On the westernmost fringe of China’s western outpost of Xinjiang, the 1,000-mile border with Kazakhstan passes barely noticed among the pastures and mountain peaks that are still capped with snow in July.

The hills are alive with the sound of shepherds on motorbikes, for whom the border, finally agreed between the two nations in 1998, is an irrelevance as they track their flocks of Bashibai sheep. It’s an unlikely place for an international free trade zone.

This region, dotted with nomadic yurts and an uneasy mix of 56 ethnic groups including the Uyghur plurality, is being held up as China’s bridgehead into Central Asia and Europe. President Xi Jinping announced plans in 2013 to construct a new Silk Road for international trade, stretching from the eastern sprawl of Shanghai and Beijing through Xinjiang to Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Afghanistan before snaking into central and western Europe.

The plan taking shape re-imagines dusty towns such as Tacheng, just over 10 miles from the Sino-Kazakh border, and new settlements like Horgos as land-ports for everything from tomatoes to cement mixers to make their way west.

Yunnan coffee and Hewlett-Packard computers are already being exported by freight train, a two-week journey to Europe on the new Silk Road. Tax breaks, infrastructure and diplomacy are all being deployed to push China’s ties to the trading partners in its back yard.

Like Beijing’s efforts to micro-manage the Chinese stock markets in recent weeks, the Silk Road initiative that launched in 2013 is a grandiose intervention that comes with some startling numbers.

A $40bn (£26bn) infrastructure fund will be used to throw down bridges, roads and airports at staging posts along the route, while a a new $16bn Silk Road gold fund is intended to stockpile the metal and support mining projects along the trade routes.

Mr Xi has said that the scheme would generate $2.5 trillion of additional trade for all those involved over the next 10 years, although the likelihood of Xinjiang being transformed into a global hub in the same way as other Chinese cities seems fairly remote.

Unlike other regions, Xinjiang has so far barely felt the rumbles of China’s roaring financial markets and burgeoning international trade more than 3,000km (1,864 miles) away in Shanghai and Beijing, in spite of the billions raised in the financial world to pay for the region’s development.

David Fuller's view

Whatever you think of China’s government, it is not short of big ideas.  With GDP growth continuing to slow during the country’s managed transformation into more of a consumer economy, it is also increasingly engaged in another massive infrastructure project, detailed in the article above.  

The world has never seen development projects of a similar scale.  This will both alarm and intrigue investors.  Will it succeed?  That depends on the management.  The challenge is enormous, but equally, development along the Silk Road of a largely barren region approximately twice the size of France, is not without considerable long-term potential.

Here is a PDF of The Telegraph article.