'Growing phobias' as China, Russia vie for influence in Central Asia

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 being hobbled by its unprovoked war in Ukraine.

Central Asia has become key to China's trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR), a defining geopolitical project for President Xi Jinping.

Around 150 countries have received Chinese funds to build roads, ports, railways or hydroelectric dams under the project.

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

Analysts say Russia's war in Ukraine has further shifted the dynamic in Beijing's favour -- 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, told AFP.

Xi will host the leaders of the five countries in the western city of Xi'an this week for a summit.

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.

Russia's war in Ukraine, said Nargis Kassenova, director of the Central Asia programme at Harvard's Davis Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, only "pushed Central Asian countries deeper into China's embrace".

Chinese expansionism

But China's inroads into Central Asia have received pushback.

Recent provocative comments by China's Ambassador to France Lu Shaye questioning the sovereignty of former Soviet republics sparked concerns about Beijing's role in the region.

In 2019, protests broke out in Kazakhstan, which has described itself as the "buckle" in the BRI project, over perceived Chinese expansionism in the country.

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

Beijing says the BRI aims to deepen friendly trade relations, particularly with the developing world.

But critics have long accused China of luring lower-income countries into debt traps by offering huge, unaffordable loans. Others say the BRI serves as a cover for China's expanding military presence around the globe.

"China has developed a system of 'Bailouts on the Belt and Road' that helps recipient countries to avoid default, and continue servicing their BRI debts, at least in the short run," a report published in March by the US-based research lab Aidata said.

Beijing's big spending -- and fears it could use its clout to influence domestic politics -- have "fed growing phobias", said Sebastien Peyrouse, a research professor at George Washington University's Central Asia Programme.

China's development is seen as a model in the region, he told AFP, but many fear Beijing's approach is fundamentally extractive.

Another source of contention is Xinjiang, where Beijing is conducting a crackdown that has seen over a million Uighur and other mostly-Muslim minorities placed in forced "re-education" camps.

Accusations include mass incarceration, forced labour, compulsory sterilisation, systematic rape, and the destruction of Uighur cultural and Islamic sites.

Uighur ties to Central Asia run deep, and a shared religious and ethnic heritage means their plight has provoked widespread sympathy in the region and fuelled anti-China sentiment.

Rising anti-Chinese sentiment

Analysts argue that China is more popular with elites in Central Asia than with the people, as politicians are desperate for investments that do not always garner popular support.

"This partly stems from the vast population and economic asymmetry between them and China," the Middle East Institute's Li-Chen Sim said.

Also feeding opposition is "resentment over the lack of job opportunities for locals in Chinese-funded projects" and "the high levels of indebtedness to China", she added.

"Anti-Chinese sentiment has risen in some places," said Stefan Hedlund, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden.

"Whether this may be overridden by massive economic inflow remains to be seen."

The region is not a monolith, and analysts say Beijing has not always been sensitive to the deep differences between the nations that comprise Central Asia.

And while attitudes appear to be shifting, research cited by London think tank the Royal United Services Institute showed that Central Asians still hold vastly more positive views towards Russia than China.

"Most of the people in the region think in terms of 'Russian yoke is made of leather that can gradually be worn out, while Chinese yoke is made of iron and one can't free oneself from it'," the Observer Research Foundation's Wani said.

"Like Russia, China has never considered us equal partners ... and, in general, as full-fledged countries," Kasybek Zholchuyev, a security analyst from Bishkek, told Caravanserai.

"For them, our region is just an appendage with raw materials, and they think that they should decide for us what we should do and how we should develop," he said.