美中全球议题对话项目

这次采访是用英语进行的。

This fall, we launched the U.S.-China Dialogue Monitor a biweekly newsletter that draws on both U.S. and Chinese sources, with a focus on government statements and media reports. To subscribe to the newsletter, please sign up here.

Eleanor M. Albert: Today we are joined by Raffaello Pantucci and Niva Yau.

Raffaello Pantucci is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) where he was formerly director of International Security Studies. He is the co-author of Sinostan: China's Inadvertent Empire (Oxford University Press, 2022), which draws on over a decade's research and travel around China, Central Asia, and the wider Eurasian heartland. His research focuses on terrorism and counter-terrorism as well as China's relations with its Western neighbors. He currently spends his time between London and Singapore.

Niva Yau is a senior researcher at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek and Central Asia fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Her work follows global China affairs with a particular focus on China’s foreign policy, trade, and security in its western neighborhood, including Central Asia and Afghanistan. Originally from Hong Kong, Ms. Yau has been based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, since 2018. She is a native speaker of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English and a learner of Russian.

Raffaello and Niva, welcome to the show. I wanted to start off by asking you both how you entered this research space and how China factors into your research focus on Central Asia? Why don't we start with you, Niva, and then we can turn to Raffaello.

Niva Yau:  Hello everybody, I'm originally from Hong Kong, and towards the end of my university years, one of my last university credits, I took a summer exchange program to the American University of Central Asia, which is based in Bishkek, where I met my current boss, and it just really snowballed from here. I've always had an interest in foreign policy, but back then it was mainly on Southeast Asia, so actually when I first started doing this I was learning as I go. But there's a lot of things going on in the region, it's very dynamic. A lot of things are changing and it's quite understudied, so it just became fascinating the last couple of years.

Eleanor M. Albert: Great. How about you, Raffaello?

Raffaello Pantucci: I was always very interested in China, Central Asia more broadly, but then in, I think it was 2009, I got an opportunity to move out to China and live there for some time. And at the time I was doing a lot of research on terrorism more generally.

And so I moved to China and I started doing research on terrorism in the country. I went out to Xinjiang and tried to understand what was happening there. And as I was doing this research, I discovered that it was a very difficult subject to research because it's quite a closed subject for many obvious reasons. But then also I discovered when I went out to the region that responding to this particular problem of terrorism was really changing China's relations with these neighboring countries in Central Asia. So I started to do more research on that, managed to travel out to the region, and I went on from there.

Eleanor M. Albert: Great. Let's dig right into the core of the matter here. The Belt and Road Initiative was launched from Kazakhstan almost a decade ago. And Xi Jinping's first post-COVID visit was also to Kazakhstan. How is China's regional presence viewed in Central Asia? Is there a consensus across the region? Kazakhstan comes up a lot because I think it's one of the big power brokers, but it is certainly not alone. How do some of these countries respond to this looming, large neighbor in China? Let’s start with you, Raffaello, and then we’ll turn to Niva.

Raffaello Pantucci: There’s no single response to China in the region. At the end of the day, all of these countries have had a relationship with China since their creation. At the end of Soviet Union, suddenly there were five new countries, three of which shared a border with China. The ones that [also] shared a direct border with Russia joined something called the Shanghai Five, which [was] basically an attempt to define, delineate the borders that they shared. So, that started shaping their relationship with China.

Now, it's been a fairly amicable shift and it's changed over time. I would say that the interesting thing that has changed over time is really China in many ways. Because when you look at their early days in the 1990s, when these countries came into being, and China, it's a very different country.

 It was still facing international isolation after the Tiananmen massacre. The Chinese economy was nowhere near what it was today. You had vast poverty across long parts of the inland. And so it was a very different relationship. What's happened is, over time, you've seen that relationship has transformed and the balance of power has really shifted. That's the most pressing thing. But it varies from country to country. Kazakhstan's always had a particular place because of its size, its hydrocarbon wealth, and its position within Central Asia. But I'd argue that in many ways it's been ahead of the pack, which has basically always been moving roughly in the same sort of direction.

