U.S. Faces Tough ‘Great Game’ Against China in Central Asia and Beyond

Former Soviet republics in the heart of Asia are critical battlegrounds in the struggle with China over global influence.
By Edward Wong

The historic town of Khiva, Uzbekistan, has been revitalized with China’s help.

KHIVA, Uzbekistan — Inside the ancient walls of the Silk Road oasis town of Khiva, China has put down a marker of its geopolitical ambitions. 

A sign promotes a Chinese aid project to renovate a once-crumbling mosque and a faded madrasa.
Outside the town’s northern gate, a billboard-size video screen shows clips of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan meeting with world leaders. 

Xi Jinping features prominently, but there are no shots of President Trump.
That China is advertising its aid efforts so boldly in this remote outpost linking Asia and Europe — where camel caravans once arrived after crossing the Kyzylkum and Karakum Deserts — is the kind of action these days that sets off alarm bells among American officials. 

The Trump administration is trying with greater force to insert itself into the political and economic life of Central Asia to counter China’s presence. 

American officials see the countries in the heart of the continent’s vast, arid steppe as critical battlegrounds in the struggle with China over global influence.
“Whenever we speak to countries around the world, we want to make sure that we’re doing what the people of those countries want,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week at a news conference in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.
The Uzbeks want a “good, balanced relationship,” he said.
“They have long borders,” he added. 

“They sit in a region where China and Russia are both present.”
Leaders of the five Central Asian nations that became independent republics after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 — Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan — are used to walking a regional tightrope. 

The area was contested during the so-called Great Game of the 19th century, when the British and Russian empires competed to establish influence and control.
Now a new game is underway. 

And officials in Central Asia, like many of their counterparts around the world, are hedging their bets when it comes to aligning with Washington or Beijing.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan, left, with Xi Jinping last year in Beijing.

“I’d like to once again note that we want to see Central Asia as a region of stable development, prosperity and cooperation,” said Abdulaziz Kamilov, the foreign minister of Uzbekistan. 

“And we would really not like to feel on ourselves unfavorable political consequences in relation to some competition in our region between large powers.”
The State Department released a Central Asia strategy document on Feb. 5 that said the top priority was to “support and strengthen the sovereignty and independence of the Central Asian states” — a reference to warding off the influence of China and Russia.
It is a tough mission for the United States. 

The nations are in China’s and Russia’s backyards, and there have been decades of close interactions among them. 

Xi has made multiple state visits to the countries since he took power in 2012, most recently last year.
The Trump administration has hit major setbacks in its attempts to build a global coalition against projects by the Chinese government and by Chinese companies. 

In fact, Britain said on Jan. 28 that it would not ban technology made by Huawei, a Chinese telecom giant, from its high-speed 5G wireless network, despite intense pressure from American officials.
Mr. Pompeo made London his first stop on a recent six-day trip to Europe and Central Asia, and he said there on Jan. 30 that the Chinese Communist Party was “the central threat of our times.” 

The next day, he spoke about China with leaders in Ukraine.
But words go only so far. 

The Americans fail to present an economical alternative to Huawei. 

And the Trump administration is discovering that its belligerent approach toward allies has a cost when it comes to China strategy. 

Withdrawing from the global Paris climate agreement, starting trade conflicts with friendly governments make those nations less likely to listen to Washington’s entreaties on China.
A recent policy report on China by the Center for a New American Security said “critical areas of U.S. policy remain inconsistent, uncoordinated, underresourced and — to be blunt — uncompetitive and counterproductive to advancing U.S. values and interests.”

Muslims praying at a mosque in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the Central Asian nations, which are predominantly Muslim, to speak out about China’s Uighur concentration camps.

Some analysts say the hawkish talk on China by Mr. Pompeo and other American officials paradoxically could make the United States look weak.
“And that last point is just the core of it for me. A central problem of US foreign policy today, not just in Central Asia, is that it feels increasingly reactive to me — back footed and on defense, not least in the face of Chinese initiatives,” Evan A. Feigenbaum, a deputy assistant secretary of state on Central Asia and South Asia in the George W. Bush administration who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote on Twitter.
“To wit, the secretary of state just made the first visit by America’s top diplomat to Central Asia in five years — five! — but spent a hefty chunk of it talking about China,” he wrote.
“The challenge for the US is to get off its reactive back foot and be proactive and on offense.”
The United States did not pursue serious partnerships in Central Asia until after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Pentagon needed regional bases for the war in Afghanistan.
China has taken a different approach.
Beijing says it will help build up the region under what it calls the Silk Road Economic Belt, which is part of the larger Belt and Road Initiative, a blanket term for global infrastructure projects that, according to Beijing, amount to $1 trillion of investment.
The projects are potential debt traps, but many countries have embraced them.
The economic liberalization of Uzbekistan under Mirziyoyev, who took power in 2016 after the death of a longtime dictator, has resulted in greater trade with China.
China is Uzbekistan’s largest trading partner, and trade totaled almost $6.3 billion in 2018, a nearly 50 percent increase from 2017, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
Chinese goods, including Huawei devices, are everywhere in Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent and other Uzbek cities.

The subway in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital.

Uzbekistan is also committing to being part of rail and road networks that China is building across Central Asia.
Since 2001, China has worked with Central and South Asian nations as well as Russia in a multilateral group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to address security issues.

