In April 2024, an enormous container ship got stuck in the canal, side by side, blocking the flow of international trade for six days. The incident was a reminder: commerce runs along a few key choke points, and those who control them have immense control. China got the message loud and clear. It has since been quietly developing an alternative, not to the West, but to make sure that no chokepoint, whether under Western or local control, can restrict its future.
With such construction, China is not posing a challenge to Western dominance, but it is reordering the current structure of how trade flows through the Asia-Pacific. This change will not rapidly collapse Western power. However, it will be slowly destroying leverage previously afforded by control of maritime routes and will change who benefits from international trade.
The Old System: Chokepoint Leverage
Geography has been a determining factor in world trade for centuries. 80% of international trade is maritime, and the majority of this flows through a few chokepoints—the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, and the Panama Canal. Using power to control these handful of significant chokepoints, or maintaining a naval presence to keep the passages open, has been a key practice of Western geopolitical dominance. In this way, they keep an eye on smaller states and ensure their dependence on them, how emerging states were curtailed from developing, and how the post-WWII era was designed.
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The challenge to the system by China is not ideological. It is structural. Beijing understood that, as long as trade moves through western-controlled chokepoints, it is vulnerable. The blockade, the closure, and a Western power deciding to limit access are still existential threats to Chinese prosperity. This is a vulnerability that can’t be solved philosophically. It requires infrastructure.
Two Strategies: Overland and Arctic
China is doing this in two different, but complementary, approaches.
The first is overland rerouting through Central Asia: The city of Chongqing, in the middle of China, has emerged as a key node for rail connections between China and Europe. Hundreds of container trains now cross the city to transport goods to Central Asia, Russia, and Europe. The routes last 10-20 days, which is similar to the time it takes for maritime shipping, but they traverse Chinese and partner territory. The same holds true for the “Middle Corridor,” Beijing’s term for a network of routes running through Kazakhstan and the Caspian Sea, which would complement the existing network of traditional maritime routes.
They are not hypothetical scenarios. The volume of containers transported by the China-Europe rail routes has been steadily increasing. The overland route offers the ASEAN Express, which will take about 19 days to deliver to China and beyond, more than 50 percent faster than maritime shipping for similar routes. These routes are not being used as experiments but rather as viable alternatives.
The second strategy is the Arctic route: With the retreat of the polar ice as a consequence of climate change, the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic Ocean is opening for navigation seasonally. Travel from East Asia to Western Europe through here would be 12,800 kilometers, while traveling through the Suez Canal would be 21,000 kilometers. This reduces transit time to 10-20 days. This makes the pathway reliable and scalable in the near future, in the next 10 years, as most projections suggest it will be ice-free in the Arctic in the summer months.
Neither road is a substitute for sea transport per se. They provide each other with redundancy.
Redundancy as Power
This is the key difference. China is not constructing these roads for the purpose of “bypassing” the West or for autarky. The Chinese economy is still closely linked with those of the West. It is dependent on trade with Europe and North America for its prosperity. What China is constructing is what they call optionality: having the ability to carry goods by several routes instead of one.
Optionality is power. If there’s only one route, its terms are set by the controller of that route. If the routes are several, then leveraging happens. A blockade of Suez is not as dramatic if products can be transported by rail through Central Asia or the Arctic route. If there are alternate routes, a closure of the Strait of Malacca will be easily dealt with.
However, this power dynamic goes beyond simply China. The rise of these avenues changes incentives for countries in Asia-Pacific. Southeast Asian countries, Central Asian states, and even countries in South Asia will gain new roles as transit hubs or nodes in other forms of transit corridors. Malaysia’s port is of less importance when products can be transported overland through Kazakhstan. A Pakistani corridor is more valuable if it is linked to overland corridors. Now, these states have new bargaining power they didn’t have before.
It is not a matter of choosing between ‘Chinese’ or ‘Western’ routes. It’s not a choice at all—it’s about it. When redundancy is present, it can cause the power of geography to automatically dissipate.
The Honest Complications
There are caveats to this narrative. Currently, these routes are subsidized in order to be competitive. Beijing has invested heavily in the rail, port, and logistics infrastructure to make these pathways viable. Many wouldn’t be economical without state support. But the big question is whether these lines will be able to become viable in the long run because of increasing traffic and development of infrastructure or whether they will continue to rely on Chinese state support.
Not all routes are also faster for all goods and destinations. Long-haul and bulk trade by sea continues to be efficient. The new routes prove to be especially good for time-critical goods and shorter regional distances. The two systems are most likely to coexist in varying degrees, with trade split on the basis of efficiency.
In addition, the structural change is a slow one as described above. Western dominance of the world trading system doesn’t disappear just because new trade routes are opened up. The automaticity of that dominance, however, starts to get undermined, as does the notion that controlling a chokepoint is unchallengeable.
What This Means for the Asia-Pacific?
But the essence of China’s infrastructure plan is not what it says; it’s what it does. The movement of capital, the growth of cities, and the concentration of power are determined by trade routes. Trade takes on an altogether different shape as overland and Arctic routes become feasible. Routes now run north-south (overland, through Central Asia) around, as opposed to exclusively east-to-west along maritime routes.
In Asia-Pacific, it translates to the region playing a pivotal role in global trade, rather than being secondary markets. The importance of Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Indonesia is not due to their proximity to Western markets but rather on the routes that matter.
It is reordering and not a revolution. As with most changes in international relations, it takes place unheralded and undeclared, without confrontation. However, it changes who has the options, who has the power, and, ultimately, who calls the shots when it comes to global commerce.
Through these avenues, China is not threatening the West militarily or ideologically. It is just making sure that the West can stop it from expanding by geography now is no longer automatic. This kind of opposition can be the most severe for an emerging power, more of a change in the rules of the game than a game of domination.