Eleanor M. Albert: Your thoughts, Niva?

Niva Yau: I very much agree with what Raffaello said. I would just add on some of the dynamics between what we can call the older population and the younger population in the region. When we talk about how China is perceived or when we talk about xenophobia, there's always a very sharp contrast between how the young people think about China versus what the older, Soviet-educated generation think about China.

When you talk to the older generation of Central Asians about China, China's a very strange country because they weren't very much exposed to China things. They didn't grow up with cheap Chinese products the way that the younger generation did. And much of what they remember actually was the Sino-Soviet split. So they remember Soviet poems about China, about the Chinese people... The image that they have is quite negative still. Whereas over time the younger generation is much more exposed to China via social media, via scholarships, via Confucius centers or even schools that would just start to teach Chinese language and teach little bits of pieces of Chinese culture here and there. Events organized by the embassy, things like that. They have a lot more information and access to know about China.

China today is very different from their parents’ or their grandparents’ generation. China today is very developed compared to Central Asia. Images of high-speed trains or shopping malls or drama TV [are] very appealing to young people. Now I think one of the biggest game changers here is also the Belt and Road Initiative because before the Belt and Road Initiative, when people think of China as a country, they think of China as a place that is densely populated, that it's very developed. But they didn't really have an association of what China does in Central Asia until the Belt and Road Initiative came and it changed everything. The connotation of the Belt and Road Initiative is that China's bringing investments, China is improving infrastructure in the region, China will connect Central Asia to the world. So all of a sudden, there's no talking about China in the region without talking about the Belt and Road Initiative, and it's been quite a positive success.

Eleanor M. Albert: That transitions us really well to talking about the policy areas that bind China to Central Asia, but also trying to explore what some of these wedge issues might be? What are some things that have changed over time, especially as the balance of power between China and this region has shifted? There's energy to talk about, there's economic development, as we just touched on with Belt and Road projects. What links China? And are there issues that are potentially driving a wedge? Are there things in policy areas that might generate some backlash in central Asian countries?

Raffaello Pantucci: The important thing to always think about with China's relations with Central Asia is the fact that there are large numbers of Central Asian ethnic people living in China. And people immediately assume I'm talking about Uyghurs, and that's certainly true. There is a large Uyghur community, around 10 million or so, that lives in China, that shares a sort of culture, ethnicity, and history that's closer to the Turkic, Central Asian peoples than it is to Han Chinese. But beyond that, there's a million ethnic Kazakhs that live in China. There's large communities of ethnic Tajiks and ethnic Kyrgyz. And in Central Asia there are communities of Han Chinese. There is a human connection that exists and has existed a long time, and that predates the sort of modern borders that we're talking about.

It reflects the fact that when you go back and look at this entire region's history, it is peoples that were spread across this entire space. The region has a cultural history that goes back much further than 1949 when the PRC [People’s Republic of China] came to be and more recently the end of the Soviet Union, when we saw the current national borders in Central Asia being defined. There is a deep history that goes back there and that impacts the relationship because it means that there is a human connection, link that always exists between the two, in one way or another. That will always influence things.

In terms of change over time, the biggest shift for me in some ways is the transformation of China's role, in China's position as a player on the world stage and as an economic force, an economic power. And that's changed in some ways the Central Asian interests, appetite, and link to China. This is a region that's 30 years young. Before that, they were all part of the Soviet Union so all their infrastructure, all their economic logic in many ways goes north to Russia.

That changed. The big change has been that China is an important partner to them all; [it] has become much more relevant. And it's become much more relevant to the very senior official level because governments can see this is a great opportunity they want to connect with. But also I'd argue at a public level as well.

But I think where I maybe would diverge from the public view that we sometimes see, which says that this is a tool that the Chinese have used to hold over all these countries. I'm not entire sure that's true in the sense that I think the logic of it from an economic perspective is natural.

