China goes beyond Pak, will build rail line to Iran

China goes beyond Pak, will build rail line to Iran

China goes beyond Pak, will build rail line to Iran

C. Raja Mohan

Tags : Beijing, Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran

Posted: Wed Sep 08 2010, 02:03 hrs

Updated: Wed Sep 08 2010, 09:46 hrs

New Delhi:

As the United States steps up the effort to isolate Tehran, China is penetrating deeper into the Iranian plateau. This weekend, Beijing will unveil plans to build a new rail corridor that will eventually link China to the Mediterranean Sea through Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

Liu Zhijun, China’s railway minister, is landing in Iran on Sunday to clinch an agreement on one important segment of this new Silk Road between the Far East and the Mediterranean, according to news reports from Beijing and Tehran.

Liu is expected to sign an agreement with Iranian transport minister, Hamid Behbahani, on building a rail line between Tehran and Khosravi on the border with Iraq.

Like the British Raj and the Russian empire that extended their railways into remote inner Asian frontiers more than a century ago as part of the Great Game, China wants to push transport corridors into all corners of Eurasia.

Unlike a distracted America, exhausted Russia, and an India that seems to have forgotten the strategic significance of railways, a rising China has put trans-continental connectivity at the heart of its grand strategy.

After promoting trans-border transport links to the Korean peninsula, Southeast Asia, Burma and Pakistan, China is now turning its attention to develop a direct rail link to the Middle East and the Mediterranean through Central Asia.

The Tehran-Khosravi rail line, expected to cost $2 billion, will go through the cities of Arak, Hamedan and Kermanshah before touching the border with Iraq. Once finances are arranged for the project, the rail line could be built in about three years. Beijing and Tehran hope to extend it further west to the Mediterranean through Iraq and Syria. They also want to plug the remaining gaps in organising a rail corridor between Iran and China, through Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For Tehran and Beijing, the rail project is part of an emerging strategic partnership that could alter the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia. For Iran, China is a partner in its defiance of the West. For Beijing, Tehran could offer not just energy security but also a pivotal foothold in the volatile Middle East.

The ambitious plan is to link the Iranian railways to the Chinese network comes on top of Beijing’s plans to modernise the Karakoram Highway into Pakistan through the Gilgit Baltistan region of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Beijing is also studying a proposal to build a rail line across the Karakorams, that ties into the Pakistani rail network and provides access to the Arabian Sea. To India’s east, China is exploring the development of the Irrawaddy corridor through Burma into the Bay of Bengal.