EU-bound Express indispensable for world economy

It is ironic that the more hostile politicians and media in the European Union have become toward China over the past 10 years, the more reliant the economies of the EU have become on the China-EU Railway Express in the past 10 years of its existence. This paradox highlights how irrational and foolish adhering to a zero-sum-game mentality is. The real world of global economic interdependence shows that it is win-win cooperation that is the reality, not win-lose competition and geopolitical manipulations. Politicians, think tanks, and mainstream media in the West need to look at the companies involved in cooperation with their Chinese counterparts to better grasp this reality.

The CEER, which connects China with the EU by rail, has become part of the Belt and Road Initiative's China-Eurasia Corridor, which goes through Kazakhstan and Russia, and then branches through Belarus to Poland and to Finland, Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea. The busiest of the routes is the one from China through Russia (including that through Kazakhstan to Russia) and Belarus that goes to Poland and the rest of the EU. Germany is the most important destination for many of the CEER linkages, and German industries have increasingly relied on it to both receive important industrial goods such as parts and for exports' products such as auto vehicles.

The first direct freight train left Chongqing and arrived in the German city of Duisburg in 2011. That year 17 trains travelled between China and the EU. By July 2022, about 10,000 trains have made the trip. The number of trains kept doubling, sometimes tripling, from 2011 to 2021. Great efforts have been made by all nations along the routes to unify custom clearance procedures and build new facilities at the border crossings so as to make the freight corridor as efficient as possible. As a result, the duration of the trip between China and the EU has gradually shortened from 28 days to 14 days, sometimes 12.