Sip by Sip on the New Silk Road | The Express Tribune

PUBLISHED
October 12, 2025

It does not begin with the clang of steel or the calculus of finance. It begins with atmosphere. Against a world where protectionism is sold as security and suspicion as sovereignty, Beijing carried a different register of defiant optimism.

I arrived in Kunming — capital of China’s southwestern province of Yunnan — to an atmosphere that felt almost defiant in its multipolar optimism, a counter-melody to the doom scroll I had left behind. The media forum on Belt and Road was in full swing, with over 200 journalists and media representatives from 87 countries participating.

Around the tables and corridors, journalists, writers and scholars from both BRI and non-BRI countries found themselves not as delegates from competing blocs but as participants in a “shared future”, giving tangible form to the Global Civilisation Initiative proposed by President Xi Jinping.

Coming from Pakistan, where CPEC is already cutting through mountains and coastlines to redraw our sense of distance and time, Yunnan felt uncannily familiar yet entirely its own. The Belt and Road here did not sit on paper as a policy chart but moved like a rhythm, present in the steam of Pu’er tea and in the chorus of accents swapping stories.

For me, it was less a conference than an introduction to the living face of the numbers we so often quote – a reminder that these corridors are not abstractions but encounters, solidarities and futures stitched together.

What startled me was the ordinariness. A Nigerian journalist chuckling in the hallway at the tired cliches of “debt traps”. An Armenian friend raising her porcelain cup with mine to “new beginnings”. A grandmother in Xishuangbanna brewing ginger tea to soften my fever.

Every moment was banal, unremarkable but profound and formed something vast.

The phrase “people-to-people connectivity,” often flattened into bureaucracy, here walked on two feet. It laughed, it brewed tea, it clinked cups.

History moved quietly beneath it. As a journalist in working in Global South, the BRI huddle felt like Bandung reborn, not through fiery oratory, but in the slow, ordinary work of human contact. In 1955, Asia and Africa gathered at Bandung to declare they would no longer be spoken for; the Non-Aligned Movement that followed insisted that sovereignty was not passive neutrality but active solidarity. In Yunnan, that spirit resurfaced— in corridors, courtyards and shared meals. It was internationalism not as theory but as practice, lived in every gesture of recognition and care.

And then, the railway. The line from Kunming to Laos is more than an engineering project — it is a rewriting of history. Once, rails carved through colonies to extract and export, carrying empire’s veins of exploitation. Today, steel carries a different pulse. These tracks reverse the flow, not draining but connecting, not expropriating but circulating. Dependency theory once described the world as a rigid diagram of core and periphery. Here, the diagram is unsettled. Goods, ideas and people flow South–South, East–East, in patterns that refuse the one-way siphons of empire.

What is most striking is the contrast. Elsewhere, “development” arrives bound to thick contracts and conditionalities, its gifts tethered to dictates that erode sovereignty. Here, the atmosphere itself resists humiliation. Not that contradictions vanish—no project is without them—but Kunming’s optimism was neither painted nor naive. It was defiant. It wagered that the twenty-first century might be multipolar, not as a balance of great powers but as a circulation of solidarities.

This wager carries with it a new imagination of modernity. Call it South–South modernity: not merely resistance to the hegemony of North Atlantic capital, but the proposal of another way of being modern, one that is rooted in reciprocity, in shared infrastructures, in the dignity of ordinary life. It is modernity not as mimicry but as creation, where the grandmother’s ginger tea and the steel of the railway belong to the same story. Both are infrastructures, both carry connections.

If Bandung was the refusal to be dictated to, then Beijing is its continuation.

During the forum, the keynote urged us to “tell compelling Silk Road stories” and to seek truth from facts about a project reshaping global relations. Yu Shaoliang, president of People’s Daily, framed the BRI as a platform for “multipolar development, humanitarian exchanges, and new opportunities for cooperation”.

Around me—Ghana to Greece and London, Armenia to Nigeria and Zanzibar—heads nodded. The room felt like praxis: dialogue not as slogan but as method.

“The Belt and Road Initiative encompasses more than just infrastructure development; it’s about strengthening people-to-people connections,” Yusuf Sharifzadeh, Director of the International Relations Department of Azerbaijan’s People’s Daily, said during one of the panel discussions.