It seems obvious to me that they would have a relation to this one and it would become a more significant one because at the end of the day they're saying it's the world's second largest economy, so it's natural that they would have some sort of connection, want to have a greater connection. The complexity from their perspective is how do they manage that and actually manage to continue to
ensure their particular interests rather than being overwhelmed by this giant that sits next door and [not] become entirely dependent on China in a way that some really are now and some specific issues really reduces their maneuverability.

Eleanor M. Albert: Could you touch on what some of those interests are for specific countries in dealing with China, and how they try to protect some of their agency from being overwhelmed by the size of China?

Raffaello Pantucci: The Kazakhs are probably a good example of a country that has tried to strike this balance and they used economic heft, the fact that they've got this giant hydrocarbon wealth. They sell it in various directions, sell it to lots of people. The fact that you’ve got others purchasing the hydrocarbon wealth as well now. The Kazakhs sell a growing volume of their hydrocarbon wealth to China, but they also sell a lot over to Europe. And historically there were lots of links to Russia. But the Kazakhs have done a more convincing job, let's say, than some of the others have actually trying to strike some sort of a balance. If instead we look at a country like Turkmenistan, they have one big thing that they sell, which is gas. And frankly they've got themselves into a real situation where the only real client they have that purchases it from them is China.

So when you see the Chinese economy contract, or Beijing CNPC [China National Petroleum Company], the main actor, decide that it doesn't need to buy as much gas from them or would like to get the price shifted. They struggle in some ways to strike against that because they've got themselves into a kind of dependency situation. This drives a lot of Turk thinking when they try to
develop other options. Recently we saw Serdar Berdimuhamedow visit Moscow, and his father as well, both of them talking to Alexei Miller, the head of Gazprom, to try to reopen the connections up there. You see them talking a lot about TAPI: they had an idea to build a Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India pipeline, which frankly I think is to the birds, but they're very keen to do that because then this would be another option for them. So I think in those two you get an example of countries that have very important hydrocarbon wealth as a driver of their economy, but being able to manage the relationship with China in a slightly different way.

Eleanor M. Albert: The importance of diversification. Niva, do you want to chime in about what some of the wedge area issues might be? It's not amicable all the time; there are things that create tension.

Niva Yau: There are several points of tension. But I think how the region views China, I think perception of China is definitely something that is evolving and is something that is constantly tilting to positive and negative depending on the subject.

For example, I think a lot of populations in this region, they actually understand and they believe and they know the treatment of say ethnic minorities in Xinjiang through friends or family that they have across the border. Populations here are actually relatively small compared to say Southeast Asia. So, it is very easy that in a village you would have somebody that's been to China who's seen something or who's heard something. Not necessarily from news. We don't see populations here mobilizing, showing their discontent on China's policy in Xinjiang. You don't see that.

You don't see that mostly because this is Central Asian's government policy to agree with China's anti-terrorism policies so to speak. And you don't see populations mobilizing at all. But what you do see is that as Central Asian populations adopt a more Islamic approach to their national identity, to a point where across the board in these societies the most popular opinion makers are mostly religious figures. You start to have religious discourse dominate a lot of what people perceive about China. So immediately, while people are able to say that the Chinese economy is growing very fast, the Chinese economy is very large, people are very hardworking, all positive things. But then they would always add, but the Chinese people, the food they eat is not halal. And this is a point where people see themselves [at a] distance from China, distance from the Chinese people, and the sense of closeness just isn't there.

The second thing that really is growing consistently is the fear of China taking land from Central Asia. Particularly because the populations perceived that in cases like in Tajikistan and in Kyrgyzstan with corrupt regimes and loans that are unable to pay back, they perceived that those deals were associated to land concessions to China. I think in recent years, especially in the past couple of years, the cases in Bhutan and in Nepal don't really give these countries a reassurance that China is a country that doesn't take land. I think this is something that China is not able to actually reverse this thinking, and it's quite apparent that China, with a lot of the economic projects, is able to buy a lot of favorable views and it's been very successful. Everybody here will agree: China’s economy is very successful, investments are bringing jobs, all these things. But there are still underlying societal embedded issues that are still quite difficult in terms of bilateral relationships between China and these countries.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's a natural segue again to ask about the political dynamics within some of these countries. There are politics everywhere regardless of the type of governing society that is overseeing a country's governance. I was curious if any of these countries have had issues where the position of elites vis-à-vis China has been politicized domestically. How is that manifested, and have there been any ramifications?

