The Making of Eurasia: Competition and Cooperation between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia 9781838601331, 9781838601379, 9781838601362, 9781838601348

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of maps
Acknowledgements
Note on translation and transliteration
List of Acronyms
1 The making of Eurasia
The Belt and Road Initiative and questions of regional order
On peripherality and agency in Eurasia
Outline of the book
2 Reviving the Silk Road: China’s new approach to Central Asia
From the ancient Silk Roads to ‘One Belt, One Road’
Old wine in new bottles? The conceptual consolidation of Silk Road narratives
Reasons why China ‘steps out’
The ‘Five Openings’, domestic economics and the role of Xinjiang
Finance and ‘monetary circulation’
The BRI and globalization: China as a ‘discursive power’
Conclusion
3 Sino-Russian relations in Eurasia
From unequal treaties to strategic triangulation
China, Russia and multinational institutions in Eurasia
The ‘new Silk Road’ and Chinese investments in Russia
Competing public diplomacies of Eurasian integration
Conclusion
4 The Linchpin of Eurasia: Kazakhstan between Russia’s defensive regionalism and China’s new Silk Roads
Introduction
The new Silk Road enters Kazakhstan
Challenges for the reception of China’s BRI in Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan’s engagement with the SREB in light of Russian leverage within the EAEU
Beyond EAEU membership: Regional alliance networks and neighbourhood diplomacy
Conclusion
5 The New Silk Road heads north: Implications of the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor for Mongolia’s place within Eurasian
Introduction
Mongolia’s quest for foreign policy options: Balancing between ‘third’ and its two direct neighbours
Mongolia within the BRI and the Mongolian Development Plan
Attempts to find partners across the globe: Mongolia’s evolving ‘Third Neighbour’ Policy in a regional context
Mongolian views on China’s growing leverage
Sino-Russian interaction in Mongolia
Conclusion
6 Eurasia’s ‘Southern Corridor’: Uzbekistan between Russia, China and West Asia
Introduction
Uzbekistan between pendulum diplomacy and regional integration initiatives
Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda and the BRI
Uzbekistan as a hub between China and West Asia
Russia’s re-engagement with Uzbekistan
Conclusion
7 Eurasia and world order
Introduction
De-Westernizing ‘globalization’
The ‘Russia factor’ in China and the ‘China factor’ in Russia’s external relations with the West
China, Europe and Eurasian connectivity in an era of Sino-American rivalry
Conclusion
Epilogue
Eurasian grand schemes and regional agency
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Making of Eurasia

ii

The Making of Eurasia Competition and Cooperation between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Russia Moritz Pieper

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Moritz Pieper, 2022 Moritz Pieper has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Holly Bell Cover image © usgs/Unsplash All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-8386-0133-1 PB: 978-1-8386-0137-9 ePDF: 978-1-8386-0134-8 eBook: 978-1-8386-0135-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

Contents List of maps Acknowledgements Note on translation and transliteration List of Acronyms 1

2

3

4

The making of Eurasia The Belt and Road Initiative and questions of regional order On peripherality and agency in Eurasia Outline of the book Reviving the Silk Road: China’s new approach to Central Asia From the ancient Silk Roads to ‘One Belt, One Road’ Old wine in new bottles? The conceptual consolidation of Silk Road narratives Reasons why China ‘steps out’ The ‘Five Openings’, domestic economics and the role of Xinjiang Finance and ‘monetary circulation’ The BRI and globalization: China as a ‘discursive power’ Conclusion Sino-Russian relations in Eurasia From unequal treaties to strategic triangulation China, Russia and multinational institutions in Eurasia The ‘new Silk Road’ and Chinese investments in Russia Competing public diplomacies of Eurasian integration Conclusion The Linchpin of Eurasia: Kazakhstan between Russia’s defensive regionalism and China’s new Silk Roads Introduction The new Silk Road enters Kazakhstan Challenges for the reception of China’s BRI in Kazakhstan Kazakhstan’s engagement with the SREB in light of Russian leverage within the EAEU Beyond EAEU membership: Regional alliance networks and neighbourhood diplomacy Conclusion

vii viii x xi 1 1 3 5 7 7 12 14 14 16 20 22 25 26 29 34 37 40 43 43 45 48 50 52 55

Contents

vi 5

6

7

The New Silk Road heads north: Implications of the China-MongoliaRussia economic corridor for Mongolia’s place within Eurasian power shifts Introduction Mongolia’s quest for foreign policy options: Balancing between ‘third’ and its two direct neighbours Mongolia within the BRI and the Mongolian Development Plan Attempts to find partners across the globe: Mongolia’s evolving ‘Third Neighbour’ Policy in a regional context Mongolian views on China’s growing leverage Sino-Russian interaction in Mongolia Conclusion Eurasia’s ‘Southern Corridor’: Uzbekistan between Russia, China and West Asia Introduction Uzbekistan between pendulum diplomacy and regional integration initiatives Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda and the BRI Uzbekistan as a hub between China and West Asia Russia’s re-engagement with Uzbekistan Conclusion Eurasia and world order Introduction De-Westernizing ‘globalization’ The ‘Russia factor’ in China and the ‘China factor’ in Russia’s external relations with the West China, Europe and Eurasian connectivity in an era of Sino-American rivalry Conclusion

59 59 61 62 66 69 70 72 75 75 77 79 83 85 88 91 91 93 94 98 102

Epilogue Eurasian grand schemes and regional agency

105

Notes Bibliography Index

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146 160

List of maps 1 2

Six proposed Eurasian economic corridors subsumed under the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ Members of the Eurasian Economic Union

xiv xv

Acknowledgements The writing of this book would have been a more arduous and less enjoyable task, had it not been for the help of a number of people. I firstly want to thank the University of Salford’s Directorate of Politics and Contemporary History, where I embarked on this research project. My travels to China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia would not have been possible without the financial support I received in the form of a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Scholarship and impact case study funding. Special thanks go to Paul Broster and Stephen Ward for allocating time and resources which facilitated the writing process and to David Maher for the enjoyable office environment and his friendship. I am also grateful to Alaric Searle for helping to arrange my visit to China, and for putting me in touch with the Zhou Enlai School of Government at Nankai University. At the latter, I wish to thank Han Zhaoying for inviting and hosting me in the summer of 2018. During my subsequent field trip to Kazakhstan, my life was made easier thanks to the logistical help of Nursultan Maratov and Adilkhanov Yerzhan. Many thanks also go to Nurlan Igembaev for suggesting additional helpful contact points and to Anuar Baltabayev for the cordial reception in Astana (now Nur-Sultan). In Mongolia, I was grateful to have had the help of Zolboo Dashnyam, Bat-Amgalan Turbat and Batchimeg Saryat. I am grateful for the invitation to the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in June 2019, and especially for the warm and hospitable reception during my stay in Ulaanbaatar. I also wish to thank Alicia Campi, Odbayar Erdenetsogt and Enkhsaikhan Jargalsaikhan for reaching out to additional contact points in Ulaanbaatar. I am grateful for the opportunities to present parts of my research at conferences that helped shape the final outcome. I want to thank Elena Korosteleva and Zachary Paikin for inviting me to float first research findings at two consecutive workshops funded by UK Research and Innovation and the Global Challenges Research Fund at the LSE in December 2018, and at the University of Kent at Canterbury, my alma mater, in March 2019. I also want to thank the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s offices in Beirut and Astana and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s office in Nicosia, Cyprus, for inviting me to give talks about my research in September 2017 (Beirut), June 2018 (Astana) and November 2018 (Nicosia). As the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), became my new port of call in the course of writing, I was very fortunate to find a congenial work environment at the Eastern Europe and Eurasia Research Division. I am grateful to a whole range of colleagues at SWP, but for helping me clarify parts of my own argumentation, I want to thank in particular Susan Stewart, Andrea Schmitz, Janis Kluge, Fabian Burkhardt, Nadine Godehardt, Hanns W. Maull and Wolfgang Richter.

Acknowledgements

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For giving up precious time to comment on parts of the manuscript, I am grateful to a number of colleagues. I wish to thank Nadine Godehardt for her comments on Chapter 2, Natasha Kuhrt for her comments on Chapter 3, Fabienne Bossuyt and Marcin Kaczmarski for comments on Chapter 5 and Andrea Schmitz for her comments on Chapter 6. Their keen-eyed reading helped me correct mistakes and sharpen my arguments. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors of fact or judgement. I also want to thank the editors of International Politics, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and Rising Powers Quarterly for granting permission to re-use material previously published in these journals. At I.B. Tauris, sincere thanks go to Tomasz Hoskins for his enthusiasm for this project ever since we first talked at the ISA Annual Convention in San Francisco in 2018. The penultimate acknowledgement comes with a disclaimer. I joined the German foreign service as this book went into production. The book’s content does not necessarily represent the views of the German Federal Foreign Office, but I am thankful for the support for and interest shown in this research project on the part of new colleagues. Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to my parents, Elke and Wilfried, for their relentless support and love; to my sister Lisa, for edifying sisterly support; and to Andréa Postiga, my partner and confidant, who has accompanied this book’s journey from start to finish.

Note on translation and transliteration For all transliterations from the Chinese to the Latin alphabet, the standard Pinyin system (without diacritic markers) was used for all proper names and translations. For transliteration from Russian, the British standard version was used. Translations from Russian are the author’s, except where indicated otherwise.

List of Acronyms ADB

Asian Development Bank

AIFC

Astana International Finance Centre

APEC

Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation

ASEAN

Association of Southeast-Asian Nations

AIIB

Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank

BRI

Belt and Road Initiative

BRICS

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa

CACO

Central Asian Cooperative Organization

CAEC

Central Asian Economic Community

CCIIC

(Kazakhstani-Chinese) Coordination Committee on industrial and investment cooperation

CCP

Chinese Communist Party

COMECON

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

CDB

China Development Bank

CES

Common Economic Space

CIPS

China International Payment System

CIS

Commonwealth of Independent States

CNOOC

China National Offshore Oil Corporation

CNPC

Chinese National Petroleum Corporation

CPEC

China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

CSTO

Collective Security Treaty Organization

DP

Democratic Party (of Mongolia)

EAEU

Eurasian Economic Union

ECU

Eurasian Customs Union

EU

European Union

EPCA

Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreement

List of Acronyms

xii ESPO

Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean (Oil Pipeline)

ETPP

Erdenet Thermal Power Plant

FDI

Foreign direct investment

FTA

Free trade area

GDP

Gross domestic product

GMS

Greater Mekong Sub-region Economic Cooperation

GUUAM

Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova

HIEI

Hunan Industrial Equipment Installation

ICT

Information and communications technology

IFC

International Finance Corporation

IMF

International Monetary Fund

JCPOA

Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action

KCBC

Kazakhstani-Chinese Business Council

KTZ

Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (Kazakhstani national railway company)

LNG

Liquefied natural gas

MFA

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

MOFCOM

Chinese Ministry of Finance and Commerce

MoU

Memorandum of understanding

MPP

Mongolian People’s Party

MSR

Maritime Silk Road

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NDB

New Development Bank

NDRC

National Development and Reform Commission

NSC

National Security Concept

NWFZ

Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone

OBOR

One Belt, One Road

OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

OSCE

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

RATS

Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure

RCEP

Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership

List of Acronyms

xiii

RRF

Rapid Reaction Force

RŽD

Rossiyskie zheleznye dorogi (Russian railways)

SCO

Shanghai Cooperation Organization

SDR

Special drawing rights

SEZ

Special economic zone

SREB

Silk Road Economic Belt

SWIFT

Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication

TEN-T

Trans European Transport Network

TIPS

TARGET Instant Payment Settlement

TIR

International Road Transports Convention

TPP

Trans-Pacific Partnership

UBD

Ulaanbaatar Dialogue

UBTŽ

Ulaanbaatar Temer Zham (Mongolian national railway operator)

UNECAFE

UN Committee for Asia and the Far East

UNESCAP

UN Economic and Social Committee for Asia and the Pacific

UNSC

United National Security Council

US

United States (of America)

WTO

World Trade Organization

ZTE

Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment

xiv

Map 1  Six proposed Eurasian economic corridors subsumed under the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’. Map produced by Dario Ingiusto.

xv

Map 2  Members of the Eurasian Economic Union. Map produced by Dario Ingiusto.

xvi

1

The making of Eurasia On 23 June 2016, as international attention focused on the Brexit vote in the UK, the heads of government of China, Mongolia and Russia witnessed the signing of a plan to establish the ‘China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor’. This was the result of Mongolian lobbying efforts for its inclusion in what came to be called the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ that Chinese President Xi Jinping had first outlined during a speech in Kazakhstan in September 2013. Presenting Mongolian territory as a useful transit space between China and Russia for potential onward travel of goods, Mongolian officials were also hoping to attract new direct investments for Mongolia’s own infrastructure and other economic sectors. Most importantly perhaps, they felt that potentially tectonic shifts were underway that would make a new Eurasian order. Claiming coownership of this process was a way for landlocked Mongolia, sandwiched between Russia and China, to prevent the region’s biggest and most influential powers from making arrangements over the heads of others in between. This book investigates the interaction between China, Russia and other Eurasian actors, in the joint making of such a new Eurasian order. It examines how China and Russia’s grand visions for regional order impact on political agency of the countries ‘in between’, and how the latter feedback into and co-shape inter-regional order. This is an aspect too often written out of analyses of Sino-Russian interaction in Eurasia. Acknowledging agency of the ‘in-between-states’ is therefore an important motivation underlying this book and remains a surprisingly understudied level of analysis in the quickly burgeoning literature on China’s ‘New Silk Roads’ and its effects on Eurasia.1 To this effect, the book zooms in on illustrative cases to examine the interaction between externally proposed integration dynamics and the regional co-ownership of these processes. Much like the ancient Silk Roads was a network of trading intermediaries with overlapping travel routes, interests and external backers, the making of Eurasia today can only be usefully analysed if we try to understand the agency of ‘the places in between’, to borrow Rory Stewart’s phrase.2

The Belt and Road Initiative and questions of regional order In 2013, President Xi announced the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ as the land-based variant of what would later become the ‘One Belt, One Road’ (yi dai, yi lu). He presented the initiative as a means to revitalize the ancient Silk Roads through the

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creation of new economic corridors across Eurasia. With a focus on the construction of infrastructure at first, this initiative took a global turn – and the new label ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) in its English alteration – about two years later and became an umbrella term for China’s growing presence in almost all policy domains in more than sixty countries around the world. It is no coincidence that China’s BRI is not accompanied by official maps with clear geographical delimitations. The discourse used to accompany the BRI vision is indicative in this regard. China speaks of an ‘inclusive’ and ‘networked’ vision (initially for its western neighbourhood primarily, then globally), emphasizes ‘connectivity’ and refers to ‘economic corridors’ that traverse multiple state borders. Foreign Minister Wang Yi called the BRI the ‘most important public service provided by China to Asian and European continent [sic]’.3 In China’s vision, the BRI goes well beyond infrastructure investments and spreads out to a range of policy domains. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic engulfing the world in 2020, China’s ‘health silk road’ as part of the BRI acquired an additional geopolitical significance, as China’s race to develop and distribute a vaccine especially to ‘developing countries’ was in line with its attempts to position itself as a provider of global public goods.4 This portrayal of the BRI as a universally beneficial policy initiative has been contrasted with critical readings that see the SREB primarily as an instrument to bolster China’s economic predominance in its ‘extended periphery’ and a means to shape a ‘Sinocentric Eurasian order’.5 Such critiques warn that participating states could become ‘satellites’ of China, akin to the ancient tributary system centred around the Middle Kingdom.6 On the other side of the spectrum, there is no shortage of foreign commentators describing the initiative as heralding a ‘Chinese World Order’,7 as a target no longer ‘constrained by geography or even gravity’,8 or as the revitalization of mystical arteries giving China the power to shape events in the heart of the world.9 The ‘new Silk Road(s)’, as China’s initiative is popularly known in the West, has become a catchphrase for the reading that power is shifting away from the West. Regardless of whether one subscribes to the view that the BRI is driven first and foremost by Chinese domestic economic motivations10 or to the view that China aims to ‘go out’ and make a distinctive contribution to globalization on Chinese terms,11 there can be no doubt that China’s foreign policy portfolio has acquired a distinctly Eurasian component.12 As China projects governance ideas, norms and standards outward across Eurasia, it gradually changes the regional order – which in turn also transforms China’s place in it. But Eurasia is neither a coherent territorial entity nor an actor with an easily recognizable agency. It is first and foremost a geopolitical imaginary that means different things to different people. Geologically, the Eurasian tectonic plate stretches from Iceland to Japan, yet generations of historians, political scientists, publicists and politicians have differentiated between Europe and Asia and invented terms such as Transoxiana, the Near and Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, West Asia and Eurasia for the purpose of political cartography. The ‘Making of Eurasia’, as will be shown, is not only a question of customs tariffs, tax harmonization or infrastructure investments. Infrastructure becomes instrumental in ‘mastering the space’.13 But importantly, the ‘mapping’ of territory also needs narration.

The Making of Eurasia

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Critical scholarship has carved out the link between economic power and the capacity to shape not only the physical space, but also the maps in our heads.14 Steeped in this logic, Marlene Laruelle has applied critical geopolitics to understand the various Silk Road allegories as geopolitical imaginaries.15 These, she writes, are often foreign policy narratives that contain ‘mythological features’ and are used in an instrumental purpose in government diplomacy.16 Without the use of ‘strategic narratives’, economic projects revolving around vaguely defined ‘connectivity’ labels across multiple countries would not be able to succeed.17 Especially China’s contemporary ‘connectivity’ discourse initially tapped into the ancient Silk Road imagery to package cross-border infrastructure plans in China’s western neighbourhood. It then experienced a shift as the BRI began to denote China’s global policies in various domains. But China is not alone in reverting to geopolitical imagery. Different ‘initiatives’ couched in the language of economic corridors have been proposed by different actors across Eurasia, be that Kazakhstan’s Bright Road (Nurly Zhol), Mongolia’s Development Road initiative, or Russia’s Greater Eurasian Partnership. The concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ floated by the US administration is another example of a term that is supposed to give meaning to a new geopolitical reality. It is a political initiative intended to present a counter-narrative to China’s BRI.18 Maximilian Mayer and Dániel Balázs put it well when they describe such new Eurasian ‘geo-visions’ as ‘crucial sites of spatial construction’.19 The analysis in the chapters to follow will caution us to be careful not to hype state-induced geopolitical narratives as alleged blueprints for future orders – either on a regional or on a global plane.

On peripherality and agency in Eurasia The analysis of the interplay between Russia, China and local agents in the age of interregional connectivity initiatives adds empirical substance to an otherwise essentialist debate. A vast amount of Western foreign policy analysis casts Chinese and Russian foreign policy towards their neighbours as neo-imperial designs to dominate them and establish ‘spheres of influence’.20 Such an analytical lens obfuscates an understanding of the interplay between domestic, regional and inter-regional factors. Analysing the interaction between Mongolian, Kazakhstani, Uzbek and other responses to Russian and Chinese regional order conceptions, I aim to resist the temptation to boil down more complex dynamics in the ‘making of Eurasia’ to mere functions of supposed ‘grand bargains’ between the region’s paymaster (China) and its fading hegemon (Russia).21 While both these states wield considerable influence over and in other countries in their shared neighbourhood, ‘influence’ is a variable often taken for granted in studies of Sino-Russian relations steeped in the literature on hegemonic power transition. Such studies often conveniently but simplistically deny agency on the part of the actors ‘in between’.22 Viewing Central Asia exclusively as a chessboard for great power rivalry neglects the role regional actors can play in shaping the final outcome of new geopolitical projects. The post-Cold War relations between Central Asian states and influential neighbouring states like Russia and China have indeed been ambivalent.

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The Making of Eurasia

Accommodation with ‘hegemonic’ Great Power politics in some policy domains has not ruled out the striving for more autonomous foreign policy options in others.23 The point here is not whether the BRI or the Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) are essentially geopolitical projects that foster national interests of influential ‘Great Powers’ (they may well be, as the first two chapters will explore), but whether analysts choose to read such a conclusion a priori into the policies under investigation, thereby selectively ignoring regional co-ownership in the ‘making of Eurasia’. Such a research bias is not unique to analyses of the BRI. Steven Parham notes in his study of China’s Central Asian borderlands that many accounts of Central Asian politics tend to perpetuate the topos of local powerlessness.24 Such a research angle reproduces political discourses emanating from centres of power external to the region, where ‘the “rules of the game” are liable to suddenly change, reflecting processes taking place in far-away places and expressed in the fanciful language of regional stability, border security and Eurasian trade flows’, he writes.25 In the period of imperial rivalry during the nineteenth century as well as during Soviet times, geopolitical commentaries about Central Asia similarly were replete with recurring ‘Great Games’ metaphors. Following the end of the Cold War, the region was largely regarded as either a testing ground for new post-Cold War demarcations between China, Russia and the Islamic world, or as a source of instability and religious fundamentalism. Either way, the chessboard and ‘Great Game’ metaphors quickly returned. These have been unmasked as essentially colonial references which deny local agency and over-emphasize Great Power intervention.26 Whether regional orders end up being competitive or cooperative depends not only on the interests and policies of external powers. One strand of the literature on regional order-creation has formulated a communitarian perspective according to which local actors are in the driver’s seat;27 another focuses on the agency of external stakeholders alone.28 These two exclusive positions are juxtaposed by a hybrid approach that conceives of regional order as the outcome of a process in which internal and external stakeholders enter into contestation.29 According to this view, local ownership forms a crucial part of the process leading to new orders.30 The chapters that follow will examine how external power intervention in the political fabric of states in the region impacts on regional order, but equally to what extent regional actors co-own the latter. Ownership is here understood to encompass agency also on the part of subnational actors. While many of the states under investigation here (with the exception of Mongolia) have authoritarian governance structures and therefore decisionmaking structures without much societal participation, it will be shown how popular perceptions, business communities and other non-governmental actors have to be taken into account if ‘agency’ of a given country is to mean more than simply the central government. This observation ties into insights from emerging scholarship on ‘de-centred practice’ whereby power is ‘produced relationally in specific situations through the practices of ongoing interactions between locally situated actors’.31 We should not overstate the power of central governments to unilaterally change crossborder political configurations.32 Recent scholarly contributions have therefore advanced a ‘state transformation’ approach that helps to relax some of the classic political science assumptions revolving around the state as a unitary, rational actor

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capable of projecting national interests.33 As much as power is relational and diffuse, state agency has become fragmented and decentralized. Central states become power brokers, intermediaries between multiple networks and agencies.34 The chapters that follow will thus trace how the interaction between China, Russia and other Eurasian actors across different policy domains and levels of agency shapes new political realities. In this effort, they draw on the scholarly literature, expert commentary and available open source material, complemented by interviews conducted with analysts as well as involved stakeholders in and outside of government from Russia, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Outline of the book This book studies public diplomacy, economics and the politics surrounding the ‘making of Eurasia’. Chapter 2 therefore puts China’s BRI into historical and contemporary context, before Chapter 3 outlines the contours of Sino-Russian interaction in the broad area under investigation, Eurasia. Chapters 4 to 6 then zoom in on case studies to substantiate the analysis of the spectrum of possible reactions to these dynamics on a regional plane. The cases have been chosen in light of their function in the larger web of Sino-Russian neighbourhood policies. With the aim to investigate variety in the reception of and reaction to Chinese and Russian foreign policy initiatives across Eurasia, the selection of these cases has to do with a range of institutional, politico-economic and geographical factors. Kazakhstan was an integral part of the Soviet Union and its Soviet legacy is easily recognizable to anyone visiting the country. No other country in Central Asia is home to more ethnic Russians than Kazakhstan, yet the Kazakhstani government is pursuing a conscious ‘multi-vector’ policy of balancing the interests of all its neighbours, including Russia and China. Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world situated in the heart of Eurasia. This explains why Kazakhstan was so central for China’s talk of transcontinental land connections when the ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) was announced in 2013. China is eyeing economic transmission belts travelling from Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf via Kazakhstan to China, and vice versa. Kazakhstan is both a member of the Eurasian Economic Union and the most important partner of China’s Silk Road Economic Belt. It serves as a microcosm for the opportunities and challenges of new interactions between Eurasian actors. Mongolia, the second case under investigation, is sandwiched between China and Russia, was never part of the Soviet Union but a brotherly Socialist state, and is culturally a unique hybrid of national traditions as well as Russian influences from the north and Chinese from the south. It is not a member of the Eurasian Economic Union, and managed to have a ‘BRI corridor’ running through its territory in the form of the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor. Starting in 2016, Russian and Chinese policy planners began to build on this by putting forward the notion of a Continental Economic Partnership as an extension from the original China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor which would serve as a platform to find synergies between China, Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan.35

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Uzbekistan, finally, is a test case for the interplay between the policies and interests of Uzbek actors, China’s growing profile in Central Asia, and Russia’s reaction to the new politico-economic realities that the latter brings along. Geographically, Uzbekistan connects China’s western provinces with the western end of China’s planned economic corridors stretching up to the Persian Gulf via the China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor. The country has therefore been called the ‘buckle’ of the ‘Belt’. Like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan has a Soviet heritage, but has not joined the Eurasian Economic Union and has for years maintained a cautious pendulum diplomacy of trying to steer clear of organizations with too much Russian influence. Since the passing of long-time President Islam Karimov in 2016, Uzbekistan has been undergoing a rapid domestic transformation which also does not leave its regional neighbourhood policies, and consequently its place within Eurasia, unaffected. Besides the motivation to examine possible variation in foreign policy reactions of SREB ‘recipient countries’ across Eurasia, the case studies thus also follow a spatiality that mirrors the three most ‘Eurasian’ economic corridors portrayed in illustrations of the Silk Road Economic Belt, namely the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor, the New Eurasian Land Bridge (via Kazakhstan and Russia) and the China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor (via Uzbekistan and Iran). The final chapter of the book then extends the analysis from the intra-regional to the inter-regional level and reflects on the international repercussions of the studied power dynamics in a context where global ‘leadership’ is contested. The emergence of a new Eurasian trans-continentality brings along implications for world order, which will be discussed in the final chapter of this book. If we want to understand processes of de-Westernization that will affect how we understand ‘globalization’, we need to understand that not all roads will inevitably lead to Beijing. It is more likely that a ‘multi-Order world’ is emerging in which regionalized orders co-exist without an overarching narrative about ‘global order’.36 Against this background, the book sheds light on the extent to which evolving power dynamics between regional powers such as Russia, China and Central (and Northeast-) Asian states have feedback effects on global governance. The aim of this book is to unpack some of the assumptions about a new Eurasian order by taking a dispassionate look at the interplay between China’s BRI and some of the reactions to it across Eurasia. It offers an attempt at understanding the multilayered spectrum of China and Russia’s Eurasian policies towards each other, ranging from competition to cooperation, as well as the roles and agency of regional actors in between.

2

Reviving the Silk Road: China’s new approach to Central Asia From the ancient Silk Roads to ‘One Belt, One Road’ At a time when the Han Dynasty was expanding westwards (206 BC to 220 AD), Central Asia became the centrepiece in one of the first truly global trading networks, with merchants, explorers and scientists exchanging goods, technology and ideas along a route that extended from Xian in central China over 4,000 km to Europe. Chinese silk and porcelain, Indian ivory, spices and shawls were traded for gold, glass and precious metals, while philosophy, the arts, crafts and science benefited from an inter-cultural fertilization that this cross-country route made possible. The Silk Road scholar Valerie Hansen referred to it as ‘one of the most transformative super highways in human history’.1 Silk Road exchange popularized the domesticated horse as well as wine grapes and viniculture across the whole of Eurasia. These ‘Silk Roads’, however, were not necessarily trade corridors between the two extreme geographical poles, China and Europe. Rather, these were economic corridors that allowed local tradesmen to make profit as they bought goods in China and resold them elsewhere, and vice versa. These ‘proto-globalizers’, as James Millward calls them,2 crisscrossed the Eurasian landmass and turned the various Silk Roads into something more complex than what the shorthand of a silk road as an East-West route between China and Rome suggests.3 Merchants and intermediaries around the Red Sea and Arabian Sea travelled between caravanserais and urban settlements and probably had an interest in even discouraging direct commercial connections between China and the Roman empire.4 Surveying the archaeological and textual evidence, Hansen concludes that there was far less contact between the Han dynasty and ancient Rome than what the popular narrative about ‘the Silk Road’ suggests.5 Between China and Rome also lay other powerful empires that responded positively to increased overland trade. The Parthians, rulers in Persia, benefitted as much from commercial ties in Central Asia as the Kushans did in what is today northern India. Desert oases such as Palmyra in nowadays Syria or Petra in nowadays Jordan became symbols for the prosperity that the Silk Roads would entail for commercial middlemen, and for the joint interests in trade of the regional powerhouses. In the East of Eurasia, the Kushans, descendants from the Chinese Yuezhi nomads, established themselves as the most powerful actor after their crossing of the Hindu Kush mountains around 50 AD.6 Thus taking control of a geographical area then called

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The Making of Eurasia

Bactria, the Kushans controlled the access routes to western China in the East, and to the Parthian and Roman empires to the west.7 Reliable coinage helped to consolidate Kushan power and to foster commercial exchange between China, India and Persia. Bactria became a bridgehead for the Silk Road. Trade, however, was not limited to overland connections. The Roman empire in particular explored new maritime routes and established connections to the ports of western India, unbeknownst to the Han rulers in central China. It was only with the rise of the Sassanid Dynasty, who would replace the Parthians as rulers of Persia in 227 AD, that such trading routes were disrupted and China became aware of them.8 Similarly, three centuries later, the Sassanids acted as commercial middlemen between Byzantium and China, sometimes through yet other intermediaries such as the Sogdians, trading nomads between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers in presentday Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and founders of the Silk Road cities Samarkand and Bukhara,9 or the Uyghurs in contemporary western China. The interaction between sedentary and nomadic peoples between East and West even left behind culinary legacies, and is said to explain the ubiquity of dumplings from eastern Europe all the way to Northeast Asia.10 The association that China had always been at the epicentre of Eurasian trade connections is thus a misconception. This distinction between Chinese sponsorship of inter-regional trade and local middlemen is important to keep in mind if we are to compare the template of the ancient Silk Road with its discursive revival in China’s contemporary foreign policy discourse, and the role of local agents in it. The fall of the Roman, Parthian and Kushan empires enabled an even more active circulation of products, but also religious ideas and cultural influences. The ‘empires of the Silk Road’, Persia under the Sassanids, Turkic khanates, the Byzantines and Islamic caliphates, came into direct contact with each other, and passed on knowledge from ancient Greece and Rome, which only later found its way back to late medieval Europe.11 The Silk Road reached its peak under the Tang Dynasty (618–907), before the rise of new actors on the world stage, the Mongols in the East, the Crusaders in the West, gradually dampened trade and ushered in the decline of the Silk Roads. Trade, however, continued under the Mongol domination in Central Asia, and Venetian merchants reached out to Mongolian-ruled China via land routes.12 Marco Polo’s travels to the court of Kublai Khan, ruler over the Mongol empire in the second half of the thirteenth century, were passed on to posterity in his romanticizing writings. To indigenous Steppe tribes in Central Asia, the Mongols did not appear as destroyers, but as unifiers who opened nomadic lifestyles to the benefits of inter-regional trade and contributed to the spread of military technology, arts and knowledge in mathematics, astronomy and other sciences.13 What finally let these overland corridors diminish in importance was the discovery of new maritime trade routes and the rise of seafaring economies from the fifteenth century onwards. In 1432, the Chinese admiral Zheng He reached Mecca and Persia, creating a brief direct link between China and the Middle East after centuries of only indirect contact via intermediaries. His maritime explorations during the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century were underscored by the idea of guaranteeing China’s access to long-distance trade and travel. It was understood that such an access would need to be secured by infrastructure stretching from China via the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf up to

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the Red Sea.14 It was also half a century before the Genoese Christopher Columbus set off on his famous exploration on behalf of the crown of Castille in 1492. From the sixteenth century onwards, China did not follow up on these post-Mongol explorations and became more introspective. Derek J. Mitchell attributes this to the growing influence of Confucian scholars suspicious of the influence of the external world on the internal and self-sufficient development of the ‘Middle Kingdom’.15 Others remind us that China’s focus on its land power was borne out of an immediate necessity: In the era of the Great Khans, the greatest threats to the Song and Ming dynasties had come from the land, not from the sea.16 In any event, the Haijin edict marked China’s retreat from the sea and the destruction of its large ocean-going ships.17 This sea ban imposed during the Ming dynasty stands emblematic for an isolationist policy that restricted maritime trading and coastal settlement. Chinese trade, as a consequence, took place in the form of tribute missions. By this time, silk and camels had long already been replaced by more bulky cargo and ships. The seafaring era was the dawn for the rise of Europe. If the ‘Silk Road’ is best seen as a shorthand for a model of inter-regional exchanges, it did not suddenly die in the fifteenth century, however. The movement of goods and dissemination of knowledge and religion continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But ‘Eurasia’ was no longer the heart of the world as seen from China, as global centres of production and knowledge generation shifted westwards. Other actors began to take to the seas and to penetrate the Eurasian space through gradual infrastructure development at a time when the Chinese empire was turning inwards. In a sense, the Chinese government half a millennium later picked up the idea of Eurasian infrastructure connections its imperial predecessors had abandoned. This re-discovery proceeded in at least three stages. During the first stage, Chinese policy actors began to conjure up a historic revival of the Silk Roads as a way to frame new neighbourhood policies towards its western neighbours during the 1990s already. The second stage marked a new Chinese initiative which repackaged the content of these western neighbourhood policies from the 1990s, as will be seen further below. This time, however, the initiative became a watershed inasmuch as international reactions helped to elevate it to a level of name recognition and prominence like no Chinese policy or initiative ever before: This was the ‘One Belt, One Road’ (yi dai yi lu) initiative which was officially unveiled by the Chinese government in 2013 during an address by President Xi Jinping at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. The proposal to build an economic ‘belt’ mirroring the ancient Silk Roads, stretching from China across Central Asia to Europe, evoked connotations of trade connections between China and the outside world spanning several regions and centuries.18 The ‘Silk Road’ language harks back to a seemingly glorious past when China was an important center of the then-known civilization. As a political discourse, the reinterpretation of history is partially selective by default. Referring to Almaty as an ‘ancient city’ in his eulogy to Kazakhstan when launching the Silk Road Economic Belt in September 2013, for instance, President Xi winked at the fact that the city had only been at the periphery of the various trading routes under the Karakhanids from the tenth century before it slipped into oblivion for several centuries.19 Beyond historical accuracy, however, the attraction of the Silk Road revival lies in its power as

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The Making of Eurasia

a metaphor. In this early stage of the initiative, the idea essentially mirrored the various ‘new Silk Road’ initiatives of the 1990s aimed at enhancing the integration of China’s western provinces into their Eurasian neighbourhood. A month after Xi’s visit to Kazakhstan, he proposed the development of a ‘21st Century Maritime Silk Road’ in an address to the Indonesian Parliament. Together, these are the ‘Belt’ and ‘Road’ of China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) initiative. Promoted separately at first, OBOR quickly became the overarching policy framework for an initiative potentially affecting more than sixty-five countries. While the Chinese government has (deliberately) not produced official maps illustrating the envisaged economic corridors of the Silk Road Economic Belt, analysts have had to refer to maps published by Chinese news agencies that were seen to resemble a semi-official representation, one from May 2014, and another from October 2014. Xinhua News Agency printed a map with two zig-zag lines, one representing the maritime Silk Road, the other the land-based Silk Road Economic Belt. On the subsequently elaborated illustrations (by observers, not the Chinese government), six economic corridors are seen to be fanning out from central China: A China-Indochina Peninsula corridor, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a corridor connecting China-MyanmarBangladesh-India, a China-Mongolia-Russia corridor, a China-Central and West Asia corridor, and the new Eurasian land bridge going into Kazakhstan and connecting at Orenburg in Russia. China’s foreign policies towards its Eurasian neighbours came to be increasingly bundled together under the unifying ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ umbrella.20 A joint action plan in March 2015 by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Commerce provided the road map for the development of this new Silk Road, which revolves around the key ideas of connectivity, policy coordination, investment facilitation, financial integration and people-to-people bonds (also known as the Wu Tong, the five openings, to which I will return below).21 In the same year, President Xi set up the Leading Small Group for Advancing the Belt and Road Initiative.22 In 2016, the initiative was renamed to ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI). This marked the third stage in the evolution of China’s new Eurasian connectivity policies. While the term stayed the same in Chinese (yi dai yi lu), the re-branding targeted foreign audiences, as Chinese policy planners began to notice that international observers had started to wonder where precisely the ‘one’ belt and the ‘one’ road would run. The evolution of the initiative thus partly followed the wave of international attention, and proved to be fairly malleable at that. The change of name from OBOR to BRI was therefore both a move to soothe speculations that China had a geographically fixated masterplan to dominate Eurasia, and an evolution in the initiative that took out the geographic focus on China’s Eurasian neighbourhood and let the imagination go global. In the first two years since its announcement, the initiative promoted a geo-strategic order conception that supposedly links Asia with Europe and thereby contributes to a new ‘mapping’ of Eurasia. After that, it became a catchphrase that summarizes China’s interests not only in Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe, but China’s engagement globally.23 At the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May 2017, Xi welcomed twenty-nine national leaders and delegates from 130 countries, as he expanded on his vision of

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new global opportunities that would arise from China’s initiative. ‘What we hope to create is a big family of harmonious co-existence,’ Xi said, as he announced the release of an additional 100 billion yuan for the Silk Road Fund and an additional 380 billion yuan channelled through the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank in support of Belt and Road projects, raising the total funding available for the Belt and Road Initiative to an astonishing $900 billion.24 In a high-end PR video (‘Why I proposed the Belt and Road’) released via the Chinese channel CGTN in 2017, President Xi employs the Silk Road imagery to underline how the BRI revitalizes an imagined past of transcontinental connections around the globe, as his voice talks over images of fifteenth-century ships sailing towards a brighter future.25 As a geopolitical imaginary, such a selective reconstitution of the past becomes a source of geo-cultural power in the present.26 The evolution of the initiative from focusing on China’s Central Asian neighbourhood to expanding its global reach was also marked by a shift in prioritized policy domains. The focus of the initiative in the first two years was on infrastructure. At this stage, it heavily emphasized the logistical development of overland infrastructure through Central Asia – the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB)’ – and a string of maritime shipping routes – the ‘Maritime Silk Road (MSR)’ – that connect Chinese ports to the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, all the way up to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea.27 The MSR, Xi told the assembled audience in Indonesia, would see Chinese investments in port development throughout the Indian Ocean, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The land-based variant was hailed as a transmission belt for economic development in partner countries and a cost-effective infrastructural asset. The effects of these Eurasian corridors will be discussed in the chapters that follow. China’s Transportation Association calculates that overland transportation from China’s east coast to western Europe takes only one-fifth of the time it takes for the thirty days of maritime transport.28 A transcontinental railway line opened for freight routes, and runs from Chongqing in China to Duisburg in Germany, carrying nonperishable goods such as laptops, shoes and clothes in one direction, and electronics, medical equipment and car parts in the other. Instead of the spice, silk or silver that traversed the ancient Silk Road, China’s new Silk Road connects East and West with freight containers, railways and consumer goods. As President Xi officially launched the first vision of new overland connections in September 2013 in Kazakhstan, he announced the construction of railways, energy pipelines and highways westwards through Central Asia, as well as southwards through Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia. Xi spoke of the need to ‘improve road connectivity’ and ‘cross-border transportation infrastructure’ that would also be linked to ‘unimpeded trade’.29 The blockage of the Suez Canal in March 2021 by a giant container ship, grinding maritime shipping at one of the world’s busiest waterways to a complete halt for six days, seems to have enforced the argument for land-based alternatives. Long-distance freight trains, however, partially predate the Belt and Road Initiative. The Chongqing-Duisburg line, for example, was already inaugurated in January 2011, and the Chengdu-Łódź line in April 2013.30 A line between Yiwu and Madrid, the longest railway link in the world, was inaugurated in December 2014. Other trains are anticipated to link Suzhou to Warsaw, Chongqing to Hamburg31 or Wuhan to

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The Making of Eurasia

Lyon. The Yuxinou express, running from Chongqing in central China to Duisburg in Germany, via the Trans-Siberian railway, is a ‘block train’, which carries a special permit that speeds up customs controls at border crossing points.32 A train from Yiwu reached London on 18 January 2017, after having crossed China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany and the Channel tunnel normally used by Eurostar trains to connect the UK to the continent. The ‘Iron Silk Road’ has become the metaphor to denote such new railway networks crisscrossing the Eurasian landmass.33 In a next step of the initiative, such connectivity and new trade opportunities would then lead to an increased use of the renminbi, China’s currency, for transactions throughout the region in what Xi called ‘monetary circulation’. The proclaimed ambition now far exceeded railways and freight transport: Under the banner of ‘connectivity’, China also intends to develop a Chinese-led Eurasian energy network (the ‘Power Silk Road’), and to create a ‘digital silk road’ that would set Chinese standards in the sectors of e-commerce and telecommunication for the whole of the Eurasian continent.34 Chinese ICT firms like Huawei and ZTE would play a major part in the shaping of this new digital environment and are already amongst the most research-active companies in the advancement of the fifth-generation mobile network (5G). As a result, China acquires ‘connectivity power’ through the implicit links between different policy domains under various ‘Silk Road’ offshoots.35 The implications for China’s global reach and leverage will be discussed in a later section.

