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By George Wehrfritz
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Talk about accidental tourists. Kim Jong Il, North Korea's shadowy strongman, is a homebody if ever there was one. He hates flying. He fears assassins. And when he met South Korean media executives in Pyongyang last year, he quipped: "Why should I go abroad when everyone comes to see me?" So when he set off to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, Kim traveled in a class all his own: chugging along the Trans-Siberian Railway at 40kph in a 21-carriage armored train, accompanied by a phalanx of bodyguards, senior officials and retainers.
Like father, like son. Kim's trip, the most ambitious to date for the world's only remaining Stalinist dictator, retraces his father's 1984 railway journey to visit North Korea's communist "elder brother." That year Kim Il Sung went, hat in hand, to plead for Moscow's aid, trade and weapons. He traveled amid great pomp and ceremony, touring the Soviet Union and its seven Eastern European allies. Little Kim's adventure pales in comparison. There's no communist bloc left to celebrate, and his country, once a well-off Soviet client state, is trapped in perpetual famine. Nevertheless, this time it was the Russian leader who had a favor to ask his North Korean counterpart.
And that favor apparently will be granted. During their summit in Moscow, Kim agreed in principle with Putin's idea to extend the Trans-Siberian Railway through North Korea and onward into South Korea. According to a summit declaration, the project "is entering the stage of active development." The deal is the latest in a rash of new railway projects that are revitalizing steel-and-wheel transport across Asia. The Russian Railways Ministry says all that's missing is a 30-kilometer-long passage across the mine-strewn Korean War armistice line, the DMZ. Putin is one of the plan's biggest cheerleaders: he is eager to bolster Russia's decaying infrastructure and, more important, to land a greater share of the trade between Asian export powerhouses like South Korea and Europe. Although the two leaders also discussed bilateral trade (which amounts to only $100,000 annually), security issues and possible oil and gas pipelines through North Korea, the rail link was the summit's key achievement.
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Kim's journey underscores how economists and government leaders in the region are taking another look at rail-based trade. During a May visit to Thailand, Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji offered $4 billion to fund a rail link between Bangkok and Kunming. Malaysia has commissioned a gargantuan feasibility study mapping out a rail network that would link nearly all of Southeast Asia to China and Europe. China is laying between 600 and 1,000 kilometers of new track every year--a construction rate faster than America's at the height of its rail boom in the 19th century, and a pace that should vault the country past Russia and India to boast the world's second largest rail network, after the United States', by the year 2005.
Experts say the new rail links could have significant economic benefits. The Trans-Siberian Railway extension, for example, could radically alter trade across Eurasia. It would slash days or even weeks off transit times for Europe-bound exports from Asia, conceivably lowering transport costs by up to two thirds. What's more, it could also generate huge transit fees for North Korea and Russia. By some estimates, more than 500,000 containers a year could be diverted from current shipping routes once the line is extended to South Korea.
The Trans-Siberian Railway was originally built as a means to project political power in Asia. Completed in 1901, the 8,591-kilometer line linked Moscow with Vladivostok, Russia's main Pacific seaport. By the 1930s it was possible to travel by train from Europe to the southern tip of Korea, a route used by some Jews escaping Nazi Germany. But after World War II, rail lines across Eurasia declined in importance. The cold war divided the continent into ideologically opposed camps. Sea transport grew as Asia's tigers exported their way to prosperity.
Since coming to power, Putin has tried to sell Asian governments on the Trans-Siberian Railway as a low-cost transport route to Europe for Japanese, Chinese and Korean exports. Russia lowered tariffs in the mid-1990s, resulting in double-digit growth in freight volumes in 1999 and 2000.
In South Korea President Kim Dae Jung wants a rail link to prove that his "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North is achieving concrete progress. But Seoul's ambitions too are driven as much by economics as by politics. "Practically speaking, we're an island," says Choi Yeon-Hye, a professor of marketing and management at the Korea National Railway College. "But through the Trans-Siberian Railway we can connect directly to Europe." A hard link from Pusan to Rotterdam, she estimates, would cut shipping time from 26 to 16 days and save $800 per container of freight.
Both countries are acutely aware of the proposed link's grander ramifications, too. Pointing to a map in his sprawling office, Son Hak Rae, South Korea's railways minister, forecasts a major realignment in northeast Asia. "We've always been caught between two superpowers, Japan and China," he says. "But now we can take advantage of our geopolitical location"--meaning, play the role of trade middleman between Japan and Europe or China. Moscow, which is striving to shore up its strategic clout in the region, holds a similar view. "The most important thing is that Russia serves as a transit corridor," says Mikhail Deliagin, director of the Institute for Problems of Globalization in Moscow. "If we don't become this bridge, the country will simply fall away from Europe and Asia."
What Kim needs, as always, is money. So far Russia, China and South Korea have pledged $1 billion to rebuild the North's decrepit trunk lines. Below the DMZ the South's construction crews began laying new track to the border last year. On the northern bank of the Imjin River, South Korean engineering battalions have cleared a 40-meter-wide corridor four kilometers from the demilitarized zone. Rails and ties stand ready on pallets, and a station with customs facilities is rising amid military bunkers, cabbage patches and minefields. All along the line, bulldozers groan from dawn until sundown. Engineers estimate that freight service between South Korea and Europe could begin by early 2003 if the North finishes its end of the project.
More ambitious planners are not stopping there: some have proposed extending the line with a tunnel linking the South Korean port of Pusan to Japan. The project would create the world's longest undersea passage, a route comprising bridges and three tunnels, one 70 kilometers long and nearly 150 meters deep. Japanese freight trains could utilize the passage to reach the Trans-Siberian, and a high-speed line could be extended onward to Pyongyang, Shenyang and Beijing, linking Japan's bullet-train network with one China plans to build by 2050. The tunnels alone--which are being pushed by a diverse range of supporters--would cost an estimated $800 billion. But, asserts designer Yutaka Mochida, "if we had 10,000 workers, it could be finished in 10 years." This train is only starting to roll.
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