Niva Yau: I think Central Asian countries, as each of them have evolved, are dropping in their rating on freedom of speech, freedom of press, all these things. So naturally we don't see so much of societal mobilization of discontent against the government on a lot of issues already. But it is definitely a narrative that people make fun of certain politicians—that they are corrupted by Chinese, they're in China's pockets… It's definitely a narrative that's quite popular, particularly on the internet. It's not particular positions per se. Most of the time it's associated with corruption.

Raffaello Pantucci: The political space in the region is controlled up to a point. At a senior government level, there has always been a desire to engage with China because they see the economic upsides. In some cases, they see it in a very personal way. They're very keen to drive the relationship forwards and that doesn't always translate at a public level where people don't necessarily see the same benefits. And I think what's interesting is the degree to which you've seen over the years that public tension, which you can find more immediately in the countries that directly share a border with China than the ones that do not. And even that's changed over time.

Now, what you've seen in some cases is the level of public complaint you have and anger you see does impact projects. We can see in Kazakhstan there's been a number of big land deals that the government's had to walk away from, that the government's quite keen on because the levels of public protest were such they felt that they couldn't push it through or they had to sort of reconsider and redo it in another way. In Kyrgyzstan, you've had a similar level of complaint and it's had an impact at a strategic level. There was some big multimodal regional infrastructure hub that they were going to build which they had to walk away from because the pushback was so strong locally that the Chinese company said “It's just not worth our trouble.”

 But then there's another side to that as well, which you do see. Kyrgyzstan is a good example of where this happened, where you have local power brokers frankly who will see a Chinese company as a rent-seeking opportunity. So they'll stir up local anger against the company to get a whole crowd to show up to complain. That then generates the company having to pay someone off and then suddenly their problem magically goes away. In some cases, the root cause of these protests are based in some sort of local anger, for example environmental despoiling, in some cases local employment complaints. But in other cases they're not; they're just artificial things that have been stirred up.

There's a complicated relationship between the public and China. It does, in some cases, filter all the way back into the government to government relations. I remember talking to Kazakh officials years ago who I put this question to them and their response was, “Yep, this is an issue. We know it's an issue. We have to manage around it.” And in a way it's positive because it shows that the governments are responsive to their publics to some degree. But I don't want to overexaggerate that because I think if the government still wants a project to go through, they will find a way of making it happen.

But it does impact things and from the Chinese company's perspective, it's not an easy environment to operate in. At the end of the day, in some of these companies, you have to think about the fact that they've got people they've deployed to actually do it. And if people aren't able to do the project then the whole thing doesn't work. This kind of tension does definitely exist. If you were to broadly simplify it, it's that the government level, there's always broadly speaking pretty positive relationship, but at the public level there actually isn't always. That spins on a number of different issues internally, including domestic dynamics. The locals will just be angry at the government but they can't express anger towards the government. So, they express anger towards the Chinese who are very close to the government and that's their way of by proxy having a go.

Eleanor M. Albert: We've talked a lot about bilateral relations that China has with the countries that make up this region, but there are of course regional organizations that take some role in facilitating regional relations. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was in large part born out of negotiations about the borders of these new Central Asian countries after the fall of the Soviet Union as we've talked about. How does the SCO fit into China's relationship to the region? Does it have a role? What areas does it operate in at a regional level?

Niva Yau: Raffaello and I actually recently published a paper together on how the SCO is shifting its focus to digitalization and how [it is] basically sitting on top of e-commerce. China has been able to push for a lot of digital changes in the region, which it has already been doing that bilaterally, but through the SCO particularly. It has been driving a lot of the effort, particularly during the pandemic when people weren't able to have face-to-face meetings. There were still a lot of meetings that were going on offline between SCO countries and Chinese tech companies.