Old wine in new bottles? The conceptual consolidation of Silk Road narratives For all the publicity surrounding the BRI, it should be noted that none of the ideas behind this initiative are entirely new. Tim Summers has analysed how the new Silk Road narrative effectively manages to rebrand previous policy ideas that already date back a few decades – like China’s ‘opening to the west’ (xiangxi kaifang) of the early 2000s or the idea of turning China into a ‘bridgehead’ (qiaotoubao).36 The 1996 ‘new security concept’ (xin anquanguan) also aimed at achieving regional stability through closer economic development, as did Jiang Zemin’s 1999 Great Western Development Campaign (xibu da kaifa).37 Importantly, such policy developments had partially been promoted at a sub-national level by Chinese provinces like Yunnan and Guangxi.38 Even some of the ‘corridors’ proposed under the BRI have predated the latter’s pronouncement in some form or another (the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar corridor, the China-Mongolia-Russia corridor, the China-Indochina corridor).39 Provinces have managed to repackage and ‘upload’ some of their pre-existing projects into central BRI documents.40 In a sense, the BRI therefore becomes an exercise in post-hoc rationalization. Taking up familiar themes to consolidate them into an overarching framework has been a Chinese policy approach since the late 1970s: The ‘reform and opening up’ phase followed a certain three-step logic by which the central government gave policy signals, typically in the form of an umbrella vision or proposal (phase 1), which was then picked up by sub-national actors with local initiatives and reforms (phase 2) in an effort to manage the implementation phase of new policies (phase 3). Giving

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Chinese trade and infrastructure objectives a new ‘spatial fix’ with the introduction of the new Silk Road vocabulary, Summers thus argues, the Chinese government aims at the ‘extension, consolidation and political elevation of pre-existing policy ideas and practice at the sub-national level in China’.41 The accompanying investment of diplomatic and political capital in the promotion of its narrative dimension, however, makes the BRI qualitatively different from previous ‘Going Out’ campaigns. It is a prime example of the ‘mapping’ of political territory: The Chinese government creates spatiality by way of a carefully chosen government discourse. Trans-Eurasian infrastructure initiatives were proposed by other governments and organizations before, such as the proposed link between East-Central Asia and the Middle East within the UN Committee for Asia and the Far East (UNECAFE) in 1960, within the UN Economic and Social Committee for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) in 1992, or the multilateral proposal in 2006 for an integrated transport network between Europe and Asia.42 The ‘Silk Road’ metaphor to denote the revitalization of trans-regional infrastructure links was used long before 2013 also by other governments: in 1997 by Japan,43 in the early 2000s by South Korea and in 2011 by the United States.44 Even China’s Premier Li Peng had called for the construction of a new Silk Road on a visit to Kazakhstan in 1994 mainly to promote closer regional ties between Xinjiang province and its neighbours.45 Where the BRI differs is in its scale and the extent to which a concerted government effort affects not only the realization of the planned projects, but also the entire Chinese public diplomacy. With the OBOR/BRI umbrella, the central government also sets a framework for regional and local politicians to coordinate, adapt and rethink their policies in line with the guidance and general direction coming from the central government. The framework incentivizes provincial governments to secure funding for the implementation of a range of corresponding policies, banks to seek returns on their investments, and businesses to seek new development opportunities abroad in a particular networked eco-system.46 As such, the BRI discourse serves as a loose scheme that is largely driven by often competing interests of domestic policy and corporate actors, oftentimes under the ‘atmospheric guidance’ of the central government, but sometimes in outright contradiction with central instructions.47 On the level of policy coordination and mechanisms for inter-regional cooperation, China’s BRI has effectively integrated and inserted its language into already existing regional cooperation mechanisms such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, ASEAN Plus China (10+1), the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the Greater Mekong Sub-region Economic Cooperation (GMS).48 In April 2019, the Small Group for Advancing the BRI published a progress report which praises the fact that BRI language has found its way into documents emanating from UN bodies, the G20, APEC and other regional organizations.49 One might add the ‘16+1’ cooperation mechanism between China and sixteen central and eastern European countries, and its extended format 17+1 after Greece was included.50 The conclusion of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in November 2020 as the world’s largest free trade agreement, comprising all ten ASEAN members plus Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and China, likewise perpetuates a Chinese emphasis on supposedly multilateral formats (no matter their substantive value), in which the pattern of a ‘China+x mechanism’

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The Making of Eurasia

repeats itself. China’s previous tendency to compartmentalize its policies towards different parts of the world (China-Africa relations, China-Middle Eastern relations, China-Asia Pacific relations, etc.) has changed, and the government sees increasing cross-linkages between them under the overarching theme of the ‘Belt and Road’.

Reasons why China ‘steps out’ The ‘Five Openings’, domestic economics and the role of Xinjiang Several theories have been offered as to why China ‘steps out’ with this new Silk Road initiative, and why it did so in 2013.51 Four factors are particularly relevant here, and it is important to disentangle China’s BRI discourse (the ‘Five Openings’) from likely underlying motivations. The first set of arguments centres on material gains. Domestically, Xi’s mantra of a ‘new normal’ of slower economic growth puts pressure on the government to expand to new markets for its excess industrial and consumer goods. The breakneck speed of economic growth that came to characterize the Hu Jintao era in Chinese politics was not sustainable anymore.52 Urbanization exacerbated the problem: As more and more people have been moving into the cities, societal cohesion could only be guaranteed by long-term growth figures around 6 per cent GDP growth. Seen in this light, investments abroad become a recipe to address industrial overcapacity (especially in the solar, steel and shipbuilding industries). They aim to avoid the middle-income trap by exploring new export markets and finding new uses for surplus capital. Finding new investment opportunities abroad becomes a strategy for state-owned enterprises to ‘rebalance towards consumption’.53 China’s manufacturing capacity has exceeded the domestic capability to absorb it. Chinese companies therefore need to engage in ‘Capacity Relocation’,54 or ‘investment facilitation’, as one of China’s five stated BRI goals puts it. China’s new ‘going out’ strategy has therefore been analysed as driven by the goal of shifting parts of its industrial and construction capacity abroad in order to maintain high-digit growth numbers.55 Yet, such a strategy does not structurally address the outsourcing of whole economic sectors to other countries with lower labour costs as China’s incomes gradually rise. It is also unlikely that overseas spending on projects solves China’s problem with its excess capacity in, say, the steel sector, as it does not address the production and supply glut at home.56 Seeing the BRI as a response to and panacea for China’s domestic economic asymmetries, in addition, only ‘postpone(s) the decisive moment when Chinese production will need to be transitioned from a low-cost model (“Made in China”) to a value-added production model (“Created by China”)’, Marlene Laruelle notes.57 A second motivation especially in the first two years of the initiative, as noted above, related to China’s geography and the perceived link between political stability and the economic underdevelopment of China’s western provinces. Promoting economic prosperity by improving the connection between Chinese western provinces and China’s neighbouring states to the west is seen as a way to ‘pacify’ China’s western

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province of Xinjiang. Chinese authorities continually emphasize that this region has been troubled by extremism and separatism instigated by an Uyghur minority.58 The central government’s stated security concerns refer to transnational Turkic nationalism (the ‘East Turkestan independence’ movement is particularly singled out here), Islamic militancy and ethnic uprisings. Terrorism and separatism are inseparably linked in China’s national security conception, and there is no clear distinction between religion, nationalism and radicalism.59 Turning Xinjiang into an important overland hub is seen as a way to reduce poverty, develop the local economy and thereby eradicate root causes of extremism.60 China’s envisaged overland connections have therefore followed an ‘all roads lead to Urumqi’ strategy. They are part of an ongoing state-building exercise in China’s frontier regions (‘Xinjiang’ literally means ‘new frontier’). Cargos unloaded at the ports of Shanghai, Guangzhou or Qingdao are transported by freight trains to the inland port in Urumqi, from where freight lines continue to the border crossing points between China and its Central Asian neighbours.61 As a geographical focal point in western China at the intersection of China and Central Asia, Xinjiang’s capital city becomes a natural candidate as a transcontinental hub for commercial corridors, despite the fact that Urumqi is farther from the sea than any other city in the world. It is the closest major city from the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility.62 The fact that the biggest town of Central Asia is not in any of the Central Asian republics but in China already indicates that geography imposes a geopolitical imperative on China: The continental size of the country forces the Chinese government to embrace a broad categorization of Asia. By default, China is not only an East Asian, but also a Central Asian power. The connectivity rationale of the BRI – especially in its early phases – has acknowledged precisely this conundrum. At the beginning of 2020, China began work on its westernmost airport in Taxkorgan, Xinjiang, close to the borders with Tajikistan and Afghanistan. This was the first airport in the Pamir Mountains, and the first in a series of another thirty planned airports in Xinjiang which will make the province home to the largest number of transport airports in China and facilitate access to the region’s population and resources by air.63 The causes for Xinjiang’s political instability, however, lie not so much in economic underdevelopment, as in the ‘pacification’ policies adopted by successive Chinese governments. These sought to contain the effects of China’s settler colonialism instead of empowering non-Han ethnicities, as the region came under Chinese imperial rule during the eighteenth century.64 The history of repression of non-Han elements (minzu, i.e., ethnic minorities) explains the level of resentment on the part of the nonHan local population. Xinjiang today is the most heavily policed of China’s provinces. The surveillance intensified after Uyghur riots in Urumqi left hundreds dead in 2009. The many Fang Bao and SWAT units on every street corner certainly make for an unpleasant atmosphere.65 The heavy police clampdown here also unmasks an internal contradiction between China’s domestic ‘pacification’ policies and the liberalizing development that would come with trans-border connectivity.66 While none of this is new, it complicates the objective underlying the BRI to promote ‘people’s bonds’ between China’s western provinces and its Eurasian neighbourhood.67 Another aspect relating to power dynamics on the ground is the power-sharing between the minzu and Uyghurs, not just between the Uyghurs and Han.68 As Sarah

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Lain notes, Chinese policymakers tend to assume ‘that efforts to promote economic development will naturally help bridge the social, political, and economic divide’.69 Policies that truly bridge economic development with societal conciliation, however, would need to account for the complex tapestries of socio-economic realities on the ground between the bazaar networks controlled by Uyghurs, local branches of stateowned enterprises run by Han Chinese, and the domestic transfer of goods produced in special economic zones elsewhere in China for sale as ‘Xinjiang products’ to regional traders from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan (from which non-Han ethnicities hardly benefit economically).70 Until the mid-1990s, the Chinese lands around the Tian Shan and Pamir mountains were a vast emptiness, unconnected to infrastructural networks, until the ‘Remake the West’ campaign in 2000 began to address the lack of interaction between Xinjiang and its Central Asian neighbours, which gradually also included Chinese investments to rebuild Soviet-era infrastructure in neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan or Tajikistan.71 New investments in rails and roads are therefore thought to be a first step towards increased cross-border trade. Other cities in Xinjiang such as the Uyghur city of Kashgar (China’s most western city) and Khorgos on the Chinese-Kazakhstani border are also at the centre of the various SREB routes. The Karakorum Highway already links the Pakistani part of Kashmir to Kashgar. The oasis town of Kashgar was a better accessible and safer crossing point for travellers on the ancient Silk Road than the more Northern Alashankou Pass, yet it is the latter that has become the main crossing point for trans-border rail traffic today. Trucks commute between the Kashgar market in Xinjiang and the bazaar in Naryn in Kyrgyzstan. Chinese businessmen mingle with Russian tourists, truckers from Uzbekistan and traders from Pakistan, and there is a rail project planned to connect Kashgar with Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan.72 As an infrastructural hub, Urumqi remains a key transit town, and it is no coincidence that posters at Urumqi airport boast of the ‘Gold Port Alashankou’ that show an arriving train next to a wall of cargo containers. The border town of Khorgos is advertised here as a ‘land full of preferential policies’ and as a ‘duty-free shopping paradise’.73 Four of the six envisaged land corridors pass through Xinjiang. Greater economic activity in the form of commercial transit, so the rationale, is a policy of societal appeasement at the same time. Underlining this nexus was an important message in President Xi’s major speech on ‘peripheral diplomacy’ in October 2013.74 The stated goal of ‘people-to-people bonds’ by way of language schools, cultural exchanges and educational programmes to further China’s image abroad, however, stands in stark contradiction to the Chinese policy of relentless repression of parts of its own population in Xinjiang and elsewhere. To date, in addition, it has not had any noticeable change in societal perceptions and enhanced cross-border exchanges between Chinese and Central Asian populations.75 If anything, the gap between official rhetoric and popular apprehension about Chinese intentions has only grown wider, as later chapters will show.

Finance and ‘monetary circulation’ The third major motivation behind the BRI relates to ‘monetary circulation’, as one of Xi’s stated ‘Five Openings’ was labelled, and which the ‘Vision and Actions’

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document of March 2015 calls ‘financial integration’. This goal is embedded in an outreach to BRI partner countries that are supposed to make this a multilateral effort. Kazakhstan and China, for example, have planned a clearance and settlement centre for Chinese renminbi in the form of the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC). The AIFC set up partnerships with the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, and a ‘memorandum on strategic understanding’ was signed between the AIFC and the Silk Road Fund.76 Launching a network of offshore renminbi clearing centres and using non-dollar currency-swap agreements also serve that purpose. It also reinforces the proposed solution to China’s overcapacity problem, because renminbi in BRI partner countries can then be used abroad to buy Chinese goods again. Agreements on local currency conversions are one step towards the ‘de-dollarization’ of inter-regional trading patterns and towards a possible ‘renminbi internalization’.77 China has also pursued a policy of sterilization, whereby the central bank stores dollars from overseas transactions and issues renminbi-denominated bills in return.78 ‘Renminbi internationalization’, however, is not a straightforward process and might take a long time: Most initial Chinese investments will likely be in US dollars for some time to come, and the ‘dollar hegemony’ is a very resilient and global systemsmaintaining institution.79 This is the ‘exorbitant privilege’ that the United States enjoys thanks to the status of the dollar as international reserve currency.80 Even if China intends to decrease the circulation of the US dollar, China’s debt itself will not decrease and will remain in US dollar. If interest rates in the US increase, China’s debt will too. The founding of the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2014 was seen as a further step towards the ‘de-dollarization’ of regional trade relations.81 The AIIB is a multinational bank and has a corporate procurement policy, in contrast to the ‘concessional loans’ provided by Chinese policy banks.82 Investing in a range of new financial instruments and regional banks is seen as a ‘potentially more productive use for accumulated foreign exchange reserves than maintain them in US treasuries’.83 China’s efforts to rectify its underrepresentation in global finance by creating its own multilateral bank were to no small extent motivated by the fact that the US Congress had blocked any IMF reforms for years.84 China’s voting share in the IMF amounted to a mere 3.8 per cent (increased to 6.10 per cent in 2018), while the US share amounted to 16.5 per cent. The ‘Vision and Actions’ document further explicitly mentions that China should strengthen the China-ASEAN Interbank Association and the SCO Interbank Association.85 China’s connectivity initiatives therefore also entail a claim to shift the international financial and security architecture.86 The normative ambition to become recognized as a co-equal of Western financial powerhouses also in a global finance and banking system has been underlying the rhetoric of BRICS summits and communiques.87 A New Development Bank (NDB), headquartered in Shanghai, with an initial capital of $50 billion was launched at the Fortaleza BRICS summit in Brazil in June 2014 and inaugurated at the 2015 summit in Ufa in southern Russia. At a minimum, the emergence of these new non-Western financial institutions challenges the prerogative of Western governments as the sole architects of the global financial system. At the 2014 summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, held in Beijing, Xi also announced the set-up of a $40 billion Silk Road Fund to serve as a ‘financing

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platform’ for BRI-related projects. China’s bulk of the allocated funds for the BRI, however, is channelled through two state-owned policy banks: The China Development Bank and the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China. By 2017, these two policy banks were lending more money in Asia than the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) combined.88 In 2015, the Chinese government injected $32 billion into China Development Bank and $30 billion into Exim Bank for BRI-related projects, which was raised to another 55.7 billion in 2017.89 Other banks such as the Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China also serve as lenders, but are less prominent. In 2019, investments and contracts worth $614 billion had been made with Chinese funds since the BRI’s inception in 2013.90 Another commercial motivation behind the BRI is the fact that many of the countries involved are important suppliers of raw materials that China’s economy relies on (such as oil, gas, uranium, copper or gold). This is an aspect that is important to keep in mind with a view to the local receptiveness to China’s investments in places like Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. The reproach that Chinese investments are made for China’s own economic benefit alone is one that has bedevilled Chinese outward direct investments across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. The Chinese government has become aware that a better communication policy has to accompany its BRI outreach if Chinese aid is to shake off the association with ‘predatory lending’, whereby Chinese loans lock contract partners into a debt dependence while reducing them to the role of exporter of raw materials for Chinese manufacturing.91 Yet, the often-repeated assumption that Chinese aid is devoid of political conditionality has to be contrasted with more nuanced financing requirements as well as implicit political conditions. Such regulations stipulate that Chinese state banks generally do not finance projects without a Chinese component to it, meaning that Chinese banks give out loans to Central Asian governments, which in turn reinvest the money in a Chinese company that carries out a project with Chinese labour. Some experts have estimated that no less than half of the materials, equipment and services procured under such contracts need to come from China under such ‘concessional loans’.92 This circular flow of loans makes Chinese aid vulnerable to the criticism that it constitutes ‘predatory aid’ from which local countries hardly benefit.93 Financial dependence also leads to expectations of political loyalty on the part of the Chinese government that come with Chinese governmental loans (sympathy with the ‘One China’ policy, which includes an alignment on Chinese positions on the Uyghurs, Taiwan relations and the status of Tibet).94 Hao Tian speaks of ‘embedded conditionality’ in which China mixes aid, concessional loans, trade agreements and unilateral investment decisions with a less tangible, but implicit level of diplomatic conditionality.95 This does not mean that the Chinese central government always has full control over some of the negative implications that come with Chinese investments. The highly centralized nature of most Central Asian regimes does not help either to cushion the effects of predatory business practices. A lack of participatory governance also helps explain why home-grown corruption and Chinese economic dominance often tend to become conflated.

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But even in cases where cause and correlation are not always easy to separate, Sinophobia nevertheless often grows as a net result. This is true across Central Asia as well as in Pakistan, where Baloch local resistance against China’s involvement in the port of Gwadar was an indication of the challenges the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is facing.96 Some Chinese experts have recognized that societal perceptions can become an obstacle for the success of the BRI, and that Chinese businesses need to engage more with local communities and adopt more of a corporate social responsibility.97 In light of Chinese misinvestments at home, however, the Chinese financing of mega-projects abroad as part of its BRI raises the question whether all of the investments subsumed under the BRI umbrella reflect economic sense. China has a track record of financing ‘White elephants’, such as the ghost town of Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia, where giant parks, luxury apartments, stadiums, shopping malls and highways have been built in expectation of inhabitants that never came. Such projects have often been financed by bad loans, while Chinese zombie companies have been artificially kept alive. Policy banks, in turn, continue to refinance dubious debtors, leading to the twin problems of investment glut and excessive (and therefore unsustainable) credit lines.98 There are also notable examples of Chinese-financed projects abroad that have turned into failures and have highlighted not only questionable corporate execution but also state-backed strong-arm tactics in negotiating bidding contracts. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, the breakdown of an electricity plant in the capital Bishkek, leaving much of the city in sub-zero temperatures, sparked a full-blown domestic political scandal engulfing former Prime Minister Sapar Isakov and other high-level officials who were accused of corruption relating to the awarding of an overpriced power plant reconstruction contract to the relatively inexperienced Chinese company TBEA.99 In Malaysia, the government renegotiated a Chinese-financed rail project and even cancelled plans worth $2.5 billion to build a gas pipeline in the wake of a corruption scandal.100 And a few kilometres east of the Khorgos dry port at the KazakhstaniChinese border, an ‘International Centre for Border Cooperation’ (ICBC) was set up as a special economic zone with the objective to attract investment and stimulate regional development. However, the scandal surrounding the arrest of the head of the ICBC for allegedly having taken a million dollar bribe did not help to increase positive publicity.101 To be sure, not all of such cases represent incompetence or corruption on the part of Chinese government actors. But they complicate the political context in which the latter have to convince contract partners of the viability of the BRI. Chinese banks, in addition, have reportedly not paid much attention to questions of debt sustainability, and China Development Bank as well as Exim Bank (whose funding is crucial for BRI projects) has not cooperated with the OECD.102 In 2019, China’s gross debt reportedly rose to over 300 per cent in relation to its GDP.103 Against this background, one may be forgiven for wondering how Chinese economic planners as well as private companies will avoid perpetuating flawed economic practices abroad. It also clouds perceptions of projects which could be either of little tangible benefit or which raise questions from a debt sustainability perspective.

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The BRI and globalization: China as a ‘discursive power’ The final motivation goes beyond the initiative’s economic dimension and relates to China’s role in global affairs at large. A strand of literature has emerged that couches China’s motivation behind the BRI as a geo-strategic grand design to remake the Eurasian, and subsequently, global order, in China’s image.104 The BRI, according to this line of thinking, is also an initiative that is indicative of China’s developing international identity. It is driven by an effort to make a distinctly Chinese contribution to ‘globalization’, and to thereby co-shape the global governance architecture.105 On a discourse level, the Chinese emphasis on the ‘win-win’ character of this initiative is a way to convey the same message that Hu Jintao’s concepts of ‘peaceful development’ in 2003 and ‘harmonious world’ in 2005 sought to get across,106 yet in a more comprehensive way that involves the streamlining of all government communications and policies. China portrays itself as a provider of public goods in order to shed both the image of a free rider and of the all-powerful economic giant whose ‘rise’ threatens other nations. Fanciful analogies in Chinese media that likened the BRI to a ‘Chinese Marshall Plan’ have therefore been duly criticized by the authorities.107 Kohlenberg and Godehardt have written on a new proactive ‘connectivity power’ that China’s foreign policy discourse has embraced.108 The Chinese government is actively accompanying its financial investments abroad with systematic efforts to occupy new discursive spaces. China’s discursive power (huayuquan), they find, seeks to provide an ideational framework for China’s connectivity initiatives. Changing the course of world history always starts with powerful ideas. Trade relations will follow, and the Chinese government has understood how the connectivity vocabulary can become its distinctive contribution to shape globalization on its own terms. Coining new discourses that might compete with the language, ideas and norms about ‘globalization’ that Western governments have used as talking points for decades is an ideational competition in the shaping of world order. China makes proactive steps to influence public opinion globally by placing its discourse increasingly also in Western media outlets and academia.109 It is noteworthy that China uses language on financial investments that taps into a Western infrastructure development discourse. But besides the well-known Chinese emphasis on ‘win-win’ cooperation and terms that make for awkward translations into English (such as ‘mutual learnings’), China also coins new concepts such as a ‘community of shared destiny’ (renlei mingyun gongtongti linian).110 The term itself appears paradoxical in a Chinese context, as Chinese policymakers have tended to categorize their engagement with external powers according to the importance of foreign governments: Major powers are attributed more importance than states in China’s periphery and ‘developing states’.111 Different approaches to relations with Russia and other ‘partner countries’ of the BRI along the various economic routes are indicative of this discursive discrepancy, and will be the subject of the analysis in the chapters that follow. China’s public diplomacy hurries to stress the co-managed nature of the BRI and seeks to rebut the sceptical perception that the initiative is a unilateral Chinese strategy.112 China continues to repeat that the BRI is an inclusive ‘initiative’, not a ‘strategy’ or a ‘plan’ over which China claims ownership. But attempts to quantify ‘Country

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Cooperation’ (as China’s National Development and Reform Commission began to do in September 2016) and the socio-economic implications of Chinese investments for local agency may constitute a contradiction with the Chinese traditional insistence on non-interference. Beyond China’s publicly declared principled opposition to the use of sanctions as tools in international politics, case studies have to shed more light on the dynamics of how political realities on the ground may run counter to China’s professed policy of non-interference in domestic affairs of neighbouring states. An internal contradiction in China’s ambition to make a distinct contribution to a ‘community of human destiny’ lies in its growing nationalism at home in a ‘new era’ of China’s relations with the outside world that Xi Jinping ushered in at the People’s Congress in 2017. In March 2018, the National People’s Congress formally added Xi Jinping Thought (a fourteen-point manifesto) to the Chinese constitution. The nationalistic rhetoric accompanying the ‘China Dream’ (Zhongguo meng) and Xi Jinping’s comments about ‘the great resurgence of the Chinese nation’ for which he has set a target date of 2049 – the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China,113 begs the question how a domestic nationalism can be compatible with the rhetoric of an inclusive, inter-connected world where ‘people-to-people bonds’ are more than mere code words for the creation of a Sino-centric new Order in Asia.114 The BRI has become President Xi’s main foreign policy contribution which complements his domestic campaign to realize the ‘China dream’.115 Tellingly, the BRI was written into the Party Constitution at the same time as Xi Jinping Thought. Finally, the various ‘Silk Road’ offshoots in a range of policy domains (from health to the digital sphere) entail a paradox that hints at the link between the increasingly global dimension of the BRI and the possible diffusion of authoritarian standards. As Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, writes in the New York Times: ‘The Chinese government has carved out an alternative internet universe with its own brands, rules and culture.’ He goes on to argue that ‘technology will decide which country emerges as the world’s dominant economic power in the long run’, and sees the risk that ‘a digitally interconnected world could die by a thousand cuts, and technoprotectionism may get a further push during the next global downturn’.116 While physical infrastructure investments in the wake of the BRI appear more tangible in the mid-term, it is the future of e-commerce and digitalization that creates the toughest challenge for the balance between data protection and costumer transparency. Issues of digital governance ultimately become a test case for the perseverance of open societies. In developing countries along the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’, up to two billion people live without bank accounts, but in need of credits that their own governments cannot provide. E-commerce and digital banking thus lend themselves as an opportunity for China to become a provider of public goods as it deepens its involvement in the capital structures of these countries. The question ‘what will China offer the world in its rise?’, which not only Wang Yiwei, who served as a semi-official explainer of the BRI on various think-tank panels, asks in the title of his 2016 book on the BRI, has indeed puzzled many who try to make sense of China’s new global strategy. How will a Chinese contribution to a ‘common destiny’ look like if China’s own development at home blends capitalist consumerism and nationalistic overtones with

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an all-pervasive techno-nationalism? The heated debate in many Western countries over the potential involvement of Huawei in the development of the 5G bandwidth internet was indicative of their perception that Chinese pre-dominance in internet and digital technologies would have a lasting long-term societal and political impact on globalization on Western terms. How China’s central government can reconcile the embrace of economic opportunities that an interconnected world economy provides with the pursuit of centralized autonomy over most other policy domains remains one of the central puzzles of Chinese international identity formation and the study thereof.117

Conclusion In a widely discussed article, Wang Jisi, the influential dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University, had urged the Chinese government to ‘march Westwards’ roughly one year before Xi’s official announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative.118 China should build ‘a new Silk Road’ from China’s coastal regions across Central Asia to Europe in an effort of geostrategic rebalancing, he argued. Economic prosperity and political stability in Xinjiang and Tibet, he held, are closely interlinked. Acknowledging this link, the Chinese government should develop comprehensive national strategies to contribute to regional stability. Wang’s article as well as the public reactions to it provided a framework for expert and policy discussions on China’s new approach to Eurasia, which was elevated to a new official level one year later when Xi Jinping stepped on the stage at Nazarbayev University to announce the Silk Road Economic Belt.119 Contrary to Wang Jisi’s language of geo-strategy, however, the Chinese government preferred to refer to the latter as an ‘initiative’ that, in its early phases, had an infrastructural emphasis on the integration of China’s western provinces into their Eurasian neighbourhood. Pegged as the most ambitious infrastructure investment project of all times, the BRI is supposed to revitalize economic corridors from East Asia to Europe. Through investments in railways, highways, ports and non-infrastructure sectors of selected partner countries, the Chinese government aims to enhance cross-border connectivity. Other assumed positive side effects are greater policy coordination, ‘investment facilitation’, ‘financial integration’ and ‘people-to-people bonds’. From 2016 onwards, the scope of the initiative was expanded to encompass China’s global policies and its vision of its place in the world. This chapter has surveyed the likely motivations behind the BRI, and has shown how these tend to be subsumed under either a set of factors linked to expected material gains (growth potential and industrial capacity relocation, exploring new export markets, cross-border commerce), political factors (Xinjiang and issues of ‘internal stability’) or into a set of ideational and geo-strategic arguments (redefining the Eurasian and global order and China’s place in it). Is the BRI driven by one particular of these factors more than by others? Perhaps. But as observers have noted, it is entirely conceivable that such a comprehensive development programme is driven by domestic

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economic reasons, considerations about foreign currency reserves, export promotion, as well as the prospect of improved neighbourhood policies, all at the same time.120 Bold announcements, however, do not always tally with profitability and sustainability checks. China disposes of impressive amounts of cash that make it the biggest cash cow in Asia, but bankable projects need to be found abroad if the government wants to avoid investing in ‘White Elephants’. The creation of the Silk Road Economic Belt cannot be enforced top-down. It depends to no small part on the active collaboration of local businesses and authorities, much like the ancient Silk Roads provided the context in which middlemen traded with each other, when Parthian, Sogdian and Kushan traders circulated goods in the lands in between Europe and China. The availability of infrastructure and the realization of a truly multi-nodal transport hub can be two quite distinct phenomena. Currently, cargo trains full of goods are travelling westwards from China, but are coming back half-empty.121 The long-term success or failure of the BRI will also have to be measured against China’s capacity to reconcile the partially competing logics at play, and this chapter has explored how some of the political and geo-strategic motivations contradict the inclusive connectivity narrative. As China’s new economic and diplomatic outreach is seen as a ‘restoration of fairness’ and a return to legitimate Great Power status for China itself,122 other nations in its Eurasian neighbourhood might be set to lose sovereignty in a new China-centred model of transnational production. From a debt sustainability perspective, Central Asia is set to become more dependent on China, as Chinese loans pour in. Finally, the question that needs answering from a foreign policy analysis is where and to what extent China’s massive economic outreach in the wake of the BRI has gradually superseded its publicly declared principle of non-interference in other countries. It will be the subject of the chapters that follow to answer some of these questions surrounding the implications of Chinese policy decisions on the economies and politico-societal fabrics of its partner countries. Before that, however, we need to shed light on the effects of Sino-Russian relations on Eurasia. These provide an additional layer of the context in which countries ‘in between’ devise their policies.

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3

Sino-Russian relations in Eurasia In 1904, the British geographer Sir Halford J. Mackinder outlined his seminal theory of the Eurasian heartland.1 Whoever ruled eastern Europe, he theorized, would command the ‘heartland’, and, in turn, would be in a position to rule what he called the ‘world island’.2 Those who subscribe to Mackinder’s idea of the Eurasian heartland would see Central Asia as the testing ground for geopolitical competition between China and Russia. In this thinking, China’s economic muscle challenges Russia in its own ‘backyard’ in Central Asia – a region which Russia regards as its ‘sphere of influence’. Here, the central question to answer if we are to understand the ‘making of Eurasia’ is to what extent China’s rise as a Eurasian power comes with frictions, and possibly even conflict, with Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his book The Grand Chessboard, also suggested that China could curb excessive Russian influence in Central Asia which would accord with the ‘geostrategic imperatives’ of the US.3 Employing the chessboard metaphor so prevalent in classical geopolitical writing, he noted: ‘Eurasia remains […] the chessboard on which the combat for global primacy will unfold.’4 But as the present chapter argues, the dynamics of Russian and Chinese interactions work in more subtle ways, and the shifting of power in Eurasia takes place gradually. Russia’s long-standing cultural ties with Central Asian states, a shared Soviet history and a common language still give Russia a residual influence in the region, alongside its significant military presence.5 China’s dealings with Central Asian governments have not been based on a comparable level of cultural familiarity.6 Up until the 2000s, Chinese interests in Central Asia were mainly linked to conditions of ‘political stability’ and the suppression of separatist tendencies in China’s Xinjiang province. The creation of the ‘Shanghai Five’ grouping in 1996 was an important step to delineate borders between China and its Central Asian neighbours. Russia and China’s joint opposition to the US long-term presence in the region after 2001 also served to align Russian and Chinese geopolitical interests.7 After the US ‘pivot to Asia’ under Obama and Trump’s apparent lack of a strategy for Central Asia, the main reference point (anti-Americanism) then gradually began to vanish. On the face of it, this increases the potential for strategic competition between Moscow and Beijing. In the mid-2000s, China also started to develop a stronger interest in investing in the regional energy exploration and distribution industry, which had

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been dominated by Russia since Soviet times. As China became more involved in the Central Asian hydrocarbon sector, it morphed into an energy competitor for Russia as far as control over distribution networks was concerned. Chinese investments have created new ‘infrastructured energy geographies’ that have had an impact on Russia’s predominance on this market.8 Russia’s economic influence in trade volumes began to dwindle at the same time. By the end of the first decade of the 2000s at the latest, it was clear to Moscow that it could not compete with China’s economic power. The announcement of the ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative in 2013 therefore presented a challenge for Russia that also has to be seen against this background. In the context of the Silk Road Economic Belt, the five Central Asian republics form the gateway for China’s economic corridors to markets further west. The March 2015 ‘Vision and Actions’ document issued by the NDRC, the MFA and the Ministry of Commerce outlines the ambitious scale of the initiative and the central geographic importance of ‘Eurasia’: ‘The Silk Road Economic Belt focuses on bringing together China, Central Asia, Russia and Europe (including the Baltic); linking China with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea through Central Asia and West Asia; and connecting China with Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Indian Ocean.’9 Russia’s response to China’s SREB, the land-based variant of the BRI with an initial geographical Eurasian focus, was therefore expected with much suspense, as it was seen as an indication not only for the future of Sino-Russian economic cooperation where Russia risked being sidelined in an asymmetric relationship, but also for notions of co-leadership in the re-definition of regional order. The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the politico-historical context in which this complex Sino-Russian relationship operates.

