As Russia is mired in a long-running war in Ukraine and increasingly reliant on China for supplies, Beijing is moving quickly to expand its influence in Central Asia, a region once in the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.
Russia, for its part, is fighting back forcefully.
As leaders of Central Asian countries meet with the presidents of China and Russia this week in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, China’s growing presence in the region is visible. New railway lines and other infrastructure are being built, while trade and investment are increasing.
Kazakh children waving flags and singing in Chinese greeted Chinese leader Xi Jinping upon his arrival in Astana on Tuesday. The leader hailed ties with Kazakhstan as a friendship that has “lasted for generations.”
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is expected to arrive on Wednesday for the start of the meeting in Astana, an annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a regional group dominated by Beijing. For years, the forum focused largely on security issues, but as the group has expanded its membership, China and Russia have used it as a platform to showcase their ambitions to reshape an American-dominated global order.
The group, created by China and Russia in 2001 with the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, has expanded in recent years to include Pakistan, India and Iran.
While China has expanded its economic influence in Central Asia, it still faces challenges to its diplomacy as Russia seeks to tip the balance of membership at the Shanghai forum in its favor.
Belarusian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko is expected to attend this year’s summit. He is Putin’s closest foreign ally, who relies heavily on Russia’s economic and political support to stay in power. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Belarus would be made a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization at this year’s summit, which would be a small diplomatic victory for the Kremlin.
An even bigger setback for Beijing is that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will not attend this year’s summit. Modi is scheduled to visit Moscow next week for his own talks with Putin and will instead send his foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, to the Astana summit.
Following Putin’s recent trip to two other Chinese neighbors, North Korea and Vietnam, Modi’s upcoming trip to Moscow signals that Putin is still capable of building his own diplomatic relationships outside of Beijing, said Theresa Fallon, director of the Center for Russia, Europe and Asia Studies in Brussels.
“He’s saying, ‘I have other options,’” Fallon said.
India had joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation at Russia’s behest in 2017, when Pakistan also joined at China’s urging. But India’s relations with China have since cooled, following border clashes between their troops in 2020 and 2022.
While Modi had favoured closer ties when he took office a decade ago, the two countries no longer even allow direct commercial flights between them.
According to Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations at King’s College London, India is increasingly concerned about the geopolitical balance of power in the region, as China’s influence rises and Russia’s wanes. China and Russia have also forged increasingly friendly relations with Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which has ruled the country since the departure of U.S. forces in 2021 and has long sided with Pakistan against India.
“So far, Russia was the dominant player, but India was not bothered by it,” Pant said. “But as China becomes more economically important and more powerful in Central Asia and Russia becomes the junior partner, India’s concerns are increasing.”
More broadly, however, Russia’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is largely a rearguard action to counter the region’s seemingly inexorable turn toward China. Putin relies heavily on China to keep his economy and military production afloat amid Western sanctions, and over the years his government has come to accept Beijing’s growing ties with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. The yawning gap between Russia’s economic power and Beijing’s makes direct competition in Central Asia futile for the Kremlin.
Instead, the Kremlin has sought to maintain some influence over its former satellites on issues that remain vital to its national interests, including by attending largely symbolic events such as the Astana summit. On Wednesday, Putin will hold six separate meetings with Asian heads of state in Astana, according to Russian state media.
Russia wants to maintain access to Central Asian markets to circumvent Western sanctions. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has sourced billions of dollars worth of Western goods through Central Asian middlemen. These include consumer goods such as luxury cars and electronic components that have been used in military production.
Russia also relies heavily on millions of migrants from Central Asia to shore up its economy, as well as to rebuild occupied parts of Ukraine.
Finally, Russia wants to cooperate with the governments of predominantly Muslim Central Asian countries on security issues, and in particular with regard to 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 the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in more than a decade. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Russia and China don’t just compete in Central Asia. They often cooperate because they perceive a shared interest in having 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 anchored in authoritarian regimes that are secular, non-Muslim and, to some extent, repressive at home,” he said.
William Fierman, professor emeritus of Central Asian studies at Indiana University, said Beijing also faces deep-rooted public concern in Central Asia that China could use its huge population and migration to overwhelm the sparsely populated region. Soviet authorities fueled those suspicions for decades, and even a younger generation that didn’t grow up under Soviet rule now appears to share those concerns, he said.
In Astana, the elephant in the room is likely to be the war in Ukraine. Few experts expect the war to be publicly discussed in a forum dominated by Beijing, given its indirect support for the Russian war effort.
Xi will also use his visit to promote his vision of building better transport links across the region, said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. After the summit, Xi is scheduled to pay a state visit to Tajikistan, where the U.S. State Department recently estimated that more than 99 percent of foreign investment comes from China.
Much of China’s investment in Central Asia is in infrastructure. Last month, China signed a deal with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to build a new rail line through the two countries. The rail line will offer China a shortcut to overland trade with Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, and beyond these countries to the Middle East and Europe. China has been trying for the past 12 years to expand rail traffic through Russia to bring its exports to Europe, but 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’s relations with Central Asia at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington.
Suhasini Raj and Li you He contributed reports and research.