New Silk Road

When Siddique Khan was a teenager in the early 1980s, he dived into a school assignment involving geography and history — studying the Silk Road, the 4,000-mile braid of routes that connected China and Central Asia with the Middle East and southern Europe many centuries ago.

“I was fascinated with the maps, and how the Chinese silk and spices traded through Central Asia, through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, into Turkey and farther into Europe and into India,” Khan said.

The subject captured Khan’s imagination, but he couldn’t have known then that one day he would be, as he puts it now, “actually running the show on this route.”

Though that may be a bit of bravado, it is clear Khan and his nearly 20-year-old freight forwarding business Globalink Logistics Group are using the old Silk Road to bring Chinese-made goods and equipment into Kazakhstan, other Central Asian nations and as far as Europe. He is one of the larger breakbulk haulers at work along what has become a major economic lifeline in the region.

Every day, trucks belonging to Globalink and other breakbulk forwarders traverse a lengthy, rugged route that stretches from eastern Chinese ports and factories into Kazakhstan carrying huge pipes, boring machines, turbines, generators and other machinery for use in the region’s booming oil, gas and minerals industries.

For freight forwarders, the trip offers great benefits, but apprehensions, too. Bureaucratic hurdles can delay trucks at Chinese provincial borders. Officials may lack the right forms or impose requirements that an escort vehicle accompany a truck, said Virginia Moore, owner of Younger Niche Logistics China, a longtime project forwarding company in Shanghai. Sometimes drivers opt to get off the main highways to avoid such hassles, she added.

“It’s a slow process, and what happens is some people aren’t patient with it,” Moore said. “The Chinese government is cracking down on the ad hoc way of doing this … A lot of space in western China is quite empty, and the drivers want to follow the old way of doing things.”

As with most international border crossings, there can also be difficulties when crossing the Chinese frontier into Kazakhstan. Moore cited a two-week delay last May when the Kazakh Customs operation at the main entry point for Chinese goods in Khorgos shut down.