From unequal treaties to strategic triangulation As Russian trappers in search of fur went as far as the Pacific and as Russian imperial control was pushed further eastwards into Siberia under Catherine the Great, contact between the Romanov empire (1613–1917) and the Chinese Qing dynasty (1644–1911) led to conflicts over territory and resources, and only gradually to the development of trading links between the Russian tsars and the Chinese emperors. The treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 codified and stabilized bilateral relations, followed by the Treaty of Kyakhta of 1727, allowing for caravan trade between Russia and China. In 1851, the Treaty of Kulja enabled trade with Xinjiang and led to the Chinese recognition of Russian sovereignty over nowadays Kazakhstan.10 Yet, Chinese-Russian relations were characterized by wary and selective engagement, as Russian leaders turned their attention to Europe and the West from the early eighteenth century onwards. The three ‘unequal treaties’ of Aigun (1858), Peking (1860) and Tarbagati (1864) then did their part in furthering the impression in Beijing that Russia was no less an exploitative imperial power than the Western imperialists. To these, China had to cede territory in the form of the infamous ‘treaty ports’ during China’s ‘century of humiliation’.11 For China, Russia likewise became a growing potential threat to Chinese sovereignty. As Steve Smith notes, the founding of Vladivostok at Russia’s Pacific Coast in 1860 ‘was a sign of Russia’s intention to establish its hegemony in the Far East’.12

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Vladivostok became an important transit for onwards travel on the Trans-Siberian railway when a southern spur of the railway was built from there to Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province, in 1898, following the Chinese defeat by Japan in the war in 1894–5.13 ‘From the shores of the Pacific and the heights of the Himalayas’, Russia’s Finance Minister Sergey Witte told Tsar Alexander III, ‘Russia will dominate not only the affairs of Asia but Europe as well’.14 After the Qing Empire’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, China’s rapprochement with Russia had come from a position of weakness. A treaty signed by General Li Hongzhang granted Russia a railway concession in Manchuria in exchange for security guarantees in the case of a renewed Japanese invasion. This did not stop Russia from siding with Japan against the Boxer Rebellion and Chinese troops five years later. This deception was followed by the humiliating experience (for China) of having to recognize Outer Mongolia as an independent country in 1945, and the rupture in diplomatic relations in the 1950s.15 Even the construction of the Baikal-Amur railway as a second spur was motivated by strategic-military considerations with a view to China, as it offered the Russians an alternative railway farther away from the Sino-Russian border. On the face of it, the Communist revolutions in both countries, in Russia in 1917, in China in 1949, propelled their political systems into a like-minded ideological bloc in opposition to Western systemic enemies. Yet, despite the official rhetoric surrounding the decade of ‘unbreakable friendship’ between 1950 and 1960 that was initiated by the 1950 Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance, relations between the Soviet Union and Communist China under Mao Zedong hit rock bottom. Structural causes date back to the early years of Sino-Soviet relations in the 1920s and the May Fourth movement of 1919, an anti-imperialist movement growing out of Beijing student protests drawing attention to the weakness of China as enshrined by the Treaty of Versailles.16 Dependent on Soviet military aid and technical assistance, Mao had to swallow the bitter pill of accepting Stalin as tacit leader of the communist camp. Adding insult to injury, the Soviet Union refused to return territories in the Far East, clung on to Manchuria, and helped to establish a Communist client-state in Mongolia under Moscow’s influence at China’s Northern border. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Mao even likened Stalin’s policies towards Manchuria and Xinjiang to the unequal treaties imposed on China by the Western imperialists.17 These tensions came to a head in 1969 when Soviet and Chinese troops clashed on their joint border along the Amur. China even positioned its nuclear weapons in an expectation of a Soviet invasion. According to Mao’s Three World’s Theory, China was considered the leader of the Third World and the Soviet Union an enemy – a position China upheld until the 1970s.18 The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 signalled a change in Soviet China policy, with a greater emphasis on cooperation and practical confidence-building measures, leading to the first territorial concessions since the ‘unequal treaties’.19 In a government statement published in Pravda on 24 April 1986, Gorbachev referred to a ‘Pacific community’ and, in his landmark speech in Vladivostok in July of the same year, to a ‘comprehensive system of international security’ for the Asia-Pacific region.20 After the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, China and Russia seemed to concentrate initially on their respective relations with the West. Then, Russia under Boris El’tsin continued Gorbachev’s policy of seeking diplomatic

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engagement with China in the early to mid-1990s while largely neglecting Central Asia. Especially NATO expansion plans at the time helped to forge a view of China amongst the Russian elite that emphasized the utility of a ‘strategic union’ between Russia and China. Even under the Western-oriented Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, whose tenure meant a strain for Sino-Russian relations, the Russian defence industry was seeking closer ties with China. Starting in the early 1990s, China emerged as Russia’s biggest arms customer. Russia’s China diplomacy in the 1990s, however, was not without frictions, as Russia tried to court Taiwan and made a bid to effect rapprochement with Japan.21 Local politicians in Primorsky and Khabarovsk, meanwhile, nurtured a latent antiChina sentiment in Russia’s Eastern provinces at a time when a thriving cross-border criminal network in the Russian Far East in the 1990s allowed for surprising SinoRussian business collaborations in the underworld in parallel to the official bilateral relations.22 Russia’s political system as it developed under Putin in the 2000s, then, began to allow for powerful CEOs of state-owned companies to contribute to the overall shaping of Russian external relations. Igor Sechin, CEO of Rosneft, for example, has been known as an active promoter of close Sino-Russian relations in the energy domain, and Gennady Timchenko, a member of Putin’s inner circle, was appointed head of the Russian-Chinese business council. Alarmist readings of possible Chinese migration and security fears in the Far East at a regional (and academic) level are therefore only one piece of the bigger puzzle that is Russia’s China policy.23 Domestic veto players also complicate monolithic depictions of China’s Russia policy. In China, there can be partially diverging policy priorities between civilian (CCP) and military (Central Military Commission) authorities. Other ministries such as the MFA or MOFCOM can be relegated to the role of policy implementer according to instructions set by the State Council. MOFCOM officials have noticed that the high-flying rhetoric of Chinese and Russian leaders does not necessarily trickle down to the working level.24 In addition, the top leadership positions in the major Chinese (state-owned) oil companies like CNPC, Sinopec and CNOOC are appointed by the Central Committee of the CCP. This gives company heads direct access to and political clout over the Chinese leadership, in addition to the state’s ‘fiscal dependence’ on these companies.25 The fact that China and Russia were united in their common opposition to US unipolarity might have helped to formally establish a ‘strategic partnership’ in 1996. At the same time, Russian popular fears of China’s demographic, economic and growing military weight have served to perpetuate perceptions of a ‘China threat’ (kitayskaya ugroza), even within parts of Russia’s political elite. The negative associations that Chinese cross-border economic activities in Russia’s Far East have evoked in Russia are a case in point. Infrastructural negligence, demographic pressure and unequal economic developments have stoked Russian fears that its Far Eastern territories would be downgraded to some sort of energy and raw materials appendage for China. Beijing also acquired assets in the forestry industry in Russia’s Far East, which helps to secure continued timber imports.26 Chinese mass migration into Russia’s Eastern territories, however, is complicated by a range of socio-economic and language factors.27 A mismatch between business practices and popular perception still prevails. In 2015, demonstrations erupted in

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Russia’s Baikal region against a forty-nine-year lease of land to a Chinese company. Instead of a Chinese takeover of the Russian Far East, however, Chinese firms had been cultivating land hardly used by Russian agricultural workers, and producing crop for the Russian market, and with Russian workers.28 Chinese labour also tends to travel south to the more affluent coastal regions of China, not north into Russia. The Kremlin, in turn, hopes that Sino-Russian joint cooperation in the Far East can boost regional development. A Commission for Cooperation and Development of Russia’s Far East and Baikal region and Northeast China was set up in 2016. However, the Russian government did not follow up on earlier development plans for its Siberian regions with concrete projects and subsidies.29

China, Russia and multinational institutions in Eurasia The ambivalent nature of the new post-Soviet relationship between Russia and China has given rise to four popular narratives about Sino-Russian relations: The perception that the relationship is a ‘union of unequals’, that demographic imbalance in favour of China serves to conjure up the ‘yellow peril’ bogeyman in Russia, that Russia is perceived useful in China’s external trade policies as an energy supplier only and that a lack of long-term trust in high-level bilateral relations does not tally with the official gloss about a strategic partnership.30 But Sino-Russian relations today also need to be understood against the background of a web of overlapping institutional memberships that impacts on their respective role conceptions and international identities.31 For Moscow, strengthening Russia’s role as a first among regional equals has a positive correlation with its international standing. It is this approach that helps explain Russian behaviour in multinational organizations such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union.32 Rather than multilateralizing Russian state actions and acting as a constraint on its foreign policy, such organizations are seen as instrumental in consolidating and multiplying Russian influence. Russia’s preferred institution that serves to bolster Russian dominance in security affairs is the CSTO, while Chinese attempts to give the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) more sway as a security actor beyond its fight against the ‘three evils’ of separatism, terrorism and extremism and beyond its implicit agenda of driving the Americans out of Central Asia have been consistently resisted by Russia. Russia and China have held joint military exercises since 2005 and have created regional organizations that could serve as dialogue forums.33 Since 2003, the SCO members have held annual joint military exercises. However, the SCO lacks a legal basis for collective defence against external aggression, while the CSTO could theoretically deploy its Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) on the territory of any of its member states without a prior UN resolution. Mirroring NATO’s Article 5, the Collective Security Treaty of 1992 declared that an attack against a member should be considered an attack against all. With its twin threats of ‘terrorism’ and ‘external aggression’, the CSTO comes closer to a NATO-like collective defence organization than the SCO. Interpretations of the SCO as an Eastern counterpart to NATO are therefore off the mark.34

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Comparing security policy coordination through the SCO and CSTO, Roy Allison finds a geographical variation in that the CSTO focuses on the CIS Central Asian region and a ‘CSTO zone of responsibility’ as an implicit reference to Russian regional influence. The SCO ‘is heavily concerned with Central Asia (including the Xinjiang Autonomous Region) but reflects wider Chinese concerns in Asia and even aspects of global policy’, Allison finds.35 Given Russia’s history of staking claims as a dominant security actor, China’s proposal to launch a Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism (QCCM) as a counter-terror information sharing platform together with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan could not have met with approval in Moscow.36 But even within the CSTO, Russian foreign policy, especially after 2014, has intensified disagreements amongst member states. Russia’s idea of turning the CSTO into an ‘anti-NATO’ was rebuffed by its allies.37 In 2010, the CSTO proved ineffective in responding to the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan and revolts in Osh when the Kyrgyz acting President Roza Otunbayeva asked Russia for a military intervention, which Moscow refused. Observers have also questioned the added value of the RATS, established as a regional anti-terrorism structure in Tashkent in 2004,38 as well as the effectiveness and credibility of the CSTO as such.39 Russia’s support for secessionism in Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 again prompted questions about the usefulness of this organization to protect state sovereignty in the post-Soviet space. Yet, the Central Asian states remain strongly affiliated with Moscow in terms of military and security policies, as illustrated by joint military exercises, the purchase of Russian weapons at discounted prices, intelligence-sharing and cooperation on border control, and the training of Central Asian military and security personnel in Russia.40 For Central Asian CSTO members, China’s growing presence and influence in Eurasia can help to see the CSTO (and Russian military dominance within it) in a new light: For Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Russia’s military presence balances China’s growing profile in the region. This observation might prove problematic for Chinese actors in the future. Given the volatile security conditions in the region, the ‘success’ of China’s BRI also hinges on security governance. Blanchard and Flint have therefore argued that China may be dragged into a position of ‘reluctant hegemony’ as it realizes that the protection of facilities and Chinese citizens requires hard security commitments.41 Chinese private security companies are starting to emerge out of a likely realization that Chinese outbound investments in areas of insecurity might require security precautions.42 This is a dilemma for China. If the economic dimension of China’s BRI vision spills over into a military rationale, the carefully constructed narrative of a peaceful win-for-all project may erode, as it may only add to its skeptics’ argument that China’s enhanced capabilities are a threat to its neighbours and the world. The Russian government, for its part, is aware of the historically grown cultural links between the Central Asian republics and Russia and points out Russia’s predominance as a security actor: When I met him for an interview in Moscow, Russia’s plenipotentiary ambassador for the Asia-Pacific was unequivocal: ‘China will never fully replace Russia in importance in Central Asia. Economically, maybe. But politically, this is out of the question. There is a certain Soviet mentality of these countries and we speak the same language. […] And security-wise, China accepts the presence of the CSTO.’43

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Similarly, the SCO has served as a multinational platform in the region, but there have been disagreements over which policy domain the SCO should move onto its agenda (security, broader geopolitical issues or even economic integration), and who gets to dominate it. Founded as an anti-terror organization initially, the SCO has become more of an economic dialogue platform, mostly at the initiative of China. An Interbank Consortium and a Business Council were set up under the auspices of the SCO in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Russia eventually gave up on its attempt to promote a Eurasian development bank as an alternative to these SCO banks.44 An economic strategy was developed in 2012–14, and a Development Strategy towards 2025 adopted in 2015. For the Chinese government, however, the value of the SCO was primarily an instrumental one as far as outward investment strategies in Central Asia were concerned: Chinese firms as well as government bodies have used such instruments as a vehicle for bilateral investments with ‘the SCO’s stamp of origin’.45 The SCO can thus serve to legitimize Chinese economic activities in the region (and thereby also alleviate fears of Chinese economic domination) by way of a multilateral embedding.46 Yet, Russia has tried to dilute China’s influence in the SCO by initiating the idea of an Indian membership (acceptable to China only by having Pakistan join too), and by blocking China’s attempts to establish an SCO Free Trade Zone.47 Russia is also supportive of Iran’s admission to the SCO, something which China sees with hesitancy (and which Tajikistan opposes). Maria Raquel Freire, in her analysis of SCO references in Russian policy documents, finds that even though Russia has attached more importance to the CSTO and the EAEU, the gradual institutionalization of the SCO has become an implicit agenda to contain China’s influence in the region.48 Finding a similar logic at play, Roy Allison writes that regionalization in Central Asia often comes in the form of ‘protective integration’ that effectively retains Russian supremacy in its post-Soviet space as a bulwark against challenges to the political status quo.49 The CCP likewise sees an authoritarian status quo as a factor of greater predictability. Both China and Russia proceed from a similar understanding of policy coordination through regional institutions as essentially sovereignty-enhancing. The functionality of bodies such as the SCO therefore remains low and directed against the ‘three evils’ – separatism, terrorism and fundamentalism.50 Russia’s preferred institution to promote ‘real’ regional integration (albeit on Russian terms, as will be seen) is therefore another one: Economically, the Eurasian Economic Union is the landmark project of the Putin administration in this regard. It was established as a multinational economic organization that comprises a Eurasian Economic Commission, a Council and a Court. A Customs Union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan was launched in 2010 within the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), establishing a uniform customs tariff for all three members. A Common Economic Space (CES) came into force on 1 January 2012, further unifying tax, monetary and customs policies. The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) then brought all three predecessors (EurAsEC, CU, CES) under one umbrella and inherited their legal and contractual edifice. Its founding treaty was signed in May 2014 by Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, and came into force on 1 January 2015. Armenia and Kyrgyzstan acceded in January and August 2015, respectively.

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The EAEU is a single market and a customs union, and adopts regulations on technical standards, competition and antitrust provisions, as well as transport, industry, agriculture, energy and investment policies. It represents a combined population of 183 million, a combined GDP of $2.2 trillion and a goods turnover of $900 billion.51 The unification of a common economic space translates into increased trade between the Union’s members as compared to trade with third countries and is supposed to reduce transaction costs. Russia is by far the strongest member economically. Whilst being a de jure multinational economic union in which member states retain competences and delegate others to supranational institutions, the EAEU’s external agenda and economic development are largely dominated by Russia.52 Because of the weight of the member states’ economies, the staff quota for Russian citizens within the organization is the highest, as is Russia’s financial contribution.53 This gives Russia much more leverage to shape the EAEU’s agenda. Kataryna Wolczuk and Rilka Dragneva have characterized Russia’s influence within the EAEU as a ‘form of “soft” hegemony’.54 They also point out a structural inefficiency by design: Even though all EAEU bodies (except the EEC Collegium) operate on the basis of nominal parity among member states, common institutions (like the commission) are ‘made deliberately weak’ for the sake of higher-valued domestic governance priorities within the member states. The lack of progress on the removal of non-tariff barriers is just one example.55 Observers have therefore noted the increased role of political factors in the decision-making process of the EAEU at the expense of member states’ sovereignty.56 The importance of visa regimes and remittance transfers for the Kyrgyzstani economy (accounting for around 26 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP) is a case in point.57 The Russian economist Viacheslav Inozemtsev, director of the Centre for Post-industrial Society Studies, has criticized the EAEU on the basis of its uneven economic potential and the poor infrastructural preconditions.58 The beginnings of the EAEU were characterized by petty trade wars, disputes over trading rules and member states’ insistence on their competence to conclude bilateral economic agreement with external partners such as China.59 Russian views of other external actors’ policies towards the region complement the picture. The acceleration of regional integration on Russia’s initiative is often read in the context of the EU’s Eastern Partnership programme, designed to enhance the EU’s relations with Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.60 Until the 2013–14 Ukraine crisis, Russian politicians talked about the prospect of a ‘Greater Europe’, with the publicly stated aim to create a common space from Lisbon to Vladivostok. This was not to be misunderstood as Russian subordination under the EU’s regulatory standards. With the establishment of the EAEU, an alternative regional integration model was created alongside the EU. This was thus also a response to the European Union’s neighbourhood policies towards the post-Soviet space, and served to emphasize Russia’s claim to be considered a co-equal on par with the EU in the definition of continental Order. Analysts have interpreted the EAEU as a reactive attempt by Russia to regain control over the post-Soviet space.61 Others have argued that the EAEU, besides its potential economic benefits, serves as a useful geopolitical ‘imaginary’ for Russia.62 Russia employs geo-economic language to construct and defend a political ‘space’ in which Russia remains predominant. As

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a closer look at Kazakhstan will reveal in the following chapter, the EAEU has also become an institutional buffer against China’s growing economic prowess in Central Asia. Yet, the workings of inter-regional arrangements (between Russia, the EAEU and China) can only be fully understood if the political agency of the ‘lands in between’ is added to the equation.63 Kazakhstan’s exemption for the harmonization of EAEU import tariffs due to its WTO accession (with a transition period until 2024) is a case in point. As will be shown, Kazakhstan is seen by the Chinese authorities as a bridgehead state for any Eurasian economic corridors, not only geographically, while Russia seeks to act as a ‘gatekeeper’ for EAEU external policies. Finally, a note on ideational visions of ‘Eurasia’ should be made here. At a policy level, the talk in some circles in the West of a creeping ‘re-Sovietization’ of the postSoviet space (pronounced most prominently by then-US State Secretary Hillary Clinton in response to Russia’s vision of a Eurasian Union) has conflated economic integration initiatives with Russia’s public diplomacy on ‘Eurasianism’.64 The latter is a complex phenomenon, and different actors advance different theories, visions and policy agendas. The official positions of the Kremlin are not the same as those of Russian nationalists or other, partially quite eclectic, movements that picked up what they found useful from the ideology of the inter-war Eurasianists of the 1920s.65 The discursive ‘reactivation’ of the Eurasian space following the disintegration of the Soviet Union was an iterative development, in which nationalists competed with the Kremlin for public attention. Charles Clover has traced the Kremlin’s circumstantial embrace of ‘Eurasianist’ philosophy as well as that of other more nationalist movements to frame controversial foreign policies, from Russia’s second Chechen war to the 2008 war with Georgia to the 2014 annexation of Crimea.66 ‘Eurasian’ intellectuals like Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov were instrumental in fanning patriotic sentiments and drumming up popular support, yet their direct influence on the Kremlin is often exaggerated in the West.67 The circumstantial instrumentality of Eurasian thought as a legitimizing foreign policy tool complicates the perception of Russian ‘grand designs’ of a neo-imperial re-constitution of the ‘post-Soviet’ space under the cover of the Eurasian Economic Union and its ‘Greater Eurasia’ vision.68 These discursive tropes are also not only products of domestic discussions. Russian policymakers were strongly critical of the announced ‘pivot to Asia’ on the part of the Obama administration in 2011 and the ill-fated New Silk Road initiative by the US government. The announcements of these initiatives, which meant a rebalancing of US foreign policy interests from the Middle East to Eurasia, also contributed to a conceptual rethinking of the need to consolidate Russia’s ‘Eurasian’ presence also at an institutional level. Eventually, the Russian government’s ‘Greater Eurasia’ vision seeks to create a common space in Eurasia in a concert with other influential powers like China where Russia remains an indispensable power. It is thus in many ways a move away from the Eurasianism as represented by the likes of Dugin (whose thought has been very much anti-Chinese and has favoured a Eurasian continental bloc where Russia develops close ties to Iran and Turkey). It is this conception of a ‘pragmatic Eurasianism’ with an emphasis on economic linkages that is presented as an antithesis to its more ideological interpretation.69 Seizing on the term in one of his newspaper articles published during

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the 2011 presidential election campaign, Putin argued that Eurasianism has been about a revival of the Soviet heritage.70 The discovery of the concept of ‘Greater Eurasia’ after 2014 then acquired an additional importance in Russia’s foreign policy discourse at a time when relations with the West sharply deteriorated. The concept serves as a geopolitical imaginary to position ‘Eurasia’ as a potentially counter-hegemonic actor in opposition to a Western-led world order.71 Russia’s multiple overlapping identities are also a natural consequence of its vast geography. While the majority of its territorial landmass is in Asia, only 20 per cent of its population lives east of the Ural Mountains. Nowadays, the imperatives of geography force Russia to adopt an Asia strategy that does not conceive of Asian nations as instrumental tokens in its engagements with the West,72 while its main cultural and political reference points (even if to challenge norms of global governance) lie in the West (Europe and the United States).73 Asia remains Russia’s ‘Other’, an observation which remains unaffected by the official discourse on the strategic partnership with China.74 It is this conundrum that Victor Larin has called Russia’s ‘East-West dilemma’,75 and which explains why observers have been sceptical about the sustainability of Russia’s alleged ‘turn to the East’ in 2014 to which I turn below.

The ‘new Silk Road’ and Chinese investments in Russia When the EU and the United States imposed sector-specific economic sanctions on Russia for its role in the conflict in Ukraine, it became clear that the success of China’s vision of blending language on economic corridor development with enhanced policy coordination also in other spheres depends to no small extent on the political relations between Russia and the West. EU sanctions limited Russian access to capital markets, imposed an arms-trade ban, an export ban for dual-use goods that could be used for military purposes, and curtailed Russian access to technologies that can be used for oil production and exploration.76 US sanctions additionally designated a number of defence companies and restrict the financing of economic projects in Russia in the Arctic offshore, deep water and shale industries.77 These sanctions have further driven Russian leaders to ‘securitize’ the political economy in Russia.78 Yet, as Tatiana Romanova points out, it ‘is also difficult (if not impossible) to separate the effect of sanctions from the overall slow-down of the Russian economy, which started before the sanctions, and from the fall in oil (and gas) prices and, consequently, export revenues of Russia’.79 Russia’s economy declined by 3.7 per cent in 2015, and the historic drop in the oil price in the summer of 2014 (dropping even to a historic low of $30 a barrel in January 2016) was an additional strain on the Russian state budget, intensifying Russian plans to diversify its portfolio of energy customers.80 Already before the adoption of sanctions, in 2009, the Russian government adopted its ‘Energy Strategy to 2030’, which made a point of diversifying Russia’s energy supplies into new Eastern markets, particularly China but also Japan.81 Already the 2009 National Security Strategy recognized the need to reduce Russia’s dependence on raw materials and the external control thereof.82 Russia’s ‘turn to the East’ (Povorot na Vostok) was supposed to be a hedging strategy towards the broader Asia-Pacific

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region as laid out in the official foreign policy concept,83 but, in its China-centred implementation, has sent erratic messages not only about the nature of Sino-Russian cooperation, but also about Russia’s engagement with multilateralism in Asia at large.84 Russia has a track record of announcing ‘pivots’ to the East: Prior such announcements were made in 1998 by Evgeniy Primakov, in 2000 by Putin and in 2009 when China and Russia announced a better integration of the Dongbei (China’s Northeast) with the Russian Far East.85 Scholars have contextualized Russia’s most recent turn to Asia against the background of Russian efforts to balance deteriorating relations with the West, but also as part of a new neighbourhood policy to respond to China’s growing economic weight in the region.86 Russia announced its ‘pivot to Asia’ at the APEC summit in 2012, which was hosted that year in Vladivostok, and one year before China’s Belt and Road rhetoric took off. With the contours of the BRI still uncertain at the time, it was the Ukraine crisis and its profound consequences for Russian-Western relations that accelerated Russia’s embrace of China post-2014.87 Finding new economic partnerships became a political imperative for Russia’s leadership at a time when the United States and EU began imposing sanctions. The other consequence was the replacement of economic liberalization as a policy goal with ‘geo-economic statecraft’ in the form of import substitution and counter-sanctions.88 The aggregate result was a powerful impetus for a geopolitical re-orientation. There were thus at least two complementary external driving factors that sped up Russia’s ‘turn’ towards Eurasia in 2014, two years after its turn to ‘Asia’ had been announced in Vladivostok. One was the pressure from the West that propelled Russia to look for economic alternatives (if only as a signalling effect). The other was the economic activism of China itself, which required an appropriate response because it could no longer be ignored.89 Concrete results quickly materialized. Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) signed a $400 billion deal for a duration of thirty years in 2014 for Russia to export 38 billion cubic meters of gas to China annually.90 To deliver this gas, China and Russia began construction on a 3,000-km pipeline known as ‘Sila Sibiri’ (Power of Siberia) which saw its official inauguration on 3 December 2019. In September 2017, it was announced that Gazprom and Chinese officials were to hold talks over a second gas pipeline, known as the Altai pipeline (which is also referred to as the Power of Siberia-2 pipeline), which would run from Russia to China via the narrow common border between Kazakhstan and Mongolia and which is expected to deliver 30 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China.91 Even though discussions on the Altai pipeline are pending at the time of writing, ‘Power of Siberia’ has tied the two countries’ gas sectors closer together. In addition, Russia’s oil trade with Asia has become dominated by Russian-Chinese trades: The Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean (ESPO) Oil Pipeline had been built after a contract was signed between CNPC and Rosneft/Transneft, but was conceived as a Russian export route to the Asian market on the whole.92 Yet, in the turn of events, the construction of a pipeline from Skovorodino in Russia to Daqing in China elevated Russian-Chinese energy cooperation to a new level. Chinese banks provided loans of $25 billion to Rosneft and Transneft for the construction of the spur to Daqing.93 Rather than diversifying Russia’s customer portfolio in Asia, this route has only

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bolstered Sino-Russian energy ties. Given traditional Russian fears of being reduced to the role of energy appendage, this development is perhaps surprising, as it only serves to deepen the existing economic asymmetry between both states. In the context of deteriorating Russian-Western relations in the Ukraine crisis, however, it was rather indicative of Russia’s lack of options.94 This trend was also confirmed by the conclusion of an agreement between CNPC and Russian gas producer Novatek, in which CNPC acquired a 20 per cent stake in Russia’s Yamal LNG project, for which the China Development Bank and the China Exim Bank provided a loan of $12 billion.95 Financial resources for the Yamal facility also came from the Silk Road Fund.96 These were also symbolic landmark investments because Novatek (along with Gennady Timchenko, who is a major shareholder) was on US and EU sanctions lists.97 US and EU sanctions have thus contributed their share in pushing Russia towards China to look for Chinese investments within Russia. Russia expects investments in new transport and logistics infrastructure, direct investment in high-tech companies, as well as development opportunities for the Far East – a long-time policy imperative for the Russian Federation. At the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum in February 2015, Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich even gave the green light for Chinese investments in industrial sectors that had previously been fenced off as politically too sensitive. Russia, he said, had overcome a ‘psychological barrier’ and would now allow Chinese investors stakes above 50 per cent in oil and gas fields.98 In May 2015, a subsidiary of the China Railway Group became a member of a consortium to design a high-speed railway between Moscow and Kazan.99 This has since become the ‘flagship’ project of the Silk Road Economic Belt on Russian territory. China is eyeing further construction projects in Russia’s Yakutsk region. In December 2015, China’s Sinopec bought a 10 per cent stake worth $1.3 billion in the Russian chemical producer SIBUR, and Beijing Enterprise acquired a 20 per cent in Verkhnechonskneftegaz.100 A special economic zone (SEZ) was set up in Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast and Rosneft and CNPC have started talks on the exploration of upstream operations in the Arctic. This came after US sanctions banned Western companies (ExxonMobil, Eni or Statoil) from doing the same. China, defining itself as a ‘near-Arctic state’, has taken a more prominent role in the Arctic, developing energy, transportation and telecommunications infrastructure in the Russian far north.101 A rail bridge across the Amur river, connecting Blagoveshchensk on the Russian and Heihe on the Chinese side, was finally completed at the end of 2019 after years of stalled construction which seemed to symbolize the slow progress in Sino-Russian economic relations. Both countries further signed a framework agreement for space cooperation, and a renminbi clearing centre was opened in Moscow.102 In addition, the Chinese and Russian ministries of finance as well as central banks have reportedly worked on mechanisms that could allow Russia to issue ‘renminbidenominated government bonds in Moscow targeting mainland-based Chinese investors’.103 These so-called ‘panda bonds’ would be another step towards the dedollarization of payments, even though Moscow seems to be apprehensive about becoming too dependent on Chinese financing.104 There were also talks to link the Chinese UnionPay credit card system with Russia’s ‘Mir’ payment system, and China

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invited Russia to join its China International Payment System (CIPS), an alternative to the SWIFT inter-banking communication system.105 The drive to revert to domestic instead of foreign currencies also extends beyond the banking sector: The use of local currencies also helps to immunize the trade of oil between China and Russia in a context where Western sanctions on Russia threaten Chinese economic ties with Russia.106 In 2019, the share of dollar payments for Russian exports to China for the first time fell below 50 per cent.107 Public declarations notwithstanding, contracting trade and the reluctance of Chinese investors to expose themselves to business operations in Russia at a time when Russia was sanctioned by the West indicate a risk-averse attitude to Sino-Russian joint ventures.108 The crackdown on corruption announced under Xi may also help explain why Chinese executives tread carefully.109 Russian officials, for their part, downplay the link between Chinese investments and economic diversification needs in light of Western sanctions adopted against Russia. They instead emphasize Russia’s own modernization course, citing efforts by RŽD, the Russian Railways, to upgrade the Baikal-Amur and the Trans-Siberian railways and investments in the Northeast Passage, an Arctic maritime route, as a new global commercial artery that could potentially link in with China’s Maritime Silk Road (MSR) concept.110 In light of structural asymmetries discussed above, in addition, one may wonder whether Chinese investments in Russia can actually help Russian provinces to develop. Chinese investments have remained miniscule, and the Chinese government has acted cautiously. On the trading side, meanwhile, adjacent regions like the Amur region are almost wholly dependent on China, leading Artyom Lukin and Rens Lee to argue that the Russian Far East is ‘one piece in China’s long-term geopolitical game aimed at creating zones of influence, if not outright hegemony, along its continental periphery’.111

Competing public diplomacies of Eurasian integration For China, investing in Russia does not come without risks. Worrying for China’s vision of a Silk Road Economic Belt stretching to Europe was Russia’s imposition of countersanctions in 2014 in retaliation for Western sanctions, temporarily banning even the transit through Russia of goods destined for Europe. While Russian transit restrictions were subsequently lifted again, they were an indication that China’s dependence on Russia for the implementation of trans-continental transits could have negative consequences. While the Chinese government has (deliberately) not produced official maps illustrating the envisaged economic corridors of the Silk Road Economic Belt, analysts have had to refer to maps published by Chinese news agencies that were seen to resemble a semi-official representation, one from May 2014, which seemed to exclude routes through Russian territory, and another from October 2014, which ‘featured an elegant but implausible arm swinging from Istanbul back to Moscow and from there continuing to Europe’, as Richard Griffiths notes.111 The presentation of these branches with different transit countries could be seen as an expression of a Chinese hedging strategy to plan for two possible scenarios: one in which tensions between Russia and the EU deteriorate to an extent where Chinese trading corridors would have to recur

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to Russia’s southern neighbours, and one where a thaw in relations will allow for the long-term transit through Russian territory. Russia, likewise, had reservations about China’s new mega-project, as it signalled the beginning of a potentially dramatic reshuffling of Eurasian power dynamics. Russia did not simply want to ‘join’ China’s BRI.112 It was only at the April 2014 Boao Forum that China began to respond to Russian concerns, followed by soothing remarks during President Putin’s visit to China one month later. First Deputy Prime Minister Shuvalov then announced at the Boao Forum in March 2015 that the EAEU would seek to cooperate with China’s BRI. A more concrete step came two months later, when in May 2015 on the occasion of Xi’s visit to Moscow for the annual Russian Victory Day, Russia and China signed agreements taking measures towards greater cooperation between the EAEU and the SREB.113 This was referred to as a ‘docking’ of the two projects (sopryazheniye in Russian, dui jie in Chinese). Two economic framework declarations granted Russian companies access to Chinese money in the form of the Silk Road Construction Fund, and granted the Chinese access to Russia as an important transport corridor.114 In an interview, a former Chinese diplomat expressed the rationale as follows: ‘To be frank, the docking of the two initiatives was due to political rather than economic considerations, […] to avoid conflict: Russia does not object to the BRI anymore, China acknowledges Russia’s role in Eurasia.’115 While the EAEU is a regional integration project with supranational institutions, the SREB remains a relatively abstract Chinese vision for closer Eurasian cooperation.116 China’s SREB is deliberately flexible in its institutional design and, on the face of it, open to any interested participants. Russia’s regional integration projects, by contrast, are seen primarily as a way to preserve Russian political influence in its post-Soviet space, and closed to a small club of members, as outlined above. This begs the question how compatible these two initiatives of ‘mapping’ Eurasian space can be. Prospects for greater convergence between the SREB and the EAEU were also on the agenda of the SCO’s summit in July of the same year. Talks to establish an SCO ‘free trade zone’ – something that then-Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had already proposed in 2003 – have been stalling for years. This was a prospect unattractive to Russia, as the abolition of trade barriers would naturally favour the most powerful economy in the region, that is, China. The SCO summit in 2015 then helped to institutionalize a level of interaction between the Russian-dominated EAEU and China’s SREB. According to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, China’s ministry of commerce and the Russian economic development ministry are in the process of examining ways to create a Eurasian trade partnership.117 This development led some Russian commentators like Sergey Karaganov, dean of the Faculty for World Politics and World Economy at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, to even proclaim a ‘macro-bloc’ in ‘Greater Eurasia’ between China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Iran, with China ‘likely to act as a leader, but not as a hegemon’.118 Together with Timofey Bordachev, Karaganov went on to argue in a report for the Valdai Club that cooperation between China’s SREB and the EAEU could mark the birth of the ‘Central Eurasian Moment’.119 Ruan Zongze, vice president of the China Institute of International Studies, similarly argued that ‘Greater Eurasia’ arises from efforts to link the EAEU and the SREB.120

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A group of Chinese experts led by Li Xin has provided a ‘road map’ for such a goal that includes the unification of infrastructure, the coordination of trade flows, and the creation of an FTA between China and the EAEU as an interim step towards the creation of an eventual Continental Economic Partnership.121 The latter concept evolved from 2016 as an extension from the original China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor to also include Kazakhstan under the auspices of the SCO as a platform for coordination.122 Russia, however, is not interested in the prospect of an FTA between the EAEU and China. Its vision of a ‘Greater Eurasian partnership’ might fit with the end goal of a Continental Economic Partnership, but the means of getting there should be different, in Russia’s view. The issue was discussed during a meeting between Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang in St. Petersburg in November 2016, where Russia proposed a broad Eurasian partnership which could embrace EAEU states, India, China, Pakistan and other potentially interested countries.123 During remarks at the Belt and Road international forum in Beijing in May 2017, President Putin thus emphasized the ‘multilateral cooperation’ not only between the countries of the EAEU and China, but between the EAEU, the SCO, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in pursuit of a ‘greater Eurasian partnership’. This collective Eurasian effort, he noted with an implicit reference to the idea of a common space from Vancouver to Vladivostok proposed during the Medvedev presidency, would ‘enable us to create a common economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific’.124 This ‘Greater Eurasian Partnership’ was an idea he had already proposed at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum held in June 2016. Such an ambition is also reflected in Russia’s updated Foreign Policy Concept of 30 November 2016, which stresses Russia’s aim to ‘create a common economic and humanitarian space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean on the basis of the harmonization of the processes of European and Eurasian integration’.125 The latter formulation is an interesting one, as Russia remains committed to the idea of association with Europe, which in practice might end up competing with the parallel vision of a ‘Greater Eurasia’. In 2016, President Putin linked the EAEU to the ‘Greater Eurasia’ vision and proposed that the Eurasian Economic Union should become its centre – tellingly, however, without prior consultation of the other EAEU members.126 As with the enlargement of the SCO, the Russian extension of an invitation to other countries beyond the EAEU serves as a way to dilute China’s influence: It is a move to make sure that the discussion does not really progress. This, together with the fact that business representatives were not really involved in discussions on the cooperation between the EAEU and the BRI, was the reason for the lack of concrete results.127 A commission headed by Russian first Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli was established to oversee the progress made, but commentators have noted that few projects get off the ground, and the ones that are implemented are often long-standing projects that had been in the making for some time.128 With its narrative of a ‘Greater Eurasia’, Russia’s economic orientation towards Europe becomes discursively linked to a supposed multi-vector policy that includes increased cooperation with China besides a range of other actors and organizations.

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For Russia, it has also become a discourse to frame its reaction to China’s economic prowess. The Chinese government takes up the theme of cooperation in a greater Eurasian concert but prioritizes bilateral negotiations with the governments along the Silk Road Economic Belt. The workings on the coordination between the EAEU and the SREB in the form of working groups serve to keep the spirit of a SinoRussian condominium alive, while other EAEU members are concerned that Russia is instrumentalizing the EAEU for its own political gains. Tellingly, other EAEU members were not part of the initial EAEU-SREB working group discussions.129 China’s own rhetoric likewise mentions Russia as but one partner among many in the coming Eurasian order: During his keynote address at the Belt and Road Forum in May 2017, President Xi spoke of a multitude of relevant policy initiatives, including ‘the Bright Road initiative of Kazakhstan, the Middle Corridor initiative of Turkey, the Development Road initiative of Mongolia, the “Two Corridors, One Economic Circle” initiative of Vietnam, the Northern Powerhouse initiative of the UK and the Amber Road initiative of Poland’.130

Conclusion Relations between Russia and China have historically been ambivalent and full of mutual misgivings. From the ‘unequal treaties’ to suspicions of territorial revisionist agendas to Chinese-Soviet tensions during the Cold War, relations between the two geopolitical Eurasian heavyweights have not developed in a straightforward way. Even the official talking points about a ‘strategic partnership’, forged by the necessities of the day as global politics was shifting following the end of the Cold War, only served to cover up a range of rather diverging interests. Increased economic cooperation between China and Russia in the 2000s was linked to China’s growing economic weight and Russian hopes that this could benefit the Russian Far East. The Ukraine crisis of 2014, however, constituted a watershed in Sino-Russian relations, when Russia’s ‘pivot to Asia’, already announced in 2012, became even more China-centric than it had already been. In search of new business partners and political allies, Russia abandoned its reservations regarding Chinese investments in economic sectors deemed strategically relevant, such as its oil and gas industry. Russia and China now conduct complex military exercises, hold frequent bilateral summits and share a range of viewpoints at the global level which will be further explored in the last chapter of this book. The public smokescreen, however, did not cover over the inadequacy of Russian diversification strategies (economically or otherwise), and the economic asymmetry between China and Russia, nurturing speculations that Russia might one day end up as China’s ‘junior partner’. At the regional level, power shifts are underway which will have global implications. Dmitri Trenin, a seasoned observer of Sino-Russian relations, writes in this context: ‘It is Inner Asia – Afghanistan, Mongolia, and the five post-Soviet states of Central Asia – that is likely to see the most impact from the deepening of Sino-Russian integration […]. With China as its powerhouse, this area can be called Greater Asia – from Shanghai, its business centre, to St. Petersburg, its outpost at Europe’s doorstep.’131

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Russia’s reaction to the BRI took a year and a half to crystallize. The official declaration of May 2015 on the alignment of the EAEU with the BRI is a signal that China’s new vision of geo-economics does not trigger an open conflict with Russia. But Russia’s slow embrace of China’s connectivity initiatives is indicative of its interpretation of what the BRI is: a Chinese strategy to bind Eurasia closer to China. In the process, China is likely to gain more political leverage at the expense of Russia. Russia’s response has therefore been to multilateralize, where possible, China’s engagement with Central Asia, by stressing Russia’s ownership within a ‘Greater Eurasian partnership’. Its ‘Greater Eurasia’ vision, in this context, becomes a strategy for Russia to reconcile multiple identity narratives while positioning itself as the ‘civilizational bridge’ between Europe and an assertive China that is ‘going out’. Rather than seeing the ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2012 as Russia’s answer to China’s growing presence in Eurasia, it would therefore appear more accurate to read the concept of a ‘Greater Eurasia’ as Russia’s response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative because it dilutes China’s economic domination in a pancontinental, and more vague, vision of a ‘Greater Eurasian partnership’. Institutions like the Eurasian Economic Union have been instrumental in creating a Russian-led economic space as a reaction to the EU’s gravitational pull in the postSoviet space, but also as a reaction to Beijing’s connectivity initiatives to shape Eurasia on Chinese terms. At the same time, both China and Russia have been treading carefully. China’s acknowledgement of Russia as an important transit space for the SREB and Russia’s avoidance of any talk that could be interpreted as attempts to forge anti-Chinese alliances in the region point to deliberate decisions on both sides to try and contain the potential rivalry that could result from China’s growing Eurasian profile. The chapters that follow will examine some of these questions surrounding the implications of Chinese policy decisions on the economies and politico-societal fabrics of its partner countries. Other Eurasian actor carefully monitor the evolving SinoRussian interaction and respond with a variety of policies of their own that collectively co-shape new realities on the ground.

