Abstract
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), linking up Xinjiang province with the Arabian Sea at Gwadar, is expected to be a "game-changer" for Pakistan's struggling economy. In China's south-western province of Yunnan, another Economic Corridor, the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) corridor, promises to revive old forms of connectivities across the region: from the so-called "southern Silk Road" to the Stilwell road, built by Allied troops during World War Two. While both projects feature prominently in Xi Jinping's signature project, the "One Belt, One Road" Initiative, neither is particularly new. The BCIM dates back to the Kunming Initiative of 1999, while the CPEC goes back to the early 2010s, when Gwadar started to make the headlines as China's grand plan for a new deep-sea port and Special Economic Zone. Following the development of both projects over the past decade, this paper draws some preliminary reflections over the effects of economic corridors on local trade. It argues that, despite claims of inclusiveness and "win-win" outcomes, such projects often achieve the opposite result: excluding local businesses from profiting in any way from large-scale investment in trans-national connectivity. In Xinjiang, security concerns have made it nearly impossible for Uyghur traders to carry out cross-border trade with Pakistan and Central Asia. In Yunnan, a stricter border regime is favouring outside, well-connected elites, over local traders. I thus argue that the corridor-ization of trade along China's frontiers has brought to the end of what I call proximity: the advantages intrinsic to a certain geographical, but also cultural and historical closeness that used to afford business opportunities to local communities.
