Author: Ryan Perkins

Ryan Perkins is a Geopolitical Analyst whose work has been published around the world and used by global companies and think tanks.

Xinjiang – Gateway to the World?

A version of this article originally appeared in Beijing Review.

Photo: Ryan Perkins
Horgas Dry Port

Xinjiang, an autonomous region in northwest China, is home to vast deserts and mountains and many ethnic minority groups. The ancient Silk Road trade route linking China and the Middle East once passed through Xinjiang, and its legacy can still be seen everywhere. The dry port Horgas is breathing new life into this ancient trade route.

Horgas, once a sleepy backwater straddling the border of Xinjiang’s Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture and Kazakhstan has been transformed as a key part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Its strategic position has turned the city into the one of the largest dry ports in the world and the starting point for the China-Europe railway. And the demand is growing.

Thanks to the dry port, trains and trucks can carry goods from eastern China to Western Europe in around two weeks, compared to a several week journey by container ship or vastly expensive air freight.

As economies around the world reeled from COVID related countermeasures, demand for made in China products soared. China posted a huge $535 billion trade surplus in 2020 according to the AP; a 3.6 percent increase in exports over 2019 to a total of $2.6 trillion; and a subsequent 1.1 percent reduction in imports. At the same time China overtook the US to become the EU’s top trading partner in goods, according to Eurostat data.

Photo: Ryan Perkins

As a result of the asymmetry of global trade, shipping rates reached a 12 year high at the end of last year. Containers continued to flow out of China’s ports but the imbalance of trade with COVID affected countries meant that the containers simply were not returning in the same volume. This led to a sudden spike in freight rates and increased shipping delays. All this made the rail freight option very attractive in 2020.

At Horgas itself, three giant rail-mounted gantries rise from the desert and meticulously move up and down the lengths of freight trains arriving from China and load them onto trains waiting on Kazakh tracks all backed by a snow- capped mountain range. These giant cranes are needed to transship containers onto Kazakh trains and vice versa as Kazakh rail uses slightly wider – former Soviet – rail lines. In addition to the railway terminal a new highway crossing from China to Kazakhstan opened in November 2018.

According to Yu Chengzhong, Chairman of the Board, already 45 percent of the port’s cargo originates from outside Xinjiang. He explains how provinces closer to the sea are switching to the overland route; from oranges in Hunan, to consumer products in Zhenzhou.

The development of the dry port has been impressive: productivity at the port has rocketed in recent years and it now handles over 180,000 TEUs a year, Yu told Beijing Review. That figure is expected to rise to 500,000 TEUs by 2023.

“Before the port was built it would take three days to reach Astana in Kazakhstan, all on dirt roads,” Yu continued to explain, “but now it’s all express highway or rail freight so the time is just hours now.”

Although some eighty percent of the goods shipped through Horgas go to the countries of the former Soviet Union, and 35 to 40 percent go to Uzbekistan alone, on January 3rd 2017 the first Yiwu to London train departed carrying 44 containers via Moscow and Minsk arriving at London’s Barking Eurohub freight terminal. On April 10th that same year the first London to Yiwu train departed carrying 88 containers covering the 12,000 km journey in just 18 days compared with 40 days for sea freight.

Added to this, the Port at Horgas provides a train route – via Almaty and across central Asia – to Tehran, with the first cargo trains arriving from China in 2018 after completing the 10,400 km journey in just 14 days and giving China increased access to this energy rich region.

But development of the port has also been a driver for local industries in Xinjiang. And horticultural projects have sprung up in the Ili Region. Where once there was open grassland, vast fields of flowers bloom and fields of lavender stretch to the horizon.

But Horgas is not Xinjiang’s only trade route under development. Xinjiang’s oasis city of Kashgar has a history stretching back more than 2000 years and was a key trading post along the historical Silk Road. Now it is the start point of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), one of the biggest projects under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Photo: Ryan Perkins

Over the course of decades roads have been built – with great hardship and many challenges given the formidable terrain – from Kashgar to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port allowing Chinese cargo to be transported overland to the port. Gwadar Port is located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, just outside the Strait of Hormuz, with access to the key shipping routes in and out of the Gulf.