China’s People’s Liberation Army has gained a new foothold in the region, in the form of a base in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains.
For at least three years, Chinese troops have quietly kept watch from two dozen buildings and lookout towers near the Tajik-Chinese border and the remote Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.
The Afghan corridor is a strategic strip of land whose borders were drawn by Britain and Russia during the original Great Game as a buffer zone.
The United States had hundreds of troops at an air base in Uzbekistan that it operated with the Uzbeks.
But it wants to move the relationship well beyond the military.
“We want private investment, American private investment sector, to flow between our two nations,” Mr. Pompeo said.
He added that the United States had committed $100 million to programs in Uzbekistan last year, and that it would give $1 million to help develop financial markets and another $1 million to increase trade and “connectivity” between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan.
On his trip, Mr. Pompeo also made a demand regarding human rights in China as he met with officials in Tashkent and Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan.
He raised the issue of China’s internment camps that hold one million or more Muslims and urged the Central Asian nations, which are predominantly Muslim, to speak out against the camps.
In Nur-Sultan, he met with Kazakhs who have had family members detained in the camps.

This month in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, Mr. Pompeo met with Kazakhs whose family members have been detained in Chinese camps.

Yet, as in other predominantly Muslim nations, Central Asian leaders have remained silent on this. (Mr. Trump himself has said nothing, and Mr. Pompeo has been accused of hypocrisy by excluding Taiwan, the democratic island that China threatens, from a religious freedom alliance.)
Trump administration policies perceived as anti-Muslim undermine trust in Washington.
On Jan. 31, Mr. Trump added Kyrgyzstan and five other nations, all with substantial Muslim populations, to a list of countries whose citizens are restricted in traveling to the United States.
In an interview in Nur-Sultan, a Kazakh television journalist, Lyazzat Shatayeva, asked Mr. Pompeo, “What do you think that signals to the other countries and other governments in Central Asia on why it happened?”
Mr. Pompeo said Kyrgyzstan must “fix” certain things: “passport issues, visa issues, visa overstays.”
“When the country fixes those things,” he said, “we’ll get them right back in where they can come travel to America.”

Axis of Evil

Russia and China romance runs into friction in Central Asia
US strategists call for driving wedge between the traditional rivals
By HIROYUKI AKITA
Russian President Vladimir Putin greets Xi Jinping in Saint Petersburg in June: Although the two leaders have found common cause in opposing Washington, their friendship has limits, experts say. 

 
TOKYO -- China and Russia are cozying up ever closer as they find a common enemy in Washington.
During Chinese dictator Xi Jinping's visit to Russia in early June, the two countries singed a joint statement pledging to deepen their ties, as well as around 30 economic agreements.
Xi's Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, has criticized the U.S. for leveling trade and technology sanctions against China and pledged to cooperate with it to resist U.S. pressure. 

The two countries are also pushing back against U.S. objectives regarding North Korea and Iran.
While analysts puzzle over whether the romance between China and Russia has peaked or will grow still more fervent, it seems clear they need each other more than ever.
Laboring under U.S. and European sanctions, Russia's economic growth is forecast to slow to around 1% this year. 

That will encourage it to lean more heavily on China. 

For Xi, Russia is a useful tool in countering Washington's increasingly hard-line policies against China.
But despite their growing closeness, China and Russia must deal with frictions.
Russia "is feeling a potential threat" from China, according to an expert on the Russian military. 

The difference the two countries' power continues to widen: China's gross domestic product is roughly eight times larger than Russia's and its population is 10 times larger. 

Russia is especially nervous about the possibility of Central Asia -- much of which was once part of the Soviet Union and is seen by Russians as their backyard -- falling under China's sway.
That is already happening economically. 

In 2018, China became the largest trading partner of three former Soviet republics: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. 

According to official data released by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, China is the largest source of foreign direct investment in the two countries. 

China has also overtaken Russia as the fourth-largest investor in Kazakhstan.
Russia tolerates China's economic advance in Central Asia because its stands to benefit from infrastructure improvements and regional development that the flood of Chinese investment will bring. 

Security, however, is another matter. 

Moscow will not want China encroaching on its turf.
In Uzbekistan, in mid-June, cabinet ministers, senior officials and experts from the U.S., Europe and neighboring countries gathered to discuss the regional situation. 

China's activities loomed large during the meeting.

The strategic environment began shifting a few years ago as China began secretly deploying troops in Tajikistan, according to local experts. 

Although the Chinese Foreign Ministry has denied its troops are in the area, a person familiar with the matter said there are similar indication in Afghanistan.
China has, up to now, refrained from involving itself in regional security issues out of consideration for Russia. 

But its actions in Tajikistan, part of its effort to keep Islamist militants from entering the East Turkestan colony, indicate a change in Beijing's thinking.
In light of Tajikistan's lax border controls, China may have sent troops to help it shore up security, one expert said. 

China is likely to have received a green light to do so from Moscow. 

But local diplomats said Russia is growing concerned about China's military moves.
Russia's largest military base outside its borders is in Tajikistan. 

The base is scheduled to remain until 2042, under a bilateral agreement. 

Given that it has around 8,000 troops at the base, it is unthinkable that the Russian and Chinese forces will both stay in the country without friction over the long term, according to one security strategist in Central Asia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin meets Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon in Moscow in April. Russia's largest military base outside its borders is in Tajikistan.

China's objective is to play a larger security role in Central Asia as part of its counterterrorism strategy without irritating Russia. 

That is easier said than done. 

Russia also seems anxious about U.S. ambitions in the region.
Leaders of the five Central Asian countries had planned to hold their second summit meeting in March. 

But the conference was canceled due a sudden change in Kazakhstan's president. 

So far, no new meeting has been scheduled. 

Whatever the official reason given for calling off the summit, a local diplomatic source said the real reason was that the participants were worried about provoking a backlash from Russia.
"Many in Russia still maintain an empire mentality. They consider the former Soviet Union to be their own sphere of influence," said Dr. Farkhod Tolipov, a political scientist who heads Knowledge Caravan, an independent education and research institution in Tashkent. 

"Russia wrongly believes that if the Central Asia region integrates it will gradually lean toward the United States and eventually enter U.S. sphere," he said.
If a rift develops between China and Russia, the implications for global politics would be significant. A weakening of the Sino-Russian axis would be favorable to the West and Japan. 

