With Russia mired in a drawn-out war in Ukraine and increasingly dependent on China for supplies, China is moving rapidly to expand its influence in Central Asia, once part of the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.
Meanwhile, Russia is fighting back hard.
As Central Asian leaders meet with their Chinese and Russian counterparts in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, this week, China’s growing presence in the region is on visible display, with new railways and other infrastructure being built and trade and investment increasing.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping was greeted in Astana on Tuesday by Kazakh children waving flags and singing in Mandarin as he praised ties with Kazakhstan as a friendship that “lasts for generations.”
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is scheduled to arrive on Wednesday for the start of the Astana conference, an annual summit of leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional grouping led by Beijing. For years, the forum has 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 world order.
The group was established in 2001 by China and Russia together with the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and has expanded in recent years to include Pakistan, India and Iran.
China is expanding its economic influence across Central Asia but still faces diplomatic challenges as Russia seeks to tilt the balance among Shanghai Forum member states in its favor.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is expected to attend this year’s summit. Lukashenko is Putin’s closest foreign ally, and Putin relies heavily on Russian economic and political support to stay in power. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Belarus would be named a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at this year’s summit, which would be a minor diplomatic victory for the Kremlin.
In a bigger blow to China, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will skip this year’s summit – he is in Moscow next week for separate talks with Putin – and will send his external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, to the Astana summit instead.
Modi’s visit to Moscow, following Putin’s recent visits to China’s other neighbours, North Korea and Vietnam, shows Putin is still capable of forging his own diplomatic relations separately from Beijing, said Theresa Fallon, director of the Centre for Russia, Europe and Asia Studies in Brussels.
“He says, ‘There are other options,'” Fallon said.
India joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2017 at Russia’s request, while Pakistan joined at China’s urging. But ties between India and China have cooled since border clashes between the two countries’ militaries in 2020 and 2022.
Prime Minister Modi wanted closer ties when he came to power a decade ago, but the two countries no longer even have direct flights between them.
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 rises and Russia’s declines. China and Russia are also forging increasingly cordial ties with the Afghan Taliban regime, which has ruled the country since U.S. troops withdrew in 2021 and has long sided with Pakistan against India.
“As long as Russia remains the dominant player, India is fine with that,” Pant said, “but as China becomes more important economically and more powerful in Central Asia, and Russia becomes a junior partner, India’s concerns will grow.”
But in a broader sense, Russia’s membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a rearguard action to counter the region’s inevitable tilt toward China. Putin relies heavily on China to keep his country’s economy and military production afloat under Western sanctions, and his government has long embraced Beijing’s strengthening ties with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. The vast disparity in economic power between Russia and Beijing makes direct competition in Central Asia futile for the Kremlin.
Instead, the Kremlin has sought to maintain some influence over its former satellite states on issues that remain important to its national interests, including by attending symbolic events like the Astana summit, where Putin is due to hold his sixth round of talks with Asian heads of state on Wednesday, according to Russian state media.
Russia wants to maintain access to Central Asian markets to circumvent Western sanctions, and since its invasion of Ukraine it has used Central Asian intermediaries to acquire billions of dollars’ worth of Western products, including consumer goods such as luxury cars and electronic components used in military production.
Russia also relies heavily on millions of Central Asian migrants to support its economy and to rebuild its occupied regions of Ukraine.
Finally, Russia is keen to cooperate with the governments of the Muslim-majority Central Asian countries on security, particularly with regard to terrorist threats. These threats were made clear earlier this year when a Tajikistani gang killed 145 people at a Moscow concert hall, Russia’s worst terrorist attack in more than a decade. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Russia and China aren’t just competing in Central Asia: They often cooperate because they see a shared interest in maintaining stable regimes in the region with little or no coordination with Western militaries, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Center, a research group.
“They believe that regional stability is underpinned by authoritarian regimes that are secular, un-Islamic and to some extent repressive at home,” he said.
Beijing also faces deep-rooted fears among Central Asians that China will use its vast population and immigration to overwhelm the sparsely populated region, said William Fierman, a professor emeritus of Central Asian studies at Indiana University. Soviet authorities have stoked those doubts for decades, and even younger generations who didn’t grow up under Soviet rule now seem to share those fears, he said.
The war in Ukraine is likely to be a major focus in Astana, with few experts expecting it to be publicly discussed in a forum led by Beijing, which is indirectly supporting Russia’s war effort.
Wu Xinbo, director of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said Xi will also use the visit to promote his vision for improving transport links across the region. After the summit, Xi is scheduled to make an official visit to Tajikistan. The U.S. State Department recently estimated that more than 99 percent of foreign investment in the country comes from China.
Much of China’s investment in Central Asia is in infrastructure. Last month, it signed a deal with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to build a new railway line across the two countries, giving China a shortcut for overland trade with Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, as well as the Middle East and Europe. After spending the past 12 years trying to expand rail traffic across Russia to export to Europe, China now wants to add a route south.
“From a long-term, strategic perspective, this railway is very important,” said Niva Yau, a nonresident fellow specializing in China-Central Asia relations at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research group.
Suhasini Raj and Li Yu contributed reporting and investigations.