Gwadar Port is central to the CPEC, and a key component in the BRI. China Overseas Port Holding Company plans to expand the port, constructing nine, new multipurpose berths. Construction and operation of the port was awarded to China in 2013 and it gives China an alternative to potential choke points like the Straits of Malacca.

Heather Fields in the Desert
Source: Ryan Perkins

This huge level of investment in Xinjiang’s infrastructure is feeding back into local communities in many ways; presenting new business opportunities, opening new markets and helping facilitate China’s poverty alleviation campaign. Given Xinjiang’s strategic position and increased connectivity with Central Asia and the Eurasian landmass at large, the region is no longer a landlocked backwater; but becoming a land-linked logistics hub.

Money Printer Go Brrrr -Asset Bubble Inflation and De-Dollarization

A version of this article originally appeared in Beijing Review.

With the U.S. economy still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and record unemployment, real estate prices continue to skyrocket pricing thousands of house hunters out of the market in the U.S. and Canada. This may seem counterintuitive for an economy that has technically been in recession since February 2020 and saw unemployment peak at just over 14% last April. The last time U.S. home prices raised this quickly, it led to an ensuing crash that brought down the global economy.

This asset bubble is not restricted to the US but is crossing borders and going global making housing or even renting unaffordable for many – especially those worst affected by the global pandemic. In fact the rate of price increases has alarmed policy makers in both the U.S. and Canada. “The dream of homeownership is out of reach for so many working people,” Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown told Politico recently. “Rising home prices and flat wages means that many families, especially families of color, may never be able to afford their first home.”

According to World Population Review “the typical value of U.S. homes was $269,039 as of January 2021, a 9.1 percent increase from January 2020. Between 1999 and 2021, the median price has more than doubled from $111,000 to $269,039.

Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau has also weighed into the topic recently in a statement saying that the cost of owning a home is too far out of reach for too many people in Canada’s largest cities, noting it can take 280 months for an average family to save for a down payment in a place like Toronto or Vancouver – a favorite with Chinese migrants.

But real estate is not the only asset class that is being inflated; both the NASDAQ and S&P 500 have increased by nearly 40% in the last 12 months despite unemployment near record COVID highs in the U.S. The NASDAC increased by 39.51% in the last 12 months while the S&P 500 rose 38.46% over the same period.

Source: Yahoo Finance
Source: Yahoo Finance

The source of this asset bubble inflation is the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing or QE – a term economist use to describe printing money and using it to buy back domestic treasury bonds from banks and other financial institutions.  This, in theory, is designed to reduce the interest rate and encourage lenders to lend to industry or individuals to stimulate the ‘real’ or productive economy.

In reality, much of this ‘free money,’ as Professor Michael Hudson, financial analyst and president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, contends is instead used to speculate on assets both domestic and international – particularly in emerging markets where the biggest and quickest gains can be made. In essence, QE disproportionately benefits those closest to the Fed. These asset bubbles show no sign of abating as the US is expected to approve an addition 2 trillion in stimulus this year and the Fed has said it won’t take it’s foot off the pedal when comes to pumping liquidity into the market.

 

Source: FRED
The chart above shows the growth of money supply from the Federal Reserve since 2002. Note the volume doubled during the Financial Crisis of 2008. From then on the economy continued to be buoyed up with periodic bouts of money printing before rocketing during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

With many of these dollars being spent abroad the central banks of the receiving countries keep them and pay the receiver in local currency. But what can central banks around the world do with all these dollars.

As congress often blocks attempts to purchase U.S. companies and assets under the guise of national security – as with the Chinese oil company CNOOC’s $18.5 billion bid for Unocal in 2005 – there is only really one option left; to purchase U.S. Treasury Bonds or T-bills to further underwrite U.S. debt. All of this is made possible because of the U.S. dollar’s unique status as the world’s reserve currency.

Source: FRED
The graph shows how Federal Reserve money supply has nearly doubled in the last 18 months.

Aside from printing money ad infinitum, this special status as global reserve currency gives the U.S. another ability. Namely, to sanction countries or individuals that do not align with their foreign policy objectives. Potentially, it gives the U.S. the ability to essentially turn off the economies of counties that don’t follow U.S. hegemony for whatever reason. But it is this threat and the increasingly liberal use of unilateral sanctions that are leading some economies to attempt to de-dollarize their economies and insulate them from economic bullying.

