Feature
Letzte Aktualisierung: March 31, 2021
Malacca: China's Suez problem
The debacle over the grounded container ship in the Suez Canal has once again shown Beijing how risky it is to become too dependent on a transport route with a bottleneck. For China, that is even more so the 900-kilometer-long Strait of Malacca near Singapore, which measures only 2.7 kilometers at its narrowest point. Most of China's raw materials have to pass through this strait. That is why China has been trying for years to build alternative supply routes as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. These are mainly pipelines.
For almost a week, the container ship "Ever Given" blocked the southern end of the Suez Canal and, thus, one of the world's most important trade routes. The gigantic 200,000-ton ship had been on its way from China to Rotterdam and then ran aground. According to
the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, 98 percent of container ships pass through the Suez Canal when traveling between Germany and China.