For me, one of the most successful elements of the SCO is being able to frame the three evils, like the anti-terrorism, anti-separatism, and anti-extremism, that these issues are deeply concerning for China, regarding Xinjiang. Via the SCO, [China] has actually been able to regionalize the issue and manage the narratives around Xinjiang on a very deep and regular basis. And by deep I mean the SCO mechanism provides heads of states of SCO to meet face to face every single year. So that's already a very close relationship. [The] SCO is only one of those occasions where China meets Central Asian states. When you have BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] forum and you have out-of-state visits and you have events that are going on in China… in 2015 or 2016, Nazarbayev went to China three, four times in a year. These are very important mechanisms to actually keep your bilateral relations really warm and then you can talk about a lot of practical deepening relations.

But it's not just heads of states. The SCO also is a dialogue platform to put together heads of governments, defense ministers, law enforcement ministers, and heads of the intelligence agencies. All of these meetings are incredibly important for China. Before the SCO, China didn't really have direct access to Central Asian leaders and Central Asian security officials. Russia has always had a closer relationship with these officials because they were basically all trained in Russia.

China never had that relationship, and SCO is a platform mainly a successful foot in the door for China to build a relationship over time with Central Asian leaders. So this has been one of the most important factors for China’s narrative management. But of course, practically speaking, there's also tons of things that the SCO does as well. Many are not so transparent, but it's definitely on the ground. You can actually feel that [the] SCO is a big organization because many people, when you ask about China-Central Asia law enforcement cooperation, many will refer to some SCO-level cooperation: they'll refer to some legal document, or this is done under the SCO framework.

Over time, we see that the SCO is expanding. Now we see digitalization. But before digitalization, it was legal training for Central Asian judges and things like that.

Eleanor M. Albert: Raffaello, on the SCO?

Raffaello Pantucci: The SCO is a fascinating organization I think because it's so large and has only grown in its 20 years existence and yet done in some way so little. Looking at it from a Chinese perspective, we have a habit of exaggerating that because I think the key thing to think about is that this is just one of China's platforms for engagement with this region. What I've always noted is that if you look at the kind of big summits or the big meetings that happen, what invariably happens is you see a lot of bilateral engagements also happen, and often the real business that China wants to achieve is achieved a bilateral level. The SCO [is] just convening forum which brings the whole lot together and then they get stuff resolved in a bilateral. The truth is within the SCO, people just don't really agree on a lot of issues.

The paper that Niva and I wrote was looking at digitalization within the SCO, our point was to say that it’s an interesting thing to observe, the degree to which economic activity and growing harmonized economic activity had come about through the digital engagement, which you'd seen China had been trying to get the organization to do in lots of other ways for years. The Chinese have been talking for years about creating free trade area in the SCO. They've been talking for years about creating a joint development account, creating all sorts of economic tools and that was ultimately always in the Chinese interest. They thought the SCO will be a vehicle for everything, but the one thing they could all agree on was counter-terrorism. This is why counter-terrorism becomes the initial issue which you see them all grouping around when the SCO comes about.

The SCO of course is born from the Shanghai Five, which is initially a border delineating exercise between China and the new countries that shared a border with from the former Soviet Union. And then with Uzbekistan's joining in 2001, it changed into the SCO. And noting that of course in June 2001, when the organization was created, then September of that year, of course September 11 happened, which transformed everything. It was interesting to see how the SCO engaged with that. Rather than the organization coming together at that point, what you actually saw was an awful lot of the Central Asians start to forge bilateral relations with the United States, which undermined theoretically some of the agreements and discussions they'd had within the SCO format, which shows how transactional the approach was. And I think China saw from quite early on that that was true. But I think from their perspective they thought, “So what? We continue to engage to with this forum.”

I think a lot of regional powers actually quite like it. The recent summit that we saw–I was in Tashkent shortly after the Samarkand summit–and what was striking was the degree to which you had the Uzbeks talking about how much they had driven the agenda for the session. Now what was actually achieved is a very good question. In tangible terms, the SCO itself didn't do much except host a wonderful meeting in Samarkand.

