Roads, Rails, and Runways: The Physical Ledger of Belt and Road After a Decade of Construction

HIGHLIGHTS

The Belt and Road Initiative does not lend itself to a single balance sheet. But a decade of construction has left a physical ledger that can be read in kilometres of track, runway capacity, and the radius of a capital’s one-hour economic circle.

The Roads

On April 1, 2023, the 7.9-kilometre New Belgrade-Surcin section of Serbia’s E-763 highway opened, built by a Chinese contractor. The segment completed a 140-kilometre operational run that now pulls large and medium-sized cities in southwestern Serbia into Belgrade’s one-hour radius, serving a population of more than four million. The highway doubles as a Balkan corridor, facilitating trade beyond Serbia’s borders.

Chinese firms have since delivered Cambodia’s first expressway and Bangladesh’s first elevated expressway — projects that required solving specific technical problems in each geography rather than replicating a template.

The Railways

The Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway, which began operations on October 2, 2022, is the most compressed case study. At 142 kilometres with a design speed of 350 kilometres per hour, it cut the journey between Indonesia’s capital and its third-largest city from more than three hours to just over 40 minutes. The project was executed by a joint venture between China Railway International and four Indonesian state-owned enterprises — a structure that embedded local ownership in the operating entity from the start.

The model has been repeated at different scales. The Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway, East Africa’s first electrified rail line, connects landlocked Ethiopia to the port of Djibouti. The Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway functions as a regional artery. The China-Laos Railway converted Laos from a landlocked country into a land-linked one, a transformation that alters the country’s physical position in regional supply chains.

The Airports

In 2019, the new terminal at Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa opened after a four-year build by Chinese firms. The Ethiopian government subsequently invited the same contractors to participate in further expansion, with the stated aim of turning the airport into Africa’s premier aviation hub. New Gwadar International Airport in Pakistan and Siem Reap-Angkor International Airport in Cambodia have since joined the list of operational BRI-funded or BRI-built aviation assets.

The Digital Layer

The physical infrastructure is now being overlaid with digital infrastructure. China’s three major telecom operators have extended overseas service networks to more than 40 countries. State Grid and China Southern Power Grid have worked on aligning technical standards with host countries — an effort that turns infrastructure exports into standards exports, with longer commercial lifespans than the construction contracts that precede them.

Andrey Ostrovsky, chief researcher at the Institute of China and Modern Asia at the Russian Academy of Sciences, noted that many of these projects would have been “exceedingly difficult” for host countries to build independently, and that the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and Silk Road Fund provide the financial architecture that makes them possible.

What the physical ledger shows, after a decade, is a portfolio of completed, operational transport assets whose economic value now depends less on how they were financed than on whether they are maintained, connected to local supply chains, and used at capacity. Those metrics will determine the return on the concrete, steel, and fibre that have already been laid.