SHROSHA, Georgia -- Over the past 30 years, as Georgia has endured civil war, the loss of two regions to Moscow-backed separatists during a brief Russian invasion in 2008, and economic upheaval, Zoya Giorgadze has continued to sell her traditional handmade ceramics from a roadside stall near the village of Shrosha.
While adapting to the swift changes brought to the small Caucasian country of 4 million in recent decades, Giorgadze says she’s tried to preserve the pottery traditions of Shrosha, a historic center for Georgian ceramics located in the middle of the country with a documented pedigree stretching back to ancient times.
But an ambitious 51.6-kilometer section of a Chinese-built highway cutting through Georgia’s rugged and mountainous countryside -- with 96 bridges, 53 tunnels, and a growing price tag approaching $1 billion -- could upend life for Giorgadze and others like her as it bypasses the small village and diverts the economically vital stream of traffic and tourists away from her shop.
"This new highway is overall a positive thing for the country," she told RFE/RL, "but little thought has been given to the impact on people like me who will be lost amid this giant project."
Ceramics made in the village of Shrosha are piled by the roadside and sold by vendors to travelers and tourists. The new highway will bypass Shrosha, depriving the vendors of a vital economic link.
Once completed, the highway will transform travel in Georgia, which lacks high-quality infrastructure, and potentially cut the journey from the capital, Tbilisi, to the Black Sea coast in half while providing a much-needed boost to the country’s tourism-dependent economy.
In addition to connecting eastern and western Georgia, it could also serve as a crucial link for transit between Europe and Asia and provide an opportunity for added trade and investment.
Since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Georgian government has accelerated efforts to fill the vacuum as shipping companies and Western governments are looking for new ways to bypass Russia, which had been the main route for overland trade between Europe and China.
But while the Chinese-built highway looks to bring change to Georgia’s timeless landscape, the megaproject has faced its own set of modern-day setbacks.
Chinese and Georgian construction crews build the new stretch of highway through the Rikoti Pass.
Questions over how the winning contracts were awarded to a constellation of Chinese firms have followed the project since its inception in 2018, and the highway has faced a series of unexplained delays that has seen costs rise and construction deadlines extended first past the original 2020 completion date and now pushed beyond a revised 2023 opening date.
Floods and landslides in March that led to road closures and damage to the highway also raised concern from environmental groups and geologists that the disruptions were caused by poor-quality construction practices from crews blasting through the mountainside for tunnels and moving earth from the project near Rikoti Pass.
Archil Magalashvili, a professor of geology at Tbilisi’s Ilia State University, said he was commissioned to carry out an impact assessment of the area for the Chinese firm in 2019 and that he raised landslide concerns in the same section during his report. He said he advised the company to conduct additional studies, carry out future calculations, and then draw up a new project plan because the company's schematics did not match the physical site and did not account for the high landslide risk.
"I'm not sure if they listened to me," Magalashvili told RFE/RL's Georgian Service in April. "They should have done [something] because they themselves knew there was a problem."
Georgia’s Regional Development and Infrastructure Ministry and the Georgian Roads Department did not respond to RFE/RL’s requests for comment, but authorities defended the construction quality of the project when faced with the backlash over the landslides, emphasizing that they happened near the old road, not on the new Chinese-one being built.
A Chinese Flagship
The stakes are high for the project. Not only will the highway transform the country by reducing risky travel and create a modern artery for improved tourism and trade, it will also provide an important flagship project for China's growing presence in Georgia.
Moving along the country's East-West highway, construction is in full swing as new stretches of road are laid along mountainsides, overpasses erected over gorges and villages, and tunnels bored through treacherous terrain. Mixed crews of Georgian, Chinese, and foreign workers erect barriers against landslides as construction camps with makeshift housing and concrete mixing towers dot the lush, green landscape.
Construction workers install new barriers to the roadside to protect against landslides. A series of floods and landslides closed the Rikoti Pass in March.
China’s role in Georgia has traditionally taken a backseat amid the country's geopolitical power struggles between Moscow and the West, but modest economic links began to pick up after Tbilisi and Beijing signed a free-trade agreement in 2017 that paved the way for more investment.
The bulk of that Chinese capital has been concentrated into transport and leveraging Georgia’s geographic position with access to the Black Sea and broad connections to trade flows from China and Central Asia through Azerbaijan. High-profile projects have included roadworks and railway construction across Georgia, as well as a $195 million special economic zone built in a Tbilisi suburb that remains underutilized and a white elephant on the country’s balance sheet.
Some Chinese projects -- and the companies awarded the contracts to carry them out -- have also courted controversy. One such company, Sinohydro, faced criticism in Georgia for environmental damage and poor-quality construction after it won bids to build various sections of highway in the country despite an international track record of corruption and shoddy work in countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and Botswana.
