China courts Central Asia as Russia’s influence wanes

BEIJING—China is renewing its push for massive infrastructure projects in Central Asia as Beijing aims to fill the vacuum left in former Soviet states by Russia, which is ensnared in a widening net of Western sanctions over the Ukraine war.

Central Asia has become key to China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, a defining geopolitical project for President Xi Jinping. Around 150 countries have received Chinese funds to build roads, ports, railways or hydroelectric dams.

Beijing says trade with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan reached $70 billion in 2022 and expanded 22 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2023.

Analysts say Russia’s war in Ukraine has further shifted the dynamic in Beijing’s favor—leading many in the region to question their long-standing ties with Moscow and seek economic, diplomatic, and strategic assurances elsewhere.

“After the Russian aggression in Ukraine, the Central Asian republics started to fear for their sovereignty,” Ayjaz Wani, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in Mumbai, toldAFP.

Xi will host the leaders of the five countries in the western city of Xi’an this week for a summit Beijing has described as of “milestone significance”.

Bound by shared borders and a long history, the choice of Xi’an—the historic eastern end of the Silk Road—is fitting.

The summit is likely to see efforts to push ahead with vast transport links and pipelines, including a long-stalled $6 billion China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway and an expansion of the Central Asia-to-China gas pipeline.

“China’s approach to Central Asia has been very consistent,” said Nargis Kassenova, director of the Central Asia program at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, pointing to long-standing ties in security, infrastructure and development.

Russia’s war in Ukraine, she said, only “pushed Central Asian countries deeper into China’s embrace”.

China’s inroads into Central Asia have not always been popular, however. In 2019, protests broke out in Kazakhstan, which has described itself as the “buckle” in the Belt and Road project, over perceived Chinese expansionism in the country.

The following year, a Chinese investor that had planned to pour nearly $300 million into a trade and logistics center in Kyrgyzstan quit the project over local protests.