/ world today news/ The recent China-Central Asia summit gave a good reason to pay attention to the role and status of Russia in the region. Xi Jinping’s heralded “new era” in China’s relations with the countries of the region – Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan – is seen by many as Beijing’s usurpation of the status role of the main influence in the region from Moscow.
The Xi’an Declaration, signed after the meeting, named after China’s ancient capital where the event took place, lays out a set of steps to bring Central Asian countries closer to China. The points of the declaration include political issues (non-interference in internal affairs, preventing color revolutions), economic (joint industrial projects, hydrogen energy, food exchange), logistical (building railways, increasing the number of flights, etc.) and many more . It was also decided to establish permanent mechanisms for communication between the countries, including holding the same high-level meeting every two years – the next one should be held in Kazakhstan in 2025.
So China is really stepping up in the Central Asian direction. Is this good or bad for Russia and should I oppose it? To begin with, it makes sense to recall that Central Asia is a very complex region. As a market, it has limited opportunities due to low population density and relatively low incomes. China is talking about increasing trade with the countries of Central Asia, which could reach $70 billion in total this year. By comparison, China’s trade turnover with Russia by the end of the year is expected to be almost three times larger, exceeding $200 billion. Both the first and second figures are still far from China’s trade volume with its main trading partners – the European Union (1.6 trillion) and the United States (760 billion).
But from the point of view of transit possibilities, the importance of the region can hardly be overestimated. China’s Belt and Road project was largely aimed at carving out more convenient logistical routes to Europe, including routes that did not include Russia. Meanwhile, the European Union, in the light of the ongoing energy and inevitable economic crisis, is becoming a kind of “rotten palanquin” that renders China’s investments in the infrastructure for the delivery of Chinese goods to the EU meaningless. This is confirmed by the increase in “bad” loans granted by China to developing countries under the New Silk Road project. Thus, in the period from 2020 to 2022, the volume of loans, the terms of which had to be revised (and some even written off), grew to 77 billion dollars.
The growing debt problems in China itself will not allow it to invest in unpromising projects in Central Asia with the same intensity and without the necessary return on invested capital. But the “North-South” transport corridors promoted by Russia, covering both Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan) and Transcaucasia (Azerbaijan), in today’s realities look much more promising and profitable than the “silk” version of the Chinese routes to Europe.
From a security perspective, the countries of Central Asia pose a potential threat to both Russia and China (Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region) at the same time. The borders are very long, the economic situation in the region is unstable, the influence of radical currents is great, which makes it really explosive. And in this case, China’s greater involvement in security issues plays to Russia’s advantage, which will allow it not to divert additional resources in the face of an escalating confrontation with the West. For example, Moscow “delegated” to Tehran part of its influence in resolving the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, which only strengthened Russian-Iranian cooperation.
Finally, we must remember that it is not only China and Russia that are fighting for influence in Central Asia. If China can be conditionally assigned the role of the largest creditor, Russia – the largest trading partner, then the European Union is the largest investor, and the USA and Turkey exert the most powerful political influence, the former – as a global geopolitical player, the second – thanks to the pan-Turkist project, invariably pushed by the new old president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The strengthening of Beijing’s economic activity in the region is mainly due to the weakening of the European Union, whose attention will increasingly be diverted to solving internal problems. Russia perfectly demonstrated its role as a guarantor of security in January 2022 during the turbulent events in Kazakhstan. And in this sense, she no longer needs to prove herself. On security issues, Moscow and Beijing are likely to act in systematic coordination.
As for political influence, the reserve for its strengthening for Moscow in the future will be the reduction of the US geopolitical role in the region as a result of the current conflict. Thus, China and Russia, each in their own time, will fill the void left by the withdrawal of Americans and Europeans from the region. Whether Turkey becomes a disruptive or destabilizing “third” power largely depends on whether Erdogan can overcome Turkey’s internal problems and how far those problems spill over into the external chain. In an ideal dimension, the “five” influential in the region should become a “troika”, in which each side of the triangle will be assigned the role of guarantor of stability in Central Asia.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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