Zoya Giorgadze, who has sold ceramics by the roadside in Shrosha for decades, stands by her stall.
Tinatin Khidasheli, who served as Georgia's defense minister from 2015 to 2016, attributes this to cooperation that exists between Georgia’s political elites and Chinese firms, which she says raises troubling questions about corruption through the tender process, the repercussions of which she says can be seen now as projects face criticism over quality, cost, and timeline.
"These Chinese companies won these contracts because they had the lowest cost and shortest timeframe, but now costs are increasing and deadlines are prolonged," Khidasheli, who now chairs the Tbilisi-based NGO Civic Initiative for Democratic and Euro-Atlantic Choice, told RFE/RL. "So, why wasn’t this contract given to a company that has a better track record for delivering what they promised in the first place?"
Since leaving office in 2016 after her Republican Party left the governing coalition with the ruling Georgian Dream party, Khidasheli has spearheaded research into Chinese business activities and became a vocal critic of how Georgian Dream has awarded contracts to Chinese firms.
Polish Ambassador to Georgia Mariusz Maszkiewicz made headlines in 2020 when he expressed frustration and confusion during an interview that the Georgian government was using funds raised through European lending institutions to award contracts to Chinese companies.
"Why? We have very good companies in Austria, in Germany, in Poland. We can offer higher quality at a reliable price," he told Forbes Georgia, the local franchise of the American business magazine.
Georgian authorities have generally dismissed these concerns, but Irakli Karseladze, Georgia’s minister of regional development and infrastructure, defended the tender process for large-scale projects during a 2021 interview with Forbes Georgia, saying the Chinese companies presented the most competitive bids and that they have an international track record of completing similar projects.
A Georgian worker directs traffic outside a work camp where construction crews sleep and new concrete is poured for the highway project.
"[Claims] that a company that did not have sufficient experience was selected through these procedures are unfounded," Karseladze said. "In general, since 2018, according to our observations, European companies do participate in some of the tenders; however, when it comes to price, they are unable to make it [among] the top three [bidders]."
The Chinese-built highway project going through the Rikoti Pass was financed with loans from the Asian Development Bank and the European Investment Bank and is broken into four sections that were each awarded to a different Chinese company, including China State Construction Engineering Corporation Limited, China Road and Bridge Corporation, and a joint bid from Guizhou Highway Engineering Group along with the China National Technical Import and Export Corporation.
Another section was awarded to the Hunan Road and Bridge Construction Group, a company that has faced controversy for bribery inside China and environmental damage for a highway project in Uganda. Since starting operations in Georgia, the company has faced strikes from local workers over low wages and has been accused of labor violations by watchdog groups.
The new highway cuts through a small village.
"This isn’t to say that because something is Chinese that it’s bad, but that there seems to be very little effort from the government for accountability and ensuring that a company behaves and follows the law," Khidasheli said.
Change Meets Tradition
While political questions hang over the highway, it will have more immediate consequences for the lives of ordinary Georgians once completed.
In addition to those selling ceramics on the roadside in Shrosha, other vendors -- many of whom have grappled with poverty for years and are still feeling the economic crunch of diminished tourism brought by the pandemic -- are also worried about being displaced.
Manana Bibiluri, 64, has been selling "nazuki" -- a traditional Georgian sweetbread baked in a stone oven -- in Surami for 25 years. The town of 7,500 is famous in the country for the staple and many local women subsist from selling the bread from small road bakeries on the town’s northern edge to travelers passing along the highway.
Manana Bibiluri, makes fresh nazuki sweetbread off the roadside in Surami. She plans to retire rather than work at a new location near the new Chinese-made highway when it opens.
But like with other smaller settlements, Surami will now be bypassed by the new highway.
The government has announced plans for setting up special markets for vendors along the new highway and similar spaces have been announced near Shrosha and other towns that will be bypassed by the project. But few details have been revealed, and many locals who spoke to RFE/RL are skeptical that the plan will work.
Bibiluri says she decided to retire before the highway opens rather than deal with relocating her oven. Others, such as Nazi Laphachi, a grandmother of seven who operates a baking hut along the road, say she has no choice but to try the new roadside location, whenever it opens.
"I don’t make very much from selling nazuki. The bare minimum," she said. "But that’s still needed for the family."
Irma Nozadze, who owns and operates the Europe Cafe near the Rikoti Pass, is unsure how her business will survive once the new highway opens and siphons off the stream of travelers who are her main customers.
Further along the road, Irma Nozadze, who owns and operates a cafe near Rikoti Pass, is worried that the new road will be the final blow to her business once it opens and siphons away the stream of travelers that are her main customers.
"Things are already very hard for us here," she said. "I can only imagine what things will be like when reduced traffic is passing through here."