You did see some deals signed but they were signed at a different bilateral level and the vehicle, the entity becomes a convenient thing. From China's perspective, that's fine because they're happy to have any tool that they can to engage with the region.

And actually, the Central Asians probably don't mind the SCO. But I think what they probably all appreciate is the fact that it was constructed was in such a way, it's very similar to the European Union in some ways, in the sense that everyone has veto power. If anyone doesn't want something to happen, it doesn't.

But this also means that you see the organization do very little because they don't really agree on much, frankly speaking. The Chinese seem happy with that because they still get a platform to engage with them. As Niva pointed out very correctly, we mistake it by just thinking about the big heads of state summit. There [are] ministerial level summits at every level and there [are] working groups that cover a whole wide range of issues, and they might not actually achieve much in a lot of these, but they do provide another touch point.

Eleanor M. Albert: There's a lot of power in shaping a narrative. From this, we've talked about the region, we've talked bilaterally, and so I wanted to bring in the U.S.'s relationship to the region and if it has any effect on the region's ties with China. I think about this particularly in the context of Afghanistan because the U.S. presence had been there for so long. How does the U.S. factor in here? Raffaello?

Raffaello Pantucci: The U.S. is Bigfoot wherever it goes. The U.S. by sheer size means that it always becomes a kind of immediate player. But the thing about Central Asia is that the problem with U.S. policy towards the region has always been [that] it comes and goes. The interest waxes and wanes and for a long time it was very heavily determined by events in Afghanistan and then it dropped off. Now it seems to be picking up again.

We can see the U.S. increasing volumes of security engagement in the region. A lot of it’s still interested in Afghanistan, but there is an element of China interest starting to bump in there as well because the U.S. recognizes Central Asia is an interesting position between China and Russia.

The region talks a lot about wanting outside powers to engage with it. They talk about having this multi-vector foreign policy where they strike a balance between all these different players. The problem with the United States has always been the fickleness of its approach, the come and go attitude, and the frustrations that they have. Central Asians will say, “Well look, the Americans will come here; the Americans will go. China and Russia will always physically be here.”

Of course, you can look at energy relations, American energy companies were active in Kazakhstan since the fall Soviet Union and they've continued to be players there.

On the security side, it has shifted. In the wake of the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan in 2005 you saw a real drop in Uzbek-U.S. relations. But then that picked up again a few years later when the U.S. Department of Defense recognized that they needed a northern distribution network to get their equipment out of Afghanistan.

I think the problem with the U.S. is it's always going to be a big player, but it's always going to have this reputation of being fickle and disinterested and not necessarily a reliable partner recognizing that at the end of the day, it's still going to be in between China and Russia and also in between Iran, which is an important country to think of in this context because of the heavy negative relations that the U.S. has with Iran.

You've got a region that wants to engage with the U.S. and does engage with the U.S. but is entirely surrounded by countries that at the moment are locked into a conflict with the United States. Geography does matter to some degree I’m afraid to say.

Eleanor M. Albert: Niva?

Niva Yau: American policy in the region has always been very focused on Afghanistan. Even today a lot of the elements are still quite Afghanistan oriented. But this is changing a little bit. Central Asian countries find certain projects and certain attractiveness in working with Western actors like U.S. and Europe. Europe is also becoming a serious player now in Central Asia. Recently—they've sent one of the highest level of delegations to Samarkand, huge EU connectivity conference connecting Central Asia to the EU. This idea is very attractive to Central Asia.

But the problem is precisely what Raffaello said: this region is cushioned between Russia, China and Iran. These are very difficult actors for the West to deal with. And how do you work in a region that is sandwiched between these three countries? Logistics matter, human mobility matter, and all these things make working on the ground very difficult.

