Imagine investing and successfully creating a brand and demand for a railway project that connects your country to a faraway key export market. Imagine pouring resources into this project over the years, hoping to grow it. A decade later, a war starts between countries along the route of the project, and its operations and its image suffer. After a difficult period, just when you finally hope to revive the project and promise to support its “stable and smooth operation,” your close friend, the country that hosts most of the railway on its territory, deals it an unexpected blow by seizing many of your companies’ containers moving along the tracks. All the while, you had an alternative hypothetical route, in which you never bothered to invest, but that could have saved you during these dire times.
What may sound like a story script is actually the cruel reality faced by China’s Northern Route to Europe, through Russia, and the Middle Corridor of the China-Europe Railway Express.
In early 2022, I foresaw the coming damage to the China-Europe Railway Express routes because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions that followed. But I would never have imagined that Russia would intentionally sabotage China’s interests along the Northern Route even more. In October 2024, without a previous warning, Russia decided to ban a variety of goods from transiting its territory, especially those having dual-use characteristics. China was the country most affected by this decision, as the rule became effective overnight, leaving few options for the companies that already had cargo containers transiting Russia.
It wasn’t the only time when the “no-limits” Sino-Russian friendship was limited by Moscow’s actions. This year, Russia decided to impose a de facto form of tariffs – a scrap tax/recycling fee – that affected mainly imports of Chinese cars. The move came after Chinese companies had achieved a dominating share of 61 percent of the Russian car market in 2023, a vast increase from 9 percent in 2021. Disguised as a measure to spur domestic car production and consumption, the additional tax ended up hurting Russia’s main geopolitical ally.
Russia’s most recent economic decisions only showed the precarious state of the China-Europe Railway Express route. The Northern Route – which has been touted as an important part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – was affected by the war in Ukraine and now by Russia’s ban, undermining years of Chinese investments in the form of subsides for container traffic to make the route functional and attractive.
The situation also brings to the forefront – again – China’s failures regarding the so-called Middle Corridor.
The Middle Corridor is, at first sight, the embodiment of the idea of Silk Road. It describes the route that starts from China, passing through Central Asia and the Caspian Sea region, then moving along the Caucasus and the Black Sea Region to finally reach Southeast Europe. This route passes through the region that used to be part of the ancient Silk Road. It is also truly multilateral, just as the original Silk Road was, as the Middle Corridor involves not just Chinese stakeholders but merchants, suppliers, investors, and transporters from all the countries along the route.
Despite the apparent synergy with the BRI – China’s 21st century revival of the Silk Road – before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China wasn’t an important player along this route. On the contrary, Turkish, Kazakh, and Turkmen traders used to be more active in taking advantage of the Middle Corridor. And even after the start of the war, China has remained a marginal player along the route.
Though often touted as part of the BRI, the Middle Corridor is in fact a combination of initiatives, projects, and memoranda of understanding signed between the countries along the route, such as Turkiye, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. China has been present in the public imagination of the Middle Corridor but curiously absent on the ground, having mostly ignored the route and its potential. China didn’t invest in the corridor or use it to transport goods. Simply put, Beijing didn’t believe in it as an alternative to the Northern Corridor and didn’t try to build it as such.
China ignored the Middle Corridor because it had the alternative railway through Russia, which was simpler and already functional. But this Northern Route came under heavy pressure following the start of the war in Ukraine, As a result, Chinese railway exports to Europe became plagued by shipping problems. In this context, some Chinese companies started looking to the Central Asia route, hoping for a miracle – but one that couldn’t come in time.
Starting in 2022, many companies that were exporting goods from China to Europe began to question the use of the Russian section of the railway because of ethical, image, and economic aspects. At the beginning, these companies were forced to limit their relations with Russian Railways, which is subject to EU sanctions before of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Three years later, companies using the Northern Route also find themselves affected by the Russian ban on dual-use goods, which has proved an unexpected headache. For example, after the rule came into force, between October and November, one Chinese company had 70 containers confiscated in Russia.
