Muhammad Imran : You’ve been living and working in China for quite a while. Why China?

Wade Shepard (WS): The first time I went to China was in 2005. I was a student and I studied Chinese at Zhejiang University, which is at Hangzhou, Zhejiang. After that I continued travelling in China, going in and going out of the country. A few years later I came back. When I came back, I was working as a blogger and an international journalist. I was working on books at that point. China story is a story that a lot of people in the world were very interested in. China as a country that’s in the spotlight, so, I found myself at the right place and the right time as far as being an independent journalist and an author. I was able to investigate firsthand on some of the nuances of Chinese government organization. I did that for two and a half years going to cities that are called ghost cities. Then I produced my first book.

So your last book is titled ‘Ghost Cities of China’? Can you tell us a bit about this book?

WS: Yes, ‘Ghost Cities of China’ was about a story of two and a half years of travelling to China’s new cities. Late ninety’s China has been completely revamped and their urban ecosystems. They built a whole entire new grid of infrastructure that spread across the country. The idea behind the book was in the late Nineties, China kind of realized that they have a major problem, that the cities of the East and the Asia just grew bigger and bigger. The more people were migrating the more business were emerging in these places. However, the inland cities, the cities of the West were not really developing much at all. First of all it’s a social problem with everybody leaving their home and going to these few big cities on the coast. There is also a problem of the economics. When you have new cities that are not really participating in the national economy at a level they should be, the country is not going to advance to itself. It’s really not going to mature to its full potential. So China’s central government is trying to develop their inland and western cities. They first enormously started this project and it’s pretty much the biggest infrastructure project the world has ever known. They constructed fifty thousand kilometers of highway, nearly twenty thousand kilometers of high speed rail network, all pretty much within a decade. They established links with cities across the country. At that time they did not really have the economic justification for being linked into the system, but, the idea was that we built this framework, we built this tree of infrastructure and the leaf will grow and blossom into something vibrant. The main goal was to give these places the opportunity so that people can come. Like this way, they constructed many of these cities, cities like Pudong, Zhengdong, Nanhui or Zhujiang.

China has a huge population and they have developed economy in a different way. Bangladesh is also over populated. Can Bangladesh follow this model to develop its economy and mobilise its people?

The initial stage of Chinese development of the country was very similar to Bangladesh. They had a massive population of people who were basically almost self-sufficient farmers. They did not have enough food; they were starving to death at that time and what they lacked was money. People of Bangladesh also don’t have money for going to better schools or going to the doctor. What China did is that they plugged up money for companies to open up factories. A lot of Chinese companies started to use their own manufacturing factories. Then what happened is that all of a sudden there was a way for people to make money, beyond just working in the farm. It’s very similar to Bangladesh because Bangladesh also has a very big mobilized population. You have many people coming into Dhaka looking for jobs; not because they are starving to death in the countryside, any environmental problems that created them refugees. They come here not to have a life, but to have a better life. They need companies that will give them job opportunities. For that, you have to build ports, build roads for alliance. When you have that, companies from all over the world will look at what you doing and will be interested to operate here. They will see that this is a place they can tap the market. If you don’t have an efficient road network, enough resources, the materials and supplies in and out of the country as efficiently as possible, then the development is not possible. That is the key, efficiency.

Now there are a lot of countries in South Asia and Southeast Asia who are kind of in a similar place of development. A lot of Chinese companies are going to these places because it has become really expensive to manufacture products in China. They are going to Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia, to manufacture products. This is an opportunity for Bangladesh. If you give them what they need, they will invest more.

Your new book The New Silk Road’, what is it about?

 WS: This book is about what happened in the belt and in the road. You can call it a movement of taking the Chinese development methodology and applying it to other countries, all the way to Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The book is primarily about going to these locations and looking at what is happening on the ground, talking to people who are involved in these projects, who work and make the decisions in government, who are in business, who are starting new manufacturing operations along that route. My goal is to try to figure out what’s going on and just follow the misunderstanding people have on this project.

You came to Bangladesh to work on this book. How do you think Bangladesh can be connected to this Silk Road?

Like I said before, the main resource that Bangladesh has is its massive population. Big companies don’t look at a place where they can’t have factories that can produce a million units. Many factories have five or ten thousand people or even more. Bangladesh has that resource that it has a larger population who are just ready and willing to work. But in order for this to happen, you have to develop your infrastructure. You are already constructing road from Dhaka to Chittagong which is absolutely essential. You also need to build a better port. This opportunity will not stay forever and the sooner Bangladesh will grasp that opportunity the better it will be for its development.

This Interview was conducted by Muhammad Imran and  published in The Asian Age daily newspaper on February 15, 2016.