While China is advancing into the vasts of Russia and Central Asia, structures and cooperation remain limited.

The relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation are largely shaped by their positive mutual public cooperation and their underlying negative geostrategic concurrence.
Regarding political fields such as security and military, both countries are nowadays warmly working together with joint naval manoeuvres and common framework initiatives like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Though, Beijing is generally trying to avoid geopolitical ‘hot topics’ concerning Moscow such as the Crimean Crisis and is even revising land corridors crossing Russia by promoting alternative routes, e.g. through Iran. On the other hand, the Chinese leadership is not shying away from subtly undermining Russian economic influence in Moscow’s perceived spheres of influence in the Western Balkans and Central Asia. Increasing ties between the POC and the latter region regarding infrastructure and energy through ‘Belt and Road’ (BRI) are further challenging the build-up of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) as well which is supposed to keep Moscow’s post-Soviet economic and soft power in place.

A central point in the relationship are Russian exports of oil and gas to China, which ‘energy-hungry’ Beijing is gladly welcoming. While the personal network surrounding Putin’s government is profiting from Chinese companies buying shares in energy giants, Moscow is nevertheless asking for ‘real’ favours in return which would profit the country as a whole, e.g. that the POC should step up its investment game in the Russian Far East. Despite its vast energy resources, Beijing has largely neglected this region until now – apart from future plans about a possible development of an Arctic trade route.

In the long run, the low-burning trading market battles in the Balkans and Central Asia as well as the differing political perceptions about projects between the BRI and EAEU or the inclusion of other Eurasian actors such as India could lead to a progressive decline in the current warm relations between Beijing and Moscow. With further exposing itself to the growing Chinese regional dominance and trying to keep up both politically and economically, Russia could potentially work itself off too much and get much more caught in dependence on China in the end than many of its smaller neighbours.

The relations between China and the Central Asian countries are even more focused on energy cooperation because the smaller less developed economies don’t have much else to offer and can’t bring much political weight to the table either. As the region is consisting of very different political regimes – ranging from an instable democracy in Kyrgyzstan to an isolationist dictatorship in Turkmenistan – Beijing is treating relations on a bilateral basis. Still, all Central Asian states but Turkmenistan are also involved as full members in the Chinese-lead Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. China sees them as vital to its land-based ‘Belt and Road’ trade and infrastructure corridor as well as nearly all freight train routes towards Europe are currently crossing Central Asia. This is also why Xi Jinping announced the land-bound part of BRI in the Kazakhstani capital.

While Beijing’s strategic investments in the region are welcomed by the political leaders and some more financially deprived partners like Tajikistan are even selling out critical economic infrastructure such as their mining business, the advancement is revoking rather critical to negative emotions in the general population. As these countries are still nationalising after becoming independent for the first time in modern history only after 1991, the notion persists not to politically submit to a dominating power yet again. Another heavily discussed topic of the last years in the largely Turkic countries of the region was the imprisonment of the Uyghur people in Chinese re-education camps which are closely connected especially to Kazakhs through their culture and religion. Some cases of wrongly incarcerated Kazakhstani citizens have emerged over the years which have provoked outrage and diplomatic tensions between Beijing and Nur-Sultan. Nevertheless, as the civic societies are largely suppressed in most of the Central Asian states, this is currently not posing a direct threat to Beijing and only has little effect on the national leaderships either.

Besides the financial incentives from energy resource trade and infrastructure investment, Beijing is offering little for the region to be better connected to the global market and develop own strategies to broaden its economic portfolio. The focal position in the Eurasian ‘heartland’ of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ strategy doesn’t mean that the countries are connected to the trade routes going through their territories towards the West. The only visible long-term gain is the small-scale build-up of eastbound infrastructure towards rising Asian markets, although it remains unclear if China would allow these states to further share their resource richness with other geographical neighbours.
But by only focusing on energy and resource extraction while leaving politics out of the game, their cooperation with the POC is not even awarding the Central Asian states with any real leverage to reduce their geopolitical dependence on Moscow.

While both the relations between China and Russia as well as the Central Asian states are largely depending on energy investments from the Chinese side, the economic and political background varies.
While Russia is still possessing economic leverage against Beijing through its trade relations with Europe and a large-scale currency backing, its less developed neighbours have to fully emerge in Chinese trade deals and an increasing resource sell-out to adjust to falling oil prices and growing needs to build up infrastructure and to diversify their economies from overcome Soviet structures.
Another differing issue is the involvement of the political elite and the general population in relations with China. While the Russian people is mostly still ignoring the growing influence of Beijing and the investment regime is only affecting the political regime surrounding the leadership in Moscow, the situation in most Central Asia states has changed over the years. Especially the notions of Chinese treatment of the Turkic Uyghurs and the overly exaggerated advertisement of the partnership with Beijing by the political elites has created a growing hostile environment which could eventually conflict within the nationalising societies of the region.