It would also help the international community increase pressure on North Korea.
At a public-private strategic dialogue between the U.S. and Europe in the polish capital, Warsaw, in June, an idea was floated for how to drive a wedge between China and Russia to give the West an edge in its strategic competition with Beijing.
It may be impossible for Europe to reconcile with Putin, given Russia's annexation of Crimea, according to military strategists in Washington. 

But they argue the U.S. should try to ease tensions with Moscow after Putin's term of office ends in 2024 to encourage Russia to keep China at arm's length.
China and Russia share a border of more than 4,000 km. 

And although they are unlikely to repeat their military clashes of 1969, it also seems unlikely that their current love affair will last forever, given their historical geopolitical rivalry.

Chinese Peril

In Central Asia’s forbidding highlands, a quiet newcomer: Chinese troops
By Gerry Shih

Hundreds of Chinese troops have been posted for three years at an outpost near Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan. 

NEAR SHAYMAK, Tajikistan — Two miles above sea level in the inhospitable highlands of Central Asia, there’s a new power watching over an old passage into Afghanistan: China.
For at least three years, Chinese troops have quietly monitored this choke point in Tajikistan just beyond China’s western frontier, according to interviews, analysis of satellite images and photographs, and firsthand observations by a Washington Post journalist.
While veiled in secrecy, the outpost of about two dozen buildings and lookout towers illustrates how the footprint of Chinese hard power has been expanding alongside the country’s swelling economic reach.
Tajikistan — awash in Chinese investment — joins the list of Chinese military sites that includes Djibouti in the strategic Horn of Africa and man-made islands in the South China Sea, in the heart of Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s economic ambitions over the past seven years have brought a wave of major investment projects, from the resource-rich Caspian Sea to Cambodia’s coastline.
The modest facility in Tajikistan — which offers a springboard into Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor a few miles away — has not been publicly acknowledged by any government.
But its presence is rich in significance and symbolism.
At a moment when the United States might consider a pact that would pull American troops out of Afghanistan, China is tiptoeing into a volatile region critical to its security and its continental ambitions.

Already, the retreat of old powers and arrival of the new are on display in Tajikistan, a tiny, impoverished country that served as a gateway into Afghanistan for U.S. units in the early phases of the 2001 invasion.
During a recent trip along the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border, The Post saw one of the military compounds and encountered a group of uniformed Chinese troops shopping in a Tajik town, the nearest market to their base. 

They bore the collar insignia of a unit from East Turkestan, the Chinese colony where authorities have detained an estimated 1 million Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority.
The crackdowns against the Uighurs have been internationally condemned as a violation of human rights.
“We’ve been here three, four years,” a soldier who gave his surname as Ma said in a brief conversation while his Chinese comrades, guided by a Tajik interpreter, bought snacks and topped up their mobile SIM cards in Murghab, a sprawl of low-rises about 85 miles north of the base.
When asked whether his unit had intercepted anyone crossing from Afghanistan, Ma smiled.
“You should be aware of our government’s policies about secrecy,” he said. 

“But I can say: It’s been pretty quiet.”

Scarce public information
Details about China’s activities at the facilities, some of which bear the Chinese and Tajik emblems, are not made public. 

Also unclear are the arrangements over their funding, construction and ownership. 

Satellite imagery shows what appear to be two clusters of buildings, barracks and training grounds, about 10 miles apart near the mouth of the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of territory in northeastern Afghanistan.

A Chinese soldier with the surname Ma buys goods in the Murghab bazaar. He told The Post that Chinese forces have been in Tajikistan for three to four years. 

The Post separately spoke to members of a German mountaineering expedition who said they were interrogated in 2016 by Chinese troops patrolling the Afghan corridor, near the settlement of Baza’i Gonbad. 

Photos provided by Steffan Graupner, the expedition leader, showed Chinese mine-resistant armored vehicles and equipment embossed with the country’s paramilitary logo. 

Taken together, the findings add weight to a growing number of reports that China, despite public denials, has been conducting security operations inside Afghanistan.
China’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment and directed questions to the Defense Ministry, which did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Tajikistan’s Foreign Ministry said there are “no People’s Republic of China military bases on the territory of the Republic of Tajikistan,” nor “any talks whatsoever” to establish one.
Analysts say the Chinese encountered by The Post may be paramilitary units under the command of the central military leadership but technically distinct from the People’s Liberation Army, China’s main war-fighting force.
U.S. officials say they are aware of the Chinese deployment but do not have a clear understanding of its operations. 

They say they do not object to the Chinese presence because the United States also believes that a porous ­Afghan-Tajik border could pose a security risk.

A satellite view of one of the Chinese outposts at the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan on Sept. 29.

Despite harboring concerns about militants in Afghanistan for decades, China has been loath to be seen as siding with any party in the conflict, much less to put boots on the ground.
Instead, China’s state-owned companies and banks have inked infrastructure deals, mining concessions and loans across Central and South Asia, the poor and turbulent belt that makes up its backyard. 

Its diplomats, who have robust ties with Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Taliban, have talked up China’s role as a regional peace broker — never a peacekeeper.
But China’s global posture is changing under Xi, who has shed the country’s long-standing isolationism and spoken loftily about restoring its great-power status.
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) strategists increasingly advocate for pushing beyond the Chinese mainland with deployments that follow in the wake of the country’s expanding “haiwailiyi,” or interests abroad, said Andrew Scobell, a Chinese security expert at the Rand Corp.
“China’s peaceful rise has encountered a complicated and severe situation,” Maj. Li Dong wrote in a 2016 journal article as part of a PLA assessment of China’s overseas military strategy. 

