as a condition of great power competition and threat to an international rules-based order, China and many in the global south hold an anti-imperialist view – an era of equality among all countries – and democratization of international relations. According to Foreign Minister Wang Yi, “Equal rights, equal opportunities and equal rules should become the basic principles of a multipolar world”. This transition to a multipolar world, as this essay will argue, has much to do with the maritime nature of the world order, in particular the need for maritime access. 

This essay, hence, seeks to appreciate the strategic rationale behind China’s Maritime Silk Road by analyzing the port and port cities as a sub-set of the Belt and Road initiative and explain why this initiative is construed as a geo-political initiative and a threat to a rules-based order and identify the strategic merits and flaws in this historical initiative.

Strategic Rationale 
In China’s strategic assessment, politics and economic policies of western countries tend to drive down economic globalization, and policy-making of international trade and investment flows are increasingly rooted in nationalism and populism. This calls for China to assume responsibility - as the second largest economy and a country trading the largest volume of commodities internationally - to initiate and lead the potentially next wave of economic globalization. According to a report titled 21st Century Maritime Silk Road published by the Silk Road Academy (National Think Tank (Beijing); 2017), “This initiative covers the core of economic globalization, seeks to construct new global governance framework, and is expected to become the tipping point of next wave of economic globalization”. The West-led process of economic globalization has entered a period of growing frustration, for the international trade agreements based on the free trade and open markets are proving to be non-beneficial. With the US-led West abandoning the very post-war multilateral architecture it had put in place for more protectionism, bilateralism and unilateralism, President Xi Jinping while speaking at the World Economic Forum at Davos in 2017, argued for not blaming economic globalization for the chaos in the world, and that, “economic globalization resulted from growing social productivity, and is a natural outcome of scientific and technological progress, not something created by any individuals or any countries”.

As a strategy, the BRI project seeks to mitigate the attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries and people between economies and innovate the process of economic globalization as an irreversible historical trend and has identified development of an external environment of opening-up and global connectivity with its origin in China as its core. Most countries along the Belt and Road are developing countries that face pronounced challenges due to poverty and the Chinese government has committed to implementing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to establish a ‘Road to Poverty Reduction’. Furthermore, according to the World Bank, “global income increases by 0.7 per cent (in 2030 relative to the baseline). This translates into almost half a trillion dollars in 2014 prices and market exchange rates. The Belt and Road Initiative area captures 82 percent of the gain, with the largest percent gains in East Asia”.

At the tactical level, this initiative aims to link Chinese domestic development to world development, and to extend the domestic pattern of transferring manufacturing from coastal to inland regions to international “flying geese paradigm”. A study explaining the poverty difference between inland and coastal China found that inland China is poorer than coastal China, mainly due to lower efficiency in resource utilization not to less endowment of resources. Also, trade became poverty-reducing in coastal China in the late 1990s but remained poverty-inducing in inland China. Yet, this entire enterprise of China’s coastal cities being inherently economically developed and wealthy is a myth and has often come with considerable cost to China’s coastal ecosystem. The Yangtze River Delta Port Group is extremely active compared to the other two port group – the Bohai Sea Port Group and the Pearl River Delta Port Group, and the economic growth of the south was better compared to that of the north. In 2017, 29 of the 54 coastal cities were found to be economically underdeveloped and constituted an arc of coastal poverty belt along China’s coastline from north to south. Yet, ports and port cities while operating at the tactical-operational level constitute the core of the strategic rationale governing the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (BRI). 

China’s coastal ports and inland river ports handle more inbound freight than outbound freight – a case for international trade inter-dependency - a rise of 2,242 per cent in volume since 1990. The total number of berth in ports of inland rivers (16,906) far exceeds to that of berths along the coastal ports (6,580), although coastal ports can berth more 10,000 ton class freighters (2,409) compared to ports of inland rivers (469).

