The national bureau of asian research

Central Asia
China and Russia are both collaborators and sparring partners in Central Asia. Long closed 
to Chinese influence during the prolonged period when it was part of the Russian empire and 
the Soviet Union, Central Asia has now resumed its traditional role as a cockpit for major-power 
competition and a crossroads for interactions among Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and 
East Asia. Russia nurses deeply felt grievances over the loss of its dominant position in Central 
Asia, while China is moving quickly to fill the vacuum through economic penetration and 
ambitious infrastructure projects. This has made Central Asia a testing ground for the balance 
between cooperation and rivalry in Sino-Russian relations. The United States needs to be engaged 
in order to be well informed.
Russia has small troop deployments throughout Central Asia, has struggled to draw regional 
countries into its Collective Security Treaty Organization, and has thus far had only limited 
success in drawing them into the Eurasian Economic Union. Russia’s efforts have been inhibited 
by the dismal state of its economy, which has been further undercut by low energy prices and 
Western sanctions, as well as by the resistance of the newly independent Central Asian countries 
to too close an association with their former ruler.
China has made better progress with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which 
it launched with Russia in 1996 as the Shanghai Five grouping (with the other members being 
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, the three Central Asian states bordering China). The 
Shanghai Five expanded into the SCO by bringing in the other Central Asian states, minus 

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SINO-RUSSIAN RELATIONS IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT 
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Turkmenistan, and eventually became the primary vehicle for coordinating Chinese and Russian 
activities in Central Asia. Regular meetings of security, military, defense, foreign affairs, economic, 
cultural, banking, and other officials from member states have taken place under the aegis of the 
SCO. However, the admission of Pakistan and India as full members in June 2017 has lessened the 
utility of the organization as a coordinating mechanism dominated by China and Russia.
In the meantime, China’s attention has shifted to its Belt and Road Initiative. President Xi 
proposed this ambitious program during a visit to Kazakhstan in 2013. It is aimed at massively 
expanding China’s links to these “western regions,” which have loomed large in the country’s 
imagination for millennia. The program entails two component projects: (1) an overland “belt” 
featuring vastly improved transportation, communication, and energy infrastructure, and (2) 
a complementary maritime “road” that will extend from the eastern coastal regions of China 
through Southeast Asia into the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East Africa and include 
upgraded port and harbor facilities capable of supporting higher levels of seaborne trade. 
The obstacles to implementation are significant.
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But if these projects are realized, Central Asia 
will in a few short decades be crisscrossed by a network of high-speed highways and railroads, 
running alongside oil and gas pipelines, that will vastly improve China’s land and sea access to 
the western parts of Asia and even to Europe. In contrast with earlier proposals, China’s Belt and 
Road Initiative is backed by tens of billions of dollars that can be disseminated through Beijing’s 
policy banks and the newly launched Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Despite thinly 
disguised U.S. opposition to the AIIB, virtually all the leading Asian and European countries, 
with the exception of Japan, have joined this Chinese-led bank.
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The initial U.S. response to these developments has been wrong-footed. This is perhaps 
understandable, as China’s Belt and Road Initiative involves not only an explicit but also an 
implicit dimension, both of which must be subjected to careful scrutiny. 
The explicit dimension is the infrastructure development. Here even the United States agrees 
that Central Asia has vast infrastructure needs that should be addressed. For example, in a speech 
in Chennai, India, in July 2011, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton called for the creation of 
a new Silk Road through Central Asia consisting of an international network of economic and 
transit connections.
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Her words sounded like a U.S. version of what Xi later proposed in 2013, 
the difference being that Xi’s proposal was backed by vastly more resources than the United States 
could muster to advance its concept.
The implicit dimension of the Belt and Road Initiative involves the geopolitical implications 
of linking China more closely by land and sea to Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle 
East. If China makes significant progress with the initiative, the strategic implications would 
be enormous.
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Beijing, however, has not addressed this aspect of the initiative directly in 
8 
For a discussion of the obstacles, see Nadège Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road