SINCE the Silk Road fell into disuse six centuries ago, Asian commerce has been carried not by land but by sea along coasts and island chains, first on monsoon winds and now in the holds of diesel ships. The story of Asia's post-war miracle is above all a maritime one. First Japan, then South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, and then all of South-East and East Asia bar North Korea and Myanmar, adopted economic models based on exporting manufactures. The rise of China has been nothing if not the embrace of the maritime world. The miracle is inconceivable without the ship-borne container.
The broad lines of Asian security mirror this watery theme. Since the Pacific War of 1941-45, the United States has enforced a Pax Americana through naval strength and a perimeter of island allies, from Australia to Japan. If American dominance is challenged, it will be at sea. The rise of China and India as military powers has been marked by a large increase in their navies.
But Anthony Bubalo and Malcolm Cook of the Lowy Institute in Sydney argue in TheAmerican Interest* that such a perspective is bumping up against the limits of usefulness. It masks a powerful impulse that is starting to reshape continental Asia's territorial expanses. For much of the 20th century the three powers of the Asian land mass, China, India and the former Soviet Union, bothered little with international exchange, and transcontinental development was derisory. That is now changing.
New roads, railways and pipelines are criss-crossing continental Asia. In December a pipeline 7,000 km (4,400 miles) long opened, bringing gas from Turkmenistan to China, via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Russia and China have a $25 billion project to pipe oil from the Russian Far East into China. An Iran-Pakistan pipeline is being built, and could eventually run into India or China. In Myanmar, South Korean and Indian firms have a big project to bring gas to south-western China.
Road networks are also expanding, led by India (in Afghanistan, for example) and, especially, China. Dusty Myanmar is now plugged into China's spanking new highway complex. New roads bind neighbours along the Mekong River. Central Asia is also seeing a flurry of road-building.
Railways reflect the boldest ambitions. China has already pushed a railway up the Himalayas to Lhasa in Tibet, on which 5m people have travelled since 2006. Now it wants to push lines down them into Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan. As for high-speed railways, from a standing start China's are the world's fastest and longest. The government has plans to roll out a high-speed network across Asia and even Europe. It proposes three main routes to connect two dozen countries, from Singapore in the south to Germany in the west (with a tunnel from mainland China to Taiwan to boot). By 2025, if the railway ministry is to be believed, it will take two days to travel from Shanghai to London.
Immense financial, not to mention political, obstacles stand in the way of such ambitions. But these projects are starting to redefine what people mean by Asia. It is no longer mainly a coastline with strong trade links to the rest of the world. Now, links across Asia matter just as much. Trade within the region is growing at roughly twice the pace of trade with the outside world. From almost nothing 20 years ago, China is now India's biggest partner, with bilateral trade that may top $60 billion this year. Central Asia's trade with China jumped from $160m in 1990 to $7 billion in 2006. And China is the biggest merchandise exporter to the Middle East. The crowds of worshippers at the mosque in Yiwu, a town in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang with a vast wholesale market, hint at the scale of the links. On the continent's western edge it is getting hard to know where Asia ends.
For all its promise, the new continental perspective does not negate the maritime one, and sometimes reinforces it. C. Raja Mohan, an Indian academic, points out that continental development is helping tie isolated populations into international markets, by giving them a route to the sea (for example, south-west China to the Bay of Bengal). Meanwhile, the continental infrastructure boom increases maritime business: four-fifths of the crude oil bound for China still passes through the Malacca strait. Resource competition among rising powers and the need to protect sea lanes will keep naval strategists in work for years.
Whether competition by land will lead to co-operation or conflict remains an open question. Instabilities abound, including thuggish regimes in Central Asia and fractious populations deep inside China and India. Much depends on how smaller countries respond to the blandishments of their giant neighbours. Not all Central Asians like the energy deals their governments are striking with China. Plenty of South Asians resent India's swagger. And now Russia wants to regain influence in its backyard.
In continental Asia, there is no enforcer of the peace, as America has been for maritime Asia. None of the new clubs, such as the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation of China, Russia and Central Asian countries, includes America. American pressure on Iran over nuclear programmes has been undermined by the energy interests of China and Russia. Though the United States has a huge military presence in Afghanistan, it vows to get out. And whereas America has tried both containment and engagement to influence the rogue regime of Myanmar, China and India have used their better contacts mainly to advance their commercial interests. With an overemphasis on maritime Asia, say Messrs Bubalo and Cook, the West risks a kind of sea-blindness when it comes to the implications of the new continental trends.
* The American Interest, May-June 2010