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4

The Linchpin of Eurasia: Kazakhstan between Russia’s defensive regionalism and China’s new Silk Roads Introduction For the ancient Silk Roads, Kazakhstan was peripheral.1 Cities and caravanserais in what is now southern Kazakhstan, on a travel route stretching from Kucha to Kokand, benefitted from trade connections under the Turco-Mongol Karakhanid empire only from the tenth century onwards.2 It was not the central Kazakh steppes, but a narrow corridor in the South that sat at the crossroads of trading routes crisscrossing the continent, from the Kiev Rus to Genghis Khan. The area was sacked by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and suffered at the hands of the Timurids and Dzhungars.3 As sea trade replaced the importance of overland transportation, Kazakhstan became ‘the land that disappeared’.4 It was only when Tsarist Russia built a fort in 1854 as a protective measure against the Khanate of Kokand that Almaty (then renamed ‘Verny’) grew in importance again. Yet it was the Soviet decision to change the name to Alma-Ata and link it to Moscow via the Turkestan-Siberian railway (TurkSib) in 1930 that gave the city a real boost in urban development.5 The TurkSib construction enabled the use of new supply arteries to reach the cotton-growing regions of Central Asia and the transport of cattle and raw materials between western Mongolia, Siberia and Central Asia. During the Cold War, the instrumental usage of Kazakhstani territory continued for two strategic sectors: for the Soviet space programme and as a nuclear testing site. The latter turned the Semipalatinsk test site in the northeast of the country (today’s Semey) into one of the most radioactive areas in the world, and would lead to first civilian protests against Soviet leadership in the late 1980s.6 While the Kremlin was eager to pass over the latter, the former remained a source of Soviet pride. The Baikonur cosmodrome in northern Kazakhstan became emblematic for the technological success of Soviet engineers, and is still leased to the Russian Federal Space Agency today, with the lease running until 2050.7

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The importance of Kazakhstan for Russia and vice versa, and in particular the close connections between the two countries’ national economies, was underlined by the fact that Kazakhstan was the last republic to leave the disintegrating Soviet Union in December 1991.8 Thereafter, Russian-Kazakh relations had to be footed on a new basis that would move away from the Russian patronage model for Soviet republics.9 Eager to balance its Soviet past with the opportunity for new relations with the West, Kazakhstan began to pursue what it called a ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy.10 Deputy Foreign Minister Roman Vassilenko calls such an approach ‘neither pro-Russian, nor pro-Chinese, but pro-Kazakhstani’.11 Balancing the partially competing interests of external powers became an especially important task as China’s economic power began to grow in the 2000s. Kazakhstan signed an Association agreement with the European Union and was working with the latter on its Central Asia strategy. Today, Kazakhstan portrays itself as a mediator between conflicting parties (and acted as a neutral host for talks on the Iranian nuclear conflict in 2013 and on the Syrian conflict from 2016), and as a bridge between Asia and Europe. In September 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping came to Nazarbayev University in Astana to announce the creation of new economic corridors across Eurasia.12 Here, he introduced the idea of the land-based ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’. Kazakhstan was quick to endorse China’s Belt and Road Initiative, as it was seen as a way to mitigate negative effects that come with the country’s landlocked status. It also seemed to be in line with the idea of Eurasian economic integration, of which the Kazakhstani government had always been a staunch supporter.13 The announcement of the BRI, in addition, was convenient timing, as the Kazakhstani government had embarked on its own government spending programme (‘Nurly Zhol’ or ‘Bright Path’) to kick-start the economy after the 2008–9 financial crisis and the depreciation of the Tenge, the national currency. Even though Nurly Zhol predates the BRI, observers and officials quickly identified synergies between both frameworks. In December 2014, China and Kazakhstan signed a formal agreement on the ‘Joint Construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt’, and in September 2015, on a state visit to Beijing, President Nazarbayev formally aligned Nurly Zhol with the SREB by signing a declaration on the coordination between the two.14 Kazakhstani-Chinese working groups were subsequently set up to concretize the alignment of both initiatives.15 ‘China shapes a new Eurasian Order’, a Kazakhstani official put it to me in an interview, and added: ‘China projects its power into Eurasia. Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet empire, but now, thanks to China’s new outreach, Kazakhstan is at the centre of this new Eurasian order.’16 Against this backdrop, analysts have speculated that Kazakhstan could constitute a fighting ground for a new ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia, this time between Russia, with its historically determined perception of the ‘postSoviet space’ in Central Asia and its own role within it on the one hand, and a China projecting its influence more visibly on the other.17 The geo-strategic location of the largest landlocked country in the world therefore is a pertinent case to shed light on the interplay between Russia and China’s Eurasian mega-projects – the EAEU as the more institutionalized form of inter-state cooperation, and the BRI as a looser vision of cross-border connectivity.

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However, the Sino-Russian relationship is complex and eschews the simplifying attempt to view their interaction in Central Asia as part of a new ‘Great Game’ over exclusive domination of the region, as the previous chapter has concluded. The May 2015 agreement on a possible cooperation between the Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the SREB officially put an end to Chinese concerns that Russia could work against the BRI or aim to sabotage it. This is a welcome development also from a Kazakhstani perspective, as synergies between the EAEU and the SREB increase the ‘transit potential of Central Asia’, as a Kazakhstani diplomat puts it.18 Beneath the official cooperative discourse, however, questions remain over how policy coordination between these two very different initiatives, and their respective sponsors, will affect not only Sino-Russian relations, but also politics on the ground. This chapter therefore offers a close-up look at the implications of China’s Silk Road Economic Belt on Kazakhstan’s socio-political fabric, and ultimately, Kazakhstan’s role in what it describes as an emerging new Eurasian order.

The new Silk Road enters Kazakhstan From Kazakhstan, the SREB is supposed to spread out in three directions, at least as far as one can tell from derivative depictions of the deliberately loose BRI vision. A northern branch extends from Nur-Sultan via Petropavlovsk, close to the Russian border, to Yekaterinburg in Russia and further to Europe. A central branch crosses the Kazakhstani port of Atyrau, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, thus bypassing Russia, and a southern branch reaches Iran and Oman via Turkmenistan. Kazakhstan did not need to lobby for the use of any particular branch. Geography and logistics play in Kazakhstan’s favour because of the country’s central location in the heart of Eurasia. According to a joint plan issued in the summer of 2016, the three top priorities of Chinese-Kazakhstani economic cooperation which become fused with the overall strategic priorities of the BRI are investments in transport infrastructure, trade and the manufacturing industries.19 Infrastructure development in particular has become the most visible part of the Silk Road Economic Belt under the moniker of the ‘Iron Silk Road’. However, not all of the big infrastructure projects associated with the creation of economic corridors are financed by China: The completion of the Kazakhstani section (from Almaty to Aktobe and from there to the Russian border) of a highway from western China for onward travel to Europe in 2016 was primarily funded by the World Bank, a consortium led by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and a contribution from the Kazakhstani authorities.20 Kazakhstani companies, which do not directly receive money from China, but indirectly via their own government’s financial infrastructure such as the national fund Samruk-Kazyna, also have plans for a high-speed train connection between Nur-Sultan and Almaty.21 There is a lack of clarity, in addition, over the financial ‘matching’ criteria. Once a project does involve Chinese financing, this financial involvement usually involves a loan given by one of the Chinese policy banks (Chinese Development Bank and

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Exim Bank in most cases), which requires that the recipient (and guarantor) of the loan reinvests the money in a project that involves a Chinese contract partner.22 The Kazakhstani Samruk-Kazyna national fund then functions as the investor.23 Large projects often stipulate a minimum of Chinese content (50 per cent) as part of interestbearing concessional loans.24 Especially when implementing projects in cash-strapped economies, Chinese loans are partly financial aid to the recipient with the expectation of ‘concessions’ in the form of project oversight, yet the involvement of Samruk-Kazyna refutes the assumption that only Chinese policy banks are involved in the financing of projects said to be linked to the BRI. This funding for the development of Kazakhstan’s infrastructure primarily goes into railway and road connections. Key projects include the construction of a new railway line from Dostyk on the Kazakhstani-Chinese border to Aktau on the Caspian Sea, the expansion of the port of Aktau, the construction of a new port at Kuryk and of a logistics center in Aktobe and in Shymkent. ‘Connectivity’ is seen as the means to transition from ‘land-lockedness’ to ‘land-linkedness’, as a Kazakhstani official puts it, and adds: ‘The Belt and Road Initiative is good for Kazakhstan because it helps break our landlocked status. It shapes new geopolitical realities.’25 A crucial project here is the Khorgos dry port at the Chinese-Kazakhstani border. Khorgos already is the key border crossing for the Central Asia-China natural gas pipeline running from Turkmenistan to China. From Aktau, crude oil is shipped to the Russian port of Makhatshkala, the Azeri port of Baku and the Iranian port of Neka – a crucial connecting point for the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ supposedly stretching all the way to the Persian Gulf. Similar to the launch of Nurly Zhol which predated the BRI, the modernization of the border crossing at Khorgos had already been announced by presidential decree in November 2010.26 The announcement of the BRI by China three years later meant an additional boost for the Khorgos dry port, as it was now elevated to the key gateway for the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ with a potentially huge transit potential. Here, as at the Chinese-Kazakhstani border crossing point at Dostyk, a logistical consideration concerns the track gauge of the railways used: Chinese trains operate on a track gauge of 1.435 metres (as do many European trains), while the track gauge in countries of the former Soviet Union like Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus is 1.52 meters. This means that freight containers entering Kazakhstan from China have to be shifted onto the wider track gauge by crane.27 After China acceded to the UN’s International Road Transports (TIR) Convention in July 2016, special trains can be sealed with certificates that obviate the need to inspect the content at each border crossing. Other non-bloc trains have to enter the nearby train station of Altynkol for customs clearance before they can travel onwards towards Almaty (if westbound). The ‘trans-shipment’ of the cargo takes place again at the Belarusian-Polish border for onwards travels to Europe (if the northern route is used) or when entering Iran (if the southern route is used). Chinese companies made moves to acquire ownership in the dry port which could translate into co-decision-making leverage. At the 2017 Belt and Road summit in Beijing, the state-owned Chinese shipping company COSCO announced its plans to acquire a 49 per cent stake in the Khorgos dry port.28 The Kazakhstani company KTZ Express, in return, holds a 49 per cent stake in a container handling terminal at the

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Chinese port of Lianyungang, which allows for a fast running of operations since the same company can load containers in China which unloads them again at Khorgos.29 This dry port thus links China’s eastern port of Lianyungang with Kazakhstan’s railway system, and the creation of the Khorgos Eastern Gates special economic zone in the Panfilov district of Almaty region is now being labeled as a landmark project of the Silk Road Economic Belt, even though its establishment already dates back to November 2011.30 The Gateway authorities began to build a special economic zone next to the dry port – an idea presumably inspired by the Dubai concept of merging a port with an economic zone. The Khorgos Gateway is ‘Where East meets West’, according to its website, but sceptics have speculated that the zone would serve primarily as a trading hub for Kazakhstani middlemen to re-export cheap Chinese products to domestic markets as well as nearby Uzbekistan – not far-away Europe.31 This is not the ‘new Dubai’ that some saw in the Khorgos complex.32 Other projects under the ‘BRI banner’ include Chinese funding for transmission grids, power plants, manufacturing industries and energy investments, most of which already predate the BRI.33 Kazakhstani experts refer to forty-eight to fifty-one investment projects worth $30 billion that are subsumed under the ubiquitous BRI banner.34 Timur Suleimanov, Kazakhstan’s national minister for the economy, also restated the number of fifty-one projects ‘in all kinds of sectors’ when I spoke to him in Astana, adding that some of these are ‘Nurly Zhol, some are Chinese-Kazakhstani bilateral projects, others are BRI projects’.35 During Xi’s visit to Astana in 2013, China deepened an already existing comprehensive partnership with Kazakhstan. Reliable information on which projects officially become ‘BRI projects’, and by which criteria, is hard to come by. Not all project and investment decisions are made public, and are often the outcome of closed inter-governmental negotiations. For that purpose, a KazakhstaniChinese Coordination Committee on industrial and investment cooperation (CCIIC) was established in August 2015 as a bilateral coordination format, and a KazakhstaniChinese Business Council (KCBC) was set up under Kazakhstan’s ministry for reform and development and is co-chaired by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).36 This flurry of investment activity overseen by new bilateral government bodies is hoped to stimulate economic growth domestically. Yet, Kazakhstan’s economic growth is in large parts due to the exploration and sale of fossil fuel. About 60 per cent of the state budget comes from revenues from oil sales. This sector became an early inroad for Chinese contract partners in the 1990s, as the Kazakhstani government sought to balance its historically grown infrastructural links with Russia in its transport, retail and energy sector by way of its new ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy. Already well before the advent of the BRI, China had been given hydrocarbon exploration and mining rights in Kazakhstan. In 1997, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) became a 60 per cent stakeholder in Kazakhstan’s AktobeMunayGas. In 2005, CNPC’s purchase of PetroKazakhstan marked China’s larger entry into the Kazakhstani energy market: Through this purchase, CNPC also gained a concession to explore oil on Kazakhstan’s Kumkol field.37 Further exploration rights for Chinese companies in the ensuing years followed. Since 2009, in addition, a China-Central Asia gas pipeline transports gas from Turkmenistan to western China via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

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The latter is therefore an important transit country for energy to China, and political and corporate elites today become ‘gatekeepers to China’s BRI’.38 This does not necessarily produce net positive results for Kazakhstan’s overall welfare. The country’s economy is hardly diversified, and it is doubtful that additional Chinese funds in infrastructure and energy will create value-added chains in other sectors. Even increased cross-border trade in manufactured goods is a boon, first and foremost, to China’s manufacturing industry rather than Kazakhstani domestic industries. While Kazakhstan’s exports to China are mainly raw materials, Kazakhstani imports from China are mainly manufactured goods. The expected spill-over effects from infrastructure investments mostly relate to higher returns from electricity, water supply and housing. In addition, there is a possibility, as with any infrastructure finance, that maintenance costs may eat up the resulting transit fees.39 Besides transport and infrastructure, the Kazakhstani government therefore hopes to turn Nur-Sultan into a new ‘financial gateway of the new Silk Road’. To this end, the Astana International Finance Centre was inaugurated in July 2018, which should serve as a clearance and settlement centre for Chinese renminbi. This is a prospect which is fully in line with the Chinese government’s declared intention to further internationalize its currency. The AIFC has signed a ‘memorandum of strategic understanding’ with the Silk Road Fund and entered into a partnership with Nasdaq and the Shanghai Stock Exchange. China and Kazakhstan have also set up a Chinese-Kazakhstani Investment Fund within the SREB framework.40 Sitting in the audience during the inauguration of the AIFC in July 2018, I listened to Kairat Kelimbetov, Governor of the AIFC, who during his opening remarks expanded on his hopes that this development would help turn Kazakhstan into a regional trading hub, and would create ‘new global trading links between Astana, Moscow, Kazan, St. Petersburg, and Tashkent’.41

Challenges for the reception of China’s BRI in Kazakhstan This extent of publicly displayed enthusiasm is juxtaposed by more sober perceptions at the sub-national level. The ‘embedded conditionality’ in which China mixes aid, concessional loans, trade agreements and unilateral investment decisions with a less tangible, but implicit level of diplomatic conditionality results in a level of unease in parts of society. Local protests in Kazakhstan in 2016 over a land reform bill (and similar reactions to a perceived Chinese attempt to lease Kazakhstani agricultural land already in 2010 which led to the symbolic decapitation of a toy panda by a Kazakh activist) drove home the message that segments of civil society are unhappy about Chinese investments.42 The legislation in question would have extended the maximum lease on farming land for foreigners from ten to twenty-five years. Any foreigners would have been eligible under the terms of the law, but the public outburst was directed at China. Popular protests quickly formed against the piece of legislation, which was seen as paving the way for a Chinese land grab. In a rare retreat, the Kazakhstani government had to suspend the proposed bill, the agriculture minister resigned and Prime Minister Karim Masimov even issued a public apology for the government’s handling of the land reform bill.43

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This speaks to the findings in the literature that emphasize corporate processes in the development of the BRI on the ground over which the Chinese government has no full control.44 The perception of loss over territory, and thus sovereignty, can be a powerful mobilizing factor, which can complicate societal relations more quickly than central government efforts can fix.45 Other concerns raised relate to the economic implications of the greater presence of Chinese companies. The Chinese practice of giving out ‘concessional loans’ where funds are transferred on the condition that they be reinvested in commissions for Chinese contractors has also been questioned by Kazakhstani experts like Konstantin Syroezhkin on the grounds that they do not help address local unemployment.46 The Kazakhstani government has therefore adopted strict labour laws imposing quotas for Chinese companies seeking to hire labour migrants, and stipulating that domestic companies need to hire a minimum percentage of Kazakhstani workers.47 ‘Local content’ requirements in other sectors (e.g. construction, retail, railways) are a way for host countries to prevent foreign companies from mining local sources without having the national economy profit.48 It is a policy, in other words, to de-link financing from contracting and to pre-empt economic dominance by technologically more capable and financially more endowed foreigners. Strict visa regimes are another instrument for Kazakhstan to regulate Chinese labour migration. Observers, however, have doubted whether blanket legislation setting local content quotas can actually benefit local staffing contracts. On a senior management level, there are limitations to how many local workers can be employed who have the required skillset.49 A practicable solution for Chinese companies operating in Central Asia is therefore to hire locals on lower levels (like, e.g. construction workers, thus ticking boxes of local content quotas), and to import Chinese nationals for senior management tasks.50 Another indication for the discrepancy between Kazakhstani elite discourse about the opportunities that come with the BRI and societal perceptions of China was protests that erupted in September 2019 in Kultuk and Zhanaozen close to the Caspian Sea coast over reports that China was planning to relocate factories to Kazakhstan.51 At the same time, the anti-Chinese rhetoric at a popular level also partially projects home-grown corruption and dissatisfaction with opaque decision-making onto the broader canvas of Kazakhstan’s economic exposure to its big neighbour.52 At a minimum, the association of corruption scandals with China’s increased visibility in the region in the wake of the BRI can further heighten anti-Chinese sentiments. As Kemel Toktomushev notes, this is a phenomenon that can be observed in authoritarian societies where corrupt rentseeking schemes become part of the policy cycle.53 Cultural misunderstandings can also arise from different corporate and social norms in China that may be perceived as corrupt abroad. The notion of guanxi is a good example, which is considered a fundamental networking approach in China to make any business work, but which also easily translates into nepotism and endemic corruption.54 Despite the stated concerns, the actual presence of Chinese labour in joint ChineseKazakhstani projects is much less than popularly assumed.55 However, nuanced labour laws and actual hiring numbers do not always affect anti-Chinese popular perceptions, leading some analysts to argue that Sinophobia may be the single most important challenge for the realization of the Silk Road Economic Belt.56 In this context, the

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Han-Sinification of Urumqi and the growing evidence of Chinese internment camps on the other side of the border are being watched with concern in Kazakhstan.57 The image of a Chinese police state and the presence of Chinese ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang do not play in China’s favour and only add to what some Kazakhstani analysts describe as a ‘deep-rooted anti-China sentiment’.58 The governmental talk of cross-border commerce associated with the International Centre for Border Cooperation at the Sino-Kazakhstani border at Khorgos does not tally with the heavy securitization of China’s side of the border. Contrary to the official BRI rhetoric in which borders become bridgeheads for unimpeded continental corridors, the outward projection of China’s security concerns, and especially Chinese detentions of Kazakhs at its borders produces new border practices that impact negatively on migration regimes and popular views of China.59 Such regional and local sentiments often stand in stark contrast with the official level of governmental enthusiasm for Sino-Kazakhstani business cooperation as outlined above. An open letter by ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang, asking President Nazarbayev to address their fate, has been ignored by the Kazakhstani government.60 Water disputes have added to these dynamics after Kazakhstan expressed concern about China’s diversion of water from the Illi and Irtysh rivers. The historical analogy of the Aral Sea, which is slowly drying up due to ecologically catastrophic Soviet planning in the 1960s, casts long shadows: China’s diversion of the Illi river water is said to contribute to the drying up of Lake Balkash in Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s second largest water reserve, which adds to a simmering anti-Chinese sentiments in segments of society in the countries concerned.61 The Kazakhstani local ‘ownership’ of investments (understood in the above context of accounting for local employment opportunities and co-decision structures) as well as the consideration of Kazakhstani national interests thus becomes an important element that will impact how the idea of partner countries engaging with the SREB evolves in the future. A perceived loss of control over land, economic dominance and the treatment of ethnic Kazakhs in western China have become domestic-level factors that contribute to the shaping of Kazakhstani agency as it engages with the SREB. Add to this Kazakhstan’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union, and the picture emerges of a complex trading and investment environment with additional veto power for the EAEU’s most dominant member, Russia.

Kazakhstan’s engagement with the SREB in light of Russian leverage within the EAEU A key transit hub for China, Kazakhstan is also a member of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The EAEU, as a regional integration project with supranational institutions, theoretically reduces customs duties and eliminates non-tariff barriers between member states, as laid out in the previous chapter. This opens Kazakhstan up to a bigger regional market while protecting domestic industries from the competitive prices of imported Chinese products. At the same time, Kazakhstan’s geographic location at the crossroads of other Central Asian markets, its role as a transit country for

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at least two of China’s economic corridors in the BRI framework (China-Central and West Asia, and the new Eurasian land bridge), and the reception of Chinese outward direct investments all bring along ostensible benefits for the Kazakhstani economy. In terms of tariff policies, the EAEU is an instrument to contain China’s economic influence in the region, as it ties recipient countries of Chinese imports and investments like Kazakhstan to the operating rules of a customs union. External tariffs will no longer be imposed unilaterally by Kazakhstan after the government committed to raise them in order to converge towards the higher Russian tariff when it became a member of the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU). Trade, however, remains a member state competence and there are EAEU tariff harmonization exemptions until 2024 that were agreed upon when Kazakhstan joined the WTO in November 2015.62 Since the EAEU member states could not agree on a joint energy market, China’s presence in this sphere in Kazakhstan also goes unchallenged. Like Russia, the Kazakhstani government does not support the idea of a free trade area between China and the EAEU. The trade agreement signed in Astana in May 2018 between China and the EAEU is non-preferential, meaning that tariffs remain in place.63 The government’s language on free trade between China and the EAEU therefore sounds rather non-committal. At the Belt and Road Forum in May 2017 in Beijing, then President Nazarbayev vaguely applauded the idea of a common economic space as follows: ‘The Silk Road Economic Belt can advantageously link the platforms of the SCO, the EAEU and the European Union in a single regional territory of prosperity.’64 Embracing the idea of enhanced cross-border trade in general, such language brushes over the partially incompatible complex regulatory frameworks of the different projects involved. Via its dominant position within the EAEU, Russia has gained veto-powers over Kazakhstan’s engagement with the SREB. Macroeconomic issues affecting the relation between the SREB and EAEU have to be discussed between the Chinese government, the Eurasian Economic Commission and all EAEU members, but it is noteworthy that discussions about cross-border cooperation were limited to RussianChinese interaction initially.65 Where China would favour bilateral negotiations and investments with recipient countries like Kazakhstan, Russia is keen to force the Chinese government into a multilateral (EAEU) setting where Russia can influence policies, that is, to pull the rug from under bilateral Chinese-Kazakhstani formats by enlarging the framework for discussions. A Joint Commission has been set up that negotiates with the Chinese government (on behalf of the Union). A BRI-EAEU working group exists that brings together Russian and Chinese officials before policy discussions are taken to an enlarged format that comprises all five EAEU members. A ‘5+1’ format then adds the Chinese counterparts, ‘but always on the basis of the initial Russian-Chinese discussions’, as Russia’s ambassador for the Asia-Pacific stressed when I met him in Moscow.66 Tatiana Valevaya, member of the EAEU board for integration and microeconomics, adds that there are parallel bilateral working groups, but that the EAEU-China working group is a necessary instrument for overall coordination if planned infrastructure and tariffs concern the whole Union. Such statements pass over the fact that Russia is supposed to represent the whole EAEU in this case.67 The focus on multilateralism here becomes a policy to retain an institutional

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leverage over Chinese investments which would otherwise be considered Chinese outward direct investments as part of China’s external trade policy. A publication by the Russian International Affairs Council, a think tank set up by the Russian MFA, even speculates that Russia’s Siberian and Far Eastern regions will be left out as Kazakhstan reaps all the benefits of Chinese infrastructure investments.68 Another concern would be the creation of a Chinese ‘Trojan horse’ within the EAEU: The Chinese economic presence in Kazakhstan can give China an inroad into the EAEU because Kazakhstan could lobby on China’s behalf (with a view to adopting regulations on competition or technical standards, for example).69 But disagreements have also surfaced between Kazakhstan and Russia about Russia’s behaviour within the EAEU: Former president Nazarbayev has criticized the ‘politicization’ of the Eurasian Economic Union, has refused to devolve trade policy competences to the EAEU’s Commission, and has resisted Russian attempts to give the EAEU a bigger say in security and defence matters.70 During a meeting of the Russian, Belarusian and Kazakhstani heads of state in Minsk in 2013, Nazarbayev did not mince his words. He took the opportunity to criticize openly the fact that Russian members of the collegium of the Eurasian Economic Commission were receiving direct instructions from the Russian government, even though board members are supposed to be unaccountable to any government.71 Overall, EAEU membership has had ambivalent results for Kazakhstan. Middleincome traders experienced losses in income, wages and returns on capital, as Kazakhstan had to raise its external tariffs in order to approximate to the Russian ones.72 In addition, business people have complained that Russian local authorities have found ways to block Kazakhstani goods by way of non-tariff barriers from entering the Russian market.73 Market access has not been reciprocal in practice. In 2014 and 2015, the economic spill-overs from the Ukraine crisis entailed further negative consequences of Kazakhstan’s EAEU membership: Adding to a depreciating Russian rouble, the Russian government imposed sanctions on the transit of Ukrainian goods via Russia. As a result, the Kazakhstani-Ukrainian trade volume decreased by more than 50 per cent,74 leading to complaints by Kazakhstani businesses who called upon the Kazakhstani government to protect the Kazakhstani domestic markets more effectively.75 Kazakhstani officials emphasize cross-border impediments on the Russian side of the Kazakhstani-Russian border as an explanation for the unfulfilled promise of intra-Union free flow of goods, people, services and capital.76

Beyond EAEU membership: Regional alliance networks and neighbourhood diplomacy The leverage Russia holds within the EAEU is not seen with enthusiasm among Kazakhstani elites and has had negative consequences for domestic businesses. This perception of Russia’s overly dominant position also extends beyond the institutionalized economic realm. Following Nazarbayev’s remark that his country might as well leave the EAEU if Kazakhstani independence was deemed at threat, Putin reacted in August 2014 by emphasizing the territorial artificiality of Kazakhstan. This

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was interpreted as a not-so-subtle hint that Kazakhstan’s territorial integrity can be seen as contingent (and could thus be re-shaped, like in Ukraine). After the annexation of Crimea, Russian nationalist opposition politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky even called on the Kremlin to also annex parts of northern Kazakhstan, reminiscent of earlier calls by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn two decades before.77 A perceived imperial legacy of the Soviet past, illustrated by a perpetuation of centre-periphery relations to the disadvantage of Kazakhstan, has not been without criticism in post-independent Kazakhstan.78 As Laruelle et al. have shown, however, Russia’s ‘influence’ over Kazakhstan is often overstated to be a coherent, state-led factor, while it actually is shaped by a range of what they call ‘active and passive vectors’. Besides proactive Russian state policies, some factors are generated from within Kazakhstan itself but help to perpetuate societal and strategic conditions favourable to Russia.79 Kazakhstan is home to the highest number of ethnic Russians in the whole of Central Asia – a legacy of Khrushchev’s ‘virgin lands’ campaign (Osvoyeniye tseliny) in the late 1950s. While there is still a level of popular Russophilia in Kazakhstan, however, Russia’s sway among the younger Kazakhs is losing hold. Younger generations might not view Russian as a lingua franca anymore, as Kazakhstani society consists of more ethnic Kazakhs than Russians, and as Kazakh immigrants from China and Mongolia are enticed to move to Kazakhstan.80 There is a Silk Road education fund for scholarship set up by the Chinese ministry of education, five Confucius Institutes operate in Kazakhstan and Chinese language learning centres have opened in Kazakhstani schools. In their collective effect, such measures also attempt to increase China’s overall cultural diplomacy within Kazakhstan.81 In the security domain, Russia’s claim to regional predominance has thus far remained uncontested. ‘We consider these countries as our last fortress’, a Russian official formulates in an interview in reference to former Soviet Union countries in Central Asia.82 Kazakhstan is no exception. Kazakhstan has responded positively to the introduction of the Russian-led Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) under CSTO auspices, and contributes an air assault brigade as well as a marine forces battalion.83 At a bilateral level, Russia supplied its S-300 surface-to-air missile defence system to Kazakhstan, whereby Kazakhstan and Russia began to set up a joint air defence network.84 Russia remains present in Kazakhstan’s security sector also through the supply of military equipment, military-to-military cooperation, CSTO exchanges as well as the presence of Russian troops.85 While China’s diplomacy continues to downplay Chinese interests in security affairs of its western neighbours, there are indications that a more active security presence gradually begins to accompany China’s economic influence. In March 2016, Fang Fenghu, the chief of the PLA’s General Staff, paid a visit to Tajikistan and Afghanistan to discuss military-to-military ties. This came after China had adopted an anti-terrorism law in December 2015 that allows the PLA to operate abroad.86 The Chinese government has also called for increased coordination between the PLA and Kazakhstan’s armed forces on peacekeeping and counter-terrorism.87 Kazakhstani officials, for their part, are well aware of the potentially allergic reaction in Russia that a stronger Chinese military presence would trigger, and would therefore be very reluctant to invite Chinese soldiers into the country for the protection of Chinesefinanced infrastructure projects or of Chinese nationals.88

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Finally, Kazakhstan’s foreign policy choices are not only developed in reaction to Chinese and Russian actors, but also to its direct Central Asian neighbours. Questions of border security, transportation, energy and water access all have to be resolved on a bilateral basis between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.89 The extent to which the SREB can mould new realities of Eurasian ‘connectivity’ will therefore also depend on the reform of these countries’ border management and customs systems.90 Thus far, administrative barriers and informal practices still continue to impede cross-country trade in Central Asia. Lorry drivers regularly pay bribes when crossing borders between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Trains sit at the border crossing for hours due to customs formalities.91 Reports of widespread incidents of smuggling, large-scale bribery and overlapping competences of government agencies (a source for graft and corruption on its own) do not abate.92 The long-time Central Asia analyst Alexander Cooley puts it succinctly: ‘Central Asia remains the most trade-unfriendly region in the world, and the potential for externallyfunded infrastructure to transform these entrenched practices is highly questionable.’93 Cooley questions the Chinese narrative that economic connectivity and cross-border infrastructure have a positive correlation with economic growth, and argues that this false assumption will only lead to the perpetuation of corruption out of a misguided policy of pouring even more funds into the coffers of kleptocratic local elites.94 At last, such practices have been acknowledged as a priority area requiring reforms by the new administration in Uzbekistan under President Mirziyoyev. The improvement of neighbourhood relations was identified as a key foreign policy priority in September 2016.95 Uzbekistan’s new neighbourhood policies might constitute a bellwether for a new era of intra-Central Asian relations, as Chapter 6 will elaborate further. However, changes occur gradually, and time will tell to what extent a new state-led neighbourhood diplomacy can change informal economies on the ground. Whether or not the BRI – as an external impetus – can incentivize governments and authorities at a sub-national level to work on border crossing facilitation remains to be seen. In the best-case scenario, the prospect of economic growth can trigger the diffusion of best practices among Central Asian states to compete for the passage of SREB-related transit goods.96 The future development of the BRI does not only depend on the provision of ‘hard’ infrastructure, but also on the ability to integrate cross-border networks with a view to potentially cumbersome (soft) regulatory contexts and ‘digital connectivity’. Kazakhstan is an actor that is more than a recipient of Chinese investments or of directives coming from Moscow. Both domestic critiques of the benefits and disadvantages of EAEU membership as well as popular protests against aspects of the government’s China policies illustrate that the outcome of the interaction between externally proposed initiatives and organizations also depends to no small part on the further use and development of Kazakhstan’s professed ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy. It will also depend on the extent to which domestic voices can inform and contribute to the shaping of future foreign policies. This process depends on the future trajectory of Kazakhstan’s political fabric under President Tokayev. The leadership changes in Kazakhstan after Nazarbayev’s resignation could open the space for a much greater debate within society

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about the identitarian implications of the government’s foreign and economic policy.97 Local anti-Chinese protests in 2019 were an indication that a more comprehensive dialogue between government bodies and societal stakeholders might be called for. At the same time, the post-Nazarbayev succession (after Nazarbayev’s physical or political demise) is likely to increase intra-elite competition and might lead to a reshuffling of old patronage networks.98 Russia and China, external powers with vested interests in Kazakhstani politics, will follow this process attentively. Given their leverage with different groups within the country, it is not inconceivable that pro-Russia and proChina networks will attempt to sway the post-Nazarbayev succession in one way or the other. The former remain predominant in the defence sector, while the latter have spread their influence in the energy, retail, construction and even educational sector. The contribution of Kazakhstan to the making of Eurasian orders therefore will depend on the nature of Kazakhstani agency in an increasingly fractious social and political context.

Conclusion Kazakhstan sees itself as the linchpin of Eurasia, as the central hub of inter-regional trade flows. Always a staunch supporter of cross-border initiatives that would help alleviate the disadvantages of a landlocked country, Kazakhstan joined the Eurasian Economic Union, and was credited by the Kremlin as an intellectual progenitor of the ‘Greater Eurasia’ idea that later made a comeback (if with a different meaning and purpose) in Russia’s official discourse. Kazakhstan also was quick to endorse the BRI and its land-based variant Silk Road Economic Belt that was pitched as a geo-economic game-changer in late 2013. Seen from a Kazakhstani perspective, the country’s inclusion in the Eurasian Economic Union as well as its importance for China’s new connectivity projects in the framework of the BRI can have direct economic benefits. Its membership in the EAEU theoretically reduces customs duties and non-tariff barriers amongst member states and therefore opens Kazakhstan up to a bigger regional market, while protecting domestic industries from competitive prices of imported manufactured Chinese products. China’s BRI translates into new investments for the country’s infrastructure as well as energy networks. Kazakhstan makes money off the transit of goods from China into the EAEU and hopes for increased cross-border commerce, while overland corridors in the energy domain (even if they predate the BRI) are a welcome avenue for increased energy exports to China. This development has the potential to affect Kazakhstan’s professed ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy, as Kazakhstan’s location as a geo-strategic ‘hub’ at the crossroads of the SREB and the EAEU ostensibly comes with frictions between the main sponsors of these two projects, Russia and China. On a geopolitical plane, the EAEU has become a mechanism for Russia to co-decide over Kazakhstani trade relations with China. For Kazakhstan, the economic benefits of the EAEU have been debated controversially as the political costs of accepting a Russian quasi-veto over tariff and trading policies were

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high. Kazakhstan had critiqued the politicization of the EAEU on the part of Russia already before the official decision to align the governmental spending programme ‘Nurly Zhol’ with the SREB, and felt ignored when Russia acted on behalf of the Union to sign declarations of continental importance with China. The same was true when Russia set up working groups without including other EAEU members. Russian officials, in turn, were irritated when the Kazakhstani government announced its own ‘sopryazheniye’ (‘docking’ or alignment) between the ‘Nurly Zhol’ programme and the SREB, which they saw as a move to undermine the EAEU. Kazakhstan deals with China through bilateral channels while also negotiating through the EAEU in a wider multilateral setting. The interaction between these different formats can result in a complex mix of competences and often diverging priorities, depending on the sub-institution and the policy domain at hand. At the same time, Russia’s dominance within the EAEU can help Kazakhstan to resist Chinese pressure (an observation being followed with interest in neighbouring Uzbekistan, where the implications of a possible EAEU membership are currently being studied), while Kazakhstan’s importance for the future trajectory of China’s BRI can help Kazakhstan develop more assertive positions vis-à-vis Moscow. Kazakhstan has emerged as a key partner for China’s BRI and is more than a conduit for Russian interests. The economic benefits for Kazakhstan as a ‘Silk Road gateway’, however, have been limited so far. Other than transit fees, Chinese ‘investments’ in the country do not significantly improve local employability. Key to the further trajectory of China’s activism in Kazakhstan is also the reception of Chinese financing practice on the part of Kazakhstani business communities but also the local populace. Many of China’s ‘investments’ are schemes to lend money to local authorities which they have to re-invest to secure Chinese engineering contracts. If the money hardly leaves the Chinese system and the impression prevails that Chinese actors’ interest lies in building and owning assets, the already simmering anti-Chinese sentiment at a popular level can create a powerful vector that can affect Kazakhstan’s political agency in its foreign relations. China will have to convince its partners in Eurasia that its grand connectivity narrative does not translate into Chinese hegemony in the region. The future development of the SREB can only partly be controlled by the Chinese government. Eventually, it also depends on cross-border neighbourhood relations in Central Asia. The BRI as an external factor might facilitate economic reforms affecting the latter, but it should not be conflated as a single causal factor changing the geopolitical landscape in the region. Both Kazakhstan and China remain wary of Russian interests, although both for slightly different reasons. The reverse also applies: Both the Russian and Kazakhstani governments look at China’s economic power with a mix of awe and alarm, as do local communities in Kazakhstan. Both NurSultan and Moscow attempt to engage with and contain Chinese business interests, aware that a tectonic geopolitical shift is underway which they hope to be able to comanage in one way or another. These business interests more often than not are those of Chinese companies engaging with counterparts in partner countries rather than expressions of a coherent Chinese state-led plan. Kazakhstani interaction with the

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outward projection of actors like Russia and China likewise is an iterative process that remains affected by domestic voices as well as formal institutional constraints and informal alliance networks. Whether similar factors are at play elsewhere in countries ‘in between’ will be the subject of the next chapter. To this end, it shifts its gaze to a north-eastern part of Eurasia to study the effects of Sino-Russian interactions on a country which has only these two as its direct neighbours: Mongolia.

