In May, Xi Jinping diverted the world’s attention from the G7 summit in Hiroshima through the inaugural China-Central Asia Summit. In the ancient city of Xi’an, capital of the historiographically glorified Tang empire and the starting point of the Silk Road, leaders of the five Central Asian countries – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan – met with the Chinese president to discuss cooperation.
For China, the summit was historic. From the Tang era, Central Asia had proved strategically vital to the Middle Kingdom for housing the Silk Road – China’s gateway to the West. While medieval camels have been replaced by trains, the logic is unchanged – goods flow from Europe to China through Central Asia and vice versa. Apart from serving as the middleman between Europe and China, Central Asia also possesses abundant reserves of oil, gas, and coal which fuel China’s economic machine. Kazakhstan alone exports over 80,000 tonnes of oil a month to China. It is therefore almost a geopolitical necessity that China maintains good relations with the region as one of her economic lifelines. Central Asia is a region of focus in Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), through which China invested a whopping $136 billion in the region.
In Xi’an, these efforts apparently paid off. Xi confirmed the support of the Central Asian leaders on the construction of two cross-border railways: the Ayagoz-Tacheng railway connecting China and Kazakhstan, and, more importantly, the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway, which offers a shorter route from China to Europe. While the CKU railway had been proposed as early as 1997, a preliminary agreement was only reached last year. The Kyrgyz and Uzbek presidents pledged speedy construction of the railways, adding resilience to China’s western transport hub. With further improvements in infrastructure came the facilitation of bilateral trade and investment, as the leaders agreed to closer cooperation between China and Central Asia with a promise to deepen commercial ties.
It is no doubt that China won a resounding victory in Xi’an, but her triumph was not without ills, especially when considered in the broader diplomatic context. Not only did it place a further straw on the already cracking camel’s back – that is, Chinese relations with the West – but it also wounded the scarred skin of Sino-Russian relations. Beijing faced two diplomatic trade-offs in Xi’an: influence over Central Asia versus friendship with Moscow, and manoeuvring Xi’an as the latest ‘wolf warrior’ stunt versus sticking to the original ‘March West’ strategy which seeks a peaceful, low-risk rise in a balanced, non-provocative way. The Chinese leaders chose the former for both, and whether those were the correct decisions remains debatable.
China and Russia: the inevitable zero-sum game
Central Asia has, since Mackinder, been valued as the ‘pivot area’ in which land powers – in this case, China and Russia – compete to project their power over the entire continent. Its strategic importance to China has been explained above. The case for Russia is more complex. The Eurasian bear has always regarded Central Asia as her ‘backyard’. Russian control over the steppes can be dated to the Tsarist era. While Russian rule formally ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Moscow’s suzerainty over the region endured and continued to be respected in the international community. The Central Asian Five participate in the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), and are, with the sole exception of Uzbekistan, all members of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), the weakened regional successor to the Warsaw Pact. Russia maintains considerable interests in the region, in particular in the energy sector, as Gazprom dominates the production of oil in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and gas in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Russia’s key to maintaining her empire has been her monopolisation of the region. Over the years, she has been largely successful thanks to the structural advantage she inherited from the Tsars and the Soviets, whose development of the region served primarily Russian interests. Central Asia is locked in an infrastructure which renders it dependent on its former coloniser to the north. 80% of Kazakhstan’s oil exports flow via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium which runs through Russia. Most Kazakh and Uzbek railways have to join the Russian Trans-Siberian network to reach Europe. The military prowess of Russia has also kept Central Asia under Moscow’s wing. Russia equips the five nations with advanced arms which they cannot obtain on their own, from selling T-90 tanks to Turkmenistan to offering discounted Mi-35M military helicopters to Uzbekistan. Apart from weaponry, the safety Russia guarantees for the five dictators – whether it be against extremist insurgencies like the IS-Khorasan or against internal unrest like Kazakhstan 2022 – has led them to allow Moscow to maintain a considerable military presence in the region in the form of widespread military bases, such as the 201st Military Base in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe and the Kant air base near the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek.
Increased Chinese engagement with Central Asia following Xi’an is a game-changer. The historic summit marked two significant changes in Sino-Central Asian diplomacy: first, its focus was shifted from infrastructure development to a newfound China-led regional integration; second, security as a new guiding paradigm was firmly established. Effectively ending Russian monopoly in the region both economically and militarily, Beijing was dissolving Moscow’s empire and turning Sino-Russian dynamics from win-win to zero-sum – with inevitable seeds of discord sowed between the powers.
The first change certified the death of Russian economic suzerainty. While the BRI had diminished it, China had avoided being directly at odds with Russia’s economic designs for the region, namely the establishment of a common market and free movement of goods within the EEU. By dedicating BRI to the cause of ‘increasing interconnectivity’ and dismissing alleged plans to create a free trade area, Xi had alleviated Russian worries by marketing BRI as complementary to EEU, even signing a declaration with Putin in 2015 ‘in coordinating development’ of the two projects. China had also executed the BRI within the existing Russian-oriented framework, in which Russia had remained a crucial transit country for railway projects like the Western Europe-Western China expressway. Before Xi’an, Russia had acquiesced to Chinese expansion because Moscow had had something to gain. But in Xi’an, Beijing’s policy of not antagonising Moscow ended. Xi pursued a more ambitious grand strategy of creating a ‘community of common destiny’ between China and Central Asia, which essentially translates to integration. Moscow is excluded in nearly all aspects of this pursuit of ‘common destiny’ – with the CKU railway, Russia is losing her role as a transit hub, while with the China-Central Asia summit becoming a biannual event, Beijing can circumvent Moscow in its engagement with the Central Asian countries, which had hitherto been primarily through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, of which Russia is an influential founding member.
