12/14/2023 0 Comments New slik road![]() ![]() Whereas the journey from China to Rotterdam takes a ship well over a month to complete, and on average around 55 days, the same trip can now be completed within two weeks by rail. Rail’s main advantage is that it offers a middle ground: less expensive (though slower) than air freight and faster (though more expensive) than ship freight. That said, the railway-based “Belt” half of the Belt and Road Initiative is likely to have at least some indirect impact on Rotterdam’s role in transnational trade. ![]() As a port which was already developed, and already supported by a prosperous national economy, Rotterdam has relatively less to gain from Chinese support. A big port with little to gainĪs previous articles in this series have shown, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has largely targeted cities which will can be easily integrated into China’s trade routes and can directly benefit from the investment and technical and logistical expertise that China offers. This probably says as much about recent changes in China as it does about the fortunes of Rotterdam and Europe more broadly: China, a country with a population twice that of the whole of Europe, has merely begun to close the gap.Įven so, the trend is suggestive of a general direction of travel that’s worth exploring. Since then, it has fallen out of the top ten largest ports in the world and now lies eleventh behind eight Chinese ports, as well as the ports of Dubai and Singapore. In an ongoing series exploring the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the cities involved, our next stop is the port of Rotterdam in The Netherlands, which must deal with increasing competition from land and sea as a result of China’s rise.Īfter a third of its buildings were destroyed during the 1940 Nazi blitzkrieg invasion of The Netherlands, the Port of Rotterdam rose phoenix-like from the rubble to become the world’s busiest port by 1962.īenefitting from its position at the entry point of Western Europe, a region that was (and, of course, continues to be) home to several of the world’s wealthiest countries, Rotterdam held this position for a remarkable stretch of over four decades, until it was finally overtaken in 2004, first by Singapore and then by the Chinese Port of Shanghai. ![]()
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