China promised billions of dollars in “financing support and free assistance” to five Central Asian countries on Friday, as top leader Xi Jinping presented a wide-ranging security and defense plan to a region that has long been in Russia’s orbit.
Hosting the China-Central Asia Summit in the city of Xi’an, the fabled end of the ancient Silk Road, Xi presented himself as a generous and reliable partner for countries that were once part of the Soviet Union — but which have become increasingly alarmed by Russia’s efforts to take back control of Ukraine, another former Soviet Republic.
This approach reveals a crack in Beijing and Moscow’s “no limits” friendship, but the bigger contrast was with the West: While Xi was hosting the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, the Group of Seven leaders were gathering in Hiroshima, Japan, to discuss Russian aggression and Chinese economic coercion.
The split-screen images highlighted how Xi is trying to create a “multipolar” world, where the United States is no longer the sole global superpower.
“Central Asia understands that in this multipolar world, they are expected to be on the side of Russia and China,” said Niva Yau, a nonresident fellow for the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
“A year ago, there were a lot of discussions in the region because of the war, about whether Central Asia needed to pivot, needed to look to the West,” she said. “This week has shown very clearly where Central Asia has decided to align themselves.”
Xi told the Central Asian leaders that China could boost the region’s “law enforcement, security and defense capability construction.” Over the course of the two-day meeting, he met each leader and signed bilateral agreements boosting trade, infrastructure and technology investment, and making visa-free travel arrangements.
Beijing is angling for greater influence in Central Asia as Moscow remains focused on its grinding war in Ukraine. Chinese state media have echoed that language.
“The countries of Central Asia have realized that Russia is having so much difficulty in its fight against Ukraine that it is not wise to completely rely on Russia — they must find a way out,” read a commentary in the nationalist tabloid Defense Times.
Days before the summit in Xi’an, the five heads of Central Asian states visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where they attended the May Day military parade.
But despite their show of allegiance, Putin’s willingness to flex his military might — in Ukraine last year and in Georgia in 2008 — has unnerved the Central Asian states and prompted them to assert their individual cultural identities.
“If you’re sitting in Kazakhstan, it’s very easy to look at the narratives that Putin used to justify invading Ukraine — there’s an ethnic Russian population, they speak Russian — and he could make exactly the same case there,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
In Xi’an, Xi assured the Central Asian states that their “sovereignty, security, independence and territorial integrity” must be “safeguarded.”
This message would have been particularly welcome after the Chinese ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, sparked outrage by questioning the independence of former Soviet states and led the Foreign Ministry in Beijing to walk back his remarks.
Although Europe and the United States have sent high-level delegations to Central Asia since the war in Ukraine began — Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the region in March — analysts say the countries haven’t received as much investment from the West as they would like.
China, on the other hand, has given Central Asia priority status. Kazakhstan was Xi’s first stop outside of China after three years of “zero covid” isolation, en route to Uzbekistan for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional body co-founded by China and Russia as a counterweight to western influence in the region.
It was in Kazakhstan that Xi in 2013 launched his flagship infrastructure investment program, the Belt and Road Initiative, under which China has since invested heavily in railways, pipelines and other infrastructure across the region.
Trade volume between China and the five Central Asian countries topped a record $70 billion last year, according to China’s Commerce Ministry.
In Xi’an on Friday, Xi announced that China would accelerate the expansion of the Central-Asia China pipeline, which China’s National Petroleum Corporation and Kazakhstan’s KazMunayGas National Company have agreed to explore.
Kyrgyzstan became the latest country to express interest in trading with China using the yuan when it agreed to explore conducting trade with China — which is almost entirely comprised Chinese exports to Kyrgyzstan — in their respective currencies.
As China’s economic ties with Russia have deepened since the war began, the yuan has become the most traded currency on the Moscow stock exchange, and countries from Brazil to Bangladesh have expressed interest in settling deals using it.
Beijing views boosting economic prosperity in the region as key to staving off its long-standing concerns about violence and instability in its western Xinjiang region, where thousands of people belonging to the mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority group have been interned in prison camps.
In the joint declarations issued from the Xi’an summit, Beijing extracted assurances from the Central Asian leaders they would not interfere in its approach to Hong Kong, Taiwan or Xinjiang.
The Xinjiang pledge is significant for China because of links between Kazakhstan and the northwestern region where Beijing has carried out a campaign to strip the mostly Uyghur, mostly Muslim population of their culture and religion.
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