Now why I would say it's changing is because particularly when we look at U.S. approach to Central Asia, it opened the USAID program in Uzbekistan only a year, two years ago. This is extremely new. Also, this reflects Central Asian states’ willingness to accept Western assistance, so to speak. Assistance is very strong, but human capacity… There’s a lot of that Western actors can offer, not just at a human level but also on an institutional level: bringing Central Asia to the international system, helping Central Asian countries actually get on board and become members of the World Bank. These are all extremely new things to Central Asia because this region is entirely not integrated with the international community. There's still many aspects that the West can explore. But it's taking time. But at least now, we've come to a period where the U.S. and Europe at the same time are committed to this region.

Eleanor M. Albert: We've touched on these countries that have passing desire to be engaged. China is the newer actor to be engaged, but there's a historical legacy of the Soviet Union and that means that Russia has a long connection to a lot of these countries. How does the Russia dynamic fit into China's relationship with the region? Is it a constraining factor? Russia with the war in Ukraine is increasingly isolated on the international stage, but it is directly, geographically connected to this region as well. How are these dynamics playing out?

Niva Yau: The war going on and Central Asia's suffering is still evolving. But I think there's one thing that Russia has brought to Central Asia, and that's instability. This level of instability at the global stage is one thing, but as a region that is already underdeveloped and is still looking for a path to development it’s been holding onto the idea of stability for such a long time, and for it to have to overcome issues with currency, sanctions, and how to avoid sanction when you trade so much with Russia is a real headache, and it's not something that Central Asia countries want at all.

So, without talking about all the labor migrants in Russia or all these very common issues and now Russian migrants in Central Asia, it just really opened up this space to see that China could be the one that provides.

That being said, I think Central Asian countries are also watching the global tension as they evolve. They're well aware of the issues that the U.S. and the West have with China over Xinjiang or over Taiwan. These are very uncertain issues for Central Asian states who are quite detached from global affairs. But global affairs of today [are] directly impacting their biggest trading partners and their biggest neighbors. So it's a very nervous time for Central Asia, which makes all the high-level visits from the U.S. and from Europe reassuring to Central Asia that they're not being left behind.

They're also not just being approached. They're also going out. Some of the newer approaches that Central Asia has done is reach out more to South Asian states and Arab states. Heads of states in the region have increasingly shown religious expression, Islamic expression. They've been going to Mecca, and they've been doing a lot more Islamic speeches in public. And the way that they have started to trade, and run, not just business projects, but also religious projects with Arab states, is quite telling that Central Asian states are aware that Russia and China could continuously be caught in this worsening global tension and they have to find other reliable partners.

Raffaello Pantucci: There is a definite change or a new tension between Russia and its relations with Central Asia. The war in Ukraine was not something that was widely popular. You can find people in the region who are sort of very pro-Russian nationalists, but the majority generally are not. 

The region has always had a concern about Russian adventurism and Russian nationalism. You can see this back in the 2008 invasion of Georgia, and you can see it in the 2014 invasion of Ukraine. And now in the more recent one as well. This is consistently something the region's been quite anxious about.

That really does underpin regional considerations and concerns, because on the one hand there's that concern, but on the other hand there's all the issues that Niva pointed out—the strong economic links that still exist. Labor migration alone is a huge economic driver. Remittances account for a third or a half of GDP in some cases, in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan. Millions of Central Asians go to work in Russia because they have visa-free access and that's all money that floods back. When you see the Russian economy contract, it's those jobs that get lost. So it's an immediate knock on effect that you can see.

Now there are advantages as well, by the way. As Russia gets cut off from the global system, it’s quite easy for Russian companies to move into Central Asia instead and rebrand themselves and then set up operations there. The key thing is that they have always got a connection with Russia, but the predictability and the reliability of Russia as a partner is something that you can see a lot of them questioning a lot more now than really they did before. 

The big issue the region has is it's kind of stuck. They would have liked to have more options, and they worry that they don't. And this is why the West is such an important player. In terms of other actors in the region, I know Niva has a positive view of India, but I'm much more cynical and skeptical about it because I've seen frankly Indian leaders repeatedly come into office with grand discussions of engaging in Central Asia and I've never seen it come to anything. I think the region [would] welcome it.