Image 1: Volume of Freight Handled in Coastal Ports and Inland Rivers (2023)

Source: China Statistical Year Book - 2024

The strategic significance of ports as part of infrastructure exceeds other types and kinds of infrastructures – roads, railway, dams etc. Nearly 16.95 per cent of the total investment in the BRI is dedicated towards port-water projects, ranking second only to the investment in railway construction. When interpreted from a Marxist perspective, as Chinese scholars often do, the port is the leader of the development of productive forces. Among the world’s 35 international cities, 31 have been developed into international cities because they have a port, and the top 10 cities are almost all port cities. Furthermore, 50 per cent of global wealth is concentrated in the coastal port cities. Yet, case studies demonstrate there is a large variety of trajectories that exists while establishing a positive correlation between ports and development. Port activities over the years have demonstrated the shifting economic balance across continents – in 1970’s approximately 40 per cent of all world port activity took place in Europe, 20 per cent in North America and 20 per cent in Asia, and in the first decade of the 21st century more than half of world’s port activity took place in Asia, around a fifth in Europe, and a tenth in North America.

While the original purpose of the Belt and Road initiative is to fill the worldwide financial gap in constructing infrastructure, the strategic significance of ports is not limited to political-economy but also maritime security and naval power projection. According to Hu Bo, Director, Center for Maritime Strategic Studies, the growing maritime capabilities of the “emerging powers” like China and technological progresses are two major driving forces for the United States (US) to transform its maritime strategy from “From the sea” to “Returning to Sea-Control” in 2012. Furthermore, since this transformation of maritime strategy is zeroed in on China, it is sure to pose a major threat to China’s maritime security strategy. The maritime transport industry which China seeks to develop is a vital part of its participation in international division of labor and the formation of international competitive advantage. According to US Trade Representative (April, 2024), China's shipbuilding market share had increased from less than five per cent in 1999 to over 50 per cent in 2023. Furthermore, China owns over 19 per cent of the global commercial fleet and controls a near-monopoly on shipping container production (95 per cent) and intermodal chassis supply (86 per cent), however, China’s ship exports contribute only 1.2 per cent of overall exports and 0.2 per cent of China’s GDP. This maritime system is crucial for national security, and an important mechanism to protect national maritime security. The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, from a strategic perspective, allows China to increasingly grasp control of freedom of navigation on the high seas, international ocean shipping, and the critical maritime infrastructure necessary to maintain global security. The transportation of strategic goods of import and export, and preventing the impact of international changes on foreign trade are inbuilt in BRI projects.

China’s aim to dominate the global shipping sector has resulted in triggering the US federal statue – Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (Jones Act) – which among other things, requires trade between US ports to be conducted by US-flag ships. To become a great maritime nation (haiyang qiangguo) is part of the Chinese Dream and was declared as a national objective by President Hu Jintao at the 18th Party Congress (2012) – “We should enhance our capacity for exploiting marine resources, resolutely safeguard China’s maritime rights and interests, and build China into a maritime power”. China’s Defense White Paper (2012) which was published in April, 2013 declared China as major maritime as well as land country, underscored the importance of seas and oceans as an essential national development strategy to exploit, utilize and protect the seas and oceans, and build China into a maritime power.

In conclusion, this section links China’s efforts at building the 21st century maritime silk road as part of its belt and road initiative to its grand strategy of realizing national rejuvenation and the geopolitical underpinnings of the maritime international order. Through this initiative, China seeks to establish itself as the anchor of the next wave of economic globalization in the 21st century and in order to do this it is putting into place a maritime system built around the 21st century maritime silk road. It is a comprehensive undertaking with military, political, social, cultural, and other exchanges revolving around an economic core. Emphasis on Ports and port cities, in particular, reveal the rationale governing this initiative. While China supports globalization and an order based at sea, it remains insecure with western domination of the maritime system. With the aim of defending its national security, through this initiative China is preparing the ground to lead the process of globalization.