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The New Silk Road heads north: Implications of the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor for Mongolia’s place within Eurasian power shifts Introduction In the thirteenth century, Mongolia became the epicentre of the then-known world.1 The first country to unite Eurasia in the wake of Genghis Khan’s conquests, Mongolia established an empire stretching from Korea in the east to Hungary in the west. The ‘Pax Mongolica’ became a peak of cross-continental trading activity. Better known for the tales of cruelty and brutal submission of their opponents amongst Western publics, the Mongols ‘established, or at least patronized, the first known large-scale international trade and taxation system, the ortaq’, the Silk Road historian Christopher Beckwith writes.2 The Silk Roads continued to flourish during the Mongol empire. Marco Polo (1254–1324) left for the Great Khanate in 1271 and travelled for almost two decades up to the court of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of China and founder of the Yuan dynasty. Upon his return, he then told his story to the writer Rustichello of Pisa, whose embroidered account of Marco Polo’s travels (Il Milione) would inspire the imagination of western Europeans for some time to come.3 After Genghis’ death, the Mongol empire began to unravel. Different successors continued to rule over large parts of Eurasia, from the Yuan in China, the Chaghatai khanate in Central Asia and the Il-Khanate in Persia to the Golden Horde, rulers of a vast area north of the Black Sea and along the Volga. In the fourteenth century, the Persian-speaking general Tamerlane made a last attempt to reconquer the territories of the former Mongol empire.4 Thereafter, the break-up of the Timurid empire in the early sixteenth century and the dawn of the seafaring era also sealed the end of the Silk Roads. Mongolia’s central role in world history and its hold over Eurasia was over. As China and Russia gradually developed a greater interest in controlling the lands of Central and East Asia thereafter, Mongolia became a part of the Manchu empire under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). After the Xinhai revolution of 1911 ended the Qing dynasty, the Tuvan Uryankhay Republic, which had been part of Mongolia since 1759, first became independent, then a protectorate of Tsarist Russia. Outer Mongolia

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gained independence under the Bogd Khan, the head of the Buddhist hierarchy. After a revolution in 1921, and following the death of the Bogd Khan in 1924, the Mongolian People’s Party seized power and established a Communist government, the People’s Republic.5 China grudgingly had to accept Mongolian independence as a satellite state leaning on the Soviet Union.6 The Yalta Conference in 1945 formally recognized Mongolia’s status as an independent state, and the 1950 Sino-Soviet treaty specifically acknowledged the independence of the Mongol People’s Republic.7 Mongolians, however, suspected that China never really relinquished its claim to rule over ‘Outer Mongolia’ during Mao Zedong’s (or indeed Deng Xiaoping’s) reign.8 The Soviet Union, for its part, considered Mongolia a strategic bridgehead and potential springboard in case of open conflict during the emerging Sino-Soviet split.9 While Mongolia was never incorporated into the Soviet Union like other Soviet socialist republics of Central Asia, it became a ‘brotherly’ socialist state. The unofficial label ‘the 16th republic’ stressed its political and economic dependency on the Soviet Union and thus always carried a humiliating connotation towards independent Mongolia.10 Mongolia and the Soviet Union signed a treaty on friendship and cooperation in 1962, which was restated and extended in 1994.11 Like all members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), Mongolia was closely integrated into Russia’s political economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union therefore constituted an economic shock for the country. After independence, Mongolia struggled to steer an autonomous foreign and economic policy course. In this process, the country underwent distinct phases of foreign policy re-orientation that involved strategies to embrace Eurasian inter-regional synergies and to integrate itself into the global economy. This new policy planning led to the adoption of the concept of ‘Third Neighbours’ in the early 1990s, with which the government attempted to recruit overseas partners as a way of reducing overdependence on either Russia or China. Mongolia wanted to be seen as more than a buffer state between these two Eurasian giants. The track record of such attempts is ambivalent, and Mongolia remained highly dependent on its two neighbours also during the first decade of post-Soviet independence.12 As the ‘Third Neighbour’ Policy did little to sustainably diversify Mongolian foreign policy options, the last two decades have seen Mongolia trying to steer a course between balancing China and Russia against each other while continuing to look for options to mitigate the effects of its landlocked status. As this chapter will explore, Mongolia saw the Chinese ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ as an opportunity to do the latter, and began to embrace a Chinese-inspired corridor diplomacy as part of the Silk Road Economic Belt while proposing its own complementary connectivity project in 2014. Concurrently, the Mongolian government has been eager to continue to balance relations with its two big neighbours while also upholding its ‘Third Neighbours’ policy developed during the 1990s. Shifts in Eurasian power dynamics increasingly impose constraints on this attempt at double balancing as China’s gravitational pull increases in the wake of Beijing’s economic power projection. At the same time, the creation of an economic ‘corridor’ through Mongolian territory as a result of trilateral summit diplomacy stands illustrative for the evolving interaction between China, Russia and landlocked countries ‘in between’.

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Mongolia’s quest for foreign policy options: Balancing between ‘third’ and its two direct neighbours In the 1990s, China emerged as an important trading partner for Mongolia as the Mongolian government was looking to relax the Russian monopoly over its economy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.13 For China, Mongolia became the most important supplier of coal, which is Mongolia’s main export commodity besides copper and iron ore. In 1997, China became the biggest investor in Mongolia.14 In 2012, China also became Mongolia’s most important trading partner, even though Russia retained influence via the supply of energy (electricity and refined oil). But Mongolia’s almost total dependence on Russian oil imports is a potential vulnerability, as petrol shortages in 2011 demonstrated. That year, Russia had suspended oil exports to Mongolia in response to shortages at home.15 Aware of this asymmetrical dependence on its Northern neighbour in the energy sphere, Mongolian politicians in turn became concerned about growing Chinese influence in other sectors of the economy. This blended with a general scepticism about foreign shareholder arrangements in the country’s resource sector that became prevalent since the early 2000s.16 When the Chinese state-owned China Shenhua Energy Company expressed an interest in investing in the Tavan Tolgoi coal mine, located in the south of Mongolia (together with the Japanse Sumitomo Corporation), the Mongolian parliament rejected the proposal in 2015, fearing Chinese predominance in its economy.17 South Korean companies eventually were the successful contenders to build the 267 km railway from the Tavan Tolgoi coal mine to the Chinese border.18 Three years before, in 2012, the Mongolian parliament had already amended its Foreign Investment Law, introducing a greater level of scrutiny for all foreign investments in the country’s mining, finance, media and telecommunications sector.19 This strategy had its downsides: because of Mongolia’s restrictive policies especially in the mining sector, annual FDI into the country decreased from $4.4 billion in 2012 to merely $36 million in 2016.20 In 2017, Mongolia had to agree to a $5.5 billion aid package by the IMF to prevent a financial meltdown. In 2015, Mongolia’s public debt had reached 77 per cent of GDP.21 Already Mongolia’s 2010 National Security Concept (NSC) had identified overdependence on external powers as a national security threat, and had prohibited any single foreign state from accounting for more than one-third of overall foreign investment in Mongolia.22 The Concept calls for ‘a policy to restrict investments by foreign state-owned companies and balance the volume of investments by neighbouring and highly developed countries within strategically important sectors’. Alicia Campi has called this Mongolia’s Energy ‘Wolf Strategy’ and reads it as an attempt to curb China’s presence in the country’s mineral resources by taking inspiration from Russian legislative precedents of resource nationalism.23 The publication of the NSC in 2010 came just a few months after the Mongolian government had signed an agreement with the Canada-based Ivanhoe Mines and the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto to develop the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold reserves (with an estimated 32 million tons of copper).24 Mongolia’s parliament then passed the Strategic Entities Foreign Investment Law (SEFIL) in 2012 to stop the attempt by the Chinese Aluminium Corporation (Chalco) to become a majority shareholder of Oyu

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Tolgoi.25 Article 3.1.15 of the NSC also reiterated the country’s Third Neighbour Policy calling for ‘bilateral and multilateral cooperation with highly developed democracies in political, economic, cultural and humanitarian affairs’.26 This policy was reconfirmed – alongside the stated necessity to maintain good relations with the two neighbours China and Russia – in Mongolia’s Foreign Policy Concept adopted in 2011. The domestic political scene is also of relevance in this context. Different domestic stakeholders continue to shape the debate about China’s role in Mongolia. The Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) has been known for its pro-Russian positions and a general scepticism about greater Chinese involvement in Mongolia’s socio-political fabric. Mongolia’s president at the time of writing, Khaltmaagiin Battulga, is a politician from the Democratic Party (DP), and an MPP-controlled parliament could limit his political leeway constitutionally. As a Mongolian government official explained in an interview: ‘It can be difficult to implement huge projects because we are a democracy. This may be easier in countries like Kazakhstan, but we sometimes have difficult debates in parliament.’27 Over-dependence on any one external power, and China in particular, is one particular subject that remains a sensitive issue and that continues to make for controversial debates within Mongolia domestically. In addition, Jeffrey Reeves writes of a number of profit-maximizing Mongolian politicians who have nurtured economic ties with Chinese companies, aggravating the two states’ asymmetrical relations and Chinese ‘structural power over Mongolia’s domestic institutions’, as he calls it.28 Others share the observation of asymmetrical economic ties, but come to different conclusions. Dorj Shurkhuu, former director of the Institute of International Relations at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, acknowledges that China’s investments could help Mongolia to develop economically.29 With a very small population of only 3 million, Mongolia lacks highly qualified people to conduct the necessary feasibility studies or draft intellectual property regulations, but also the necessary training and educational preconditions, he adds.30 Without structural reforms, Mongolia remains dependent on foreign expertise – something which Mongolia’s long-term development policy vision for 2050 acknowledges and aims to remedy.31 Such a reading also helps to nuance the notion of Chinese debt trap diplomacy: Chinese negotiators might not necessarily be pushing countries into debt traps, but a country like Mongolia may lack expertise and negotiating skills to conduct the complex contractual negotiations involved when facing economically more adept Chinese counterparts whose reach expands in the wake of the BRI.32

Mongolia within the BRI and the Mongolian Development Plan Mongolia was only belatedly identified as a partner state in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. When President Xi presented his idea of a Silk Road Economic Belt at Nazarbayev University in Astana in September 2013, he proposed the creation of five economic corridors. None would go through Mongolia. ‘We felt left out’, a Mongolian foreign ministry official said in an interview, and recounted how President Elbegdorj subsequently began a campaign to initiate a Chinese-Mongolian-Russian trilateral meeting the following year at the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

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(SCO) summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Fearing it could be excluded from the new Eurasian connectivity plans, Mongolia began to work on ways to be included in the Silk Road Economic Belt, as this was seen as a way to update its generally poor rail and road infrastructure and mitigate disadvantages of its landlocked status.33 According to a Mongolian diplomat who at the time worked in the Policy Planning department, the fact that Mongolia was a founding member of the AIIB also helped to advance Mongolia’s case for an additional corridor.34 Besides offering its territory as a useful transit corridor, Mongolia also hoped to gain access to Chinese ports for the export of Mongolian products to third countries. An important breakthrough for Mongolia was Chinese president Xi’s visit to Mongolia on 21 to 22 August 2014, during which twenty-six economic agreements were signed.35 During this visit, six Chinese seaports, including Tianjin, Dalian and Jinzhou, were designated as transit ports for Mongolian products to overseas markets.36 For China, connecting Mongolia to Northeast China’s economic powerhouses made sense, as this represents the shortest connection to Europe. The Mongolian transit route is 748 km shorter than the Manzhouli route connecting China with Europe via Manzhouli, the largest land port on the Sino-Russian border, and 513 km shorter than transit through Kazakhstan. A reliable transport connection through Mongolia (and onwards through Russia) could be more advantageous than the southern routes through the Central Asian republics because it is shorter and involves crossing less customs borders and different jurisdictions. This does not mean that China becomes a stakeholder in Mongolian railways. The Mongolian national railway company UBTŽ is a RussianMongolian joint venture with equal shares.37 Russia’s rail company RŽD is slated to modernize Mongolia’s rail network.38 This sector therefore remains relatively sealed off from potential Chinese investments. Focusing solely on investment opportunities does therefore not explain China’s interest in new ‘economic corridors’. China’s cooperative approach, as Jeffrey Reeves points out, has also been the result of a Chinese foreign policy shift away from Deng Xiaoping’s focus on Great Power relations to a recognition that more diplomatic efforts need to be put into relations with China’s immediate neighbours. In the functional logic of Eurasian connectivity, this made sense for China to the extent that stable relations with ‘peripheral states’ (a formulation not particularly liked by China’s neighbours) serve to tie China’s neighbourhood into an overall Sinocentric order as a strategic means for China to restore Great Power status.39 In 2014, China and Mongolia began to describe their bilateral relationship as a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’.40 Sino-Mongolian relations were also elevated to a level where both countries deepened their cooperation on law enforcement, border security or anticorruption and antiterrorism policies.41 In September 2014, the importance of Mongolia for cross-continental economic corridor received public recognition when the creation of a China-Mongolia-Russian corridor was proposed at the first trilateral meeting of Mongolian President Tsahiagiin Elbegdorj, Chinese President Xi and Russian President Putin.42 At that meeting, President Elbegdorzj unveiled his ‘Steppe Road’ (Tallin Zam) plan for Mongolia’s economic future at a meeting of the heads of state of Mongolia, China and Russia in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.43 This $50 billion project foresees highway construction, electricity distribution, an extension of the Trans-Mongolia Railway as well as new

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natural gas and petroleum pipelines. Infrastructure projects proposed include the construction of ‘The Land Road’, a 997 km highway from China to Russia, over 1,000 km of new railways, and an oil and gas pipeline traversing Mongolia. The latter is an idea that Mongolian policymakers are eager to push as an alternative to the ‘Altai’ pipeline, which, if built, would run via the narrow common border between Kazakhstan and Mongolia and therefore circumvent Mongolian territory. The pipeline project was discussed at prime ministerial level between Mongolia and Russia in December 2019, and Mongolian officials underline the positive effects for all sides: Russian gas would transit through Mongolia to the Chinese market, and Mongolia would be integrated into the regional energy network.44 Mongolia presented its ‘Steppe Road’ as a complementary project to the BRI, not as a competitor. In this logic outlined in 2014, Mongolia thus put forward the idea of a trilateral economic linkage which would later morph into the ‘economic corridor’. Mongolia had proposed various plans to upgrade its poor infrastructure before. In 2001, the government had already initiated the ‘Millennium Road’ project. This aimed to construct roads and railways to link the country up to regional transport and trading networks, but failed to attract foreign investment. The BRI can turn out to be a watershed in this regard. With China and its BRI, Mongolia finds a willing and financially potent partner to invest in the country’s infrastructure under the banner of ‘connectivity’, albeit at the expense of becoming more dependent on Chinese investments. The Sino-Russian rapprochement in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 was an additional factor for Mongolia to push a policy of re-engaging with its two neighbours.45 On 4 January 2015, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Mongolian Foreign Minister Lundeg Purevsuren reached an understanding on the creation of the Mongolia-China-Russia economic corridor.46 This corridor would allow Mongolian cargo to travel to Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific coast and potentially the far-away European markets via Chita (where it would connect to the Trans-Siberian railway). Mongolia would also act as an important transit corridor for Chinese and Russian trade heading in both directions. The Mongolian authorities did not need to expand much on the advantages offered by the infrastructural bridgehead status the country occupies between China and Russia: The Trans-Mongolian line runs from Erenhot at the Sino-Mongolian border to Ulaanbaatar, then onwards via Naushki at the RussianMongolian border to Ulan-Ude, where it connects to the Trans-Siberian railway lines.47 The announcement of the trilateral corridor then enabled a range of joint projects. Under the auspices of the BRI and the Steppe Road, the construction of a Zamiin-UudUlaanbaatar expressway was launched in May 2015: The ground-breaking ceremony was attended by Mongolian regional representatives as well as Chinese and Russian representatives, who underlined not only the economic benefits Mongolia would reap from the projects, but also the symbolic nature of a highway ‘connecting Asia and Europe’.48 Chinggis Land Development Group, the Mongolian National Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Mongolian Road Association signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the inclusion of Mongolian companies in the construction of that highway.49 This came hard on the heels of the publication of the Vision and Actions document, issued by China’s National Development and Reform Commission in March 2015.

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Here, Mongolia was finally mentioned in Chinese official policy documents on the BRI. The document couches Mongolian geography in the language of development opportunities and highlights the proximity of Inner Mongolia (a Chinese province) to Mongolia and Russia. It further speaks of the ambition to ‘improve the railway links connecting Heilongjiang Province with Russia and the regional railway network, strengthen cooperation between China’s Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning provinces and Russia’s Far East region on sea-land multi-modal transport, and advance the construction of a Eurasian high-speed transport corridor linking Beijing and Moscow with the goal of building key windows opening to the north’.50 Shortly after the publication of the Vision and Actions document, a second trilateral meeting between Elbegdorj, Xi and Putin took place on the sidelines of the combined BRICS meeting and the fifteenth annual SCO summit in Ufa, Russia, in July 2015.51 Here, a road map for trilateral cooperation was presented. This preparatory work was elevated to a publicly more visible level one year later. The SCO summit in Tashkent saw a third trilateral Russian-Mongolian-Chinese high-level meeting, which led to further agreements on infrastructure development (an ‘Economic Corridor Plan’ agreement) and procedures for customs clearance. The partnership agreement also foresees a range of joint projects on sectors from tourism, health, to scientific and technical cooperation (thirty-two projects in total).52 The China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor was born. There is reportedly an understanding between China, Mongolia and Russia that the three top priorities are road development, railway infrastructure and the energy sector.53 The North-South Central railway corridor, according to the timeline preferred by the Mongolian foreign ministry, should become a success story first; further projects in other sectors that can have a positive impact on regional trade can follow. A trilateral tourism conference was initiated (the fourth conference in that format was held in Ulaanqab in the Inner Mongolian autonomous region in June 2019), but the deepening of trilateral cooperation in the tourism sector is considered contingent on the improvement of infrastructure links between the three countries. This would include making the current single-track line traversing Mongolia double-track to speed up transit operations. The latter would depend on a consensus reached in parliament, and thus touches on parliamentary dynamics outlined above. The Mongolian parliament needs to ratify agreements that involve foreign investors in infrastructure projects, and the Chinese proposal to build new narrow-gauge rail tracks connecting Mongolia and China has been controversial among parliamentarians. In 2014, the parliament for the first time approved of the construction of narrow-gauge railroad spurs for better transportation of Mongolian raw materials to China.54 A cross-border freight transportation link from Ulan-Ude to Tianjin in China via Ulaanbaatar was opened in August 2016; another is planned to connect Choilbasan in Eastern Mongolia to the Port of Dalian through Manzhouli. The difference in rail gauges, however, remains a practical complication that impacts on container handling and railway capacity. The trans-shipment of train carriages takes place at the Chinese-Mongolian border. In a bold effort to increase transit speed, China even offered to finance the construction of parallel (narrow gauge) rail ways traversing the country.55 This remains a controversial proposal for Mongolian parliamentarians, as the construction of a Chinese gauge would facilitate access for Chinese companies and reheat the debate about economic over-exposure.

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So far, northbound Russian-gauge railroads continue to connect mineral mines to the Russian border for onwards travels via the Trans-Siberian railways, or to connect with the Mongolian-Russian free trade zone that was set up at the Northern border town of Altanbulag in 2014.56 Mongolia’s railway system may therefore become a physical illustration of Mongolia’s new policy of trilateralism. If built, a Chinese railway spur would go south from the coal mine at Ukhaa Khudag to the Sino-Mongolian border at Gashuun Sukhait (in spite of Russia’s protective stance regarding the wide gauge). A Sino-Mongolian Cooperation Council began discussing mining, railway and processing aspects of the Tavan Tolgoi coal project with China’s Shenhua Group in 2017 again – a noticeable shift from just two years earlier. The official rhetoric began to emphasize potential benefits of Mongolia’s cooperation with its direct neighbours also in other areas. Erenhot at the Sino-Mongolian border as well as Inner Mongolia saw the construction of logistics facilities in expectation of increased cross-border trade. Erenhot has also become what has been called a ‘pilot city with preferential taxation’.57 With a striking similarity to the creation of the special economic zone at the Sino-Kazakhstani border at Khorgos, China and Mongolia have established a cross-border trading area at their common border with the intention of creating a separate free trade area there as well. The logistics centre at Zamiin-Uud (at the Mongolian-Chinese border) ‘could become the next Khorgos’, a Mongolian foreign ministry official said in an interview.58 The two countries also signed an MoU on a free trade agreement as a first step towards a free trade area in the future. Concrete steps towards closer Russian-Mongolian economic cooperation were taken when an intergovernmental commission met in February 2018. There, agreements were signed to expand cooperation in the areas of nuclear energy, banking, crossborder ecology and transit transportation.59 Mongolia also helps with China’s goal of renminbi internationalization: In 2014, Mongolia and the Bank of China agreed to double the amount of a currency exchange swap from 2011 to 20 billion renminbi, and the Chinese renminbi has become Mongolia’s second most actively traded currency.60 Importantly, China signed the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement, leading to hopes in Mongolia that cross-border trade can be improved also in both directions, not just in terms of increasing Chinese exports to Mongolia.61 Such publicly stated intentions read well, and Mongolia may well stand to benefit from its inclusion into investments projects mostly couched in the language of infrastructure development. But how did Mongolia’s embrace of such development opportunities by way of trilateral summit meetings evolve, and what can it tell us about the centrifugal forces of competition and cooperation with the region’s ‘Great Powers’ also in other policy domains?

Attempts to find partners across the globe: Mongolia’s evolving ‘Third Neighbour’ Policy in a regional context Sandwiched between two Eurasian giants, Mongolia has attempted to steer an autonomous policy course that avoids over-dependence on the policy preferences and economies of Russia and China since the 1990s. Mongolia in the 1990s first attempted to broaden its room for manoeuvre in international politics at large, while the last

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five years have seen a new embrace of trilateral diplomacy with China and Russia. Mongolia’s ‘Third Neighbour’ Policy in the 1990s was meant to attract Western FDI in order to become less dependent on China and Russia.62 ‘Our Third Neighbours are Western countries: The US, Europe, Japan, Korea,’ a Mongolian government official said in an interview, and added: ‘We strategically balance our relations.’63 As this was not forthcoming as expected, the ‘Third Neighbour’ Policy from 2010 onwards was revised to expand ties with other partners at the opposite end of Eurasia, including Iran and Turkey.64 Mongolia also considers India an important third neighbour. India and Mongolia share a commitment to their democratic constitutions, and Mongolia looks to India as an ally to counteract a powerful China in the region.65 Even though there have been no political indications that Mongolia’s observer status within the SCO might change, India’s admission to that organization as a full member in 2017 led some in the Mongolian foreign policy expert community to debate the benefits and disadvantages of Mongolia’s own status within that organization. Mongolia has been content with its observer status in the SCO, which has always been an expression of Mongolia’s reservation about Russia and China’s dominance within that organization. The inclusion of another democratic full member (India), so one argument went, makes the SCO more than a Sino-Russian exclusive club, and could institutionalize a more meaningful regional dialogue among a range of actors about questions of regional order. This could of course complicate the implementation of the BRI according to China’s perspective. Jamsran Bayasakh of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences therefore argues that it was a strategic mistake on the part of the Chinese government not to have linked the BRI to the SCO in some way.66 Others speculate that China’s willingness to let the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor materialize in a way that it generates benefits for Mongolia could be contingent on Mongolia’s full SCO membership in the near future (which President Battulga also seems eager to advance).67 Like India, Mongolia could decide to engage selectively with the organization, and opt out of policy domains like defence cooperation in order to uphold its policy of aiming to balance between its immediate neighbours and overseas partners.68 In the 2010s, President Elbegdorj developed a trilateral dialogue with the United States and Japan to serve as a counterbalance to the Sino-Russian-Mongolian trilateralism.69 Following the same logic, Mongolian President Elbegdorj (2009–17) had proposed a ‘Forum of Asia’ as a continental dialogue platform on a state visit to Japan in 2015.70 The Forum, he said, was thought of as a platform to promote equal representation of the interests of all sovereign nations in Asia, and to guarantee their independence, integrity and development. The timing and location of his announcement seemed to indicate that he was not too happy about over-dependence on China, even as the government had officially welcomed (and actively lobbied for) the China-Mongolia-Russia corridor just one year before. Without a reference to the BRI, Elbegdorj underlined that the Forum was open to all interested Asian nations. It was an emphasis of local agency and a move to underline that China’s external economic policies must not exclusively be seen as ‘peripheral diplomacy’. It may also have been an attempt to reassure external ‘third neighbours’ and to recruit third-country partners (besides China and Russia) to get involved in the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor.

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Mongolia even began to promote itself as a potential mediator in helping to deescalate the North Korean nuclear crisis in what Bolor Lkhaajav has called Mongolia’s ‘Small-country diplomacy’.71 According to one of the negotiators of Mongolia’s NuclearWeapon Free Zone (NWFZ) status (the world’s only one-state NWFZ), Mongolia was in a good position to mediate between different sides because of its credible nonpartisan stance on the back of its legally guaranteed NWF status.72 This perception was also behind then-President Elbegdorj’s statement at the UN General Assembly in September 2013 that Mongolia’s first-hand experience in negotiating security guarantees with neighbouring nuclear powers had prepared the country to lead efforts to create a NWFZ for the wider Northeast Asian region.73 The Ulaanbaatar dialogue meetings and the Ulaanbaatar process meetings (organized by the non-governmental organization ‘Blue Banner’) serve to bring together North Koreans and other stakeholders. Such a mediatory diplomacy is complemented by a balancing approach in Mongolia’s security policies, reflecting what Munkh-Ochir Dorjjugder calls Mongolia’s evolving ‘multi-pillar foreign policy’.74 This essentially extends Mongolia’s attempts to avoid over-dependence on any one partner into the security realm: Russia and Mongolia continue to nurture a close defence relationship, but this does not preclude China and Mongolia from holding joint military exercises at the Sino-Mongolian border. An agreement on military-technical cooperation was signed between Mongolian Defence Minister Dashdemberal Bat-Erdene and Chinese Vice president Li Yuanchao in September 2013. At the same time, Mongolia has built military ties with the United States, has set up a regional peacekeeping training centre, and engages in the annual international peacekeeper exercise ‘Khaan Quest’. More controversially, Mongolia joined the ‘coalition of the willing’ in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 (a position at odds with that of the country’s two big neighbours).75 The Mongolian military also participates in Russian-led military exercises and purchases Russian weaponry, yet has deflected Russian attempts to encourage Mongolia to join the Collective Treaty Security Organization (CSTO). All in all, Mongolia’s active participation in regional military exercises as well as bilateral defence ties point to the reading that its carefully nurtured image of geopolitical neutrality is mirrored by diversified and balanced security policies in the broader region. In the UN General Assembly, Mongolia abstained from a resolution condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea on 27 March 2014. Uncomfortable with such an egregious violation of territorial integrity, Mongolia still opted for a hedging strategy that avoided antagonizing its important Northern neighbour. In the same year, Mongolia also proposed its own dialogue platform for regional security, called the ‘Ulaanbaatar Dialogue on Northeast Asian Security’ (UBD). The UBD was presented as a Track 1.5 forum bringing together academic experts and government officials to discuss regional security issues and regional cooperation (including its economic and environmental aspects). Mongolia’s active presence in the UN may also be a way to compensate the difficulties of its isolated geography, and to ‘show flag’ on the international stage. Yet, in May 2015, China signed an MoU with Mongolia on the cooperation of law enforcement to combat the ‘three evils’ of terrorism, separatism and extremism. This extends the same rhetoric used in the framework of the SCO to its bilateral relations with non-SCO member Mongolia.76 Embracing China’s discourse on counter-terrorism

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could provide the framework for China to violate Mongolia’s territorial integrity or citizen rights out of alleged concerns for ‘terrorist activities’ on Mongolian soil. That this is a concern in Mongolia was reconfirmed by reactions to the way China has been using its growing leverage to get its message across, as we will see below.

Mongolian views on China’s growing leverage When in December 2016, the Dalai Lama visited Mongolia, China reacted with sanctions by closing a border-crossing between China and Mongolia, leaving hundreds of truck drivers stuck at the border. China also began to impose fees on the import of commodities from Mongolia.77 China then suspended all bilateral talks and put a $4.2 billion economic loan on hold.78 This was a strong, if perhaps not unexpected reaction, if China’s allergic reactions to the issue of Dalai Lama visits also to other countries in the past were any indication. It forced the Mongolian government to adapt its talking points and issue a veiled statement implicitly distancing itself from the Dalai Lama. ‘We’re a Buddhist country, we cannot deny the rights of our Mongolian Buddhist population to worship the Dalai Lama,’ a Mongolian diplomat told the author in an interview, and added: ‘This makes our relations with China sometimes difficult. They demand that we respect their core interests. This is what we call a risk factor in Chinese-Mongolian relations.’79 Not only does such a perceived display of Chinese chauvinism, alongside occasional remarks that ‘Mongolia was part of China once’ poison societal relations,80 it also distorts the more complex historical relationship between various Mongolian and Chinese dynasties. Such signalling is understandably read by Mongolians as a veiled threat that the recognition of Mongolia’s sovereignty could become contingent on Mongolia’s willingness to cooperate with China. The link between China’s economic presence in the country and control over land is another notoriously delicate one, as the leasing of agricultural land to China in Dornod Aimag province in 2015 illustrated. That decision came under domestic criticism which have added to concerns about China’s presence in the country.81 The public embrace of China’s investments in Mongolia by President Elbegdorj was also challenged by domestic critics, including high-level politicians, who have even taken the step of demanding constitutional reforms to curtail presidential powers.82 The Chinese embassy in Mongolia has announced scholarships for Mongolian students to study in China in line with the promotion of what in BRI terminology are ‘people-topeople’ bonds,83 but such Chinese soft power efforts would need to be complemented by policies that avoid giving the impression that Mongolia’s sovereignty is deemed contingent on Chinese interests. Like in other partner countries of the BRI, labour concerns and the notion that the initiative may only be a fig leaf for the export of Chinese goods and workers have also been noted in Mongolia. Concerns over the composition of the workforce for construction projects in Mongolia have sparked a debate over the reliability and skills of Mongolian workers, in which ‘lazy Mongolians that drink a little’ fare badly in comparison to the ‘little-demanding and hard-working Chinese’.84 A Mongolian foreign ministry official responds to the question whether Mongolia’s inclusion in

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one of the official SREB corridors may come with an increasing financial and political dependence on China as follows: ‘In the 2016 Economic Corridor Plan, we deliberately included a clause on Third country inclusion. We expect higher AIIB, and higher ADB funding – and less CDB, less Exim funding’ (the two Chinese policy banks that provide most of the loans under the BRI).85 Loyal to Mongolia’s emphasis on nonChinese and non-Russian Third Neighbours, the government hopes to attract funding from (notional) multinational banks, namely the (Chinese-dominated) AIIB and the (Japanese-dominated) Asian Development Bank – not only from Chinese policy banks. The criticism of debt trap diplomacy in Central and Southeast Asia combined with a simmering Sinophobia casts long shadows.86 Jeffrey Reeves has identified a considerable level of anti-Chinese sentiment amongst Mongolian society, due to the export of labour for local construction projects, a disregard for Mongolia’s environment and ecology (and contributing to air pollution, deforestation, wildlife depletion and water shortages), and an overall extractive economic policy that does not benefit local economies and even contributes to ‘structural violence’ within Mongolia’s socio-political fabric.87 At a more structural level, anti-Chinese sentiments amongst Mongolian society have roots in centuries of ethno-political tensions between ethnic Mongols and Chinese and are embedded in the historical legacies of Chinese colonial policies in Outer (present-day independent) and Inner Mongolia particularly in the second half of the Qing dynasty in Inner Asia.88 In 2017, there were indications that the balanced approach of previous Mongolian governments was giving way to a more overt anti-Chinese sentiment. The election of President Khaltmaagiin Battulga from the Democratic Party (DP), a former judo wrestler who succeeded President Elbegdorj in July 2017 after winning the presidential election with 50.6 per cent of the vote, raised concerns in China that the anti-Chinese rhetoric of his election campaign would not bode well for Chinese investments in Mongolia. Following the election, the Washington Post ran a story commenting on Battulga’s Sinophobia, his pledge to reduce Mongolia’s trade dependence on China and the generally polarizing election campaign.89 Russian President Putin immediately congratulated Battulga on his electoral victory. Battulga, in turn, spoke of the creation of an FTA with the Eurasian Economic Union.90 Yet, his election has not fundamentally changed the parameters of Mongolia’s need to also engage China in an effort to update its railway and transport system. Despite Battulga’s initial anti-Chinese rhetoric, Mongolia subsequently has not changed its course in favour of the trilateral economic corridor. Mongolia seems to have recognized that engagement with the regional integration ideas of its neighbours can be a strategy to reduce the vulnerabilities that its geographic position entails. As a non-member of the EAEU, Mongolia also began to underline its potentially useful status as a ‘transit nation’ between China and Russia which could usher in linkages between the BRI and the EAEU.91

Sino-Russian interaction in Mongolia Russia’s perception of Chinese projects in Mongolia constitutes an additional layer of complexity. According to a European ambassador to Mongolia, Russia has asked

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European counterparts to make sure the IMF credit loan to Mongolia continues, because otherwise, ‘there’d be only China left to lend money’.92 A certain mutual apprehension between China and Russia about their respective engagement in Mongolia predates any talk of a trilateral corridor or BRI projects. ‘Russia and China have a common interest in keeping Mongolia in a vacuum,’ Dorj Shurkhuu, former director of the Institute of International Studies at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences said in an interview. ‘It is a question about who will control Mongolia militarily, financially, culturally, linguistically, even civilizationally’, and added that transnational ethnic ties (Russian Buryats to the north, China’s autonomous province of Inner Mongolia to the south) can serve as leverage to influence politics in Mongolia. Both China and Russia, he continued, also share the view that so-called Third Neighbours should be kept out of Mongolia.93 This shared scepticism of third country involvement may help explain why China and Russia are cautious not to risk a fall-out between themselves over their respective policies in Mongolia. When in 2016, China halted a project to build a dam on the Eg River in Northern Mongolia (the Egiin Gol hydropower project, which is not a BRI project), it responded to Russia’s stated ecological concerns. Russia had criticized the dam project due to the proximity to Lake Baikal and the uncertain impact it would have on the ecosystem of Lake Baikal.94 A planned 300 MW hydroelectric project on the Selenge river would divert water via a 1,000 km-long pipeline to the Gobi region. Russian environmental scientists as well as government officials have therefore criticized the project.95 This project would also have reduced Mongolia’s dependence on Russian energy imports, as it would have enabled Mongolia to generate its own energy from hydropower. Mongolia has set itself the objective of reducing the import of Russian electricity and wants to increase the share of renewable energy sources to 30 per cent by 2030. Paragraph 3.2.4.3 of the 2010 National Security Concept of Mongolia made pledges to ‘reduce direct petroleum dependency on one country so that domestic output fully supplies energy demands by the year 2020’.96 Mongolia remains highly dependent on energy imports and has an underdeveloped electricity transmission network that stretches out from Ulaanbaatar in a 500 km radius, northwards to the Russian border and southwards to the Chinese border. Some Mongolian experts have therefore speculated that Russia’s criticism of these hydropower projects may have been motivated by the need to keep Mongolia dependent on Russian energy imports.97 With several hydropower stations on the Angara river, the Irkutsk region is the main electricity provider for Mongolia. Any attempts by Mongolia to diversify its electricity supplies would financially affect this region within Russia in particular. In December 2016, China’s Hunan Industrial Equipment Installation (HIEI) announced its investment in the Erdenet Thermal Power Plant (ETPP), which supplies a Mongolian-Russian copper mine with energy.98 With a view to the competition to Russian energy imports that Mongolia’s recent energy generation projects might bring along, it is difficult to discern whether Russia was genuinely concerned about the ecological impact, or whether geo-economic considerations have played a role. Interestingly, the feasibility study for the Eg dam project had been carried out by the Asian Development Bank, not by Chinese authorities.99 Yet, despite the fact that China’s Exim bank had already agreed to provide a $1 billion loan to finance the project, China halted the project.100 This was indicative

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of the possibility that Chinese authorities are receptive to Russian reactions to Chinese projects in BRI partner countries – an observation that counters the notion that China is bulldozing ahead regardless of external scepticism or resistance. The creation of transcontinental corridors, this observation reminds us, depends not only on China, but on a variety of stakeholders. Mongolia’s case is an illustrative example of a process whereby the country’s Third Neighbour Policy is being affected by the government’s embrace of a new form of trilateral talks with China and Russia. This process is already changing the realities not only of Mongolian foreign policy options, but also of how China and Russia interact with each other in the lands ‘in between’.