[Central Asians] don't know what other options they have, and they're constantly trying to find them. They're always going to be stuck because they're always going to have a tie to Russia, not withstanding whatever links they build abroad. From the Western perspective, the difficulty is “We want to engage but we worry about their links,” but they're never going to be able to sever that link. It's going to take generations before they really can. Even then, I think they won't be able to entirely. Moscow's always going to be an important player. Others will come and be significant, and China in particular will be, but Moscow will always be a very relevant player.

Eleanor M. Albert: To conclude, I want to ask you to put on little prognosticator hats and look towards the future. If you had to identify one or two developments in this region as it relates to China and Central Asian affairs, is there something that you are particularly watching or something that particularly concerns you? Niva?

Niva Yau: Something that I'm certainly watching is the development of social media because this region is very young. Half of the population is below 32 years old or something, and people have huge families. Everybody is on mobile phones. They are on cheap Huawei. I think social media has been so incredibly significant because we know that the algorithm on most of these apps, be they TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, they are always favoring very short videos that are already popular around the world.

These are Chinese-made videos that are very simple. They could be life hacks, they could be showing village life in China, and these are very powerful images, and they're not posted by ambassadors or officials or anything. These are just regular Chinese account videos that get reposted again and again, in different languages or even sometimes, it's just with background music, just skits. The way that these short videos open the eyes of people in the region to China. You sit at home and this is all the access you have. It's quick, it's easy.

This is something that actually really strikes me as a very significant inroad that China has made. Honestly, I don't think it's a conscious policy even; it just happened. The algorithm just favors short, simple videos and most of the people that I talk to, they don't even search for these videos, they just show up. Not even as ads. These videos make a significant impact on what people think about China because men will tell you that, and these are old men, they would say that China, they're building really fast highways. They build it in such a short time. And because in the video, they speed it up and it looks really incredible. It's very simple things that are eye-catching.

It is not a grand political, security factor that I'm offering, but social media changes the perception of China so much and is going to continuously change that in the next five to 10 years. I will not be surprised if in our next 10 years, we would have an entire region that is actually very favorable towards China because of just the sheer amount of what they consume about China that is entirely positive. When there is so much of positive, and so little negative information actually gets to Central Asia about China, the way that the perception is going to change, is already changing at a really rapid rate…  This is going to have impact on the way that policymakers can work more with China. Students will go more to China, there'll be more people who are willing to do business, cooperation in many different areas, sciences, environment, water, etc. China will be able to make such an advance because of this perception precisely.

Eleanor M. Albert: Great. Raffaello?

Raffaello Pantucci: We have a habit I think of looking at China's relations to the region through some pretty big obvious lenses and most often I hear people say, "Oh, well, it's all about resources, it's all about the mineral wealth in the region that China wants." But there's a web of relationships that go in all other directions as well, which are going to shape the region in a really interesting way going forward. For me, the one thing I'm really interested in is the degree to which we see China actually becoming a player in the region in terms of asserting its interests and trying to resolve problems in the region.

Since the beginning of the year, we've had major instability that's led to the deaths of people in four of the five countries, and the fifth country is Turkmenistan, where frankly information is very limited so it's difficult to know really what's going on. But my point is, we've had people dying because of unrest in four of the other countries, including clashes between states, between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Who's going to come in and try to resolve these? The region is struggling with some of these issues, and the history was that they would think of Russia, even though Russia actually did very little in terms of trying to do this kind of stabilizing role. But I think what you're going to see is, as China becomes the dominant economic player in a whole range of different ways, you'll see a desire by the region, an expectation, that China will come in and try to do something or say something about this.

I think Beijing is going to be reticent to do that. But at a certain point, because the logic of China's relations with the region is very heavily based on a foundation of trying to create stability and prosperity at home in Xinjiang, which is a really important and difficult region for Beijing to manage. I think there's going to be an interesting tipping point where you'll find that China will find itself obligated to get dragged into some of these regional issues. How they try to resolve them I think is going to be really interesting.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.