China Opens New 2,000-Mile Land Cargo Route Across Central Asia to Afghanistan

Central Asia’s quest for regional integration took a big leap forward on Thursday when the first freight train to traverse a new freight line departed from its eastern hub in China’s Gansu Province, bound for Afghanistan.

The train left from the Dongchuan logistics center in Lanzhou, Gansu’s capital city located on the Yellow River, on Thursday. Carrying 39 containers of goods, including automobile parts, furniture, office supplies, and mechanical equipment, the train will head westward, tracing much of the same paths of the ancient Silk Road to Kashgar, a city in the far west of China’s westernmost province, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

In Kashgar, the cargo will be unloaded onto trucks and driven across the Tien Shan mountains and into Kyrgyzstan, where it will be loaded back onto train cars in Osh, at the eastern end of the Fergana Valley. From there, the train will take it westward into Uzbekistan, along the length of the Fergana and south until it crosses the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan Friendship Bridge over the Panj River, finally reaching the Afghan city of Hairatan.

The total distance is about 1,940 miles (3,125 kilometers), according to Chinese media, and is expected to take 15 days to traverse.

“We hope to normalize the route for Sino-Afghanistan express service and aim to run four times a month,” Li Wei, a marketing manager from New Land-Sea Corridor Operation Co, one of the main firms involved in the shipment, told Chinese media.

Completion of the route will play an important role in increasing trade through the region, especially to Afghanistan, which has the potential to become a continental infrastructure hub - a potential as-yet unrealized thanks to decades of war.

Following the Taliban* takeover in 2021, as US forces finalized their withdrawal from Afghanistan, regional powers such as China, Pakistan, and Iran moved to try and help to stabilize the country.

Recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said: "China is ready to strengthen cooperation with Pakistan on the Afghan issue, facilitate the process of peaceful reconstruction in Afghanistan, as well as stability and progress in the region."

A similar effort is underway to build a train route from Kashgar to the Iranian city of Khaf, on the far side of Afghanistan, which has been dubbed the Five Nations Railway Corridor and would run over part of the same rail lines used in the newly inaugurated freight route. However, the rails will also have to traverse the Tien Shan, some of the world’s tallest mountains.

The China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan link of that railway has made some progress recently, since it was agreed to in 1997.

“All three sides will contribute equal investments toward the Kyrgyz section of the railway. However, many practical issues are not yet resolved, particularly those of public concern in Kyrgyzstan,” Niva Yau, a fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute said in a March report.

A preliminary route for the Kyrgyz section was approved in June 2022, and a feasibility study was expected to be completed last month.

But the negotiations intensified recently, with a preliminary route of the Kyrgyz section having just been approved in June 2022.

*The Taliban: a group under United Nations sanction for terrorist activities.