Silk Road: Jonathan E. Hillman’s book The Emperors’s New Road – Culture

Silk road! One thinks of endless caravans with camels that bring treasures from the Orient to Central Europe on dangerous routes. In your mind’s eye you can see vast steppes, tundra, taiga, deserts, rugged mountain ranges in countries with unpronounceable names, plus daring traders and highwaymen, you can sense the threatening danger and the tempting exoticism in equal measure. One always thinks of the Silk Road as a seemingly endless stretch that connects Central Europe and the Mediterranean with East Asia by land, in order to finally arrive at the Great Wall of China. Central Eurasia merges seamlessly with Central Asia, the “Stans” are by the wayside: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan. A fairy tale world full of oases and bazaars.

None of this is still true. This is the rather sobering result of a Silk Road tour that the author Jonathan E. Hillman, a member of the US think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, has compiled in a book entitled “The Emperor’s New Road”.

The Silk Road is considered to be the historical and civilizational artery that connects the Orient and Occident. Some consider it the oldest beaten track of globalization: Rome looked to the east, China to the west. Organized movements are recorded on it from the second century BC. Not only spices, pasta, glass, wool, porcelain, precious metals and unknown spices were later transported back and forth here, but also knowledge, religion, culture, armies and of course the plague. The Silk Road is not a “road” at all, rather a network of routes that enabled travel that was sometimes more, sometimes less secure.

Robbery on the Silk Road already employed a court in 670, and the files were delivered to China

Especially in legal terms, people embarked on adventures here: the case of a man from present-day Iran who successfully sued a Chinese in his local court in 670 for handing him back the 275 bales of silk that was given to his assassinated brother has been handed down robbed one of these routes. The plaintiff was, however, 6,700 kilometers of bumpy land from the defendant. There is no record of what became of the bales. The fact that the case is known at all is due to the fact that archaeologists discovered the court documents, remnants of Persian jurisprudence, in a grave in Turfan, China. They had been delivered to China – via the Silk Road – where they served as burial clothing for the dead there: corpses were wrapped in them like dead fish in old newspapers.

The political imponderables on the long route caused different levels of occupancy: After the decline of Rome and the rise of Arabia, the Silk Road became increasingly unsafe, in the 13th and 14th centuries there was a revival, with Marco Polo being its most prominent user. But it was always the case that those who could keep in touch and communicate over long distances also had control over the region. It is still like that today.

This is one of the reasons why the latest technology has always been used when driving the Silk Road. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the major European powers in particular sought to make the Silk Road serve their imperial desires through infrastructure projects and investments in road and rail connections. Before the First World War, the British geographer Halford Mackinder even declared the contiguous continents of Europe, Asia and Africa to be the “island of the world”, in the center of which lies the “heartland” (“pivot area”) of the entire globe, which stretches from the Volga to the Yangtze and stretch from the Himalayas to the Arctic.

Is the “New Silk Road”, the construction of which China began in 2013, the project of the century?

The Silk Road lost its radiance in the course of the 20th century. The world wars and the great powers that subsequently froze into hermetic blocks with their satellites contributed to this, as did the extreme increase in global air traffic and international shipping. That changed suddenly in 2013, when China launched a large-scale project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The “New Silk Road” was announced. It was supposed to create an intercontinental trade and infrastructure network that, under the leadership of China, would connect 60 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. As early as May 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared Chinese activities the “Project of the Century” in view of the progress allegedly already made.

Jonathan E. Hillman didn’t want to believe all of this unseen and that’s why he drove the route a little way. He has toured and explored some of the places that have already been rated as exemplary. His report is sobering: “China, which has always played the role of the weaker”, he writes, “is now struggling with the challenges of its growing power. But it only follows in the footsteps of the former imperial powers and repeats their mistakes.” Reality and full-bodied rhetoric cannot be reconciled. Even in Korgas, a Chinese city on the border with Kazakhstan and now a presumed railway junction with the nickname “new Dubai”, the tourist only receives a protective helmet instead of a ticket for the high-speed train to Europe in the midst of untouched brown steppe. “Do trains run here at all?” Hillman asks his companion. “At least not today,” is his reply.

Everywhere on his route Hillman discovers this discrepancy between the Chinese offensive, which is already feared in the West, and the rather modest, often chaotic, coincidences and local power interests that are more like a “Shakespearean drama than a spy thriller”. China allegedly finances the port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka, but actually only finances the highly indebted local politics, with a completely uncertain outcome. In China, Hillman does not discover bundled forces with a clear focus on the BRI goal, but rather “a wide variety of interest groups who forge their own plans and have hardly anything to do with the officially announced long-term plans and major strategies”. Outside observers and experts would see strategy where there is none. This is of course also due to the fact that China can plan for the next decades, if not centuries, while Western politicians struggled to survive the next week and the next re-election.

Yet Hillman by no means belittles China’s activities as empty megalomania. “China’s search for market access, its attempt to exert influence and the unmistakable military footprint it leaves everywhere are reminiscent of the classic behavior of rising powers.” But seeing these parallels does not mean “to write them off as harmless. On the contrary: the echoes should remind us to be careful.” Hillman speaks of a “steadily growing imperialism”, although his book title paraphrases the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. If China were to focus just a little more, the current “lender of last resort” would actually become a preferred, influential partner in large parts of the world. But the same applies to today’s China: many have got lost on the Silk Road over the millennia.

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