Conclusion The case of Mongolia at the crossroads between China’s outreach in the wake of the Belt and Road Initiative and its historical and politico-economic links with Russia provides insights into the intricacies of the making of a new Eurasian order. Attempts to balance relations between China and Russia have led to the encouragement of China’s entry into Mongolia’s oil sector to rival Russian companies, the reduction of Mongolian coal exports to China in 2013 for fear of over-dependence, and to the acceptance of Chinese loans for the implementation of Mongolian hydroelectric energy generation projects that would serve to reduce Mongolia’s dependence on Russian oil imports.101 Mongolia’s position as a geopolitical bridgehead state has led the country to adopt a hedging ‘Third Neighbour’ policy in the 1990s that sought to maintain stable relations with both Russia and China, while also looking for additional external partners and allies. Mongolia has agreed to a comprehensive partnership with the United States, and has encouraged the involvement of Japanese, South Korean and Canadian investors as well as the multinational Rio Tinto in its mining industry. At the same time, Mongolian politicians tried to limit the involvement of foreign stakeholders in Mongolia’s economy by way of restrictive legislation, with mixed results. With the emergence of a new Chinese connectivity discourse with a Eurasian focus from late 2013, the Mongolian government embraced the BRI as an opportunity to mitigate negative effects of its landlocked status, lobbied for the inclusion of Mongolia within an economic corridor traversing the country, and presented its own ‘Steppe Road’ project as a useful complement to China’s infrastructure investments. ‘China is our eternal neighbour’, a Mongolian government official said, ‘We cannot get out of our region, we are a hybrid between Central Asia and East Asia’.102 Mongolia has subsequently embraced a new phase of trilateral diplomacy with China and Russia, both in an attempt to make gains from the potential benefits that come with the promised ‘docking’ of the Eurasian Economic Union and the BRI, and to counterbalance China and Russia against each other within Mongolia. This has implications for the extent to which China and Russia compete and cooperate with each other. Both China and Russia eye each other’s involvement in Mongolia with scepticism,

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but are cautious not to risk confrontation in different sectors of Mongolia’s politicoeconomic fabric. The narratives of new Eurasian corridors shape a new transnational political space which naturally imposes constraints on Mongolian decision makers. China’s growing economic activism comes with constraints on the local agency of regional governments, as Chinese incursions into Mongolian politics have shown. With only two international borders, one with China, the other with Russia, and a high economic dependence on both, Mongolia cannot ignore the implications of its geographic location when it comes to investment deliberations. The regional effects of the evolving Sino-Russian relationship will therefore impact on the extent to which Mongolia can co-shape power shifts in Eurasia. Backlash effects to China’s mega-project at a societal level such as popular concerns about economic domination or disrespect for cultural and religious specificities are an indication that Mongolia’s socio-political fabric becomes a factor determining the evolution of the China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor envisaged under the BRI umbrella. Finally, memberships in international organizations also need to be factored into this equation. Mongolia is not a member of the SCO, and does not partake in that organization’s policy discussions on terrorism and cross-regional politics, even though India’s admission to that organization has sparked a renewed debate about the benefits and disadvantages of full membership. Mongolia is freer to conduct external economic and foreign policies, and it is also not a member of the Russian-dominated Eurasian Economic Union. This freedom can also be interpreted as vulnerability: Mongolia’s small labour market puts the country at a disadvantage in the face of Chinese financial prowess. Both Mongolian officials and independent observers note the potential benefits that the country’s integration into regional economic corridors can entail, but also remain cautious about possible economic and political risks. There is an expectation, for instance, that market access should be reciprocal, and that the BRI should not simply become a shorthand for Chinese inroads into Mongolia’s political economy. The delicate issue of granting foreign access to Mongolia’s mining sector during the 1990s and 2000s is an illustration of the widespread level of wariness when it comes to opening up to Mongolia’s southern neighbour. How China reacts to such expectations will also shape the future direction of the BRI: If China is seen as a country that exports abroad but closes off its domestic market to others, this has the potential to create a backlash that is contrary to the logic of ‘connectivity’. This is not only an important lesson about expectation management, but also about generating the tangible benefits that an economic corridor promises on paper. At different levels within Mongolia, there remains a principled scepticism about China’s promotion of the BRI. Despite the official embrace of the Sino-MongolianRussian economic corridor, Mongolian wariness stems from China’s asymmetrically powerful investment power and the perceived and actual occasional (and to some observers structural) ethnic-cultural Chinese chauvinism towards Mongolia. It remains to be seen whether closer Sino-Mongolian relations will come with an implicit price tag that will see Mongolia move closer to Chinese security interests. China’s assertive reaction to Mongolia’s invitation of the Dalai Lama in 2016 was an

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early indication of a correlation between China’s growing economic activism and the expectation that recipients of Chinese investments ought to share China’s view on ‘sensitive’ political issues. As elsewhere in Eurasia, the long-term progress of the BRI does not only hinge on Russian reactions and the extent to which Chinese policymakers can avoid to build ‘white elephants’ abroad, but also on the reception of the ‘lands in between’. To further study how and where such factors differ across Eurasia, the next chapter moves from Northeast to one of its most central parts – Uzbekistan.

6

Eurasia’s ‘Southern Corridor’: Uzbekistan between Russia, China and West Asia Introduction The lands of today’s Uzbekistan were the hub of the ancient Silk Roads. Caravan towns sprang up from the desert, religious facilities flourished and offered physical and spiritual recovery to exhausted travellers. Before the advent of Islam in Central Asia, Buddhism spread from India to China, Zoroastrian mixed with Buddhist art along the Silk Road, and Iranian Buddhists mingled with Nestorian Christians from the Near East.1 With the rise of Islam in the region, Islamic institutions and architecture began to replace the hitherto dominant Buddhist and Christian influences. The cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan became symbols of the Islamic imprint on the Silk Road. In Bukhara, the teachings of Ibn Sina in the early eleventh century, known as Avicenna in Latin and widely seen as the father of modern medicine, became an illustration for a cross-cultural knowledge generation that surpassed anything seen in western Europe during its Middle Ages.2 When the Silk Roads began to lose their importance, Uzbekistan’s geographical location in the heart of the Eurasian continent imposed a relative isolation on the country and its people. Independent Uzbek khanates were further weakened by wars with Persia and Northern Nomads. Briefly subjected to the Persian empire in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Khanates of Bokhara, Khiva and Kokand came into contact with the Russian empire as the latter was pushing southwards in the nineteenth century.3 The Uzbek khanates were eventually incorporated as protectorates into the Russian empire by 1876.4 The gradual territorial expansion of the Russian Tsarist empire and the incorporation of diverse religious, ethnic and cultural communities turned Russia itself into a profoundly multi-ethnic state.5 The conquered territories were opened to Russian commerce and administered by Russian governors, but retained some self-administration at the local level.6 With the advent of the Bolsheviks, Uzbekistan oscillated between limited autonomy and a Russification of Uzbekistan’s politico-administrative culture that began with the imposition of Soviet rule after 1920.7 After independence in 1991, Uzbekistan had to develop new neighbourhood relations with the other newly independent republics in Central Asia, set relations with Russia on a new footing and establish relations with other actors across the globe. It did so only gradually with an inclination to view initiatives aimed at regional integration with a dose of suspicion. Today, Uzbekistan is not a member of the EAEU, and has served as a test case of a Central Asian state that has been engaging selectively

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also with other Russian-dominated multinational institutions: Uzbekistan has an ambivalent relation with the CSTO, as it did not prolong the treaty in 1999, re-joined the organization in 2006 and left again in 2012. Economically, Uzbekistan perpetuated a system of institutionalized rent-seeking under President Karimov.8 The economy was only partially opened to foreign investors, the outflow of capital was tightly controlled by the state and an import-substitution policy was adopted for manufactured goods that encouraged domestic production. Strategic sectors like energy, transportation or agriculture remained under state planning and control. Following Karimov’s death in November 2016 and the coming to power of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who had already served as prime minister for thirteen years, the Uzbek economy has been experiencing an unprecedented opening-up and liberalization.9 An exchange rate reform liberalized the currency, the Uzbek Sum, in 2017, which for many years had been kept artificially low. This was an important milestone in the reform process initiated under Mirziyoyev. Trade and regulatory barriers were lifted and a tax reform introduced. Overcoming the legacy of a neo-patrimonial authoritarian regime is an arduous task. Yet, the year 2017 marked the beginning of a transition from a closed, state-centred economic model and illegal corporate raids to an open market economy. An insider to the system, Mirziyoyev knew which issues needed to be urgently addressed, and how to go about doing that. Once elected the president, he began to institute reforms at a pace that surprised even long-time Uzbekistan watchers. Under his watch, Uzbekistan made it into the world’s top twenty business climate improvers. In the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) ‘Doing Business’ report for 2016, Uzbekistan climbed from the 105th place to the 42nd in the ‘credit system’ ranking category.10 In 2019, Uzbekistan was named country of the year by The Economist.11 Uzbekistan’s opening up also started to kick off at a time when China’s interest in Central Asia grew in the wake of its BRI. China’s BRI discourse in the early stages of the initiative made Uzbekistan a natural choice as a partner country, as the narrative then focused on rejuvenating cross-regional connections along the routes of the ancient Silk Roads. In a sense, turning to Uzbekistan meant re-activating the latter. Uzbekistan is a key transit state for China’s more southern corridors of the Silk Road Economic Belt stretching all the way to the Persian Gulf via the China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor. The SREB therefore not only increases China’s presence in Uzbekistan, but also has the potential to elevate Uzbekistan’s role as an inter-regional hub between China, Central Asia and West Asia. Activating the potential of Uzbekistan’s geographic location, however, depends not only on the nature of Uzbek-Chinese relations, but also on the future trajectory of Uzbekistan’s relations with its Central Asian neighbours in the new, post-Karimov era. Against this background, this chapter analyses how China’s growing profile in the region is received in a Central Asian state that, like Kazakhstan and Mongolia as examined in the two preceding chapters, has a historically close but ambivalent relationship with Russia, is not a member of the EAEU (unlike Kazakhstan, but like Mongolia), and has been undergoing a rapid domestic reform programme since the death of long-time President Islam Karimov in 2016 and the coming to power of a new president. How this puts the country in a special position at the crossroads of new

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transnational corridors will be the subject of the pages that follow. The first part of the chapter traces the evolution of the Uzbek perspective on questions of transnational policy coordination, before the second section outlines how the BRI and the domestic changes within Uzbekistan intersect. The chapter then turns to an analysis of how the geographic location of Uzbekistan as a hub between Central and West Asia impacts on the views of outside actors like Russia and China on these dynamics.

Uzbekistan between pendulum diplomacy and regional integration initiatives Uzbekistan twice joined and left the CSTO. This organization was initially founded as the Tashkent Collective Security Agreement at the initiative of President Islam Karimov at the CIS summit in Tashkent on 15 May 1992. It was Karimov who brought Russia into a Central Asian defence organization because, so he thought, the continued presence of Russian troops in Central Asia would serve as a powerful protection against Islamist fundamentalism.12 In 1999, however, Uzbekistan’s decision to withdraw from the agreement was triggered by anger over Russia’s response to the Tashkent bombings on 16 February. The Kremlin had considered the explosions of five bombs in the Uzbek capital on that day a domestic matter and therefore outside the purview of the Tashkent Collective Security Agreement. The Uzbek government, however, blamed the attack on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and expected Russian solidarity in the face of a movement it considered not only a domestic, but a transnational threat. Uzbekistan’s withdrawal from the organization in protest led to the renaming of the agreement as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which has remained its designation until today. Both during its membership and after it left the organization, Uzbekistan displayed a principled reservation about Russian influence in Central Asia. One of the drivers of Uzbek foreign policy post-independence was to position Uzbekistan as an independent power pole in the region, independent of the attempted tutelage of external powers – a ‘sub-regional hegemon’, as Ruth Deyermond has called it.13 Allergic to the idea of joint military forces under Russian control, Uzbekistan did not support the creation of the Rapid Reaction Forces as a collective defence mechanism within the purview of the CSTO (and to which other members like Kazakhstan had responded positively). The RRF, it was felt, could have been used as a pretext to interfere in the domestic affairs of states in the region.14 The insistence on the notion of national independence and the rejection of foreign bases on Uzbek territory as guiding foreign policy principles were relaxed when Tashkent offered the Karshi military base near Khanabad to the Americans north of the Afghan border in a broader foreign policy alignment with the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Joint military exercises between NATO and Uzbekistan had already been held before, in mid-2001. The signing of the Declaration on the Strategic Partnership and Cooperation Framework with the United States in 2002 further illustrated this period of security alignment between Uzbekistan and the United States, which also saw Uzbekistan participating actively in the United States’ notorious ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme that included extrajudicial rendition and torture of ‘enemy

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suspects’. The international outrage over the Andijan massacre in May 2005, when troops killed hundreds of anti-government protesters at daylight, then put an end to this brief tactical cooperation, and Uzbekistan quit the generally pro-Western GUUAM grouping the same year (which Uzbekistan had joined in 1999).15 However, Uzbekistan had already begun to distance itself from Western partners some two years before, when critiques of Uzbekistan’s poor economic performance and abysmal human rights record did not abate. As the gap between Uzbekistan and its Western partners widened, Tashkent sought closer alignment with other regional partners like China and Russia. At the 2003 SCO summit, Uzbekistan’s observer status was raised to full membership, and China expressed its support for Uzbekistan’s fight against the ‘three evils’ – separatism, terrorism and extremism.16 In 2004, in addition, Russia and Uzbekistan signed a Treaty on Russian-Uzbek Strategic Partnership. A treaty on Uzbek-Russian alliance relationship followed in November 2005.17 Uzbekistan also re-joined the CSTO in 2006 (but left again in 2012). Uzbekistan’s obstructionism within the CSTO meant that the country’s departure from the organization in 1999 and again in 2012 removed a sceptical veto player, but also presented the organization with the challenge of being ‘hollowed out in Central Asia’.18 ‘Uzbekistan lost one important, albeit weak, multilateral platform for international engagement; the CSTO lost one important, albeit stubborn, member’, Farkhod Tolipov neatly summarized in 2013.19 Uzbekistan even allowed NATO to redeploy its Central Asian Liaison office from Astana to Tashkent in March 2013.20 Yet, while Uzbekistan suspended its participation in the CSTO in June 2012, the Russian and Uzbek presidents had signed a Declaration on the Further Consolidation of Strategic Partnership and a memorandum of understanding on Measures of Uzbekistan’s accession to the CIS just two weeks before.21 Sceptical of intra-regional institutionalized cooperation, Uzbekistan preferred to channel policies that could tie the government in a treaty-based organization via bilateral contacts.22 The 2012 Foreign Policy Concept of Uzbekistan put this into writing by proclaiming the country’s right to withdraw from any international organization in case that organization were to turn into a more formal politico-military bloc.23 It becomes clear already from this brief overview why Uzbek foreign policy has been compared to a pendulum, which in the timeframe of two to three years was said to move back and forth between the West on the one hand and Russia and other CIS states, but also China, on the other.24 Other scholars have referred to the notion of multi-vectoralism to describe Uzbekistan’s strife to diversify its foreign policy options.25 Uzbek foreign policy during that time bespoke a deep suspicion of states seen to be pursuing a hegemonic agenda in Central Asia. Conceptually, this was encapsulated in the notion of ‘Mustaqillik’ or the ‘self-reliant idea’ (mustaqillik g’oyasi) as an organizing principle for the country’s foreign policy outlook.26 Bernardo Fazendeiro argues that under the reign of Karimov, this self-reliance was rather defensive, ‘marked by five key trends: the relentless pursuit of equality; a focus on bilateral relations; an energetic defence of Uzbekistan’s national image; a drive for self-sufficiency; and a reluctance to embrace expansionist ideological agendas’.27 In 2012, reminiscent of a similar formulation in China’s public diplomacy, Uzbekistan’s Foreign Policy Concept listed its

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four ‘no’s’: no to deployment of foreign bases in Uzbekistan, no to membership in any military block, no to participation in international peace-keeping operations, and no to the mediation of any external power in the resolution of regional conflicts in Central Asia.28 Naturally, this hermit mentality also had a bearing on the country’s views on regional economic integration initiatives. Attempts to institutionalize regional cooperation were made when the formation of a Central Asian Union was proposed in 1994 between Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The proposal for a Central Asian Economic Community (CAEC) followed, renamed to the Central Asian Cooperative Organization (CACO) in 2002, which merged into the Eurasian Economic Community in 2005. Despite these attempts, Central Asian states continued to pursue their own trade and tariff policies.29 Uzbekistan was sceptical when the idea of a Eurasian Economic Community was first raised by Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev in the 1990s,30 but joined the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), a precursor of what would later morph into the EAEU, in 2006. Neighbourhood relations, as a consequence of these policies, were tense. After independence, Central Asian states ‘engaged in the game of bypass your neighbors’, as Ivan Safranchuk writes.31 Especially relations with neighbouring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan deteriorated. Uzbekistan’s trade tariffs used to be the highest in the region, with potential arbitrage gains for Uzbek traders and authorities from different regulatory and customs regimes. Corruption and local graft at the border crossings between Uzbekistan and its neighbours were blossoming.32 Relations between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were tense, as were relations between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, though for reasons that had more to do with what Jonson and Allison have characterized as a hidden rivalry for regional hegemony between the region’s economic locomotive (Kazakhstan) and the region’s most populous country (Uzbekistan).33 Most notoriously, the irrigation needs of the three states located downstream of the Central Asian rivers (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan) clashed with the energy needs of the two states located upstream (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan). Concerns on the Uzbek side were raised that Tajikistan could negatively impact agriculture in Uzbekistan by controlling cross-border irrigation.34 When Tajikistan proposed to build a hydroelectric dam on the Rogun river, Uzbekistan reacted by closing its border with Tajikistan. The ‘ghost of intra-Eurasian isolationism’ had cast long shadows.35 An unexpected impetus for change then came from within Uzbekistan in 2016.

Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda and the BRI After the passing away of long-time President Karimov in September 2016, a new political culture began to be introduced under the new President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. In February 2017, Mirziyoyev signed a decree (Ukaz) espousing a ‘New Strategy for Development’ for the years 2017–21 that includes political reforms and an economic opening-up.36 In Uzbekistan, presidential decrees are legally binding and serve as guidelines for the further development of implementation of policy by parliament and the respective ministries. This strategy singled out privatization, addressing red

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tape in the economy, and incentives for greater competition and modernization of Uzbek industries as key policy challenges to address. By way of presidential decree, the president also introduced measures aimed at strengthening the independence of the judiciary, reforming public administration and introducing civil liberties. The new reform process did not leave foreign policy unaffected either. Mirziyoyev declared already in September 2016 that improvement of neighbourhood relations was a key foreign policy priority for Uzbekistan.37 The ‘New Strategy for Development’ of February 2017 dedicated a section (5.2) to foreign policy issues, which foresees the ‘creation of a security, stability and good neighbourliness belt around Uzbekistan’. The president himself, as well as key ministers of his cabinet, embarked on a tour to visit all of Uzbekistan’s Central Asian neighbours. This charm initiative was meant to reopen channels of communication and put neighbourhood grievances behind. This was a marked departure from the past practice when regional leaders only met in the presence of foreign powers.38 When Mirziyoyev assumed the presidency, the level of Sino-Uzbek cooperation also leapfrogged. The BRI appeared to be fortunate timing at a time when Uzbekistan opened up to regional markets in the wake of its reform agenda. On his visit to China in May 2017, Mirziyoyev underlined the important role that the BRI plays in the further development of economic cooperation. In a striking similarity to the docking frenzy between the BRI and complementary domestic programmes seen in Kazakhstan and Mongolia (the ‘Nurly Zhol’ and ‘Steppe Road’, respectively), Uzbekistan began to work on a ‘docking’ of its ‘New Strategy for Development’ for the years 2017–21 and China’s Silk Road Economic Belt, with similar hopes to unleash the potential for the domestic labour market.39 In January 2020, China even opened an office for economic cooperation in Tashkent, which is affiliated with the Uzbek ministry for investments and external trade.40 However, China’s economic involvement in Uzbekistan predates the presidency of Mirziyoyev. A first MoU on Uzbekistan’s cooperation with the SREB was already signed by President Karimov in 2015, one year before his death.41 But as elsewhere across Central Asia, China’s growing presence also predates the announcement of the BRI. A Declaration on Strategic Partnership with China, concentrating on economic cooperation, was signed in 2012.42 Already prior to the BRI, China’s primary interest in Central Asia lay in the energy sector. In December 2009, the first section of the Central Asia-China gas pipeline from Turkmenistan was opened via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which directly transports gas to western China. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have even linked their national gas systems to this pipeline.43 In 2013, construction started on a third spur (Line D) from Uzbekistan to China. Under the heading of a ‘Green Central Asia’, in addition, Chinese investments now also flow into renewable energies. In Bukhara, for example, the Chinese firm Lioaning announced its plans to invest in a wind power project worth $1.8 billion.44 The main interest of the Chinese government in Uzbekistan continues to be in the energy sector, and in Uzbekistan’s consumer market as an export destination for Chinese manufactured goods. Besides China’s earlier investments in natural gas reserves and gas transportation infrastructure, Chinese companies have only in recent years begun to invest in the transport and other industrial sectors. According to the Uzbek ministry of

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investment and foreign trade, a total of investment projects worth over $30 billion were being implemented in the spring of 2020.45 There is talk of industrial parks, car manufacturing, cement plans, hydropower projects and of upgrades to Uzbekistan’s telecommunications technology. In 2019, China Development Bank for the first time gave out a loan of 500 million yuan to Uzbekistan in China’s currency instead of in US dollars.46 If this does not remain an isolated event and becomes more common practice, it will reflect both China’s objective to de-dollarize regional payments and Uzbekistan’s growing confidence in Chinese banks as lenders. In terms of infrastructure development, China has pledged investments in railways, roads and tunnel development. While details of projects officially subsumed under the BRI are scarce, the public fanfare aims to convey the message that the BRI is expected to boost China-Uzbekistan relationship.47 President Xi Jinping was the first foreign head of state to address the Oliy Majlis, Uzbekistan’s parliament, on 22 June 2016. ‘A new era of strategic Chinese-Uzbekistan partnership has begun,’ Xi Jinping announced as he addressed the assembled deputies, ‘Both nations should stand side-by-side to unlock new opportunities for cooperation.’ In 2015, China had already become Uzbekistan’s largest trading partner, surpassing Russia, with a total trade volume of $3 billion.48 The ‘flagship project’, which again highlights both the popular attraction with the ‘iron’ Silk Road and the focus on infrastructure development in Central Asia as the BRI’s focus during its early phase, is a train connection from China to Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan, for potential further extension to Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey. A trilateral working group on the construction of this railway project was set up in 2017.49 Plans for such a connection, however, predate the BRI. China had been advocating the construction of this trinational railway since 1997. The Chinese-proposed railway would meet the gauge standard of Chinese (and most European) rail gauges, but not the wider Russian one. With the aim of preventing an alternative route to the Trans-Siberian railway, Russia persuaded Kyrgyzstan to reject the Chinese proposal, which it eventually did in 2013.50 The China Railway Tunnel Group was tasked with the construction of the 124 km Angren-Pap line, which was completed in 2016. The line includes the almost 20-km Kamchiq railway tunnel going through the Qurama mountains, a mountain range shared by Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. This makes it the longest railway tunnel in Central Asia and the first of its kind in Uzbekistan. Infrastructure development could potentially be a job and wealth creator for the Uzbek economy. Eldor Aripov, director of the institute of Strategic and Regional Studies under the auspices of Uzbekistan’s president, writes that Uzbekistan could make profits from transit through its territory, and that transport links with Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Russia would have positive effects on regional economic development.51 With a common border with all other Central Asian republics, as well as Afghanistan, Uzbekistan wants to make use of its central geographic location. As a double-landlocked country, Tashkent has started to see the liberalization of its external economic relations and the link to cross-regional corridors stretching up to the Gulf countries and Iran as an asset.52 However, the image of Central Asia as a flourishing transit zone linking western China to the Middle East is complicated by the fact that Uzbekistan’s trade with the outside world is heavily dependent on transit through neighbouring states, in particular Kazakhstan. It also depends on the easing

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of Uzbekistan’s previously conflictual relations with its neighbours – a process which has been started under President Mirziyoyev, but which cannot be enforced by outside governments. Uzbek officials recognize that good neighbourhood relations are also beneficial for China’s trade interests, but emphasize that the new regional engagement started under Mirziyoyev was not a process initiated in order to create good conditions for the BRI. ‘We lived in the same state for 70 years. We need to learn to live with each other now’, an Uzbek diplomat noted in an interview as he outlined the motivations for his government’s new neighbourhood diplomacy.53 The fact that Uzbekistan finally demarcated its border with Tajikistan in January 2020 after years of tense border diplomacy should be seen as encouraging news in this context.54 Tashkent’s policy of opening up to its neighbours could also have a positive impact on economic development especially in southern Kyrgyzstan. In the long term, infrastructure investments need to be weighed against the costs of maintenance as well as the required political capital involved in seeking to shape a transnational economic space. The sequencing between building transport links and facilitating border stability with places like Afghanistan is not made explicit in the more optimistic accounts of the benefits that the BRI will bring to the region. More importantly, however, as with other partners elsewhere in Central Asia, the perennial question of local ownership will determine the progress of the linkage between the BRI and Uzbekistan’s New Strategy for Development. The further development of China’s Silk Road Economic Belt depends not only on governmental declarations, but also on Central Asian inter-state relations as well as societal perceptions, and China’s presence in the region has not been without criticism. A proposed China-KyrgyzstanUzbekistan railroad project met resistance among Kyrgyzstani government officials because it was seen as a potential trigger for renewed rivalries between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan (the site of deadly ethnic clashes in 2010).55 In Uzbekistan, labour laws on paper are relatively strict and regulate that Chinese companies can only send management personnel, not labourers.56 In practice, however, such laws are undermined from both Chinese and Uzbek contract partners.57 Other roadblocks complicating China’s evolving Eurasian profile relate to the limits of Chinese public diplomacy initiatives across the region. Confucius Institutes in Tashkent and Samarkand, cultural events like music and film festivals, and language training already in secondary schools aim to enhance China’s soft power in the country.58 As in neighbouring southern Kazakhstan, however, what complicates crossborder people-to-people ties are not only ethnic tensions and reserved attitudes about China’s economic embrace of Uzbekistan especially on the part of the ethnically Turkic and Muslim populace, but a lack of cultural familiarity that could serve as a basis for genuine societal dialogue.59 The reception of Chinese actors is naturally conditioned on societal links between China and its Central Asian partner countries, and this is a long-term process that central governments can try and nudge in a particular direction, but can never fully control. Finally, the BRI and Uzbekistan’s reform agenda are two separate, while potentially mutually reinforcing, processes – pending the handling of negative associations with China’s economic power projection at a popular level. It would

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therefore be misleading to read the changing geopolitical landscape around Uzbekistan as a by-product of the advent of the SREB to the region. The reasons for Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda originated from a domestic setting. As the latter is transforming itself and its neighbourhood, however, the transnational networks thus created can become a valuable asset for any actors with an interest in pushing the discursive trope of unhindered Eurasian corridors.

Uzbekistan as a hub between China and West Asia With the expansion of the Sassanid empire along the ancient Silk Roads and the establishment of Samanid rule in Transoxania, Persian became widely spoken, especially along more southward-lying routes traversing nowadays Uzbekistan.60 Today, the Middle East and Iran in particular play an important role in China’s regional connectivity initiatives, as the China-Central Asia-West Asia corridor under the Silk Road Economic Belt is supposed to stretch from western China to the Persian Gulf via Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The geographical location of Uzbekistan explains why the country becomes relevant from a Chinese perspective for the SREB in a broader regional context, as Uzbekistan constitutes a bridge to West Asia. Already in 2011, an agreement on the construction of a transport corridor from Uzbekistan to Iran and Oman was signed.61 The importance of the Middle East for China’s external economic policies is to be explained by its energy hunger and the vast resources that the region holds. The majority of China’s oil imports come from the Middle East, yet energy deliveries into China depend on overseas supply lines. The majority of Chinese oil supplies from the Middle East pass through the Strait of Malacca, a maritime strait between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, linking the Indian to the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. The Chinese government has come to regard this strait as a strategic chokepoint that makes the passage of its cargo ships both dependent on external actors’ benevolence and vulnerable to potential attacks. Enabling overland transportation thus becomes a motivation to encourage ‘corridor diplomacy’ between Central and West Asia. To deepen relations with Middle Eastern states, China has signed memorandums of understanding with Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran to ‘jointly build the Belt and Road’, and has begun free trade area negotiations with the GCC and Iran, respectively. Five out of the six GCC states (with the exception of Bahrain) are also founding members of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Based on these memorandums, geo-economic and geostrategic effects of the SREB on the Persian Gulf are mostly logistical in nature, even if the stated ambition extends beyond infrastructure: At a ministerial meeting of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in June 2014, President Xi proposed the ‘1+2+3’ formula that would henceforth capture the preferred pattern of cooperation between China and Arab states, whereby energy cooperation constitutes the core (1), infrastructure construction, trade and investment facilitation are the two wings (2), and the three high-tech fields of nuclear energy, aerospace and new energy are labelled ‘the three breakthroughs’ in China’s official Arab policy paper.62 Chinese construction firms are busy building projects such

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as new railways, aided by the Chinese Development Bank.63 Such an infrastructure development is not only in the corporate interests of the Chinese construction firms involved, but also furthers the Chinese government’s long-term plan to deepen political ties via economic cooperation. In November 2015, the China Railway Corporation proposed the construction of a high-speed line from Urumqi to Iran via Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. For this line, the standard gauge of 1435 mm would be used throughout, making gauge changes similar to the one at the Chinese-Kazakhstani border unnecessary. An additional container train line from Yiwu (in East China) to Iran via Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan was launched in February 2016.64 This reduced the usual twenty-five-day journey from China to Iran by sea to a total of fourteen days on the land route. Iran also wants to facilitate the transfer of goods between the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. Not every infrastructure project in the region, however, is a ‘BRI’ one, as Uzbekistan plans railway connections from Iran to Uzbekistan at a bilateral level – via Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan.65 Likewise, Russia and Iran have been eyeing ambitious infrastructure projects separate from the BRI, such as a transport link from St. Petersburg through Kazakhstan to Bandar Abbas in Iran. An impediment for China’s attempts to ‘connect’ Central Asia with purported parts of the Silk Road Economic Belt further west along its southern route is the fact that China has previously paid little attention to the complexities of Middle Eastern politics and lacks the expertise that other governments, like Russia, have built up during long decades of involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. Observing a discrepancy between China’s wish to ‘keep things simple’ in its public discourse on the Middle East and the region’s complexity, Kerry Brown writes that ‘the world’s second biggest economy has little geopolitical imagination when it comes to trying to solve the problems of a region to which it has increasing material links’.66 Its involvement in the Middle East and attempts to ‘connect’ the Persian Gulf and Central Asia therefore force China, already by nature of its economic weight, to mature into some sort of global power status that forces it to take positions on security issues and politics of seemingly faraway places. This would also be commensurate with the global underpinning of the BRI as from 2015. In such ponderations about Eurasian ‘corridor diplomacy’, Uzbekistan becomes central, as it sits geographically in the centre of the region, and as Uzbek minorities are present in all other Central Asian countries.67 Leaving aside Uzbek motivations as laid out above, the ‘utility’ of Uzbekistan, as seen by China in light of the SREB, therefore lies in connecting regions. In this sense, the country carries more weight seen from a Chinese perspective than other Central Asian states like Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, even though any overland connections from China via Uzbekistan have to pass through these two Central Asian countries first. Yet, if the narrative of connecting Asia and Europe is taken as a central objective of the BRI, then the logistically more useful connections lie further north, through Kazakhstan and Russia, simply because the transit through one common customs area would be faster than through various Central and West Asian tariff zones. The emphasis on several economic corridors branching out from the Chinese mainland, including one through the more southern routes of Central Asia, therefore appears to reconfirm that the intention to bind

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China’s Eurasian neighbourhood closer to the Chinese political economy for domestic industrial reasons is more important than the idea of connecting to far-away European markets (at least for manufactured goods). In this context, the Russian government’s interest in Uzbekistan also increases again.

Russia’s re-engagement with Uzbekistan Following post-Soviet independence, Uzbekistan ushered in a process of deRussification which assigned greater importance to the Uzbek language. Russian and Cyrillic street signs were removed, and the country sought ways of becoming less dependent on Moscow.68 A draft law in 2020 by the Uzbek justice ministry that foresees fines for Uzbek officials not using the state language Uzbek in their jobs was indirectly criticized by the Russian foreign ministry with the comment that ‘the preservation of the Russian language in formal matters fully corresponds to the spirit of the history and current quality of our relations’.69 Infrastructural links and economic interdependence proved to be more sticky obstacles in Uzbekistan’s quest to steer the country away from Soviet legacies. Under Karimov, Russia was therefore described as a ‘priority partner’ in the economic sphere. This, however, mainly meant that Uzbekistan was the main source of cotton for Russian textile factories.70 With new economic opportunities after the Karimov era and in the context of a growing Chinese presence in the country, Russia has begun to express a renewed interest in forging ties with Uzbekistan. In 2018, Russia and Uzbekistan signed an agreement for the construction of Uzbekistan’s first nuclear power plant with a stated capacity to cover 20 per cent of the country’s energy needs, and to be financed largely by a soft loan from Russia. The launch of this project was the culmination of President Putin’s state visit to Tashkent, which also saw the signing of other agreements in the energy sector, including production-sharing agreements for the Dzhel gas field between Gazprom and Uzbek state firms.71 In the same year, Russia and Uzbekistan began to cooperate in the field of hydropower, as the Russian company RusHydro expressed an interest in building new hydropower plants on the Pskem river in Uzbekistan.72 A number of memorandums of understanding and cooperation agreements in a range of sectors were signed during Mirziyoyev’s visit to Russia in 2017, Putin’s visit to Uzbekistan in October 2018 and Prime Minister Medvedev’s visit to Uzbekistan in May 2019. This high-level travelling activity between both sides served to underline solid relations between ‘strategic partners’, as was expressed during a meeting of the RussiaUzbekistan Joint Commission at the level of heads of government on Medvedev’s visit to Uzbekistan in 2019.73 Putin’s visit to Uzbekistan was the largest ever to the country: Accompanied by an enormous business delegation, Putin oversaw the signing of deals reportedly worth $27 billion.74 This amount outstripped the $23 billion negotiated between China and Uzbekistan one year before. Besides Russian companies investing in Uzbekistan, labour migration remains an area where Russia continues to be the top destination for Uzbeks going abroad and sending remittances back home.75 Russia continues to enjoy social leverage within Uzbek society and Russian remains widely spoken. As with other Central Asian

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countries that emerged from the Soviet Union, Russia’s cultural influence remains strong. Similar technical standards, language familiarity and a common history are still cited as reasons for a proximity between Uzbekistan and Russia that facilitates dialogue.76 Militarily, Uzbekistan is re-engaging with Russia after years of treading carefully, given Karimov’s strong views on Uzbek independence and his corresponding reluctance to align the country with any kind of defence bloc or any other single country. Today, joint exercises between Russian and Uzbek soldiers have been taken up again. Uzbekistan is also again making use of Russian training assistance.77 Uzbekistan signed a joint military cooperation plan with Russia in 2017.78 At the same time, the Uzbek government purchased Chinese-produced HQ-9 air defence systems to replace Russian S-200 surface-to-air missiles in 2015.79 In its arms procurement, Uzbekistan does not solely lean on Russia, even though Putin’s visit to Uzbekistan in 2018 led to additional arms purchases from Russia. But Uzbekistan continues to refuse to deploy Uzbek troops beyond its national territory, and is guarded when it comes to formalizing defence relations with either Russia or China.80 Having settled its border disputes with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan has made progress on formulating a joint anti-terror policy with Dushanbe, Bishkek and Nur-Sultan.81 Perhaps the most noteworthy development regarding possible closer institutional ties with Russia is the debate that has begun in Uzbekistan about a potential EAEU membership in the future. If neighbouring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan serve as a comparison, this would increase Russian leverage. At the same time, common institutional membership in a Russian-dominated organization would also be a way of hedging against China’s growing presence. As Uzbekistan is not yet a member of the WTO, concerns have been raised over possible legal complications if the country were to join the EAEU first. A working group has been set up under the presidential administration to study the effects of WTO access.82 Mirziyoyev’s foreign policy advisor Sodiq Safoyev rejects the idea that EAEU membership would curtail Uzbekistan’s foreign economic policy options, and points out that current EAEU members have navigated possible complications between EAEU trading rules and WTO membership as well.83 Other officials at a working level appear more circumspect with a view to Russia’s ‘quasi-hegemonic role’ within the EAEU and have taken note of Kazakhstani and Belarusian complaints to that effect.84 Farkhod Tolipov likewise argues that an Uzbek EAEU membership would increase Russia’s leverage over Uzbek policies. If Uzbekistan were to become an EAEU member, he holds, this would raise ‘questions related to its real independence, the geopolitics of great powers, and non-economic driving forces of genuine integration such as democratic values and common security interests’. This is, he argues, precisely because the EAEU is not just an economic union.85 Among the possible advantages are the free movement of labour, goods, capital and services that access to the economic union would entail. While free movement of labour might be first and foremost an advantage for the Russian market which is in need of cheap labourers, membership in the EAEU could also be beneficial for social security reasons of the many Uzbek migrant workers in Russia. Free movement of goods has already been a controversial issue for EAEU members Armenia and Belarus, which had to raise tariffs upon accession, making the

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import of goods from outside the bloc more expensive. Finally, the movement of capital and services has been improving within Uzbekistan largely thanks to Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda. For Uzbek markets, therefore, little might change in relevant sectors if the country were to join the EAEU. The possible advantages are thus carefully considered in light of the possible negative trade-offs, namely loss of control over external trade policy.86 Umid Abidhadjaev from the Centre for Economic Research and Reform under the presidential administration argues that gaining observer status would give Uzbekistan the chance to study the dynamics within the EAEU from within before making a decision on a possible full membership.87 On 6 March 2020, that decision was officially taken, when Uzbekistan’s cabinet of ministers approved the decision to apply for observer status.88 Free trade areas at Uzbekistan’s borders could also be a way of easing cumbersome customs regimes in Central Asia short of membership in a common customs area. In December 2014, Presidents Putin and Karimov had already alluded to the possibility of a future agreement on the creation of a free trade zone between Uzbekistan and the EAEU.89 Such a prospect would also align with Uzbekistan’s Concept of Social and Economic Development until 2030.90 Uzbek officials, however, add for consideration that some of the country’s neighbours (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) are members of the EAEU, where different tariff regimes complicate the establishment of such free trade areas.91 Full EAEU membership might eventually even impact negatively on Uzbekistan’s trading relations with other partners. Despite Mirziyoyev’s attempts to balance relations with China and Russia, the primary audience to hear the signals from Uzbekistan’s reform agenda is supposed to be the West and ‘advanced economies like India, Japan, and South Korea’, Frederick Starr and Svante Cornell argue.92 Here, Russia’s policy outlook of defensive regionalism can add irritants. Uzbekistan’s policy of balancing regional and extra-regional partners could be intentionally misread in Moscow, and Foreign Minister Lavrov already hinted at that possibility by alluding to the conflation of a new regionalism in Central Asia as efforts to ‘exclude Russia’ from Central Asia’.93 Such a language is reminiscent of Russian perceptions of Ukraine’s negotiations over an Association Agreement with the European Union, the consequences of which engulfed Russia and the West in a violent crisis in 2014. Deliberately misconstruing Mirziyoyev’s ambitious reform agenda and effort to re-design regional relations, however, would more likely be disadvantageous for Russia – under the assumption that Moscow is keen to shed its image as a disruptive actor with a declining attraction for its Central Asian partners. Elsewhere in Eurasia, the presence of Russian and Chinese contract partners has already led to a subtle competition between the Russian and Chinese government for influence.94 Russia’s reaction to Chinese outreach in ‘West Asia’ was to try and dilute the presence of Chinese actors by institutional means: At the December 2016 summit of the EAEU, it was decided that free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations with Iran should be started. If implemented, an FTA between Iran and the EAEU (as has already been implemented with Vietnam and Israel) could serve to tie the Iranian and Russian economies further together. In other regional organizations, Russia has also welcomed the inclusion of Iran into broader inter-regional arrangements: Russia has expressed

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support for Iran’s membership application to the SCO. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov noted following a meeting of the SCO foreign ministers in Astana on 21 April 2017 that Iran fully meets the SCO membership criteria after UN-level sanctions had been lifted after 2016.95 Besides its potential benefits for Russian-Iranian relations, welcoming Iran into the SCO is also a Russian policy to counter China’s growing influence in the region, comparable to Russia’s motivation for the admission of India. Iranian policymakers, for their part, have acknowledged the potential advantages that come with Iran’s inclusion in the Silk Road Economic Belt. However, they seem to prefer a balanced integration into different markets, including European ones, rather than an exclusive alignment with Chinese or Russian geo-economic interests, which may even have negative net results for Iran.96 Policymakers in Tashkent are following such debates with interest, as different degrees of interaction with the EAEU in different places across Eurasia can provide useful indicators for Uzbekistan’s own decision on which policy course to opt for.

