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On the 'New Silk Road,' a Father-Son Road Trip Goes 8,000 Miles to China and Back


Alblas International Logistics
the Transport Internationaux Routiers
the Lau China Institute
King’s College
Google
Huawei
Data Sheet
Fortune‘s


Siebe Alblas
Alblases
Kerry Brown
China?”Still
Jamie Oliver’s


Dutch
Chinese
Uighur Muslim
European
Kazakh


Europe
Central Asia
the Middle East.“It’s
Western Europe-Western
the Belt and Road Initiative


Road Initiative
Silk Road
China International Transit Corridor


Rotterdam
Netherlands
China
Berlin
Moscow
Kazakhstan
New York
Los Angeles
Xinjiang
U.S
London
Russia
Urumqi
Coldplay
Almaty
Khorgos
Poland
Perth


a Chinese Special Economic Zone

Positivity     48.00%   
   Negativity   52.00%
The New York Times
SOURCE: http://fortune.com/2019/06/02/china-to-europe-route-belt-and-road/
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Summary

As far as road trips with your dad go, this one was unusual, even for Siebe Alblas.First, there was the distance: more than 4,000 miles one way, from Rotterdam in the Netherlands to western China, via Berlin, Moscow and much of Kazakhstan.Then, there was the pace: more than 80 hours of driving—nearly as long as it would take to drive from New York to Los Angeles and back—over less than six days, with father and son switching off when the other was tired.And finally, there was the return journey. China joined the Transport Internationaux Routiers, a global transport convention, in May 2018, and its ambitious “Belt and Road Initiative” has built a network of fresh highways and transit links through Central Asia—routes that could bring Europe and China closer than ever before.The Alblases were the first ones to send commercial trucks on the route under the new convention, but they expect the journey to soon be commonplace.“We might be the only ones now, but of course in the near future there will be others,” Alblas said.The Belt and Road Initiative is a Chinese project first announced in 2013 to expand the country’s economic and cultural influence the world over—especially on vital trade routes, including the ancient Europe-to-Asia thoroughfare once known as the “Silk Road.” Much of the initiative’s focus has been on funding infrastructure, and in the sparsely populated countries of Central Asia, that often means roads.Kazakhstan alone has received $2 billion worth of investment through the program. The company says the journey is now a full commercial route, with at least ten trips a month, with plans to increase the number of trips further.For Alblas, driving the route from Moscow to Kazakhstan to China was a totally new experience.

As said here by Katherine Dunn