He pinpointed the Central Asian frontier as one of three top flash points along with the Korean Peninsula and the East and South China seas.
China’s deployments abroad lack strength and “flexibility,” Li wrote. 

“China should push the construction of its overseas military presence gradually.”

A rugged chessboard
In 2017, China unveiled a naval base in Djibouti that gave it a foothold in the Middle East and Africa. It steadily installed infrastructure — and later, weaponry — in the contested South China Sea. 

A recent Pentagon report predicted a PLA base could appear soon in Pakistan — a prospect China has denied.

Chinese troops visit the Murghab bazaar. 

Beijing’s moves have been similarly opaque in the rugged mountains spanning Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China: the same chessboard where czarist Russia and the British Empire vied for influence 150 years ago.
There will be “no Chinese military personnel of any kind on Afghan soil at any time,” Col. Wu Qian, the Defense Ministry’s spokesman, told reporters in August.
In private, the Chinese tell a slightly different story.
In late 2017, the Development Research Center, an influential think tank under China’s cabinet, invited a handful of Russian researchers to its central Beijing offices. 

In what was billed as a private seminar, the Chinese explained why China had a security presence in Tajikistan that extended into the Afghans’ Wakhan Corridor, according to Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a Russian participant.
The Chinese researchers took pains to describe the outpost as built for training and logistical purposes — not a military occupation. 

They also sought to gauge Russia’s reaction with questions: How would Moscow view China’s move into its traditional sphere of influence? 

Would it be more palatable if China deployed private mercenaries instead of uniformed men?
“They wanted to know what Russia’s red lines were,” said Gabuev, who has held similar conversations with scholars working under the Chinese intelligence agency. 

“They don’t want Russia blindsided.”
In the 1990s, a Uighur separatist group, calling itself the East Turkestan Independence Movement, rose in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban and threatened attacks against China. Although Western officials and analysts question the ETIM’s ability to carry out significant attacks, it heralded the beginning of an extremist threat facing China.
Since 2014, hundreds of Uighurs have left China for Syria, and Chinese officials, like their Western counterparts, have warned about the prospect of fighters there decamping for Central Asia as they lose territory. 

In 2016, the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan was targeted in a suicide bombing that Kyrgyz authorities attributed to the al-Nusra Front in Syria.

'You never saw us here'
To make the days-long overland journey across Tajikistan, from the capital, Dushanbe, to the remote canyon held by Chinese soldiers, is to witness a landscape altered by an even more irrepressible force than the troops: Chinese money.
In the west, Chinese-built coal-fired plants loom over the skyline, providing electricity and heat to the capital’s residents. 

In the east, Chinese-funded hospitals and schools rise from the hardscrabble countryside. 

In the south, Chinese-financed tracks circumvent a crucial Soviet-era railway that had been shut down by Tajikistan’s neighbor, Uzbekistan. 

Stitching it all together are Chinese-bored tunnels and ­Chinese-laid asphalt that cut hours off trips along the country’s winding east-west highway.

Murghab, established as an army outpost in the 1890s by Russian Cossacks, is about 85 miles north of the remote Chinese border outpost. 

The projects reflect Tajikistan’s strategic position in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, an ambitious infrastructure investment plan to pull the Eurasian land mass into its economic embrace. China, through a single state bank, held more than half of Tajikistan’s external debt as of 2016, up from none in 2006, according to 2017 Tajik Finance Ministry data.
In the soft-power stakes, the United States and Russia both appear to be losing relative ground to China, which provides scholarships for undergraduate Tajiks and military academy training for up-and-coming defense officials.
Susan M. Elliott, former U.S. ambassador to Tajikistan, said China’s generous aid and funding should be applauded but viewed with skepticism. 

In the past year, a handful of countries that have taken Chinese investments have reconsidered BRI deals amid allegations of corruption and low feasibility.
“If someone’s offering money to build roads and help put power lines up, it’s hard to turn that down when you have no alternative,” Elliott said. 

“This is a strategic and important part of the world, and we need to continue our strong partnerships with Tajikistan and other countries in the region.”
In many ways, the shifting geopolitical currents play out on the windy streets of Murghab, established as an army outpost in the 1890s by Russian Cossacks.
These days, it is Chinese troops who are dropping by in their unassuming minivans to pick up provisions.
Aiperi Bainazarova, a part-time manager at the only hotel in town, said locals believed there were hundreds of Chinese troops who stayed on base. 

They mostly come to town to buy phone credit. 

Sometimes they buy hundreds of kilograms of yak meat at the price of 30 somoni — about $3 — a kilo, she said.
“It helps the economy,” said Bainazarova, 21, an ethnic Kyrgyz who studied on a Chinese government scholarship in Shanghai.
Despite the Chinese government’s insistence on keeping things secret, its troops’ periodic visits to Murghab’s bazaar, a row of shipping containers converted into storefronts, are anything but.

Safarmo Toshmamadov is a shopkeeper in Murghab. Some of her customers are Chinese troops. 

Safarmo Toshmamadov, a 53-year-old ethnic Pamir shopkeeper, said they have come to her for maybe three years. 

Some attempt a few words of Russian — although they always come accompanied by Tajik interpreters, she said.
“We don’t think about them, and they don’t bother us,” Toshmamadov said, shrugging. 

“They buy my water and snacks. It’s good.”
One afternoon outside Toshmamadov’s store, a Post reporter saw Ma, the Chinese soldier, who was initially surprised to encounter another Chinese speaker.
He spoke guardedly but affably about his deployment, which he explained was secret.
“You should know our government’s standard policies around revealing information,” he said. 

“So don’t tell your friends.”
When asked to pose for a photo together, Ma recoiled.
“Remember,” he said, walking away. 

“You never saw us here.”