The second change is even more ground-breaking. While Chinese presence in the region had been restricted to economics (which is a reason for Russia’s acquiescence), in Xi’an, ‘security’, a word that appeared 21 times in the resulting joint declaration, became just as important as trade and investments. This was a direct challenge to Moscow, which had been embarrassed by Astana’s refusal to support Russian war efforts in Ukraine. Central Asia’s collective turning to Beijing for security implied the perceived weakness of Moscow, and its emergence as the true security threat under a warmonger committed to undoing Soviet dissolution. Meanwhile, China’s rushing to supplant Russia as the region’s protector put a blunt end to Putin’s Eurasianist dreams.
The Sino-Russian Great Game has begun. While China is perceived as a silent supporter of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, geopolitics destine the two to clash in the long run. China is leading the early game, and Russia is unlikely to turn the tides in the near future as her war becomes increasingly disastrous. Yet the cost Beijing has to bear for this victory is the alienation of a key ally against the US-led international order. Hal Brands analysed for Foreign Policy the damage an anti-American Eurasian bloc would deal to Washington, but with the Great Game onset, whether such an alliance could realise becomes questionable. Xi’an, then, is the watershed of not only Central Asian politics but also what the US calls the struggle of democracy against autocracy, as the two ends of the autocratic axis embark on a zero-sum, open-ended tug of war. China’s net loss in this trade-off depends on 1) whether Russia can recover as a great military power, and 2) whether China can grow strong enough to confront the US on her own. Her best case scenario would be that Moscow accepts vassalage to Beijing in the same way Mussolini did to Hitler, but given Putin’s unyieldingness, this is highly unlikely.
China and the US: the unnecessary zero-sum game
Xi’s ambitious Weltpolitik has led us to forget the original intention of revitalising the Silk Road was a pragmatist one. Devised by the Chinese IR theorist Wang Jisi in 2012, this strategy of ‘March West’ was designed to de-risk Sino-American relations by diversifying China’s strategic interest, which had exclusively been in Asia-Pacific, into her west, including Central Asia. Wang argues should Sino-American relations remain entangled in East Asia, zero-sum dynamics will drive the two to collision – a scenario which can be avoided in Central Asia where power relations are more dynamic and the room for cooperation is larger. Wang notes that for this strategy to succeed, China has to calm her nationalist nerves and confrontative narratives so that cooperation can be fostered.
Ultimately, the appeal for China to march into Central Asia lies in the non-existence of a Sino-American zero-sum game there. Unlike the case of Russia, Chinese gains there are not naturally American losses, especially after Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan which left a huge security void requiring someone to fill. But Beijing was transmitting the opposite. The collision in timing of Xi’an and Hiroshima was the best signal that Xi wished to orchestrate a competition with G7. Then, from spokesperson Hua Chunying’s provocative tweet that asked ‘G7 = World?’ to head of Asian affairs Liu Jingsong’s remark of the ‘stark contrast’ Xi’an posed to Hiroshima, Chinese diplomats repeatedly put the Chinese and G7 summits on opposing fronts. The success of Xi’an was measured not by its own achievements but by its supremacy over Hiroshima. What could have been a win-win situation turned zero-sum at the hands of the wolf warriors.
Beijing’s approach to Xi’an was another demonstration of the logic that for China to exist, the US has to cease to exist. The two nations are now virtually trapped in a curious ontological relationship in which the existence of one nation is not in her own right but relative to that of the other. Foreign policies formulated following this logic are destined to be reactionary, guided by a zero-sum doctrine according to which the opponent’s losses take precedence before the self’s gains. The US had been plagued by this thinking, showing no clear direction in her China policy other than reactions towards Beijing’s provocations from the spy balloon to TikTok. Xi’an proved the same applied to China.
‘Great power diplomacy’ does not equal an all-rounded zero-sum diplomacy. Utilising Xi’an as a wolf warrior stunt is unnecessary and dangerous. Engagement with Central Asia was supposed to be a regional issue that did not necessarily concern the distant US, which had limited her interests there after a costly war with the Taliban. Allowing Weltpolitik to subsume all aspects of foreign policy is misguided and hubristic. When the primary raison d’être of a country’s foreign policy is not her raison d’état but the anti-raison d’état of a rival, the world is steered to a bipolar standoff, rather than the multipolar order Xi has stressed and can use to court like-minded leaders like Macron and Lula. History has taught us bipolar thinking catalyses the fulfilment of the Thucydides prophecy, and when the time comes, the outcome may not always be predictable, let alone favourable – a lesson Wilhelm II learnt brutally which Xi may want to revisit.