Kashgar and Ruili: A tale of two cities on China’s frontier
Since the Chinese government launched its “Go West” campaign and embarked on the Belt and Road Initiative, pushing further west, strengthening ties with Eurasia while pushing southwest towards Southeast Asia, several small cities on China’s overland frontiers have risen from marginal locations to dynamic economic outposts. US academic Chen Xiangming explores Kashgar and Ruili, two such cities which have benefited from this outreach.
“Go West, young man, go West…” — Horace Greeley, American author, 13 July 1865
“The Americans historically went west, the Russians east, and the Chinese south.” — Gordon Redding, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism (1995)
I chose these two quotes to open my article “Taiwan Investment in China and Southeast Asia: Go West, but Also Go South” in Asian Survey, published in 1996. Just three years later, in 1999, the Chinese government launched the “Go West” campaign to accelerate the lagging development of China’s (south)western region. Over a decade later, in 2013, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to push further west to strengthen trade and logistic ties with Eurasia while pushing southwest for stronger economic engagement with Southeast Asia. This two-fold geographic turn has led several small cities on China’s overland frontiers to rise from marginal locations to dynamic economic outposts. Kashgar and Ruili are two such cities.
Kashgar: resurging into a new silk road city
Kashgar was a trade hub in the far western Tarim Basin along the ancient Silk Road(s) — extending from Xi’an along routes to the west, northwest, and south of Han China — two millennia ago. At that time, Kashgar seeded the time-honoured trading activities at the local Sunday bazaar which is still alive in a much larger city of around 700,000 people today.
Relative to other cities in Xinjiang region, which had received government economic assistance since the 1950s, Kashgar (Kashi) fell much behind fast-growing coastal cities despite having received one of the largest amounts of aid from wealthy cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen from the early 1980s.
The industrial investment resulted in Kashgar’s GDP quadrupling from US$5.1 billion in 2010 to US$20.1 billion in 2023.
Kashgar’s fortunes turned fast between the 2000s and 2010s. It was designated a national-level Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 2010, the only city in western China granted the same favourable policies given to Shenzhen in 1980. Kashgar also built an industrial park to host Shenzhen’s companies.
At a clothing factory in this park — set up by a Shenzhen company making army uniforms for the northwestern frontier — I saw scores of Uighur women working on sewing machines under the supervision of technicians from Shenzhen, even though the factory struggled to maintain a stable work schedule due to traditional demands on these women’s time. The industrial investment resulted in Kashgar’s GDP quadrupling from US$5.1 billion in 2010 to US$20.1 billion in 2023.
Rapid economic growth has unleashed Kashgar’s location-based trading and tourist strengths from bordering or being close to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. This geographic advantage was further strengthened in 2014 when the national government chose Kashgar to be a Comprehensive Duty-Free Zone to manage logistics, warehousing, trade and border-crossing operations.
In 2020, Kashgar was designated a Model Tourist Zone to promote Xinjiang’s rich historical and Uighur cultural heritage, including its Old Town dating back almost a millennium. In November 2023, Kashgar received the status of China (Xinjiang) Pilot Free Trade Zone, sharing this special privilege of enjoying the most favourable policies and greater autonomous governance with Horgos and Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
In terms of tourism, on 10 December 2024, an inaugural group of Pakistani tourists arrived in China through the Khunjerab Pass, the world’s highest border gate at 4,700 metres above sea level.
For the first half of 2023, Kashgar’s trade grew 100.6% more than the first half of 2022 and accounted for 30.7% of Xinjiang’s total trade, up 5.4 percentage points, and ranking second only behind Urumqi. For the first half of 2024, Kashgar’s trade grew 80.5% over the same period of 2023. Its two largest trading partners of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan grew at 5.7% and 593.3%, respectively.
Kashgar has improved its logistics procedures to achieve efficient warehousing and fast freight trucking to and from Kyrgyzstan at the Irkeshtam Pass, 140 km from Kashgar. In terms of tourism, on 10 December 2024, an inaugural group of Pakistani tourists arrived in China through the Khunjerab Pass, the world’s highest border gate at 4,700 metres above sea level.
Ruili: rising on the China-Myanmar border
Somewhat like Kashgar, Ruili was a key geographic point on the “Southern Silk Road” to India and Burma dating back to China’s Han dynasty. In the 1940s, Ruili was the primary border-crossing point for the Burma Road, a vital route for military supplies during China’s war against Japan.
After 1949, Ruili remained a small, sleepy border town, with limited trade and cross-border movement of people, primarily those who married between China and Myanmar. This restricted cross-border contact survived the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) during which poor Chinese border residents escaped to Myanmar for better economic opportunities. Ruili languished due to prolonged policy neglect during the first decade of China’s opening, which favoured the coast.
Over time, a more complete jade production chain including cutting, polishing and processing facilities emerged as I observed during a field trip in 2019 relative to 2013.
