The Eurasian Land-Bridge After One Year — Trade Explodes

Although China's trade fell this year overall, in dollar terms, Xinhua reported Tuesday on the extensive new trade facilitated by the new "Eurasian Land-Bridge" rail routes from China to Europe.

"For the whole of 2015, China's total export and import values continued decreasing by 7% year on year, falling for the first time in six years. However, Yiwu's [in the coastal province of Zhejiang, the terminus of a Land-Bridge line] small commodity center witnessed a surge of 46.2% year on year in its foreign trade volume, hitting $25.66 billion in the first three quarters of 2015," they write.

This route, called Yixin'ou in Chinese (Yiwu-Xinjiang- Europe), at 13,052 kilometers, is the longest train route in the world, Xinhua reports, cutting travel time to one-third that of shipping and cutting costs to one-fifth those of air freight.

"Over the past year, 17 trains carried 794 TEU containers to Europe. Three trains sent 146 TEU containers of imported goods back."

Meanwhile, the northern route from Harbin (in Heilongjiang in the Northeast) to Hamburg through Russia and Poland, transported $87 million worth of goods in the second half of 2015 after the service was launched in June. The 15-day trip, covering 9,820 km, carries goods from China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan to European countries, including Germany, Poland, France, Spain, and Italy.

The west-bound cargo is mostly electronics and auto parts, while China now enjoys "beer from Germany, ham from Spain, pizza from Italy as well as industrial products and daily necessities [which] have become more accessible to ordinary Chinese," said Cheng Yao, vice head of the economic research institute of the Heilongjiang provincial academy of social sciences.

Xinhua adds that the Land-Bridge "also assisted China's manufacturing firms in expanding overseas business along the rail line."