Some have seen the Middle Corridor as “the alternative to the alternative,” meaning that the Middle Corridor was an alternative to the Northern Route, which itself was an alternative to maritime shipping. But the Middle Corridor has remained a mostly hypothetical alternative, as it was never developed as it could and should have been. China has lacked a long-term strategy when it comes to its rail routes to Europe and especially the Middle Corridor.
This neglect is best exemplified by the example of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway, for which a new construction agreement was signed in 2024. This project – which stretches from Kashgar (China) through Kyrgyzstan to Andijan (Uzbekistan), where it connects to a very old route that leads toward the Caspian Sea and Iran – has been in negotiations for two decades, all the while existing only on paper. The CKU railway was mentioned as a project in the leaders’ statement after the Second Belt and Road Forum in 2019, but still there was no concrete action. Only in 2022, on the sidelines of that year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, did China, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan finally sign the first agreement for the railway construction. But construction still hasn’t started and might only begin three years after the SCO signing. Moreover, construction is estimated to last six years – a timeline that will probably lengthen.
Despite being a rather short but very necessary connection between China and the Caspian Sea, the CKU railway wasn’t an important project on China’s BRI agenda. For many years, it was Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that were more interested in this project, being to their economic advantage. But with the recent geopolitical developments, the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway would have been the best alternative to reduce transport time – if it had been already built. As it stands, this project will arrive just a little too late to make a difference in the region and for China’s railway routes to Europe.
The CKU railway is not an exception. Along the Middle Corridor there is another example, that of Baku–Tbilisi–Kars (BTK) railway. Though sometimes included as part of the BRI, this project didn’t actually involve China; however, it became an important link for the Middle Corridor and the new China-Europe route. The project was finished in 2017 with investment from three of the Middle Corridor countries: Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkiye. Despite the fact that Chinese outlets linked it to the BRI, the BTK railway, like many other projects along the Silk Road Economic Belt, wasn’t built or refurbished by China, but just used by it in order to export its goods in time of need. In other words, China has successfully applied the BRI brand to other countries’ project.
When the China-Europe routes were set through Kazakhstan and Russia, their strongest selling point was time. Not only were these rail routes of a similar cost to maritime shipping, thanks to Chinese subsidies, but the delivery time was cut in half compared to maritime shipping, reduced to 15-18 days. Fast forward in 2022, and it took a rail freight coming from China around two months to reach Romania.
Despite the fact that the Middle Corridor is shorter by about 2,000 kilometers compared to the Northern Corridor, it doesn’t automatically imply a shorter transport time. While the Northern Corridor passes through two countries (Kazakhstan and Russia) before reaching Europe, the Middle Corridor involves at least four countries (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkiye) before reaching European countries like Bulgaria or Romania. That means twice as many problems.
One problem is related to the lack of good infrastructure and different gauges. Another one is the lack of customs agreements signed between these countries. While the Northern Corridor had 10 years to improve its bureaucracy and treaties in order to save time for shipping, the Middle Corridor started to think about these issues only in 2022. Finally, another problem that hinders the shipment of the goods through the Central Asia and Caucasus corridor is that the route needs to pass through one or two seas, the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.
Because of all these hurdles, China didn’t put too much faith and money in this route, preferring the simpler northern alternative – but it is now looking south for salvation.
While this salvation may come, the Middle Corridor is only half feasible. The ports in the Caspian and Black Seas are too small to accommodate a large number of containers, the railways are too old to ship products in time, and the lack of custom agreements hinders exports to Europe as well. In fact, the Middle Corridor has only 5 percent of the Northern Route’s capacity. For the moment, shipping goods from China to Europe through the Middle Corridor is not only costlier, but also slower than the maritime route. So why would any company, Chinese or Western, use it when their interests are in profits, not PR?
Had China already invested in the Middle Corridor years before, following a well-thought-out long-term strategy, today the route could have been not just an alternative but a real competitor to the Kazakhstan-Russia-Europe route. But that window was missed, and now China and others are left wondering what could have been.