Posts tagged Central Asia

A “New Silk Road” bypassing China?

By Martin Saxer | October 29, 2011

Ideas of a “New Silk Road” through Afghanistan, linking Central Asia with Pakistan, have been floating around in American thinktanks for a couple years. In view of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the plans seem to become more concrete. Hillary Cinton and President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov discussed the matter last week. A pipeline bringing gas from Turkmenistan to South Asia, improved road and rail links, and an Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement are on the agenda. An upcoming meetings in Istanbul on 2 November is designed to promote the idea. Dawn/AFP quote an American official: “It’s part of a wider effort to help to build up the Afghan private sector, to help create sustainable economic development in Afghanistan, to create this economic integration between South and Central Asia”.

In Pakistan, however, an other dimension of the upcoming talks is highlighted, namely the absence of China and what that means for Pakistan. Yesterday’s editorial in the Express Tribune summarises these reservations and puts them into perspective:

Some commentators in Pakistan are looking at this development as a strategy to cut China off from Central Asia and bring the United States into the region ‘by other means’. Pakistan therefore is being presented as a victim of an either/or situation: join the Northern Silk Road Project and ditch China or keep out of the project and prove its strategic loyalty to China who is presumed to be an outsider opposed to the project. This is a wrong assumption because China is very much there in Central Asia and any Silk Road Project will redound to its regional advantage. The project may at best be negatively described as a plan to diversify the rapidly developing economic domination of China in the region.

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Border revisions in Central Asia

By Martin Saxer | July 30, 2011

Stephen Blank (China Brief vol.11, issue 14) on the tendency that the PRC seeks to renegotiate its Central Asian borders demarcated during the 1990s.

In the last several years, we see repeated instances of China “rectifying” these border treaties, primarily, but not exclusively, with Central Asian states, to reclaim previously conceded territory. At the time of the original treaties, China’s position had been quite concessionary.  The most recent example of this process is the Sino-Tajik agreement that was ratified in January 2011.  This agreement—allegedly based on a prior accord between the two governments in 2002 that was reiterated in 2010—cedes about 1,000 square kilometers, or about one percent of Tajikistan, in the sparsely populated Pamir Mountains to China.

China Brief is published by The Jamestown Foundation, which, according to the slogan on their website, provides “information without political agenda, from Eurasia, China, and the world of terrorism”.

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Henryk Szadziewski: The Uyghurs, China and Central Asia

By Martin Saxer | July 28, 2011

Henryk Szadziewski for openDemocracy on the problems Uyghurs face in Central Asia:

The post-Soviet era and the years of “war on terror” have seen the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in central Asia, punctured by episodes of domestic conflict (as in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan). The region’s political leaders, seeking to maintain themselves in power, find China’s mix of one-party rule and economic dynamism an attractive model.  Since the establishment of the SCO, their countries’ trade with China has grown substantially. [...]

This developing economic relationship, underpinned by a shared ideology of power, equates for the Uyghurs to more repression. Uyghurs, and in particular refugees in central Asia, exist in the shadows of the international community and of transnational organisation such as the SCO. They need more protection by mandated international agencies from the reach of the Chinese state.

(Via ETH Zurich, International Relation and Security Network. Szadziewski manages the Uyghur Human Rights Project)

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Hannah Beech: The New Great Game

By Martin Saxer | July 26, 2011

Hannah Beech for Time Magazin:

This year, Kazakhstan’s trade with China will likely surpass its trade with Russia; Hu has predicted trade levels will double within four years to $40 billion. “The whole of Kazakhstan has a population that’s smaller than one of our big cities,” says Liu Wei, a Sinopec employee in Atyrau, referring to the Central Asian nation’s 16 million people. “But it has so many natural resources. What’s the problem if we want to buy them and help make Kazakhstan rich?”

But money is just part of the equation. China is leveraging its growing clout in neighboring Kazakhstan to put pressure on the tens of thousands of ethnic Uighurs who over the decades have fled across the border from Xinjiang to escape persecution by the Chinese. Central Asia’s latest Great Game thus has it all: intense competition among three big powers, high stakes for natural resources and communal strife. But there is little question about who is now ahead in the game. Says Nurlan Keikin, the managing director for capital construction and reconstruction at the Atyrau refinery: “We all know the future is China’s.”

It’s a good read but I am sceptical about the new Great Game thesis. The 19th century Great Game was one between two empires – the British and the Russian. Today, there are more powers involved and Central Asian polititians take a much more active part in playing the different interests against each other. Kazakhstan, for example, is also part of the Customs Union with Russia and has its own agenda in the recent energy row between Russia and Kyrgyzstan. There is nothing to win for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan in taking sides with either Russia or China. There is nothing to loose enganging with both.

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