Horgos: The First New City Of The New Silk Road Becomes A Hub For Robots
Wade Shepard ,
CONTRIBUTOR
I travel to emerging markets around Asia and report on what I find.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
JAN 9, 2017 @ 12:24 PM
In the spring of 2015 I found myself walking through the streets of Horgos, a place on the Chinese side of the China/ Kazakhstan border that has recently reemerged as
the first new city of the New Silk Road. Although its history extends back to the Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618) and it was once a stop on the ancient Silk Road, the modern city of Horgos at that point wasn’t even a year old. The initial wave of construction was just getting going there, and the only thing the place really had was
a struggling cross-border duty free zone, the full support of Beijing, and little else.
The big dream is for Horgos, a place that is being built up from a small village and some lavender fields, to become a major trade junction that would link together east and west, north and south along the New Silk Road — the emerging network of trade corridors, pipelines, logistics zones, and
new cities stretching from East Asia to Europe. It took a couple of years to build the basic infrastructural framework of this place, but in 2017 companies are starting to notice and move in.
The road to the Kazakh border in Horgos. This is a part of the Western Europe-Western China Expressway, which goes from Lianyungang on the coast of China to St. Petersburg, Russia, and is a vital road corridor of the New Silk Road. Image: Wade Shepard.
Horgos is now being positioned to become
a prime robot manufacturing and export hub. A company called Boshihao Electronics has moved a portion of their production from
the high-tech empire of Shenzhen on China’s east coast all the way out to the country’s farthest western fringe.
Boshihao manufactures service robots — i.e. robots that can replace humans in professions such as cooking, nursing, banking, and education -- in addition to more standard ones that have industrial capabilities. Chinese President Xi Jinping
called for a robot revolution in 2014, one year after he announced the Belt and Road initiative, which was to become the policy framework guiding China's participation along the New Silk Road. Boshihao manufacturing robots in Horgos combines both of the president’s ambitions.
The initial goal is to produce 10,000 robots per year in Horgos, which will be destined for export to Silk Road countries in Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. Production is to commence in May.
Why would a sophisticated Shenzhen tech company would move all the way out to the far side of Xinjiang — a place that could serve as the defacto definition of remote — to make robots?
It is Horgos’s unique geographic position that is the main draw here — the place really doesn’t have much else (if you don’t count the massive tax breaks and other government incentives to encourage companies to move here).
Horgos is a new city in the middle of nowhere — almost literally. The place sits a tick from the
Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility, the farthest point on earth from an ocean, near the fabled region which Herodotus claimed to be inhabited by creatures that had the bodies of lions and the heads and wings of eagles, where the North Wind originated from a cave. Sitting right on the border of China and Kazakhstan, Horgos is out there, but it is precisely this remote location that’s now of essence about the place: the middle of nowhere is being turned into the center of the world.