THE STILWELL ROAD: STRAIGHT AHEAD?

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.