China's Paranoia Gives Its Neighbors Nightmares

From Russia to Central Asia, Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative triggers bad memories of Chinese imperialism.
BY ROBERT DALY, MATTHEW ROJANSKY
Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev on May 9, 2015 in Moscow, Russia. 

In 1904, Halford Mackinder theorized that whichever nation ruled the “World-Island” of Africa, Asia, and Europe would “command the world.”

One hundred and nine years later, in Astana, Kazakhstan, Xi Jinping made his move, declaring himself the prophet and China the engine of Afro-Eurasian integration. 

The era of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) diplomacy had begun.
The World-Island quickly proved too small for Xi’s vision. 

One month after the Astana speech, Xi went to Jakarta to announce that China would “strengthen maritime cooperation with ASEAN countries … and vigorously develop maritime partnership in a joint effort to build the Maritime Silk Road.” 

In January, Foreign Minister Wang Yi invited more than 30 Latin American and Caribbean nations to join the BRI. 

Days later, the State Council issued a white paper on China’s Arctic strategy whose final sentence encouraged Arctic Council members — which, unlike China, actually border the Arctic — to work with China to “participate in the governance of the Arctic, and advance Arctic-related cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative.”
From South America to the North Pole, the BRI posits China as the overlord of global integration. But Beijing’s neighbors are rather more skeptical.
The authors recently visited Beijing, Astana, and Moscow to gauge how Xi’s vision jibes with those of Eurasian neighbors whose cooperation is essential to the BRI’s success. 

We found an eagerness to participate in projects that support national development, but deep resistance to any westward or northern expansion of China’s practices, ideas, or population. 

As the region’s newest capital, Astana might be expected to showcase Eurasian ambitions, but with the exception of a Chinese-built hotel, there is not a trace of Sinophilia in the city. 

Storefronts and skyscrapers are ablaze with Cyrillic and English; there is barely a Chinese character in sight. 

Russia remains determinedly Slavic and European; its stylistic and ideological orientations are wholly occidental. 

Neither country hopes that China’s power will increase with its investments.

China’s strategic logic
Xi Jinping either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care. 

While Mackinder thought any World-Island hegemon must first rule Eastern Europe, Xi is confident that history proves the key to continental control lies in China. 

In September 2013, he told the Kazakhs that “more than 2,100 years ago … imperial envoy Zhang Qian was sent to Central Asia twice to open the door to friendly contacts between China and Central Asian countries as well as the transcontinental Silk Road linking East and West.” 

That October, Xi said in his address to the Indonesian parliament that “Southeast Asia has since ancient times been an important hub along the ancient Maritime Silk Road.”
The implication was that premodern Eurasian and Southeast Asian trade was driven by China, a distinctly revisionist view. 

The term “Silk Road” was coined in 1877 by a German geographer to connote the historic phenomenon of Eurasian trade rather than a particular route.
The Silk Road was not Sinocentric, nor was it a road. 

Xi’s mythologizing of the Silk Road also elides the fact that soldiers as well as salesmen moved along the storied routes. 

Zhang Qian’s true mission was not to establish a free trade regime — Eurasian economic exchange began millennia before he was born — but to convince nomad peoples to ally with China in a war against Turkic tribes in what is now East Turkestan and Central Asia. 

Xi’s paeans to Eurasian integration may skip China’s violent expansion, but that history has not been forgotten by China’s neighbors.
Xi’s historical references elide the deeper strategy of motivating China’s present-day BRI campaign. China is in the midst of what it calls a “period of strategic opportunity” resulting from its rapid rise and the slow growth of the West since 2008. 

For Beijing, the financial crisis ended China’s 30-year economic apprenticeship to the United States and put the lie to the universalist claims of American values and the American-led world order. 

Xi and his colleagues believe their strategic opportunity has been extended by the decline in American prestige since the 2016 election and by Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. 

They see the epicenter of global power shifting East.
It’s hard to argue the point. 

While the United States is an obstacle on China’s maritime borders, it barely registers as an annoyance when China looks west, across Central Asia, to Europe. 

There, China hopes to employ its foreign exchange reserves, which are the largest in the world, its construction expertise, the lending power of its state-run banks, and its excess (and world-leading) capacity in steel, aluminum, and concrete production, to integrate not only infrastructure but information flows, financial systems, and customs clearance practices as well, winning deference in the process.
Beijing doesn’t disguise the self-interest woven into the BRI. 

In China’s telling, the BRI will be good for everyone, but especially good for China. 

As a People’s Daily “manifesto” published in early 2018 put it: “The world needs China … That creates broad strategic room for our efforts to uphold peace and development and gain an advantage” (emphasis added). 

At a private meeting held in Washington in February, a Beijing-based scholar twice confided that the true purpose of the BRI was to internationalize China’s currency, the renminbi. 

By making the renminbi the official currency of BRI transactions, the scholar explained, China would challenge the U.S. dollar’s status as the premier mode of global exchange even though the renminbi is tightly managed by Beijing. 

China will require participants in BRI projects to accept Chinese standards of justice as well as its currency. 

In an underreported story, China is setting up new courts in Beijing, Xian, and Shenzhen to adjudicate BRI disputes.
The praise lavished on Xi and the BRI by China’s party-media, furthermore, suggest the BRI is less about benefitting China’s partners than strengthening domestic support for China’s Communist Party. 

Chinese enthusiasm for Xi’s vision is reaching absurd heights. 

At a Beijing conference which the authors attended in late 2017, a Chinese foreign-policy analyst claimed that Xi’s vision could not only guide the peaceful development of the human race, but would benefit non-human animal species and plants as well. 

There is reason to think such fulsome nonsense, now as during the Mao era, serves to mask Chinese doubts about the wisdom of the BRI.
Nonetheless, China’s framing of Eurasian integration now drives policy discussions worldwide; it is the BRI, not Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union or the United States’ all-but-forgotten New Silk Road initiative that captures imaginations and headlines. 

