Hacked out of the jungle 60 years ago as part of the Allied push to end Japanese military domination in Asia, the Stilwell Road, if reborn, may soon instigate a sea-change in the Asian economic balance. Further, there's little reason to believe that the reverberations of such a shift would be confined to the eastern hemisphere. While recent years have seen increasingly fervent discussions of the rising — and rival — individual mights of India and China, the current momentum to reopen the link between the two countries promises a whole new consideration: the prospect of further aligning the two economies, which jointly comprise 40 per cent of the global population.
While most of the men who built the Stilwell Road are now dead, the Road itself remains: disused in many places, crumbling in others, and in a few areas impassable during heavy rains. Built by Asian labour and American machines and travelled by trucks constructed in Detroit factories, the Road was once a testament to America's emergence as an economic superpower. At that time, India, Burma and China were seen as little more than conduits and destinations for goods made elsewhere. Today that dynamic has changed.
Perhaps more so now than during that era, the Stilwell Road is not one road, but many roads. Passing through South, Southeast and East Asia through fractious, politicised regions, it is a very real, physical route through difficult terrain. In November 2004 and April 2005, a series of overland surveys found that, contrary to public perception, the road is very much motorable. Except for a stretch of about 80 km in Burma that remains impassable without a bridge during the rainy season, the work needed for a revival of the road is not nearly as extensive as the public has been led to believe. Some of that work is already underway or complete; the Chinese portion is essentially done. China is also currently providing funds and working extensively with Burma -including the creation of a new shortcut that dramatically cuts the Burmese portion in half.
In the wartime atmosphere when the Stilwell Road was first laid, the task was physically daunting but remarkably free of political complexities. Reopening the Road, on the other hand, will involve several governments and their bureaucracies. It is even possible that the most important forces pushing through the opening will not necessarily be national governments, but the agitations of trade, modernity and human connection.