China-Europe freight train route connects small commodity hub Yiwu with world

The total import and export of goods to and from Yiwu, the world's largest wholesale market for small commodities and consumer goods in east China's Zhejiang Province, reached 560.16 billion yuan (about 77 billion U.S. dollars) in the first 10 months of 2024, up 18.3 percent from the previous year.

The China-Europe freight train route linking Yiwu with Madrid in Spain marked its 10th anniversary on Nov 18, contributing greatly to that number.

Over the past decade, more than 6,700 China-Europe freight trains have set off from Yiwu, transporting over 670,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) containers of goods, including nearly 50,000 different types of goods from the Yiwu International Trade Market in Jinhua City.

Connected by rail to the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port, the world's largest port in terms of cargo throughput, the Yiwu International Trade Market is also selling larger products such as new energy vehicles using China's first specialized platform for display and trading of new energy products.

Having worked for the China-Europe freight train service for a decade, train driver Huang Wei's job is to align the containers of goods and pull them to the starting point of the Yiwu-Madrid journey.

After the train returns, Huang will use the locomotive to bring the containers of goods to the customs clearance area.

"When the first train on the route returned to Yiwu from Madrid, it brought back wine in constant-temperature containers, which was the first time I had seen them. When I saw this container appear in the train behind my locomotive, I thought this line was a success! The timeliness and safety of our China-Europe trains can fully meet all cargo transportation requirements,” said Huang.

Since 2014, the annual number of China-Europe freight train trips from Yiwu has soared from just 23 in the beginning to over 1,100 this year. Annual cargo value has risen from 92 million U.S. dollars to 2.62 billion U.S. dollars, while the variety of transported goods has expanded from about 10,000 to nearly 50,000 categories.

"When the Yiwu-Madrid route of the China-Europe freight train service was launched, only one to two trains operated on it each month, and now around three to five trains run on the route every day," said Huang.

To date, the China-Europe freight train service has connected Yiwu with more than 160 cities in 50 countries and regions across Asia and Europe.

China-Europe freight train route connects small commodity hub Yiwu with world

The Global Security Initiative (GSI) proposed by China has shifted the paradigm in thinking about global security away from the traditional zero-sum mentality toward a vision rooted in dialogue and development, said a Chinese expert on Tuesday.

In April 2022, China proposed the Global Security Initiative (GSI), which aims to create a new path to security that prioritizes dialogue over confrontation, partnership over alliance, and win-win over zero-sum thinking.

The initiative provides a new course and approach to addressing the root causes of international conflicts and solving security challenges facing humanity.

During an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), Wang Xinsong, associate professor at the School of Government at Beijing Normal University, hailed the initiative's importance amid escalating global challenges.

"It's been four years and we have witnessed that the Global Security Initiative or GSI has transformed from a framework in principle to an action plan with many actions having taken place in mediating the conflicts. The major difference between the GSI and the traditional and the existing mainstream idea about global security is that the mainstream idea is being the zero-sum mentality where the belief is that one country's safety is possible only if its neighbors safety is not existent. The GSI shifts the paradigm in thinking about global security away from the zero-sum mentality by arguing that security at the end of the day is very much related to development," Wang said.

Over the past four years, China has consistently promoted the implementation of the GSI. By the end of 2025, the initiative has received support and appreciation from more than 130 countries and regions, as well as international organizations, and has been explicitly incorporated into more than 140 bilateral and multilateral documents at home and abroad.

China's Global Security Initiative shifts paradigm away from traditional zero-sum mentality: expert