No one can accuse Xi of thinking small. 

Eurasia and Africa, which remain the short-term focus of the BRI, comprise 57 percent of the world’s landmass, 86 percent of its population, and 65 percent of its GDP. 

The BRI vision — the economic integration of these regions through infrastructure — would be a historic achievement. 

It is already accepted as commonplace that existing regional transportation networks cannot be connected, nor can new ones be built, unless China plays a major role in the financing and construction of highways, rail systems, pipelines, and ports.
But Xi’s BRI plan is as vague as its promised $1 trillion in investments is enticing. 

Despite Xi’s lofty promises, China’s total foreign direct investments have grown along the same trajectory established before the BRI was announced, and actually fell in BRI nations in 2016. 

And though it’s early days for the BRI, the program has so far generated few smashing successes and experts remain skeptical that Eurasian rail networks can ever compete with the low costs of ocean transport. 

Nor is it clear that China’s branding, cash, and ambition can overcome the uneven development, political and cultural diversity, age-old hatreds, and daunting geography of the World-Island.
Accordingly, reactions to China’s proffered largesse have been mixed. 

Russia, Kazakhstan, and even Pakistan harbor deep suspicions despite official enthusiasm. 

The G-7 nations, India, and Japan have declined to endorse the initiative despite China’s constant pleading, primarily because they see the BRI as China’s bid for global dominance. 

Despite doubts about the feasibility and revisionist tendencies of the BRI, however, Xi’s signature program is winning support from Thailand to Tajikistan to Greece. 

Seventy-one countries have “joined” the initiative, although it is not clear what joining entails.
But while Xi speaks in certainties, China’s Russian and Kazakh partners are more circumspect. 

They welcome Chinese investment when it suits them, but do not embrace Xi’s calls for a “community of common future” overseen by a "benevolent" China. 

Such doubts need not be fatal to Eurasian infrastructure integration, but widespread unease over China’s growing power indicates that many of China’s neighbors will not march under Beijing’s banner, even if they benefit from its wealth.

Moscow’s Eurasian pivot
In the aftermath of its annexation of Crimea, Moscow can hardly reproach Beijing for advancing expansive territorial ambitions by creating facts on the ground. 

Both Russia and China regularly trumpet the primacy of sovereignty in international relations, yet neither shows much deference to the sovereignty of smaller neighbors. 

Such attitudes have strained China’s ties with the West, and have utterly upended Russia’s relations with the United States and Europe, and thus driven Russia’s own “pivot” toward China and the Asia-Pacific. 

For Moscow, China’s enthusiasm for enhanced Eurasian connectivity comes just in time, as Russia finds itself increasingly cut off from Western markets.
Of course, Russians are not only looking eastward out of pique or desperation. 

Russian officials and experts talk explicitly about China’s “return to its natural place in East Asia” and insist that they cannot miss the opportunity to be a part of China’s and Asia’s rise. 

At the same time, Russians recognize that their relatively small demographic and economic presence in East Asia will not alone secure them a leadership role in the resurgent, realigned region. 

They hope to compensate for these limitations by capitalizing on their strength as a security and geopolitical actor in the region, and on warm personal ties between the Russian and Chinese leaders. It is against this backdrop that Vladimir Putin proposed a “greater Eurasian partnership,” also dubbed the “integration of integrations,” as a path to connecting the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union with China’s Belt and Road.
The Russian-Chinese strategic partnership announced in 2012 was hardly a conceptual breakthrough. Moscow and Beijing signed partnership agreements in 1994 and 1996 and concluded a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 2001. 

For years, they have sought to coordinate positions in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS, the G-20, and of course, the U.N. Security Council. 

When asked about his most important foreign-policy achievement at the end of his second presidential term in 2008, Putin cited the settlement of a long-simmering border dispute with China. In case there was any doubt about warming relations, in 2006 and 2007 the two countries declared reciprocal years of Russia and China to celebrate trade and cultural and political ties.
Yet Russians recognize that China’s growing weight and ambition will test the durability of their own position in East Asia. 

Like their Western counterparts, Russians are watching Chinese investments in Eurasian infrastructure closely, and say they will assess the significance of the Belt and Road based neither on fears nor promises, but on real-world results. 

One such outcome was described to us by a Russian businessman who cautioned that while Chinese business partners would never make overt political demands, transactions with them would eventually be conducted entirely in renminbi, and supply chains would be reoriented entirely toward Chinese manufacturers. 

As one Russian official put it to us, “Chinese culture does not orient to domination — they simply see themselves as the center of the world.”
Russia’s enthusiasm for increased Eurasian economic connectivity is partly an expression of its frustration with Europe and the United States. 

It is not only that Western sanctions are damaging to Russia’s economy — they are, though that has not changed the Kremlin’s policies in Ukraine or Syria — but rather that they are marks of continuing disregard for what Russia sees as its rightful stature. 

Some Russians still think in terms of a geopolitical “triangle,” with the United States, Russia, and China at the corners, while others are convinced that a new Cold War looms between Washington and Beijing.
Either way, many Russians consider China’s rise the leading indicator of the West’s decline, and they expect this fact to force concessions from Washington and Brussels over time, including the end of economic and political punishments imposed on Russia after 2014. 

For Russians who share this view, pursuing economic integration with the East is, ironically, largely about securing better relations with the West. 

But Russians may be mixing metaphors in their conjuring of the BRI as a counterweight to Western pressure and isolation. 

After all, Russia matters most of all for China as a potential land corridor to Europe, whose half-billion wealthy consumers are the largest single market for Chinese goods.

Kazakhstan: the buckle in the belt?
Kazakhstan is landlocked and sparsely populated, though rich in energy and other natural resources. Hemmed in by the behemoths, Russia and China, and saddled with the legacies of rule from Moscow during the tsarist and Soviet periods, Kazakhstan has no shortage of geopolitical challenges. 