“I believe it will help build bridges of understanding and communication among participating countries.”

In one session, hope wore the face of migration and cultural exchange: a French baker celebrated as a “son-in-law of Yunnan,” a Vietnamese conductor and his Chinese composer wife speaking in duet, a French-Chinese couple translating songs on stage.

Wang Ning, CCP Secretary of Yunnan, noted six million international visitors last year—“many choose to stay and make a life here, just like Vincent.” That official applause for cross-border love is not a common sight in Washington or London; here it’s a policy horizon.

During a coffee break, I started chatting with Armenian journalist. Weeks earlier, Armenia and Pakistan had finally established diplomatic relations after decades, on the sidelines of SCO summit in Tianjin. We clinked teacups to “new beginnings.” As a Pakistani, finding an Armenian friend felt quietly insurgent against inherited geopolitics. History was moving with us, too.

Field notes from Yunnan: where theory touches ground

When the formalities ended, our hosts took us on a tour across Yunnan. The province reads like a palimpsest: misty mountains, minority cultures, tunnels and viaducts stitching once-distant valleys into a common time zone.

At a Pu’er tea plantation, Hani women taught us the ceremony: rinse, awaken, sip. The leaves were smoky-plum; the morning, medicinal. New highways cut through mountains; relocation programs brought remote families closer to schools and clinics. Development here wasn’t an abstract noun—it had pavements, drainage, and bus routes. One afternoon, however, all that frantic activity caught up with me. Whether it was something I ate or sheer exhaustion, I fell ill with a fever and upset stomach. By the time we reached a Dai ethnic village near Xishuangbanna’s tropical forests, I was wilting.

Sensing my discomfort, our local host – a petite grandmother with silver hair pins in her bun – quickly brewed a pot of strong Pu’er tea with ginger. She insisted I sit in her airy stilted home while the others continued the tour. I sipped cup after cup of the hot, bittersweet brew as she fanned me gently and spoke in soft Mandarin I barely understood.

By evening, my fever had broken. I’ll never forget lying under a mosquito net in that wooden house, listening to crickets and feeling profoundly grateful. In my notebook that night, I scribbled: “Yunnan — a journey of many cups I undertook sip-by-sip, and sometimes even gulp-by-gulp.”

‘Mini-United Nations’

Two days later, I found myself climbing before dawn to the Hani rice terraces of Honghe—the UNESCO-recognised amphitheatre of water and sky. A short film at the forum, “Where Terraces Meet Tomorrow: Azheke’s Transformation,” had charted how a village turned poverty into eco-tourism without burning its past. On the ridge, the film’s thesis felt tactile. In Dali and Lijiang, the Tea Horse Road resurfaced in cobbles and cafes; the past and present bargained amicably in the marketplace.

A Yi woman running a coffee cooperative told me how Yunnan’s beans, once a missionary’s experiment, now fund livelihoods. “Tea is our past, coffee is our present—thanks to connectivity,” she smiled.

Nights were a mini-United Nations that worked: barbecued fish, mushroom hotpot, crossing-the-bridge noodles, and conversations in English, Russian, Arabic, French, Chinese—plus a lot of Google Translate.

Friends and colleagues from across the routes often said the same thing to me in different words: you don’t need an op-ed to see what the BRI means, you just need to ride it. A Nigerian journalist leaned over during a session and said, pointing at slides of the China–Laos Railway, “Look, that bullet train nose pulling into Kunming South Station is an argument in itself.”

In less than two years, tens of millions of trips had turned distance into opportunity—Lao coffee and Thai fruit heading north, Chinese machinery rolling south. A landlocked country has transformed into a ‘land-linked’ one.

These stories, shared over tea and late dinners, carried the same conclusion: the Belt and Road is being read, especially in the Global South, as a genuine alternative to neoliberal conditionality
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Instead of austerity packages and privatisation, what’s on offer is infrastructure first, capacity building, and a respect for sovereignty too often denied elsewhere.

We all knew that power is always in play—no one was naive about that. The question, my friends kept asking, is different: what kind of power, and to whose benefit?

