Lianyungang
Landlocked Kazakhstan's primary seaport — 11,870 km of rail making a Chinese coastal city the proxy coastline for a nation with no ocean access.
Landlocked Kazakhstan uses Lianyungang as its primary seaport. A 1995 agreement gave Kazakhstan dedicated logistics facilities at the eastern terminus of the New Eurasian Land Bridge — 11,870 kilometres from Rotterdam, connected by rail through China, Kazakhstan, Russia, and into Europe. This arrangement makes a Chinese coastal city the proxy coastline for a Central Asian nation with no ocean access.
The mutualism is genuine: Kazakhstan gets ocean shipping without a coastline, and Lianyungang gets Central Asian rail traffic without having to compete with Shanghai or Ningbo for Chinese domestic cargo. Over 50 international shipping routes now operate from the port, many of them created specifically to serve this transit function.
Landlocked Kazakhstan uses a Chinese coastal city as its primary seaport — 11,870 km of rail making Lianyungang the proxy coastline for a nation with no ocean.
Lianyungang is also one of China's major pharmaceutical manufacturing clusters, producing generic drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredients for global export. The city hosts multiple chemical and pharmaceutical industrial parks, leveraging its port access to ship bulk chemicals directly from production to container.
The population of 4.6 million makes Lianyungang one of Jiangsu's smaller cities, but its geographic position gives it outsized strategic importance. It sits at the eastern end of China's east-west railway corridor, the natural loading point for anything moving between the Pacific and Central Asia. The Belt and Road Initiative has amplified this position, bringing Chinese infrastructure investment that deepens the rail connections and expands the port.
Lianyungang functions as a biological proxy organ — performing a critical function for an organism that cannot develop the capability itself. Kazakhstan could in theory develop alternative trade routes through Iran or Russia, but the established infrastructure at Lianyungang makes switching prohibitively expensive. The mutualism persists because leaving costs more than staying.