So Kazakh officials are justifiably proud of having secured their country’s sovereignty, built a relatively stable, prosperous economy, and forged a distinctive but still pluralistic national identity over the past three decades. 

A sense of that determination and pride comes across when Kazakhstan’s leaders refer to their nation as the “buckle” in China’s BRI.
Kazakhstan’s geography makes it central to the belt. 

The most efficient land route from Western China to Eastern Europe passes through Kazakhstan en route to Russia. 

The rail journey from China to Europe over this route now takes about 14 days, but Kazakh officials aim to bring that down to 10 through physical infrastructure enhancements and streamlining border crossings. 

Kazakhstan’s participation as a core member of the Eurasian Economic Union with Russia and Belarus means that customs are standardized across all three former Soviet states, so that — at least in theory — shipments should be held for inspection only once at each end of the route, where trains must shuttle between standard (European and Chinese) and wider (Russian and Kazakh) gauges. Climate-controlled rail cars moving swiftly from Chinese factories to European markets in less than two weeks promise to revolutionize trade in high value-added products such as advanced electronics. European producers aim to fill returning rail cars with food and luxury items that find eager buyers in China.
Kazakhstan, while hardly a poor country, is acutely aware of the need for new sources of growth and a development vision that looks beyond energy exports. 

Connecting Eurasia may offer the opportunity not only to boost Kazakhstan’s own trade with China and Europe, but to extract transit fees provided rail volumes continue growing as they have over the past decade, from 1,200 containers in 2011 to over 200,000 in 2017. 

Moreover, Kazakh leaders argue that the construction of transportation infrastructure connecting the country’s own eastern and western regions has particular value for a country that has historically been focused on north-south linkages. 

This is why, according to officials, Kazakhstan invested $5 billion of its own sovereign wealth in BRI infrastructure projects, including construction of what is meant to be the world’s largest dry port facility at Khorgos. 

“When China proposed the [BRI] idea,” one Kazakh expert explained, “they found a very motivated partner.”
So much for the attraction of the BRI for Kazakhstan. 

What about the risks? 

For now, Kazakh officials insist they have relations with both Russia and China well in hand. 

They are confident in their ability to keep trade and investment separate from politics and security. Whereas Moscow’s pivot eastward was a largely political decision, they argue, for Astana it’s just good business, with no political component. 

Yet while Kazakhstan has paid for its share of infrastructure construction the Chinese have invested nearly $30 billion across more than 50 projects as well. 

In fact, China is now the leading foreign investor in all five of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, Kazakh students are increasingly studying abroad in China (some 40,000 to date), and Chinese workers have flocked to attractive jobs in pipeline, rail and other construction projects, especially in Western Kazakhstan.
How close is too close for comfort? 

Although Kazakhs embrace their status as a “truly Eurasian” country, they have absorbed Eurocentric views about China from their long association with Russia, while channeling insecurities and prejudices of their own. 

Kazakh-Chinese projects to connect Eurasia may be all business for both sides, but they are hardly equal partnerships. 

As one Kazakh expert queried, “how could we integrate with 1.5 billion people?” 

In 2016, thousands of Kazakhs protested over a proposed land reform that critics argued would result in Chinese buying up too much Kazakh soil. 

Arms-length business ties may suit Kazakhstan, but China will almost inevitably seek more respect, and much more control, as its investment in the region continues to grow. 

“Remember,” cautioned one well-placed international observer in Astana, “that the biggest central Asian country is western China.”
Like most of China’s neighbors, Kazakhstan and Russia judge China’s intentions not by China’s dubious historiography and lofty rhetoric, but in light of their own experience, interests, and vulnerabilities. 

They are enticed by China’s deep pockets, but unconvinced of its good will. 

Considering the sensitivities of its neighbors, Beijing may be wise to keep its BRI vision vague and to let the program evolve gradually. 

It runs the risk, however, that this lack of specificity will be read as a cover for Chinese self-interest. China’s prospective partners across Central Asia and Eastern Europe, after all, are no strangers to imperialist plots and bristle at any hint of cultural condescension, economic exploitation, or encroachment on their sovereignty.
Despite Xi Jinping’s difficulty in translating his vision to foreign and domestic skeptics, the BRI has become a global force, both symbolically and as an engine for real investment. 

As Eurasian integration evolves, and if China continues to adjust its practices as a world power, the BRI may achieve many of its goals. 

It is unlikely, however, that the nations of the World-Island, many of which are proud civilization-states, will embrace Chinese leadership. 

Even if the BRI helps to forge a Eurasian logistical network, its anxious beneficiaries are not likely to give China the deference it seeks.
China’s response to that disappointment will be the true measure of its Eurasian dreams.

Axis of Evil

The Quiet Rivalry Between China and Russia
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative, an economic expansion plan that follows the trade routes of the medieval Tang and Yuan dynasties across Eurasia, is overly ambitious because, like all grand strategies, it is aspirational. 

Yet the future of Eurasia is written into its design.
This new Silk Road serves several goals of China’s leaders, who are intent on making their country a full-fledged superpower. 

It is a branding operation for many of the roads, bridges, pipelines and railroads that China has already built, linking it with the former-Soviet-controlled countries of energy-rich Central Asia. 

In the process, One Belt, One Road seeks to develop — and at the same time surround — the Muslim region of China that abuts Central Asia.
Further westward, China intends to create an organic alliance with Iran, a state that because of its immense size, location and population, as well as its long imperial tradition, functions as the fulcrum for the Middle East and Central Asia.
The larger Chinese goal is to dominate Eurasia, which means relegating Russia to a second-tier power.
China and Russia share a land border of more than 2,600 miles, an interminable stretch of birch forest separating mainly the Russian Far East from Chinese Manchuria, whose particulars were formally agreed upon only in the last decade. 

