DW’s documentary, ‘The New Silk Road: From China to Pakistan, ’ delves into China’s Belt and Road Initiative, highlighting its impact on global trade and local communities.

The New Silk Road is a massive project aimed at connecting China with the West. It’s a gigantic infrastructure project that Beijing says will benefit everyone. But this two-part documentary shows China’s predominant self-interest and geopolitical ambitions.

The Old Silk Road is a legend, whereas the New Silk Road is a real mega project. China wants to reconnect the world through a network of roads, railways, ports, and airports between Asia and Europe. A team of reporters travels by sea and land along the New Silk Road, showcasing how China, with the most extensive investment program in history, is expanding its influence worldwide. Their journey begins in Shenzhen on the Pearl River Delta. This is where China’s legendary rise to an economic superpower started 40 years ago. The private market economy experiment unleashed forces that allowed Shenzhen to grow into a mega-metropolis. 

The team takes a container ship to Southeast Asia. Its first stop is the port city of Sihanoukville in Cambodia. A joke is making the rounds there these days: you can now travel to China without a passport and without leaving your own country. Sihanoukville is now almost part of China itself! The Chinese have financed practically everything built here in the recent past: the extension of the port, new roads, bridges, and factories. Many Cambodians are unhappy and feel like losers in the boom. Rising prices and rents are making the poor even poorer. But for land and house owners, on the other hand, it’s a bonanza.

In Myanmar, resistance is already growing. Locals in Kachin have successfully blocked a new dam project, questioning how the Chinese can produce energy for their own country while leaving the locals themselves without electricity.

The Myanmar government pulled the emergency brake, and the massive Chinese dam project did not get beyond the first concrete piers in the river. 

The Karakorum Highway, from Kashgar in China across the Roof of the World to Islamabad in Pakistan, is one of the most challenging and perilous roads in this breathtaking mountainous region. Once the road is completed, it often deteriorates again, and rockfalls and landslides block the highway, as if the Karakorum Mountains are trying to deny China strategic access to the Arabian Sea. The first part of the report ends in Islamabad.

See Part 2 of this documentary here » GO.