Like Kashgar, Ruili’s fortune turned with China’s pivot to its western region. This unleashed new opportunities for Yunnan province to expand its cross-border economic engagement with Southeast Asia, boosted by Ruili’s establishment of the Jiegao Border Trade Zone in 2000. In 2019, Ruili saw bilateral trade totaling US$11.6 billion, up 14.5% year-on-year, which accounted for about 66% of total China-Myanmar trade.
Ruili’s population of around 50,000 people in 1980 rose to around 250,000 by 2020, while its GDP soared to US$3.3 billion, averaging 10.5% annually. In August 2019, the Chinese government designated Ruili as an integral area of the China (Yunnan) Pilot Free Trade Zone covering Dehong prefecture, which governs Ruili. This zone elevated Ruili to a regional hub for anchoring the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, a sub corridor of the BRI’s China-Indochina Peninsula Corridor traversing China and Southeast Asia. This most favourable policy reinforces an analogy of Ruili as the “Shenzhen of the borderland”.
While Ruili has benefited from multiple policy incentives, it has relied on jade trade as its main traditional economic activity spatially rooted in the Jiegao Border Trade Zone hosting many Myanmar traders. Over time, a more complete jade production chain including cutting, polishing and processing facilities emerged as I observed during a field trip in 2019 relative to 2013.
The Ruili government has also built up a new light industry, especially clothing, which has hired a growing number of workers from Myanmar. Some of these factories have been set up by investors from wealthy coastal cities, akin to Shenzhen- and Shanghai-financed light manufacturing in Kashgar.
Cross-border trade of tropical fruits has added another important dimension to Ruili’s economy at and through its central wholesales market for fruits covering around 100 acres with rows of covered truck depots.
Cross-border trade of tropical fruits has added another important dimension to Ruili’s economy at and through its central wholesales market for fruits covering around 100 acres with rows of covered truck depots. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the market would receive around 700 trucks daily including smaller 16-ton Myanmar trucks bringing in fruits, mostly watermelons, and larger 20-ton-plus Chinese trucks picking up the cargo.
Hired Myanmar workers moved boxes of watermelons or other fruits from Myanmar trucks to Chinese trucks, which then drove north to deliver fresh watermelons to large Chinese cities, especially during the winter season. This demand boosted the price of Myanmar watermelons to around US$430 per ton and accounted for 90% of Myanmar’s watermelon exports.
With many working in jade, light manufacturing, fruit trade, and also local construction, long-term residents from Myanmar in Ruili are estimated to hover around 30,000 including some Rohingyas, accounting for about one-seventh of Ruili’s total population.
Connective cities on the edge
Both Kashgar and Ruili are small in China’s top-heavy city-size hierarchy dominated by such populous first- and second-tier cities as Shanghai and Kunming. Yet as China’s far (south)westernmost cities, Kashgar and Ruili are two most critical frontier connectors despite or because of their edge locations that offset their relatively small size.
Since January 2022, Kashgar’s international airport ...has opened freight flights to Bishkek, Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore with longer routes to Budapest, Cologne, Moscow and Liège, Belgium.
Since January 2022, Kashgar’s international airport, the second largest in Xinjiang only after Urumqi’s and within a two-hour flight to the capital or major cities of eight Central and South Asian countries, has opened freight flights to Bishkek, Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore with longer routes to Budapest, Cologne, Moscow and Liège, Belgium. The more recently expanded Kashgar airport has seen its shipped cargo reach 6,034 tons during January 1-July 15, 2023, up 19.1% over the same period of 2022, while its passenger volume rose to 1.7 million, up 53.9%.
The China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway, under discussion since 1997, broke ground on 27 December 2024 with construction to begin in July 2025 for completion around 2030. Going from Kashgar through the Torugart border crossing into Kyrgyzstan, this new railway will further shorten and strengthen Kashgar’s connectivity to Central Asia, Europe, and also the Middle East, bypassing Kazakhstan and Russia. In December 2024, the Kashgar region trade association also opened a resident office in both Dushanbe and Tashkent, the capital cities of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, respectively, to promote closer trade.
While the envisioned China-Myanmar Railway would go through Ruili as the critical border-crossing station, it has been shelved largely due to Myanmar’s military coup in February 2021 and its aftermath. This railway would otherwise drive the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor like the China-Laos Railway for the China-Laos Economic Corridor, now a major driver of the BRI’s China-Indochina Peninsula Corridor.
Ruili’s trade connectivity has suffered from periodic border closings due to the constant threat and spillover from the fighting between the Myanmar military and armed ethnic groups in northern Myanmar, often very close to China’s border. In addition, the recent China-led crackdown on cross-border online fraud and human smuggling has also dampened trade flows.
As China’s global footprint spreads longer and wider through the BRI, its edge cities like Kashgar and Ruili play a greater role in reviving old and forging new logistics and trade ties between cities deep inside China and those in its neighbouring countries and farther away, echoing a little of the powerful connective role of Shenzhen bordering Hong Kong in the late 1970s. This thematic thread through China’s local city-making and global economic integration runs from east to west across its vast territory, shrinking geographic distance and overcoming its barrier while enhancing its connective power from the edge.