In 1969, the dispatch of about 30 Soviet divisions to this border, and China’s deployment of 59 divisions in response, deepened the Chinese-Soviet split and allowed for Richard Nixon’s opening to China and his détente with the Soviet Union.
In few areas is the Russian state so feeble as in its far east. 

The ethnic Russian population is only an estimated 6 million. 

Chinese migrants are moving steadily north into this vastly underpopulated Siberian back-of-beyond, rich in the natural gas, oil, timber, diamonds and gold that China covets. 

China lost part of this region to Russia only in the 19th century, when the Qing dynasty was in its death throes, and the rest in the 20th century.
At the same time, China is vanquishing Russia in Central Asia. 

In the last decade, the China National Petroleum Corporation has become Central Asia’s main energy player. 

China pumps Kazakh oil to Europe and also to China through a pipeline, and the Chinese transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to western China. 

Chinese money has also been coursing through Central Asia to build power grids and transportation infrastructure, altering the landscape and forming the backbone of the One Belt, One Road plan.
The prize is Iran. 

Lying at the other end of Central Asia from China, Iran has 80 million people and straddles the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf, providing Beijing with the incentive to build rail lines through the Iranian plateau, make energy deals with Tehran, use Chinese state companies to excavate Iranian mines, and send armies of entrepreneurs there. 

Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union, including Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, was formed in 2014 to counter China’s growing influence in Eurasia.
Russia is not only losing out to China in its far east and Central Asia, but in Europe, too. 

While Moscow has been undermining the independence of the former Soviet republics in the Baltic and Black Sea basins through subversion and military incursions, Beijing has been strengthening trade ties throughout Europe. 

The Trump administration’s aversion to free trade — combined with its apparent ambivalence about defending European allies — has provided China with an opportunity in Europe, further enhancing Beijing’s plans for the western terminus of One Belt, One Road. 

China’s gains will weaken not only American influence in Europe, but Russian influence, too.
For example, Greece, because of its tensions with the European Union and its Orthodox religion, should be drifting closer to Russia. 

But it is slipping into China’s economic grasp, as the port of Piraeus becomes another western endpoint of the new Silk Road. 

China is also competing for nuclear power plants and other energy infrastructure in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic. 

Vladimir Putin’s compulsion to challenge the West — while China under Xi Jinping is quietly on the march all around him — demonstrates his strategic shortsightedness at a time of Russian economic vulnerability.
China and Russia refer to their relationship as a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” in which Russia supplies oil to China and the two countries hold joint military exercises. 

And, officially, their relationship has rarely been better.
But trade is lopsided in China’s favor; the fall in energy prices has made China considerably less dependent on Russia. 

Russia sells arms to China’s adversaries, India and Vietnam. 

And China has copied Russian weapons designs.
These deeper geopolitical realities mean China and Russia will be only allies of convenience. 

And because the Beijing-Moscow rivalry is long-term, understated and focused on remote terrain, thus lacking in appeal for the news media, it is easy to ignore.
China’s geopolitical ambitions, like Russia’s, arise out of internal insecurity. 

The Chinese state is weakest in the west — that is in East Turkestan — home to the Muslim Turkic Uighur minority, which the dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese, view with trepidation.
Islam represents an alternative identity for the Uighurs, one independent of the Chinese state. 

Unlike the Tibetans with their Dalai Lama, the Uighurs don’t have an elite leadership with which to communicate with Beijing. 

Rather, they embody an anarchic force that could be provoked into upheaval by an environmental disaster or other emergency. 

China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, by joining the rest of Turkic Central Asia economically and politically closer to China, is meant in part to deny the Uighurs a rear base in an uprising.
China can be stopped only by its own internal demons. 

As Samuel P. Huntington wrote in his classic 1968 study, “Political Order in Changing Societies,” the more complex a society gets, the more responsive its institutions must become, otherwise the creation of a large middle class is destabilizing.
China’s autocracy, precisely because of its successes, could face a crisis of legitimacy as social, ethnic and religious tensions intensify in both Han and Uighur areas, especially in the event of any further slowdowns in economic growth that thwart the rising expectations of its people. 

That’s why the ultimate success of One Belt, One Road will be determined less by what happens in Central Asia and elsewhere than by what happens inside China itself.
The United States, which has longtime allies to defend against Chinese bullying in East Asia and against Russian bullying in Central and Eastern Europe, is helped by the quiet geopolitical rivalry between Beijing and Moscow. 

Because the contest between China and Russia is largely determined by their geographical proximity and therefore must persist, America will have the greater possibility to maneuver, hardening or softening its position toward each power as the situation demands.
The United States must only prevent China from dominating the Eastern Hemisphere to the same extent that it has dominated the Western Hemisphere. 

But it must do this without selling out Central Europe and parts of the Middle East to Russia.
The solution to this conundrum for the United States lies outside geopolitics. 

It is precisely because Washington has no territorial ambitions in Eurasia that Americans are not viewed with suspicion by local populations there the way the Chinese and Russians are. 

By relentlessly promoting free trade, human rights and civil society America will gain credibility with societies undergoing rapid social transformation across the region.
This is how the United States gains entry into Eurasia without crudely trying to balance one power off against the other at a moment when the Chinese-Russian rivalry is far more subtle than it was in Nixon’s time. 

The very economic development that China promotes will make societies along the path of the new Silk Road — particularly in the sterile dictatorships of Iran and Central Asia — harder to manage, and thus to rule.
It is precisely the universal values that Trump disdains that can now pay geopolitical dividends. 

A populist-nationalist agenda that confines American interests to North America will only marginalize the United States on the other side of the world.