One such country is Russia. On June 3, the Kremlin announced its policy outline for de-dollarization. The plan to abandon the US dollar was developed by the government in response to tougher US sanctions. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov announced plans to reduce the share of the dollar in the Russian National Wealth Fund (NWF) to zero.

“I can only say that the de-dollarization process is constant,” said Siluanov, expressing doubts about the reliability of the main reserve currency, at a press conference at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. According to him, this process is taking place not only in Russia, but also in many countries. “We made a decision to withdraw from dollar assets completely, replacing them with an increase in euros, gold, and other currencies,” the minister said.

According to him, as the share of the dollar is reduced to zero, the share of the euro will be 40%, the yuan 30%, gold 20%, pounds and yen 5% each. Siluanov, noted the replacement will take place “rather quickly, perhaps within the month”. Even before the Ministry of Finance announcement, the Bank of Russia carried out a large-scale restructuring of its gold and foreign exchange reserves, shifting about $100 billion in 2018 into euros, yuan and yen.

Added to this, at the end of 2019, several European countries set up a new transaction channel designed to facilitate companies to continuing to trading with Iran despite US sanctions after President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear agreement or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Set up by Germany, France and the UK, the ‘Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges’ or INSTEX gives European companies the capacity to bypass the U.S. controlled SWIFT banking system – a network that enables financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions and one of the main tools for U.S. sanctions.

“We’re making clear that we didn’t just talk about keeping the nuclear deal with Iran alive, but now we’re creating a possibility to conduct business transactions,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told reporters at the time.

In addition, China launched its Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CISP) in 2015. CISP is a payment system which offers clearing and settlement services for participants in cross-border yuan payments and trade.

At the start of the 21st Century the idea of de-dollarizing global trade seemed insurmountable. But now it seems as if the COVID-19 pandemic and America’s response may be accelerating the process faster than many imagined possible.

Rising Commodity Prices in China Stoke Fears of Inflation

China commodity prices for such materials as iron ore, steel rebar, coal and copper soared to record highs in May forcing the government to intervene and curb cost increases for consumers.

As the world’s largest manufacturer and construction market, China has been the main driver behind global metal markets for more than a decade.
From January to mid-May, prices for steel rebar, hot-rolled steel coil and copper rose more than 30% as construction and manufacturing expanded in the world’s largest consumer of metal.

Other vital industrial inputs including iron ore, thermal coal, sulphuric acid and glass also roser to record highs as consumption outpaced supply.
China’s economic recovery accelerated sharply in the first quarter of 2021 after the coronavirus lull in 2020

The huge government stimulus measures launched at the height of the COVID-19 lock-down last year spurred construction activity, while the world’s largest manufacturing base capitalised on booming demand for appliances, exercise equipment and machinery in locked-down countries around the world from mid-2020.

With rising raw material prices stoking fears of inflation, the government is urging coal producers to boost output while investigate behaviour that may be bidding up prices.

Regulators in Shanghai and the steel hub of Tangshan warned mills this month against price gouging, collusion and irregularities, and said they would close businesses of those disrupting market order.

China’s commodity price rises have been further exacerbated by global shipping rates. The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) – a bell weather for dry freight rates – surged to a 19-month high underpinned by excess demand and COVID affected supply.

China’s Myanmar Dilemma

According to Myanmar’s Directorate of Investment and Company Administration foreign investments from China were around $139.4m from October 2020 to January this year. Myanmar’s financial year starts in October.

Chinese investments were exceeded only by Singapore’s, which totaled around $378.3m in the same period, the data showed.

Conversely, China is the top destination for Myanmar’s exports and the largest source of imports into the Southeast Asian country.

But trade is not the only reason Myanmar is strategically important to China. Oil and gas pipelines through the country help diversify China’s sources of energy and avoids the Malacca Straits, a hotspot for piracy.

Added to this the development of ports and overland connectivity between China and Myanmar help facilitate a Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean.
Beijing has in the past had a good relationship with both the Myanmar military, and the civilian government of de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

However, Myanmar’s strategic importance may force China to choose a side. Particularly as it forms a key part of President Xi Jinping’s signature ‘Belt and Road Initiative.’