Conclusion China’s economic outward projection in the wake of the SREB meets favourable politico-economic conditions in Uzbekistan, as the unprecedented domestic reform programme started under President Mirziyoyev positively affects not only the economic framework conditions for foreign direct investment flowing into Uzbekistan, but also Central Asian inter-state relations. China’s SREB predates this development, but it has accelerated ideas to link Uzbekistan’s own development strategies with Chinese connectivity plans. If the discourse surrounding the BRI translates into changed political realities, one might be led to believe that the advent of Eurasian integration schemes and of China’s ‘new Silk Roads’ can help to alleviate the historically conflictual relations between Uzbekistan and its neighbours. Past grievances would then take a backseat as a transnational belt of economic activity ties people across the region closer together. The ‘new development strategy’ for Uzbekistan also aims to improve relations with neighbours after years of self-imposed isolation. The current Uzbek leadership, however, ushered in its reform programme on the basis of intrinsic motivations to overcome a governance system in need of an overhaul after the death of long-time President Islam Karimov. Uzbek officials do not want this to be misconstrued as a mere reaction to Chinese talk of cross-border trading links. On a parallel track, China’s increased engagement with the Central Asian countries has triggered Russian renewed interest in Uzbekistan. Beyond the beaten path of imperial legacies, Moscow sees a potential for a re-definition of its relations with the ‘post-Soviet space’. Here, however, the often-repeated division of labour between China and Russia in Central Asia should be questioned. Although Russia does enjoy primacy in matters of security governance in the region, China does not have a prerogative on investment and finance. Uzbekistan has no interest in re-joining the CSTO, even though joint military exercises between Russia and Uzbekistan have been taken up again of late.

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While Chinese investments in infrastructure, energy and other sectors continue to grow, Putin’s visit to Uzbekistan in 2018 in particular highlighted the fact that the Russian leadership has taken note, and will not renounce on economic competition with Chinese investors in sectors of the economy. As Uzbekistan continues to open up to the world, Tashkent hopes for foreign direct investment to come from Western partners more than from China or Russia. Any talk of exclusive competition and cooperation between China and Russia in Uzbekistan neglects the fact that domestic preferences might lie elsewhere. Uzbekistan is ‘emerging’ into a geo-economic landscape where neither a socialization into liberal market economies nor an association with a Chinesedominated regional trading system should be assumed as a historical necessity. Finally, Central Asia and Uzbekistan in particular are important as transit zones along the envisioned southern routes of the SREB, which are supposed to enable stronger links between the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. This, however, depends on a range of factors that the Chinese central government alone cannot control. The further development of the SREB’s southern routes depends not least on Central Asian interstate dynamics and infrastructure development with uncertain political conditions and an uncertain investment climate. Further west along the southern corridors of the Silk Road Economic Belt, there are hints of new forms of competition between China and Russia to win political trust and commercial contracts with partners in West Asia. There is potential for a growing Russian-Chinese competition at this westernmost point of the SREB, while both countries have a joint interest in de-dollarizing international finance and seeing the role of the United States in this part of Eurasia diminished. Beyond local governance and domestic preference formation, this latter aspect broadens the angle to the global governance level, to which the final chapter now turns.

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Eurasia and world order Introduction After the fall of the Soviet Union, the five newly independent Central Asian states were heavily dependent on the Russian economy, while China’s ‘rise’ was still relatively inward-looking. The twenty-first century then saw the United States become an important security actor in Central Asia, linked to the war in Afghanistan, but also to US interests in the regional energy market. The post-2011 US strategy to revive the ancient Silk Road, as announced by US Secretary Hillary Clinton during a speech in Chennai, India, in July 2011, was driven by an interest in energy supplies from hydropower-rich states such as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, and by an interest in stabilizing Afghanistan, boosting India’s regional standing, and isolating Iran.1 Supply routes should go through the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, and thereby bypass Russia, which was increasingly presented as a geopolitical threat.2 With critical security conditions in the Caucasus and Turkey, a lack of funding and political will, and steadfast Russian opposition to US plans, the US Silk Road initiative has subsequently been tacitly put on the back burner. The US new Silk Road plans silently fizzled out,3 as other actors, most notably China with its Belt and Road Initiative, began to repackage the Silk Road imaginary. Geographically and geopolitically, the United States faded into the background in the establishment of a new Eurasian pecking order. The latter has become a testing ground for shifts in power constellations as China ‘goes global’.4 The US withdrawal from Afghanistan – announced during the Obama administration and one of US President Trump’s most important campaign promises – had been repeatedly postponed also because Afghanistan has been recognized as important for Chinese new regional policies – albeit more for its potentially disruptive potential.5 A US departure would have signalled a tacit acknowledgement that the baton has been passed over to China in that part of the world. That is a policy constraint which is only likely to grow in weight as the Sino-American rivalry continues to intensify. Whether the United States, as a former shaper of order also in Eurasia, will still co-shape the construction of new regional orders in Eurasia depends on many factors and policy options, ‘running from “benign neglect” at one extreme, to “militarized” competition at the other’, as Daniel Markey holds.6 The United States has recognized as much, and has embraced the concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ as a way to float a rival concept of regional order, with increasing pressure

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on the EU and its member states to also incorporate this concept into their policy vocabulary. Especially in combination with the Trump administration’s language on a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’, the concept implicitly aims at the containment of China’s growing power and stands indicative of the growing Sino-American rivalry impacting on the entire spectrum of policy domains.7 The escalation of tariff wars between China and the United States in the summer of 2018 was a first reaction by the United States to the ‘Made in China 2025’ policy, China’s plan for industrial modernization. The US government has read China’s talk of developing economic corridors across Eurasia as part of a strategy to entangle a range of client states in a China-centred politicoeconomic arrangement, akin to a neo-tributary system. This stands in the tradition of the ‘China threat theory’ which has gained traction in some scholarly and government circles in the United States in particular. Peter Navarro, who was appointed director of the National Trade Council by US President Trump, puts it into decisive alarmist language in his 2011 book, suggestively entitled Death by China.8 There may be less bluster in other political camps, but the assessment that a standoff with China is perhaps the single most pressing foreign policy challenge for the United States in the 2020s is one that enjoys a remarkable bipartisan consensus. In an article published in Foreign Affairs in April 2020, Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, outlined his key foreign policy views and pledges. Using language intended to alert his public to the ‘special challenge’ that China represents, he writes: ‘China is playing the long game by extending its global reach, promoting its own political model, and investing in the technologies of the future.’ Elaborating on his policy priority to combat climate change, he underlines that his administration would ‘(insist) that China – the world’s largest emitter of carbon – stop subsidizing coal exports and outsourcing pollution to other countries by financing billions of dollars’ worth of dirty fossil fuel energy projects through its Belt and Road Initiative’.9 It is therefore likely that China and the United States will continue to move apart on trade, technology and foreign policy also under president Joe Biden from 2021. Powerful actors develop defensive mechanisms against attempts to diminish their reach and influence. They become ‘gatekeepers to the inner sanctums of international regimes’, as Amrita Narlikar puts it.10 Where the United States and Europe have acted as such ‘gatekeepers’ to a Western-led (called liberal) international order, Asians, Parag Khanna argues in The Future Is Asian, are now ‘presiding over the construction of a new Asian-led order encompassing the vast majority of the world’s population’.11 With China’s imprint on inter-regional politics and ambition to make a distinctive Chinese contribution to ‘globalization’ in particular, the Belt and Road Initiative triggers reactions ranging from competition to cooperation on the part of other Eurasian partners such as Russia and Central Asian governments, as the previous chapters have shown. At the same time, China’s underlying ambition to use Eurasia as a staging ground to re-define its global role as well as the evolving Sino-Russian interaction has far-reaching implications for the future interaction between Eurasian actors and Western ‘gatekeepers’ to a Western-led order that is already in the process of transitioning to something else. Developments on the Eurasian landmass have implications for conceptions of world order, and it is to this aspect that this final chapter turns its attention.

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De-Westernizing ‘globalization’ China’s connectivity initiative supposedly offers a model of economic and political development on Chinese terms as an alternative to Western development aid and policy sector reforms proposed by organizations dominated by Western states. If the BRI indeed leads to a more integrated Eurasian network of partnerships (at a financial and economic level), it will increase China’s global leverage vis-à-vis the United States.12 Eurasia thus becomes an important stepping stone for China’s increase of power globally. This is accompanied by steps to place Chinese discourse on ‘globalization’ and to gradually de-Westernize definitions of the latter term. At an ideational level, the insertion of new terms in international diplomacy (‘community of shared destiny’, ‘shared winnings’, ‘mutual benefits’, ‘Chinese wisdom‘, ‘Chinese effectiveness’, ‘Chinese solution’, etc.) indicates that analysts need to throw overboard conceptions that China’s ‘rise’ can be steered as a ‘socialization’ of China into an international community dominated by ‘the West’. With its connectivity policies across a whole range of policy domains, from physical infrastructure to economic (trade) corridors, from the digital space to the geopoliticization of global health policy, China has advanced the BRI as a stepping stone for the transformation of international politics in China’s image.13 ‘China’s grand strategy’, William A. Callahan holds, is to ‘build a Sinocentric “community of shared destiny” in Asia, which in turn will make China a normative power which sets the rules of the game for future global governance’.14 China’s expanding influence abroad begs the question whether rival governance models to Western-style liberal democracies will accompany China’s financial prowess. Its new connectivity initiatives need to be understood as a comprehensive attempt to become a co-shaper of the institutions of global governance, including their normative foundations. Increasingly, China’s discourse is rejecting the moral high ground with which Western governments have approached processes of globalization. It has also begun to reject Western values as such. The reiteration that the current world order is ‘unjust and unreasonable’ is a long-standing trope in Chinese foreign policy discourse.15 This does not mean that China is replacing a ‘liberal international order’ created and sustained by the West. ‘A partial, loose, and malleable hegemony will do’, Nadège Rolland argues in her analysis of the views of world order of Chinese policy elites. For this objective, Rolland holds, the Chinese Communist Party has identified ‘the developing world as the forefront of its struggle against the hegemonic forces that stand in the way of its own accession to the paramount power position’.16 China articulates its own, distinct contribution to ‘globalization’ and formulates a claim to be amongst the architects of global governance. Russia shares the objective to ‘de-Westernize’ global governance, but is apprehensive about the growing Chinese contribution in this process. Sino-Russian joint declarations often serve to paper over some strategic disagreements, while long-term areas of cooperation will remain intact for as long as both distrust global governance mechanisms created on Western terms.17 A joint perception of ‘humiliation’ at the hands of Western powers is what unites Russian and Chinese strategic policy planning. The Chinese ardently remember the ‘century of humiliation’, when territorial concessions granted to Western governments (and Japan) during the nineteenth century ceded Chinese sovereignty,

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Russia remembers Western self-congratulatory praise about the alleged ‘end of history’ after the Cold War which translated into a perceived disregard for Russian ideas about security governance. This is where worldviews of Russian and Chinese political elites converge, albeit with different approaches to how a joint resentment of US dominance should translate into the practice of achieving the ‘democratization’ of international relations that policy elites in both states routinely call for.18 In 2016, China and Russia also adopted a joint declaration on the promotion of international law, which highlights their affirmation of the UN Security Council – in which both wield veto powers as permanent members – as the central decision-making body for global governance which should not be circumvented.19 The extent of Sino-Russian cooperation, so the conclusion of one camp of scholars, is that Sino-Russian cooperation is a direct consequence of great power status seeking in a Western-dominated world. Gilbert Rozman writes of ‘parallel identities’ that tie Chinese and Russian interests in global affairs closer together,20 John Garver argues that Chinese stronger ties with Russia were a function of China’s views of the unbalanced international system,21 and Elisabeth Wishnick argues that a joint perception of external pressure from the West draws China and Russia closer together on a normative level.22 Already in 1997, Jiang Zemin and Boris El’tsin signed a Russian-Chinese Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order in April 1997. Thereafter, however, China and Russia were looking to improve their respective relations with the West while deepening bilateral ties with occasional irritants, as laid out in Chapter 3. Some twenty years later, calls for a ‘new international order’ have not abated, and neither has the debate about the purpose and future direction of Sino-Russian relations.

The ‘Russia factor’ in China and the ‘China factor’ in Russia’s external relations with the West The ambition of actors like Russia and China to re-define global power structures in their own image meets resistance. The US National Security Strategy that was unveiled on 18 December 2017 labels both China and Russia ‘revisionist powers’. Both now rank alongside such threats to national security as the ‘rogue powers of Iran and North Korea’ and ‘transnational threat organizations, particularly jihadist groups’.23 The charges are elaborated in the new US National Defence Strategy, issued on 19 January 2018. In it, China is described as ‘a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbours while militarizing features in the South China Sea’, and as a country ‘pursuing Indo-Pacific hegemony’. Russia, the document writes, ‘has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbours’.24 Tensions between Russia and Europe in particular persist over disagreements in their shared neighbourhood and over what has been termed ‘frozen conflicts’ in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.25 Russia’s economic vulnerabilities were exacerbated in 2015 by low oil prices as well as by US and EU sanctions imposed on the country in the

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wake of the Ukraine crisis and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The gap between Russia’s foreign policy ambitions and its economic performance could not be starker. Andrew Monaghan describes a Russia that is simultaneously ‘resurgent and declining’.26 Russia has proven to display a unique ability to project a foreign policy assertiveness not because of its economic performance (as in China’s case), but in spite of its economic deficiencies. Today, Russia sees itself as the vanguard for a new post-Western Order. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaks of the ‘post-West’ to denote a world in which the West will no longer be dominant.27 Opposing narratives are at work that obstruct a meaningful dialogue between Russia and the West: Many Western governments have become convinced of a geopolitical reading that focuses on a Russian government re-evaluating its fading regional hegemony, bent on dominating its neighbours and disregarding the principles of non-intervention in its own neighbourhood. The Russian governmental discourse stresses the reactionary nature of its foreign policy in response to NATO expansion plans, and a perceived Western ‘encirclement’ of Russia. Russian calls for joint Euro-Atlantic security structures, so the narrative repeated in Moscow, were ignored by the West, international legal principles bent or circumvented to justify externally imposed regime change. The West, in contrast, seized on the narrative of ‘captive nations’ in central and eastern Europe following the end of the Cold War and argued that the finalité of regional integration projects was the eventual ‘unification’ of the European continent. Eastern European countries, EU and NATO members reply, were never forced to join the institutional structures they themselves voluntarily chose to accede. For Russia, the nail in the coffin of a joint security architecture was the NATO-led intervention in Libya and subsequent overstretching of a UN mandate to justify regime change in 2011; for the West, it was the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. For Russia, the necessity to work on the creation of a ‘Greater Eurasia’ has become a reflection on gradually deteriorating Russian-Western relations as a consequence. Precious Chatterje-Doody has provided a useful overview of recurring themes in Russia’s discourse on Eurasian integration which have a direct link to Russia’s understanding of its international identity. Among the most pertinent is the idea of ‘Great powerism’, the idea of Russia as an international equal (which stems from being a Great Power in Moscow’s understanding), the claim to be a ‘first among regional equals’ (which again follows from being a Great Power and translates into a contingent sovereignty of its direct neighbours), and the idea of Russia as a ‘Eurasian bridge’ which could facilitate the creation of a ‘common space’ between Europe and Asia. The latter vision has been explicitly emphasized with Russia’s ‘Greater Eurasia’ concept.28 Taken together, these themes help explain Russia’s contradictory foreign policy, where principles it holds dear in international law (non-intervention, territorial integrity, sovereign Equality) are violated in its own neighbourhood. On the global stage, the partnership with China represents a ‘geopolitical equalizer’, as Angela Stent has put it, which for Russia is useful in furthering its vision of a post-Western international system in which US influence will be significantly diminished.29 In the long-term, however, Russia and China’s leadership have different understandings of how this ‘post-Western’ world should look like. These differences are

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not publicly articulated, as the joint objective of ‘de-Westernizing’ global governance institutions still enjoys priority. Privately, however, Chinese leaders may be bemused at Moscow’s obsession with ‘great power-ness’ (derzhavnost) and baffled with its apparent incapacity to modernize and diversify its economy. Chinese leaders may also not always find the more outspoken Russian foreign policy discourse conducive to furthering their own interests. ‘China has a long record of low-key diplomacy, whereas Russia easily and eagerly resorts to megaphone diplomacy’, Makocki and Popescu write.30 The combination of a principled convergence on many pressing international issues with a different approach to public diplomacy had turned China into a ‘free rider’ in the early 2000s that benefited from Russia’s public posturing. The China from back then had shied away from shouldering the burden of speaking up and potentially risking a public clash with other actors in international diplomacy. China’s UNSC positioning therefore often tended to hide behind a publicly more outspoken Russian position.31 The assessment that Sino-Russian relations used to be ‘informed by instrumentalism’ has been a dominant one in Western scholarship,32 and is also shared by some Chinese scholars.33 This posture sometimes implied accepting Russian policy priorities that China might otherwise find dangerous. The 2014 Ukraine crisis did not change this basic equation. Chinese officials refrained from publicly criticizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, even though it constituted a clear violation of the bedrock principles of international relations which also China continually refers to (sovereignty and territorial integrity). Chinese representatives did, however, abstain (and not veto) when votes were cast in the UN Security Council and the General Assembly condemning the annexation – and also when the Security Council voted on the establishment of a tribunal to examine the shooting down of flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine.34 China had already been noticeably uncomfortable with the Russian recognition of the Georgian provinces Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states in August 2008.35 Russia’s selective embrace of separatism was a major irritant in light of China’s Tibet, Taiwan and Xinjiang policies. Today, China’s principled reservation as a public relations actor is undergoing changes, as the country has begun to project its power and interests much more. The BRI and its associated new vocabulary is indicative of China’s shift from being a participant to being a shaper of globalization. China has transitioned from its previous low-key public diplomacy to a more proactive use of discourse to increase Beijing’s leverage within international organizations and in bilateral settings.36 This development will naturally also affect Sino-Russian relations. Some prominent Chinese experts such as Xing Guangcheng, director of the Research Centre for Chinese Borderland History at the State Council-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Feng Yujun, former director of the Institute of Russian Studies at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, are sceptical of the long-term utility of Russia as China’s partner.37 Others have offered a more optimistic analysis of the prospects of a Sino-Russian rapprochement as a critical junction in international affairs. The influential Chinese analyst Yan Xuetong, dean of the International Studies Department at Tsinghua University, argues that the growing strategic rivalry between China and the United States propels China to enter into a stronger partnership with Russia –

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an assessment which is much more assertive than the official Chinese position which regularly emphasizes the need for multipolar global governance.38 Gao Fei from the China Foreign Affairs University likewise sees a convergence of interests due to a similar political culture.39 In a Foreign Affairs article published in 2016 that drew some attention, former Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Fu Ying offers her account of Sino-Russian relations across multiple policy domains and emphasizes the many times China has been deceived by Russian plans for territorial expansion. It has been speculated that the high-profile status of the author and the prominent publication outlet were indications for a collective Chinese governmental effort to convey official Chinese reservations about a full partnership with Russia.40 Fu Ying depicts a complex partnership that, even though economically underdeveloped compared to other important trading partners and even though fraught by historical misgivings, is expanding. China’s BRI combines the financial muscle with a proactive discourse to place Chinese norm conceptions in BRI partner countries as well as in global governance institutions. This gradual change naturally also affects how Russia looks at China’s presence in their shared neighbourhood. The previous chapters have shown how the increased Chinese presence across Eurasia has not been wholeheartedly welcomed by Moscow. The technicalities of regional integration in Eurasia are complex and are accompanied by Chinese and Russian suspicions about each other’s political agendas for the wider region. Yet, because of a shared incentive to ‘de-Westernize’ global governance, both states have been downplaying these suspicions and differences. The hardening perception in many parts of the world of the US government as a source of global instability under the Trump presidency has provided a convenient opening for a new assertiveness of non-Western actors to work on alternative models of order conceptions. It has also become an endurance test for transatlantic relations. The ‘normative project’ of the West, however, had been challenged by rifts in EU-US relations well before the ascendancy of the Trump phenomenon.41 Structural drifts within the ‘liberal international Order’ have been underway for some time.42 These centrifugal developments erode the unity of ‘the West’ as a consolidated normative entity, at a time when its monopoly to shape and sustain order is being challenged by external actors.43 This is where the ideational component of mega-projects such as the BRI, whether state-led or not, can add to shifts in societal governance across the Eurasian space. Nadège Rolland puts it well when she writes that the ‘BRI might lead to Eurasia becoming an illiberal insert into the global order’,44 and Robert Kaplan formulates provocatively in The Return of Marco Polo’s World: ‘As Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres’.45 The US leadership role is declining, but an entirely alternative international order is not yet in sight. Shifts in power concentrations on a global level take place gradually and tend to be more events-driven and reactionary than the talk of grand strategies has us believe. As orders are in flux, one should be cautious with predictions about a looming systemic competition between ‘liberal’ and ‘authoritarian’ models of governance. The decline of American leadership and the rise of something else depend on many different factors and do not follow from Chinese, Russian or even a concerted Sino-Russian blueprint to upend the liberal international order.

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The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 reminded us that new political ‘spaces’ can be created in reaction to unforeseen events that have effects on a global scale. The pandemic has sharpened the growing divide between the US and European governments, as disputes over appropriate containment measures and transnational vaccine research have been illustrative of fundamental differences between the Trump administration and EU member states regarding international cooperation and the provision of global public goods. Russia and China’s leadership, meanwhile, has begun to claim authorship over new discursive spaces on ‘international solidarity’ as a way of positioning themselves for a post-pandemic world. Russia’s provision of medical equipment to pandemic-ridden Italy was a case in point. More prominent and symbolic were China’s ‘mask diplomacy’ and its subsequent commitment to a global vaccine distribution, with which Beijing wanted to be seen as providing crucial medical supplies to European countries struggling to secure solidarity from EU partners, as well as vaccine to countries without the necessary medical infrastructure especially in Latin America and the Middle East.46 The pandemic has also accentuated, however, differences in approaches to interregional policy challenges in other parts of Eurasia, when Russia swiftly shut the 2,600-mile border between itself and China. Beijing, for its part, began experimenting with new forms of diplomacy with the five Central Asian governments to create new channels of communication that do not involve Russia: The first ‘China + Central Asia (C+C5)’ foreign ministers meeting took place as a video conference on 16 July 2020.47 The pandemic also constituted an initial boost for closer technological ties between China and Central Asian governments, as the latter were increasingly looking to acquire Chinese telecommunications and surveillance equipment under the cloak of social distancing tracing methods as part of a Covid-19 containment strategy. Yet, it is too early to infer from such developments that the Corona pandemic will accelerate the creation of a ‘Pax Sinica’ on the Eurasian continent.48 Russia’s merging of an SCO meeting at defence ministerial level in Moscow in September 2020 with gatherings of the CIS and the CSTO, two organizations in which China does not have a voice, drove home the message that Russia wanted to be seen as the driver of consultations of continental importance – not only in light of the Covid-19 crisis, but also against the backdrop of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in July, and constitutional crises in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan in August 2020.49

China, Europe and Eurasian connectivity in an era of Sino-American rivalry The sensation of order transitions, or of an ‘interregnum’, is also being felt in Europe, the Western end of the Eurasian continent.50 China, unlike Russia, has never claimed to be a part of Europe. Its regional integration projects might have an economic rationale, but the projection of Chinese prowess into Europe has clear inter-regional and global implications. Yet, European governments have been hesitant in their public reactions to China’s BRI. Economists and policy commentators have highlighted the EU’s slow response both to the region’s ‘investment gap’ of $300 billion identified in 2017 by

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the Asian Development Bank and to the quickly unfolding BRI. This slow response was curious, as the EU’s own connectivity plan for Central Asia, the Trans European Transport Network (TEN-T), already dated back to the 1990s.51 An Uzbek diplomat noted in an interview that ‘China builds tunnels, power plants, and railways, while the EU is still writing White Papers’.52 Already by nature of its geography, but also its normative ambition to shape the politico-institutional space of its wider region, the EU needs to develop long-term responses to China’s BRI if it does not want to cede grounds as a declining discursive and normative power. The alternative to a European response is grim, as William Callahan argues: ‘Europe will move from being a centre of global power to being relegated to the side lines as merely a market in the “far periphery” of China’s “community of shared destiny”.’53 The EU set up an EUChina ‘connectivity platform’ in June 2015 to find links between the BRI and European infrastructure policies as well as digital networks, but China refuses to engage with the EU on BRI policies in the lands ‘in between’ the respective starting and end point of the ‘Belt’ and ‘Road’.54 Besides such diverging perspectives on what a desirable Sino-European ‘new Silk Road’ dialogue should look like, there are European concerns about China’s lack of transparency on public procurement, labour legislation and lack of corporate social responsibility. China’s policy of obtaining foreign technology and intellectual property through Chinese investments abroad (termed ‘reverse technology spill-over’) has led to alarmed reactions in Europe.55 The German ministry for economic affairs raised the threshold for mergers and acquisitions with foreign entities to be scrutinized under ‘national security considerations’, and the Federation of German Industries, in a January 2019 report on industry policies, openly warned against the danger of Chinese hostile takeovers, and calling China a ‘systemic competitor’.56 French President Emmanuel Macron, on a state visit to Beijing, warned that the ‘new Silk Road’ cannot be a one-way street. Such roads would ‘transform those that they cross into vassals’.57 Other European governments like Portugal, Greece and Italy are less concerned and have signed memorandums of understanding to seek cooperation with the BRI,58 which in turn has been reprimanded by the European Court of Auditors as bypassing the European Commission’s competence in trade matters and therefore breaching EU law.59 Calls for a coherent industrial policy on an EU level have grown louder in reaction to China’s growing outward direct investment in Europe, because market access to China is not based on reciprocity and China fences off its industrial champions and limits the involvement of foreign companies.60 This makes the search for synergies between the BRI and the EU’s Investment Plan for Europe (the so-called ‘Juncker Plan’) not an easy task.61 The EU’s response to China’s BRI then came in the form of its new Central Asia Concept of November 2018, building on pre-existing cooperation with Central Asian partners as a means of increasing their ‘resilience’ in the face of powerful actors like China. The EU concluded an Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (EPCA) with Kazakhstan, launched EPCA talks with Kyrgyzstan in 2017 and is looking to launch similar talks with Uzbekistan. The EU’s Connectivity Strategy (Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions and the European Investment Bank)

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was adopted in September 2019.62 Beyond the EU’s boilerplate language on ‘sustainable’, ‘comprehensive’ and ‘rules-based’ connectivity, however, it falls short of proposing policies and investment priorities that would constitute an adequate European response to the BRI. Setting a precedent, the EU Commission eventually labelled China a ‘systemic rival’ promoting alternative models of governance ahead of the twenty-first EU-China summit, held on 9 April 2019 in Brussels.63 Talk of a possible European payment system (TIPS) in early 2019 was motivated by the need to create a rival system to China’s Alibaba or Tencent – but also by the need to reduce European dependence on US payment systems like Visa and Mastercard. A report published in January 2020 by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China sums up the criticism that European companies are hardly involved in the financing and construction of BRI projects, turning the BRI into a ‘road less travelled’.64 Citing opaque bidding processes, distortionary Chinese state subsidies for Chinese national champions and the instrumental usage of the BRI for Chinese standards to be pushed, the report argues that ‘the BRI has failed to become the open, transparent and international initiative that it often claims to be’. It thus concludes: ‘If the EU fails to play an active and competitive role, there is a real danger that it could eventually become little more than a peripheral market tacked on to the end of Eurasia.’ But Europe has more options than sitting on the fence and criticizing China’s lack of transparency. The outline of an EU-China investment agreement, agreed upon after seven long years of negotiations in December 2020, now promises to grant European companies access to the Chinese market without forcing them into ‘joint ventures’ with Chinese state-subsidized companies.65 The agreement, details of which are still to be specified, is supposed to help level the playing field for EU companies. It also spells out prohibitions of investment requirements that compel a transfer of technology and thus establishes guarantees against intellectual property theft – on paper at least. Outside of China, however, Europe also has more policy options than the popular narrative of an all-pervasive Chinese clout suggests. Governments and civil society actors across Central and East Asia emphasize that a new generation of skilled professionals is needed to implement some of the mega-projects in the making in a way that also is beneficial for local economies. Offering education and training opportunities via European agencies, foundations and cultural intermediaries, finding ways to link European integration initiatives in a concert with local as well as Chinese interlocutors (and institutional partners like the OSCE) on concrete issue areas from water management to rule of law and trade is one way of becoming a stakeholder in this new order in the making. The making of a new Eurasian order challenges the West at a time when transatlantic ties unravel. China has now grown into and overtaken expectations of a powerful international actor that the Sino-American rivalry is seen by many as the ordering principle of international politics of this century, overshadowing other layers of regionalized order. French President Emmanuel Macron’s initiative in October 2019 to re-engage Russia as a way of forging European-Russian relations in order to contain Beijing stemmed from this line of thinking. Europe, in this reading, should become an independent power pole that is not reduced to the role of bystander having to choose between a US- and a Chinese-led model.

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The productive agency of powers other than the United States and China, however, is a variable often overlooked in analyses and predictions steeped in the power transition paradigm.66 Talk of a century dominated by the contours of the Sino-American rivalry tends to reproduce mental patterns of historical teleology. Its proponents argue that the relation between the ‘rising’ power China and the established ‘status quo’ powers (predominantly the United States) is an asymmetrical one. China’s economic growth since the 1980s, they argue, will go hand in hand with increased military capabilities and a corresponding political willingness to formulate more assertive foreign policies that will challenge the currently dominant powers.67 In reality, policy formulation is a more fragmented process than traditional International Relations theories want to have us believe. Useful new research has been produced that proceeds from a ‘state transformation’ approach: Multiple agencies have contributed to a fragmentation, decentralization and internationalization of the state.68 This makes it all but impossible to assume that foreign policy is crafted and implemented by central government agencies alone in a coherent manner. As much as policy formulation nowadays has to take into account this fluidity, the creation and transitioning of ‘international order’ does not follow from static interests by monolithic actors. What the now widely debated perception of a growing SinoAmerican rivalry also illustrates is that the making of any transnational order does not follow from templates developed by powerful central governments to impose, diffuse or help develop standards (whether technical or normative), but is often the outcome of originally domestic political concerns. This is true both for the United States under a Trump administration, where the ‘America First’ doctrine took an entire foreign policy agenda hostage, and for China, where Xi’s ‘China dream’ with a domestic audience can only be realized if China ‘goes global’ in the wake of its BRI.69 Attempts at ‘decoupling’ on both sides may leave actors ‘in between’ with the choice between a rock and a hard place. Seen in this global context, Russia is no determining actor anymore, but one with a vast disruptive potential, for which Eurasia remains a testing ground for the implications of China’s growing influence and US fading interest in ‘global leadership’. Eurasian countries ‘in between’ can co-shape new orders in the making, as the previous chapters have shown, but lack the resources to coshape global governance to the same extent as China or the United States. Central Asian countries find themselves at the bottom of the global pecking order and value creation. Global value chains, as the main drivers of economic growth over the last decades, have largely circumvented the region. The main export remains low-skill labour (remittances) and commodities, with limited opportunities for institutional learning in globalized hypercompetitive markets. Diversification efforts mainly failed. The evolving geopolitical situation across the Eurasian space and new technological trends in ICT affecting almost all policy domains do not give a hint that the region’s current growth model can enter a hotspot of accelerated revenue generation. And as the EU and its member states struggle to determine the long-term impact of shifts in the transatlantic relationship, China’s imprint on the socio-political fabric of societies across the continent grows and demands policy responses. The result of this ‘interregnum’ may be a more anarchic conception of ‘world order’, as the former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd reminds us.70 If the recourse to

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national responses in the Covid-19 pandemic and talk about a reverse globalization are any indication, we are witnessing the further erosion of a multilateral system and its underlying norms and institutions that began already some fifteen years or more ago. In hindsight, the pandemic may thus become a catalyst for the Sino-American rivalry and its subversive impact on multilateralism. But since historical changes never occur in linear ways, there are alternative scenarios. In one of these, changes in policy direction and political leadership, especially in Beijing and Washington, may usher in a new modus vivendi and a drive for partial reforms of international institutions as well as the conceptions of order that they evoke. This may not be the end of the ‘liberal international order’, but the birth pangs of networked regionalized orders. It is this long-term development of re-balanced power relationships that Amitav Acharya termed the ‘end of American World Order’, which might be followed by ‘a concert among the established and emerging powers and a network of predominantly regionalized orders’.71 Rather than theorizing about the rise of regional hegemonies, Acharya notes that a ‘multiplex order’ is about to emerge that decentralizes Western dominance in international relations and replaces it with the rise of networked power relations.72 To this, Trine Flockhardt adds a conception of a coming ‘multi-order system’, which is understood as a system consisting of different ‘orders’ nested within an overall international system.73 These co-existing orders, she further holds, will be defined by distinct identities, rather than regions.74 Parag Khanna similarly argues that ‘(t)he anchor of global order isn’t necessarily a single country or set of values […]. Instead, the foundations of the emerging global order are the US, European, and Asian systems – all at the same time.’75 The puzzle that regional integration presents us, however, is whether regions and identities can realistically be considered separate from each other. As the preceding chapters have analysed, both China and Russia have engaged in elaborate efforts to ‘shape’ order in Eurasia, both discursively and physically. In this, societal and transnational processes are at play that transcend the IR realist logic prevalent in the power transition paradigm that the baton is passed from one power pole to another. The good news is that this leaves room for agency of the ‘in-betweens’ to constructively use and work with the ambivalences thus created.

Conclusion In a context where Western leadership in international governance mechanisms is contested, this chapter has reflected on the character and durability of the SinoRussian partnership in influencing shifts in global order. China’s BRI is seen as a Chinese claim to become a ‘rule-shaper in the global arena’,76 to assume a position to co-formulate the rules of the game instead of simply having to accept them. This is a perspective China shares with Russia and a range of non-Western actors that have been said to be ‘emerging’. Instead of seeing a joint opposition to a world order said to be US-dominated, it has been argued here that the Sino-Russian joint interest in deWesternizing international financial instruments and global governance institutions speaks to a level of convergence which is paralleled by a level of competition in several

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policy domains across Eurasia. These relate to questions of tariffs, customs and labour dynamics as well as issues of security governance, as seen in preceding chapters. The making, sustaining and changing of orders do not follow from policy efforts led by any single state alone. International and regional organizations are likewise used as vehicles to convey and influence normative structures. The same conclusion can be drawn from Russia’s past efforts at institution-building, where Russia is using multilateral organizations like the EAEU, the SCO or the CSTO to convey and amplify its own power standing. The Russian-Western alienation post-2014 has been an additional factor forging closer ties between Russia and China. As the institutional and normative divide between Russia and the West has widened, the effect on Sino-Russian interaction in a Eurasian context has served to reduce the potential for conflict. This now has become a dilemma for the Russian leadership, as it entails the risk of Russia becoming a ‘junior partner’ in a greater Eurasian concert on a regional, and in a context of growing Sino-American rivalry, on a global plane. With the Belt and Road Initiative, China is constructing positive images of continental economic corridors as a way of shaping new political spaces and realities. The potential limitlessness in terms of policy domains involved as well as geographic reach of the BRI, however, explains the considerable degree of consternation in the West about its underlying rationale, functioning and implications. Europe, at the westernmost end point of the projected economic corridors, has been struggling to respond with policies that correspond with its ambition not to be ground up as yet another ‘in-between’ actor in an intensifying ‘Great Power’ competition. Finally, this chapter ended on a note of caution: Assumed power shifts as part of the latter do not proceed in a linear way, and analysts should be careful not to project outdated assumptions of power transition between ‘declining’ and ‘rising’ powers into their forecasts. As much as other Eurasian actors co-shape processes that eventually see orders change, so does Europe.

