With Russia mired in a long-running war in Ukraine and increasingly reliant on supplies from China, Beijing is moving quickly to expand its influence in Central Asia, a region that was once the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.
Russia is fighting back vigorously.
China’s influence in the region continues to grow as Central Asian leaders meet with their Chinese and Russian counterparts in the Kazakh capital Astana this week. New railway lines and other infrastructure are being built, while trade and investment are growing.
When Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Astana on Tuesday, he was greeted by flag-waving Kazakh children singing in Chinese. He praised the relationship with Kazakhstan as a friendship “passed from generation to generation.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to arrive in Astana on Wednesday to attend the opening ceremony of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s annual summit. For many years, the forum focused primarily on security issues. But as the group’s membership has expanded, China and Russia have used it as a platform to showcase their ambitions to reshape the U.S.-led global order.
The group was founded in 2001 by China and Russia along with the Central Asian countries Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and has expanded in recent years to include Pakistan, India and Iran.
Even as China expands its economic influence in Central Asia, its diplomacy faces challenges as Russia attempts to tip the balance of membership in the Shanghai Forum in its favor.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is expected to attend this year’s summit. He is Putin’s closest foreign ally, and Putin relies heavily on Russia’s economic and political support to stay in power. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov said that Belarus will become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at this year’s summit. This would be a small diplomatic victory for the Kremlin.
A bigger setback for Beijing is that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will miss this year’s summit. Modi plans to visit Moscow next week to hold talks with Putin and dispatch Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to the Astana summit.
Theresa Fallon said Modi’s upcoming visit to Moscow, which follows Putin’s recent visits to two of China’s other neighbors, North Korea and Vietnam, shows Putin is still able to separate his diplomatic ties from Beijing, Brussels, Russia, Europe , Director of the Asia Research Center.
“He said, ‘I have other options,'” Ms. Fallon said.
India joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2017 at the request of Russia, when Pakistan also joined with the encouragement of China. But since border clashes between the two countries’ armies in 2020 and 2022, India’s relations with China have become cold.
The two countries no longer even allow direct commercial flights between the two countries, although Mr Modi advocated closer ties when he came to power a decade ago.
Harsh V. Pant, professor of international relations at King’s College London, said India is increasingly concerned about the geopolitical balance of power in the region as China’s influence grows and Russia declines. China and Russia have also established increasingly friendly relations with Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which has been in charge of the country since the withdrawal of US troops in 2021 and has long sided with Pakistan against India.
“As far as Russia is dominant, India is happy with that,” Pant said. “But as China becomes more economically important and powerful in Central Asia, and Russia becomes a secondary partner, India’s concerns will intensify.”
From a broader perspective, however, Russia’s membership of the SCO is very much a rearguard action designed to counterbalance the region’s seemingly inexorable shift toward China. Putin relies heavily on China to sustain his economy and military production amid Western sanctions, and over the years his government has come to embrace Beijing’s growing ties with Central Asia’s former Soviet republics. The huge gap between the economic power of Russia and Beijing makes direct competition by the Kremlin in Central Asia pointless.
Instead, the Kremlin seeks to maintain some influence over its former satellites on issues that remain critical to its national interests, including by participating in largely symbolic events such as the Astana summit. Putin will hold six separate meetings with Asian heads of state in Astana on Wednesday, according to Russian state media.
Russia wants to maintain access to Central Asian markets to circumvent Western sanctions. Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has obtained billions of dollars worth of Western goods through Central Asian middlemen. These include consumer goods such as luxury cars, as well as electronic components used in military production.
Russia also relies heavily on millions of Central Asian immigrants to prop up its economy and rebuild occupied areas of Ukraine.
Finally, Russia hopes to cooperate with the governments of Muslim Central Asian countries on security, especially the threat of terrorism. These threats were laid bare earlier this year when a group of Tajik citizens killed 145 people at a Moscow concert hall in Russia’s worst terror attack in more than a decade. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Russia and China are not only competing in Central Asia. They often collaborate because they see a shared interest in establishing stable regimes in the region that have little or no coordination with Western militaries, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Center, a research group.
“They see regional stability as being based on secular, non-Muslim and to some extent domestically repressive authoritarian regimes,” he said.
William Firman, professor emeritus of Central Asian studies at Indiana University, said Beijing also faces deep-seated concerns among the Central Asian public that China could use its large population and immigration to overwhelm sparsely populated regions. Soviet authorities had stoked these suspicions for decades, he said, and even younger generations who didn’t grow up under Soviet rule now seemed to share the same concerns.
In Astana, the large statue in the room is most likely the Ukrainian War. Given Beijing’s indirect support for Russia’s war effort, few experts expect much public discussion of the war in Beijing-led forums.
Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said Xi would also use the visit to promote his vision of building better transport links in the region. After the summit, Xi Jinping plans to pay a state visit to Tajikistan.
Many of China’s investments in Central Asia are focused on infrastructure. China last month signed an agreement with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to build a new railway line across the two countries. The railway line will provide a shortcut for China’s overland trade with Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, as well as the Middle East and Europe. China has been trying to expand rail transport through Russia for the past 12 years to get its exports to Europe, but now wants to add a southerly route.
“From a long-term, strategic perspective, this railway is very important,” said Niva Yau, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based research organization specializing in China-Central Asia relations.
Suhasini Raj and Li You Contributed reporting and research.