Bridges of Water and Coffee

Before leaving Yunnan, I found myself standing before the Longjiang Water Conservancy Hub — a gleaming artery of steel and water coiled through the green heart of Baoshan. The air was heavy with humidity and the faint metallic scent of turbines. Engineers from the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) explained that the hub has already generated nearly 12 billion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity, enough to power entire cities without a single plume of coal smoke.

The project is more than a technical feat — it’s a social one. Its vast reservoir now irrigates over 100,000 acres of farmland and secures drinking water for 150,000 people. It has absorbed record floods, sparing downstream communities from ruin.

Families once relocated from the valley have built new livelihoods — small guesthouses, agro-tourism ventures, cafés perched over the reservoir like quiet lookouts. In their stories, one can sense the quiet revolution of Chinese socialism’s rural vitalisation: not the displacement of people for progress, but their reintegration into a new ecology of living and earning.

The Longjiang dam is part of a pattern. Across Asia and Africa, CNNC’s international projects echo the same ethos — technology and livelihood intertwined. In Pakistan, the Hualong One nuclear reactors at Karachi now supply nearly 30 billion kilowatt-hours annually, cutting millions of tons of coal and preventing 24 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions — the equivalent of planting 210 million trees.

In Namibia, CNNC’s investment in the Rossing uranium mine sustains thousands of local jobs and funds schools and health programs. From these projects emerges a quiet but radical proposition: that modernisation need not mimic the West’s carbon-heavy past. It can, instead, reconcile technology, climate goals and social uplift.

In fact, panellists in Kunming were in agreement about this. For the first time in its recent history, China has managed to increase energy use while reducing carbon emissions — a milestone seen as an early sign of “absolute decoupling” and potentially one of the most consequential shifts in global climate politics.

By breaking the historic link between economic growth and rising emissions, China appears to be embarking on a high-stakes transition towards a ‘post-carbon industrial model’, positioning itself as the world’s first emerging electrostate.

The Coffee Mountains of Baoshan

Later, high in the Baoshan mountains, the air turned thin and crisp. Clouds brushed the terraces of Gongjiang’s coffee estate in Xinzhai village, where I tasted a tea brewed not from leaves but from the skins of coffee beans — a humble, fragrant invention. It was floral and faintly tannic, with green-apple sharpness and the scent of forest bark. Resource-wise, nothing is wasted; culturally, everything is transformed.

The farmers told me these slopes were once part of the Southern Silk Road, the ancient trade artery linking Yunnan to Burma, Laos and India. Mules once carried tea and salt across these trails; now, small trucks carry sacks of coffee to Kunming, Shanghai, and beyond.

Today, Yunnan produces over 95% of China’s coffee, mostly Arabica — Catimor, Typica, Bourbon — grown alongside tea and fruit trees by Dai and Wa ethnic farmers. In a paradox, only globalisation could author, the homeland of camellia sinensis, the original tea plant, has become China’s coffee capital. The seed that began in Ethiopia, journeyed through colonial plantations, and circled the world has found a second home here — nurtured not by empire but by self-determination and soil science.

Each cup carries both continuity and inversion: the colonial commodity repatriated, the frontier reconnected, the mountains globalised — not through extraction but participation. These coffee terraces are, in their quiet way, a Silk Road reborn under the Belt and Road Initiative, connecting not only continents but also methods of living: green, cooperative, embedded in the land.

Trade Routes of Humanity

From dams to beans, from electrons to aromas — this was the geography of a new kind of globalisation. One that doesn’t flatten culture but weaves it. Where hydropower lights homes and coffee sustains livelihoods, where industrial precision meets ecological patience.

It reminded me that the Belt and Road, when stripped of propaganda and prejudice, is not a story of empire, but of mutuality — of finding prosperity not in competition but in coordination. The Longjiang Hub, the coffee terraces, the dam engineers, the women selling bean-skin tea: each is a verse in the same ballad — the ballad of a world under reconstruction.

The old Silk Road was once a web of traders, monks, and scholars exchanging salt and stories. The new one, built through ports, railways and friendships, trades in the same human currency.

When I left Yunnan, I felt I had not merely seen projects — I had glimpsed a philosophy: that progress can be both material and moral, that development can have the patience of tea and the courage of mountains.

Another world is not only possible.

In the hills of Baoshan, under the hum of turbines and the fragrance of coffee skins, it is already being brewed.