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Epilogue This book has zoomed in on a region that has been called the ‘heart of the world’ because inter-regional power dynamics here have often proven to be a laboratory for the functioning of international politics at large.1 As China is marching westwards, Russia is developing a vision of a ‘Greater Eurasia’ in which Moscow stakes out a place for itself as an indispensable power. The conventional wisdom on this dynamic goes like this: A division of labour has so far prevented China’s BRI from triggering a Russian course of outright resistance or sabotage. Where China has become the predominant economic powerhouse, Russia has been granted the right to remain the pre-eminent security actor. Moscow has used regional institutions like the Eurasian Economic Union, but also the Collective Security Treaty Organization, to fend off outside influence and retain strategic leadership in the post-Soviet space. This defensive posture is increasingly being challenged by China’s claim to make a distinct contribution to globalization, for which its connectivity discourse and the imagery of a rejuvenation of the ancient Silk Roads across Eurasia serve as a vehicle. The inevitable friction at a regional level that comes with this development is checked by a convergence of interests between China and Russia at a global level which helps bridge structural tensions in the mid-term. Both share an assessment of the necessity to bring about a ‘multi-polar’ world order in which US dominance is challenged so as to allow Moscow and Beijing to become co-shapers of global governance. Russia’s current partnership with China rests on Moscow’s dissatisfaction with the West. At a normative level, Russia’s resistance to Western doctrines and policies has received the most public attention. But China’s stealth mode of gradually carving out its own discourse on globalization and interconnectivity also seeks to upend a normative monopoly on the interpretation of legitimacy in global politics. This is no less significant than Russia’s confrontational style of norm resistance that has even translated into military conflict. But this arrangement has an in-built expiration date and tends to deny agency of the actors in between, as this book has argued. Beyond the discursive trope of a deepening strategic partnership, the Sino-Russian relationship is not so structurally enmeshed yet so as to make any alignment irreversible. This is not to preach to the choir of those observers predicting the imminent break-up of this supposed marriage of convenience. But if anything, history teaches us that no partnerships are permanent and remain contingent on many different factors and ‘wild card’ developments. In what follows, I attempt to sum up possible scenarios for a future Sino-Russian relationship, before conclusions on the spectrum of reactions on the part of ‘in-between’-actors are offered.

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In the long term, China’s ambition to connect the Eurasian landmass not only presents an alternative vision of globalization, but will also impact on institutions hitherto dominated by Russia. China and Russia are unlikely to clash over Central Asia, but frictions will translate into a new modus vivendi. At least three scenarios are thinkable: In the first, Russia becomes subordinate to an economically much more powerful China, while retaining a semblance of equality. As China becomes the regional paymaster, Russia’s intrinsic value as a business partner has already been declining since at least the mid-2000s. The continuing utility of Russia for other Eurasian actors would then lie in security governance and the convergence of certain interests in global affairs. Russia is by far the most vocal critic of a perceived Western normative dominance in international affairs, and a division of labour could continue whereby China is recognized as the economic powerhouse of Eurasia while Russia is responsible for the bark about anti-hegemonism. In this scenario, a convergence of interests between Russia and China to ‘de-Westernize’ international institutions at a global level might temper the effects of regional rivalry. Mongolia, the Central Asian states and partners further West across the Eurasian space would not be presented with the binary choice of choosing to align with either Russia or China, but could, depending on diplomatic skills as well as economic resources, develop policies that accommodate both actors selectively according to the policy domain at hand. The long-standing narratives of a multi-vector foreign policy of states like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or the ‘Third Neighbour’ Policy of Mongolia are examples of such an approach, and regional organizations such as the SCO, if their statutory multinational purpose were to be fully developed, could serve as examples of platforms where Central Asian and broader Eurasian affairs can be channelled in a multilateral setting. In a second scenario, Russia is completely marginalized by China, not only economically, but also in security governance and political influence. Russia is strategically displaced by an assertive China and relegated to the periphery of international decision-making, as China’s activism in Eurasia translates also into a more vocal foreign policy in the UN Security Council and the physical protection of its interests across the globe. Russia could become what has been called ‘China’s Canada’ – a Northern, politically close ally that supplies the Chinese economy with the needed resources but otherwise is content with a subordinate role in global affairs.2 The consequences for other Eurasian actors would be the elimination of the possibility to uphold ‘multi-vector’ or ‘balancing’ foreign policies. The financial dependence of states like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, in this scenario, could translate into a level of political subordination. Both of these countries depend on Russia for security and migrant remittances, while enormous Chinese investments in various sectors like infrastructure, mining, industries and agriculture have led to a compounding of their external debt to China. Foreign policy options of China’s neighbours could thus become even more curtailed. China’s experiments with a more forceful economic statecraft in neighbouring Mongolia that ties loans and investments to an expectation of political loyalty in key areas of foreign policy concern to China are examples of this tendency where, ultimately, sovereignty of smaller states is at risk. This is the scenario that analysts have in mind when they warn of China’s ‘debt trap diplomacy’ – thereby often overstating the central government’s ability to shape and control the implementation of

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policy on the ground.3 Regional actors in Eurasia have started to pre-empt this scenario by re-engaging with Russia despite earlier attempts to reduce dependence. According to this reading, other Eurasian states need Russia as a counterbalance against China. A third scenario underlines the role of other actors external to the region that are in a position to influence political order by nature of their relative geographical proximity. In this scenario, a re-energized European Union, led by a ‘geopolitical Commission’, engages more actively with Eurasian partners on the basis of its Connectivity Strategy, and co-opts both Russia and China in the process. Rather than seeing the shaping of a new Eurasian environment as a Chinese-driven project, Europe recognizes the open-ended process that these new initiatives entail, and devises an architecture in conjuncture with China and Russia that is not anti-American, but that is based on a realistic assessment of where European interests differ from American ones without having to align with either a Chinese-led or a US-led order. This would acknowledge the possibility of a ‘multi-order world’ nested within an overall international system instead of reducing agency to binary choices in an alleged Sino-American rivalry over world order. Such a selective engagement on ‘connectivity’ would also not need to compromise other, systemic disagreements that Europe might still have with Russia and China over other foreign policy issues as well as domestic and societal governance. Finally, the future development of relations with other Western actors like the United States has the potential to affect relations between China and Russia. A course correction in Russia’s or China’s relationship with the United States is likely to weaken ties between both countries across some policy domains. Such a development would also impact on Sino-Russian interaction in their Eurasian neighbourhood.

Eurasian grand schemes and regional agency China’s ambitious BRI may be the story that China has been trying to find to tell the world. It has become a theme that subsumes and streamlines previous policies and initiatives, and rebrands an image of China to showcase to the world. At the same time, top governmental decisions to launch new initiatives such as this have to operate against the background of a plethora of foreign policy voices, and indeed, competing foreign policy identities.4 Chinese domestic actors at a micro-level contribute to the overall shaping of foreign policy as much as policy and corporate actors across Eurasia contribute to the shaping of transnational geopolitical space. If state transformation cannot be controlled by central governments alone, transformations of entire regions engulfing several countries certainly cannot either. The cases studied in this book have offered an analysis of the potential of and challenges for cooperation between Russia and China in their shared Eurasian neighbourhood. Institutional interaction between the EAEU and China’s BRI in Central Asia provides an illustrative example for the emergence of new forms of interregional cooperation that also nuance the scholarly and policy debate surrounding ‘emerging powers’. Neither could Russia alone sustain a position of political dominance in ‘Eurasia’, nor could the Chinese government alone create lasting conditions for politico-economic leadership in Asia or beyond. Rather than proceeding from static

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stages of ‘power transitions’ and theorizing on power clashes between ‘status quo’ powers and the revisionist agendas of others said to be ‘rising’, analysts should therefore pay attention to new dynamics of norm diffusion, where dominant interpretations of world order are being challenged by compartmentalized cooperation between Western and non-Western actors, but also amongst non-Western actors. Questions of Eurasian integration are being contested between the region’s most important shapers of order, China and Russia, as well as other actors in between. As much as Asia is more than just ‘China plus’,5 the reactions of governments along China’s ‘new Silk Roads’ will determine to no small extent the future trajectory of this initiative. Official reactions range from complementary policies, to wary embrace, to outright resistance. China’s BRI is indicative of China’s claim to shape a Eurasian order in its own image, but due to local pushbacks, parts of the initiative will necessarily be adapted to and co-shaped by local agency. The process is already changing the political landscape across Eurasia. Mongolia’s Third Neighbour Policy has been affected by the government’s embrace of a new form of trilateral talks with China and Russia. With a track record of guarding against a too strong dependence on either neighbour, the Mongolian government saw the SREB as a useful vehicle to break out of its regional and international isolation, while the dangers of a dependence on China are clearly seen by Mongolian political constituencies and socio-ethnic communities. Kazakhstan likewise is experiencing both centripetal and centrifugal forces that come with its institutional and spatial overlap between the EAEU and the Chinese-promoted Silk Road Economic Belt. Its EAEU membership has produced ambivalent results and has been debated domestically, while the official embrace of China’s SREB is met with mixed reactions on the part of business and local communities. Smaller, but geographically important Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan are re-thinking strategic outlooks in a changing political environment, where EAEU membership (if and when this becomes an option) would impact its policies towards China. The ‘connectivity’ rhetoric, however, should not be misconstrued as a causal factor pushing the Uzbek leadership towards closer politico-economic cooperation with Chinese contract partners. If and when the latter happens, it will be the result of shifting political realities made possible by an ambitious reform agenda under President Mirziyoyev since 2016. And further west, where China’s Silk Road Economic Belt ends at the Persian Gulf, the interaction between China and Russia hinges to no small amount on domestic political conditions as well as the centrifugal forces tearing at the nuclear deal with Iran, and Iran’s international standing with it.6 As much as there is no one Eurasian order dominated by any single actor, the regional responses to the interaction between different ‘grand schemes’ vary. Whether the interaction of the different actors across the Eurasian space is cooperative or competitive depends on the policy domain, the involvement of China and Russia in the respective countries ‘in between’, domestic governance, historical legacies and institutional arrangements. Domestic preference formation in the sociopolitical fabric of the ‘in-betweens’ constitutes another important element in the overall shaping of new regional order. Some recipient actors willingly take up offers of economic cooperation and link them with their own complementary framework programme, regardless of whether they may have pre-existed or not, as we saw with

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Kazakhstan’s ‘Nurly Zhol’ programme, or Mongolia’s ‘Steppe Road’. Policy actors and business communities beyond central governments, however, have reacted with hesitation. Partly, this variety of reactions has to do with different levels of economic dependencies, historical experiences as well as regime and governance models. A democratic governance culture in Mongolia, for instance, allows for more parliamentary debate and intra-elite conflicts about the benefits and consequences of China’s growing economic presence, while criticism of foreign economic policies of the central government has been more muted in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan where the space for civil society has been shrinking. Common to all the cases analysed, however, is a basic tension between policy elites across Eurasia embracing cooperation with China and the intention on the part of more sceptical segments of society to uphold their sovereignty and notional autonomy.7 Complementary policy initiatives can therefore also be a way to absorb and co-shape externally proposed initiatives like the BRI rather than simply being at the receiving end, but their effects depend on the quality of state-society dialogues within relatively authoritarian governance systems. Finally, the ‘making of Eurasia’ results in the shaping of new overlapping and contested tapestries of identity. The BRI, the ‘Greater Eurasia’ vision and other regional connectivity initiatives are couched in the language of economic corridors, but importantly also contain an ideational element of forging transnational bonds. Beyond a convergence around the legitimacy of authoritarianism at the level of national governance, there is little societal resemble between China and Russia or between China and other actors across Central Asia. Senses of entitlement and identity link back to deeper-rooted questions of biopolitics, and the language of ‘docking’ of regional integration initiatives can only serve to advance people-to-people ties so much. Borderlands in Eurasia with their often complex overlapping tapestries of identity are entangled in ways that can only partially be altered by central governments. Societies respond to state policies and ideologies in non-linear ways, and the presence of central state actors combines with other forces on the ground. These can be centripetal or centrifugal: They can resonate with or contravene the set of interests projected by central states. The creation of order, eventually, also rests on civilizational bonds, and these grow organically and over long periods of time. It remains to be seen whether the Sino-Russian interaction has enough normative and gravitational pull to forge new ‘post-political’ relations across Eurasia. If so, however, they will inevitably be coshaped by other Eurasian actors.

Notes Chapter 1 1

Notable examples of book-length analyses are Mischa Hansel, Sebastian Harnisch and Nadine Godehardt, Chinesische Seidenstraßeninitiative und amerikanische Gewichtsverlagerung. Reaktionen aus Asien (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2018); Daniel Markey, China’s Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Marlene Laruelle, ed., China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Central Asia Program Report, 2018). 2 Rory Stewart, The Places in Between (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2006). 3 Wang Yi, ‘“One Belt One Road” Initiative Achieves Series of Important Earlystage Harvest’, Xinhua, 22 May 2015. Available at: http://www.xinhuanet.com/ english/2016-05/22/c_135377975.htm (accessed 17 July 2017). 4 Jacob Mardell, ‘China’s Vaccine Diplomacy Assumes Geopolitical Importance’, Merics, short analysis, 24 November 2020. Available at: https://merics.org/en/shortanalysis/chinas-vaccine-diplomacy-assumes-geopolitical-importance (accessed 9 December 2020). 5 Nadège Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century? Political and Strategic Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (Washington: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2017), 3. 6 John King Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). 7 Bruno Maçães, Belt and Road. A Chinese World Order (London: Hurst, 2018). 8 Jonathan E. Hillman, ‘How Big Is China’s Belt and Road?’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 3 April 2018. 9 Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads. The Present and Future of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 10 The sceptical view does not buy into China’s ‘win-win’ connectivity rhetoric and holds that the BRI is a policy framework to find new export markets for China’s ‘overcapacities’ at home. Tying neighbouring Central Asian states closer to China’s national economy, according to this logic, is a way of introducing a ‘neotributary’ economic system. See, for instance, Su-Yan Pan and Joe Tin-Yau Lo, ‘Re-Conceptualizing China’s Rise as a Global Power: A Neo-Tributary Perspective’, The Pacific Review 30, no. 1 (2017): 1–25. Such an economic dependence might be intensified by a debt spiral that cash-strapped Central Asian economies might find themselves in once they will not be able to pay back Chinese loans. Chapter 2 will explore likely motivations behind the BRI in more detail. 11 Simon Shen, for example, argues that China’s BRI is comparable to the US Marshall Plan. See Simon Shen, ‘How China’s “Belt and Road” Compares to the Marshall Plan?’, The Diplomat, 6 February 2016. Available at: https://thediplomat. com/2016/02/how-chinas-belt-and-road-compares-to-the-marshall-plan/ (accessed 14 April 2020).

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12 Maximilian Mayer, ‘China’s Rise as a Eurasian Power: The Revival of the Silk Road and Its Consequences’, in Rethinking the Silk Road. China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Emerging Eurasian Relations, ed. Maximilian Mayer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 4, italics in the original; Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century; Raffaello Pantucci and Sarah Lain, ‘China’s Eurasian Pivot: The Silk Road Economic Belt’, Whitehall Papers 88, no. 1, 16 May 2017; William A. Callahan, ‘China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the New Eurasian Order’, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Policy Brief Nr. 22 (2016), 1. 13 Sheila Fitzpatrick, in Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, ed. Karl Schlögel (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2016), 483. 14 David Harvey, ‘Cartographic Identities: Geographical Knowledges under Globalization’, in Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geopolitics, ed. David Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2001), 208–36; Henri Lefebre, La production de l’espace social (Paris: Economica, 1974); Gerard Toal, Critical Geopolitics. The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). See also Jeppe Strandsbjerd, Territory, Globalization and International Relations: The Cartographic Reality of Space (London: Palgrave, 2010); Gerard Toal and Simon Dalby, eds., Rethinking Geopolitics. Towards a Critical Geopolitics (London: New York, 1998). 15 Marlene Laruelle, ‘The US Silk Road: Geopolitical Imaginary or the Repackaging of Strategic Interests?’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 56, no. 4 (2015): 360–75. 16 Ibid., 361. 17 Eytan Gilboa, ‘Searching for a Theory of Public Diplomacy’, ANNALS, AAPSS, 616, March (2008): 67; Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Public Diplomacy: Taxonomies and Histories’, ANNALS, AAPSS, 616, March (2008): 31–54. 18 Maçães, Belt and Road, 125. 19 Maximilian Mayer and Dániel Balázs, ‘Modern Silk Road Imaginaries and the CoProduction of Space’, in Mayer, Rethinking the Silk Road, 209. 20 For a critical appraisal of the state of scholarship, see Marcin Kaczmarski, ‘NonWestern Visions of Regionalism: China’s New Silk Road and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union’, International Affairs 93, no. 6 (2017): 1358. 21 For an example of the ‘playground’ analogy in analyses of post-Soviet ‘power rivalries’ in Eurasia, see Suzanne Loftus and Roger E. Kanet, ‘Whose Playground Is It, Anyway? Power Rivalries in Post-Soviet Space’, in Power, Politics, and Confrontation in Eurasia. Foreign Policy in a Contested Region, ed. Roger E. Kanet and Matthew Sussex (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 15–41. 22 Douglas Lemke and Jacek Kugler, ‘The Evolution of the Power Transition Perspective’, in Parity and War – Evaluations and Extensions of the War Ledger, ed. Jacek Kugler and Douglas Lemke (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 3–34; Douglas Lemke and Ronald L. Tammen, ‘Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China’, International Interactions 29, no. 4 (2006): 269–71. 23 Scott Radnitz, ‘Between Russia and a Hard Place: Great Power Grievances and Central Asian Ambivalence’, Europe-Asia Studies 70, no. 10 (2018): 1597–1611; Marlene Laruelle and Sébastien Peyrouse, The Chinese Question in Central Asia: Domestic Order, Social Change, and the Chinese Factor (New York: Colombia University Press, 2012). 24 Steven Parham, China’s Borderlands. The Faultline of Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), viii. 25 Ibid., 21; see also Mayer, China’s Rise as a Eurasian Power, 20; Ikboljon Qoraboyev and Kairat Moldashev, ‘The Belt and Road Initiative and Comprehensive Regionalism in Central Asia’ in Rethinking the Silk Road, ed. Mayer, 121.

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26 Alexander Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4–5; see also Sally Cummings, ed., Power and Change in Central Asia (London: Routledge, 2002); Emilian Kavalski, ed., Stable Outside, Fragile Inside? Post-Soviet Statehood in Central Asia (London: Routledge, 2016); Parham, China’s Borderlands, 242. 27 Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1992); Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules. 28 Prateek Goorha, ‘Modernization Theory’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies (2010); Roland Paris, ‘Saving Liberal Peacebuilding’, Review of International Studies 36 (2010): 337–65. 29 Roger MacGinty, ‘Hybrid Peace: The Interaction between Top-Down and BottomUp Peace’, Security Dialogue 41 (2010): 391–412; Timothy Donais, Peacebuilding and Local Ownership: Post-Conflict Consensus-Building (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 30 See also Elena A. Korosteleva and Irina Petrova, ‘From “the Global” to “the Local”: The Future of “Cooperative Orders” in Central Eurasia in Times of Complexity’, International Politics, published online 24 July 2020. 31 John Heathershaw, Catherine Owen and Alexander Cooley, ‘Centred Discourse, Decentred Practice: The Relational Production of Russian and Chinese “Rising” Power in Central Asia’, Third World Quarterly 40, no. 8 (2019): 1441. See also Max D. Woodworth and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, ’Exploring China’s Borderlands in an Era of BRI-Induced Change’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 61, no. 1 (2020): 1–12. 32 Astrid H.M. Nordin and Mikael Weissmann, ‘Will Trump Make China Great Again? The Belt and Road Initiative and International Order’, International Affairs 94, no. 2 (2018): 237. 33 Shahar Hameiri, Lee Jones and John Heathershaw, ‘Reframing the Rising Powers Debate: State Transformation and Foreign Policy’, Third World Quarterly 40, no. 8 (2019): 1397–414. 34 Jeffrey Reeves, ‘China’s Silk Road Economic Belt Initiative: Network and Influence Formation in Central Asia’, Journal of Contemporary China 27, no. 112 (2018): 505. 35 James Ferguson, China’s Eurasian Dilemmas. Roads and Risks for a Sustainable Global Power (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2018), 162. 36 Trine Flockhardt, ‘The Coming Multi-Order World’, Contemporary Security Policy 37, no. 1 (2016): 3–30. See also a similar argument in Parag Khanna, The Future Is Asian. Global Order in the Twenty-First Century (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019), 78.

Chapter 2 1 2 3

Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road. A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5. James A. Millward, The Silk Road. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 7. The term is often attributed to the German traveller and geographer Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen who is said to have coined it in 1877. See Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen, Über die zentralasiatischen Seidenstrassen bis zum 2. Jh. n. Chr. (Berlin: Verhandlungen der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1877), 96–122. However, as Matthias Mertens sums up, while Richthofen helped to consolidate the concept and to set in motion its popularization, other scholarly works using the term

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had preceded Richthofen’s. See Matthias Mertens, ‘Did Richthofen Really Coin “The Silk Road”?’, The Silk Road 17 (2019): 1–9. 4 Liu Xinru, The Silk Road in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19. 5 Hansen, The Silk Road, 20. 6 Wilfried Pieper, Ancient Indian Coins Revisited (Lancaster/London: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc., 2013), 129–30. 7 Liu, The Silk Road in World History, 38–41. 8 Ibid., 33. The rise of the Sassanid empire also signalled the decline of the Kushan empire in the third century. 9 Ibid., 80. 10 Millward, The Silk Road, 63. 11 Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road. A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009). 12 Liu, The Silk Road in World History, 123. 13 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004). 14 Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 195–6. 15 Derek J. Mitchell, ‘Expanding the “Strategic Periphery.” A History of China’s Interaction with the Developing World’, in China Steps Out. Beijing’s Major Power Engagement with the Developing World, ed. Joshua Eisenman and Eric Heginbotham (New York: Routledge, 2018), 23. 16 Kerry Brown, China’s World (London: I.B. Tauris. 2017), 17. 17 Roderich Ptak, China and the Asian Seas: Trade, Travel, and Visions of the Other (1400–1750) (Aldershot, Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998), 105. 18 ‘Full Video: President Xi Jinping Delivers Speech at Nazarbayev University’, CNTV, 7 September 2013. Available at: http://english.cntv.cn/program/ newsupdate/20130907/102105.shtml (accessed 15 September 2018). 19 It was only Almaty’s fortification by the Russian empire in the nineteenth century which elevated the city in regional importance, and it was the decision of the Soviets to link Alma-Ata to Moscow via the Turkestan-Siberian railway (TurkSib) that made the city important again for regional trading connections. The peripheral role of Almaty for the ancient Silk Roads, however, did not stop city planners from placing Silk Road associations (most notably camels) at the airport, in metro stations or pedestrian zones, as I noted when I visited in June 2018. 20 Nadine Godehardt, ‘China’s “neue” Seidenstrasseninitiative. Regionale Nachbarschaft als Kern der chinesischen Außenpolitik unter Xi Jinping’, SWP Research Paper, June 2014. 21 ‘Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road’, NDRC, 28 March 2015. Available at: http://en.ndrc.gov. cn/newsrelease/201503/t20150330_669367.html (accessed 15 September 2018; hereafter: ‘Vision and Actions’ Document, NDRC). The NDRC is the main body that oversees the BRI, and receives its instructions from the State Council. 22 Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century, 50. 23 Wang Yiwei, Belt and Road Initiative: What Will China Offer the World in Its Rise (Beijing: New World Press, 2016). Wang Yiwei was China’s designated ‘voice’ of the BRI, explaining and promoting its objectives at home and abroad.

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24 ‘Full Text of President Xi’s Speech at Opening of Belt and Road Forum’, Xinhuanet, 14 May 2017. Available at: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-05/14/c_136282982. htm (accessed 8 August 2018). 25 ‘President Xi: Why I Proposed the Belt and Road’, CGTN, 12 May 2017. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNKTbMx8PFk (accessed 8 August 2018). 26 Tim Winter, Geocultural Power. China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the TwentyFirst Century (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 85–100. 27 The MSR has raised Indian concerns that China might be in a position to dominate the Indian Ocean. The MSR, according to this narrative, resembles the previous ‘String of Pearls’ strategy of building a chain of naval bases across the Northern Indian Ocean. In addition, the contested territory of Kashmir constitutes a challenge for any overland economic corridors between India and China: Chinese investments focus on the Pakistani-administered part of Kashmir, which India regards as legitimizing Pakistan’s claim over the whole of Kashmir. The interplay between India’s neighbourhood and trade policies and regional rivalry with China also became evident when Prime Minister Modi upgraded the ‘Look East’ policy of the 1990s to an ‘Act East’ policy in 2014. See Christian Wagner and Siddharth Tripathi, ‘India’s Response to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative’, SWP Comment 7 (2018). 28 Alexandros Petersen, Eurasia’s Shifting Geopolitical Tectonic Plates. Global Perspective, Local Theaters (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 139. 29 Xi, Jinping, ‘Promote Friendship between Our People and Work Together to Build a Bright Future’, Speech at Nazarbayev University, Almaty, Chinese Foreign Ministry, 8 September 2013. Available at: http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/cebel/eng/zxxx/t1078088. htm (accessed 27 June 2017). 30 Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century, 37. 31 The Chongqing-Duisburg route as a result of China’s OBOR initiative, for example, is a Trans-Eurasia-express train for which simplified customs requirements have been introduced. 32 ‘YuXinOu’ is an acronym and indicates the route of the train: Yu (Chongqing), Xin (Xinjiang), Ou (Europe). 33 Paulo Duarte, ‘China in the Heartland: The Challenges and Opportunities of OBOR for Central Asia’, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Central Asia Program Report, 2018), 13. 34 Paul J. Kohlenberg and Nadine Godehardt, ‘Chinas globale Konnektivitätspolitik’, SWP Aktuell 18, March 2018. 35 Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century, 104. 36 Tim Summers, ‘China’s “New Silk Roads”: Sub-National Regions and Networks of Global Political Economy’, Third World Quarterly 37, no. 9 (2016): 1628–43. 37 And even the NSC has been called a ‘warmed-over and repackaged version of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence‘, first articulated at the Bandung Conference in 1955. See David Shambaugh, China Goes Global. The Partial Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 97. 38 Li Mingjjang, ‘Local Liberalism: China’s Provincial Approaches to Relations with Southeast Asia’, Journal of Contemporary China 23, no. 86 (2014): 275–93; Yu Hong, ‘Motivation behind China’s “One Belt, One Road” Initiatives and Establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’, Journal of Contemporary China 26, no. 105 (2017): 363.

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39 International Crisis Group, ‘Central Asia’s Silk Road Rivalries’, Europe and Central Asia Report, No. 245, 27 July (2017): 3. 40 Lee Jones and Zeng Jingshan, ‘Understanding China’s “Belt and Road Initiative”: Beyond “Grand Strategy” to a State Transformation Analysis’, Third World Quarterly 40, no. 8 (2019): 1424. 41 Summers, China’s ‘New Silk Roads’, 1634. 42 Richard Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Leiden: HIPE Publications, 2017), 16–18. 43 Ibid., 19. 44 Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century, 10–11. 45 Godehardt, China’s ‘neue’ Seidenstrasseninitiative. 46 Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road, 35. 47 Jones and Zeng, Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’. 48 Callaghan and Hubbard also contend that both APEC and ASEAN have been promoting the agenda of ‘connectivity’ for years before the launch of the OBOR initiative. See Mike Callaghan and Paul Hubbard, ‘The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: Multilateralism on the Silk Road’, China Economic Journal 9, no. 2 (2016): 117. 49 Chinese foreign ministry, ‘The Belt and Road Initiative – Progress, Contributions, and Perspectives’, April 2019. Available at: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/cgfrankfurt/ det/zt/ydyl2/P020190715630556064579.pdf (accessed 10 February 2021). 50 Chinese investments finance the modernization of a direct train line between Budapest and Belgrade. 51 Joshua Eisenman and Eric Heginbotham, China Steps Out; François Godement and Agatha Kratz, eds., ‘One, Belt, One Road’: China’s Great Leap Outwards (Paris: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2015). 52 Kerry Brown, The World According to Xi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 28. 53 Peter Ferdinand, ‘Westward ho – the China Dream and “One Belt, One Road”: Chinese Foreign Policy under Xi Jinping’, International Affairs 92, no. 4 (2016): 951. 54 Marek Jochec and Jenny Jenish Kyzy, ‘China’s BRI Investments, Risks, and Opportunities in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan’, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia, ed. Laruelle, 69. 55 Eisenman and Heginbotham, China Steps Out, 4. 56 Miller, China’s Asian Dream, 49–50. 57 Laruelle, Introduction, x. 58 Raffaello Pantucci and Matthew Oresman, ‘China’s Strategy in Central Asia’, in China Steps Out, ed. Eisenman and Heginbotham, 81–100. 59 Liselotte Odgaard, ‘Beijing’s Quest for Stability in Its Neighbourhood: China’s Relations with Russia in Central Asia’, Asian Security 13, no. 1 (2017): 46. 60 The same idea was behind the Great Western Development Strategy developed in 1999. See Thomas Zimmerman, The New Silk Roads: China, the US, and the Future of Central Asia (New York: New York University, 2015), 6; Yu, Motivation behind China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ Initiatives, 358. 61 Qingdao, where the 2018 SCO summit took place, is also looking to become a gateway for cargo transportation via inland ports. 62 The Pagoda in Urumqi’s Hong Shan park has a miniature replica of the geographical marker of the center of Asia. 63 Yang Jinghao, Li Yang and Li Liang, ‘Construction of China’s Westernmost Airports Begins on the Pamirs’, CGTN, 27 April 2020. Available at: https://news.cgtn.com/

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news/2020-04-27/Construction-of-China-s-westernmost-airport-begins-on-thePamirs-Q1VgrVrqkE/index.html (accessed 31 August 2020). 64 Parham, China’s Borderlands, 98. 65 Author’s observation on a visit to Urumqi in June 2018. 66 Author’s interview with Kairat Moldashev, Almaty, 29 June 2018. 67 Chen Yangbin, ‘From “Lamb Kebabs” to “Shared Joy”: Cultural Appropriation, Ignorance and the Constrained Connectivity within the “One Belt, One Road” Initiative’, Journal of Contemporary China 29, no. 121 (2020): 1–16. 68 Parham, China’s Borderlands, 123. 69 Sarah Lain, ‘The Potential and Pitfalls of Connectivity along the Silk Road Economic Belt’, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia, ed. Laruelle, 2. 70 Parham, China’s Borderlands, 180–3. 71 Ibid., 126; 196. 72 The Grand Bazaar in Urumqi, however, is no longer the important trading hub that it was during the times of the ancient Silk Roads. Miscellaneous Silk Road tourist kitsch, from toy camels, scarves and Central Asian instruments mixes with Russian matryoshkas as well as the ubiquitous nuts and dried fruits. Author’s observations, Urumqi, June 2018. 73 Author’s observations, Urumqi, June 2018. 74 Callahan, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the New Eurasian Order, 2. 75 Sebastian Schiek, ‘Bewegung auf der Seidenstraße. Chinas “Belt and Road” – Initiative als Anreiz für zwischenstaatliche Kooperation und Reformen an Zentralasiens Grenzen’, SWP Research Paper 16, August 2017. 76 China Daily, Business, 13 June 2018, 13. 77 Barry Eichengreen and Masahiro Kawai, eds., Renminbi Internationalization. Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2015); William H. Overholt, Guonan Ma and Cheung Kwok Law, eds., Renminbi Rising: A New Global Monetary System Emerges (Hong Kong: Fung Global Institute Limited, 2016). 78 Jonathan Holslag, The Silk Road Trap. How China’s Trade Ambitions challenge Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 49. 79 Doug Stokes, ‘Trump, American Hegemony and the Future of the Liberal International Order’, International Affairs 94, no. 1 (2018): 142. 80 Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 81 Callaghan and Hubbard, The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. 82 See the AIIB Corporate Procurement Policy. Available at: https://www.aiib.org/en/ policies-strategies/procurement-policies/corporate-procurement.html (accessed 9 August 2018). 83 Alexander Cooley, ‘New Silk Route of Developmental Cul-de-Sac? The Prospects and Challenges of China’s OBOR Initiative’, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo No. 372, July (2015), 2. 84 Callaghan and Hubbard, The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, 136. 85 ‘Vision and Actions’ Document, NDRC. 86 Nadège Rolland, ‘China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Underwhelming or Gamechanger?’, The Washington Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2017): 127–42. 87 Oliver Stuenkel, The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (London and Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015). 88 Tom Miller, China’s Asian Dream (London: Zed Books, 2017), 12.

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89 ‘Full Text of President Xi’s Speech at Opening of Belt and Road Forum’, Xinhuanet, 14 May 2017. Available at: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-05/14/c_136282982. htm (accessed 9 August 2018). 90 In 2019, the average size of Chinese construction deals overseas shrank and investment fell. See China Global Investment Tracker. Available at: https://www.aei. org/china-global-investment-tracker/ (accessed 20 May 2020). 91 Safovudin Jaborov, ‘Chinese Loans in Central Asia: Development Assistance or “Predatory Lending”?’, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia, ed. Laruelle, 34–40; Tian Hao, ‘China’s Conditional Aid and Its Impact in Central Asia’, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia, ed. Laruelle, 21–33. On China’s hidden credit to developing countries, see also Sebastian Horn, Carmen Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch, ‘China’s Overseas Lending. Kiel Institute for the World Economy’, Kiel Working Paper, no. 2132 (2019): 1–66. 92 Tian, China’s Conditional Aid and Its Impact in Central Asia, 27; Nargis Kassenova, ‘China as an Emerging Donor in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan’, Institut Francais des Relations Internationales – Russia/NIS Center, January (2009), 10. 93 Holslag, The Silk Road Trap, 10. 94 Tian, China’s Conditional Aid and Its Impact in Central Asia, 24–5. 95 Ibid., 26; see also Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century, 116; Jeffrey Reeves, Chinese Foreign Relations with Weak Peripheral States. Asymmetrical Economic Power and Insecurity (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). On China’s interpretation of development assistance, see the ‘White Paper on China’s Foreign Aid’, State Council Information Office of the PRC, 2011. Available at: http://english.gov.cn/archive/ white_paper/2014/09/09/content_281474986284620.htm (accessed 15 September 2018). 96 Markey, China’s Western Horizon, 4–5. 97 Author’s interview with Wang Xinsong, Bejing Normal University, Beijing, 20 June 2018. 98 Holslag, The Silk Road Trap, 55. 99 Andrew Higgins, ‘A Power Plant Fiasco Highlights China’s Growing Clout in Central Asia’, The New York Times, 6 July 2019. Available at: https://www.nytimes. com/2019/07/06/world/asia/china-russia-central-asia.html (accessed 19 May 2020). 100 ‘A Malaysian Corruption Scandal Shows the Dark Side of China’s Belt and Road Initiative’, The Washington Post, 11 January 2019. Available at: https://www. washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/a-malaysian-corruption-scandalshows-the-dark-side-of-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative/2019/01/11/d90541a6-143f11e9-90a8-136fa44b80ba_story.html (accessed 19 May 2020). 101 International Crisis Group, Central Asia’s Silk Road Rivalries, 13. 102 Holslag, The Silk Road Trap, 38. 103 ‘China’s Debt Tops 300% of GDP, Now 15% of Global Total: IIF’, Reuters, 19 July 2019. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-debt/chinasdebt-tops-300-of-gdp-now-15-of-global-total-iif-idUSKCN1UD0KD (accessed 19 April 2020). 104 Callahan, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the New Eurasian Order; William Callahan, ‘China’s “Asian dream”: The Belt Road Initiative and the New Regional Order’, Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 1, no. 3 (2016): 226–43; William Callahan, ‘China 2035: From the China Dream to the World Dream’, Global Affairs 2, no. 3 (2016): 247–58; Theresa Fallon, ‘The New Silk Road: Xi Jinping’s Grand Strategy

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for Eurasia’, American Foreign Policy Interests 37, no. 3 (2015): 140–7; Miller, China’s Asian Dreams. 105 Maçães, Belt and Road, 19. 106 Nicola Casarini, ‘When All Roads Lead to Beijing. Assessing China’s New Silk Road and Its Implications for Europe’, The International Spectator 51, no. 4 (2016): 98. 107 Liu Ying, “‘Marshall Plan” Copycat Allegations Misleading’, Beijing Review No. 6, 5 February 2015. Available at: http://www.bjreview.com/special/2015-02/02/ content_667594.htm (accessed 15 April 2020). 108 Kohlenberg and Godehardt, Chinas globale Konnektivitätspolitik; see also Nadège Rolland, ‘China’s Vision for a New World Order‘, The National Bureau of Asian Research, NBR Special Report No. 83, January 2020. 109 Markey, China’s Western Horizon, 35–40. 110 At the Boao Forum in April 2018, China made reference to ‘a community of common destiny for Asia’. See Xi Jinping, ‘Working Together toward a Better Future for Asia and the World’, Keynote Speech at the Boao Forum for Asia, Boao, Chinese Foreign Ministry, 7 April 2013. Available at: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/ wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/t1030610.shtml (accessed 15 April 2020). 111 Eisenman and Heginbotham, China Steps Out, 7; Reeves, Chinese Foreign Relations with Weak Peripheral States. 112 Kaczmarski, Non-Western Visions of Regionalism, 1364. 113 see also Brown, The World According to Xi, 64. 114 Mitchell, Expanding the ‘Strategic Periphery’, 38; Deng Yong, ‘China: The PostResponsible Power’, The Washington Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2015): 117–32. 115 Ferdinand, Westward ho. 116 Ruchir Sharma, ‘Tech Battle with China, Coming Soon’, The New York Times, International edition, pp. 1, 17, 29 June 2018. 117 David Shambaugh, ‘Chinese Thinking about World Order’, in China and the International System. Becoming a World Power, ed. Xiaoming Huang and Robert Patman (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 26–43. 118 Wang Jisi, ‘“xijin,” zhongguo diyuan zhanlue de zai pingheng‘ (‘“Going West” to Rebalance China’s Geostrategy’), Global Times, 17 October 2012. Available at: http:// opinion.huanqiu.com/opinion_world/2012-10/3193760.html (accessed 9 August 2018). 119 For a concise interpretation of the dialectic between Wang Jisi’s writings and the official government’s position, see Godehardt, China’s ‘neue’ Seidenstrasseninitiative, 21–3. 120 Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road, 48. 121 Comments by a European ambassador at the 7th Workshop on EU-China Relations in Global Politics (‘European and Asian Perspectives on China’s Belt & Road Initiative’), attended by the author, 26 April 2018. 122 Xuetong Yan, ‘The Rise of China in Chinese Eyes’, Journal of Contemporary China 10, no. 26 (2001): 35.

Chapter 3 1

This chapter is derived in parts from an article published in Rising Powers Quarterly, available online at: https://risingpowersproject.com/quarterly/mapping-eurasiacontrasting-the-public-diplomacies-of-russias-greater-eurasia-and-chinas-belt-androad-initiative/.

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Halford J. Mackinder, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, Geographical Review 23, no. 4 (1904): 421–44. 3 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1998). 4 Ibid. 5 Morena Skalamera, ‘Russia’s Lasting Influence in Central Asia’, Survival 59, no. 6 (2017): 123–42. 6 Laruelle and Peyrouse, The Chinese Question in Central Asia. 7 The US presence in Central Asia increased following the 2001 ISAF mission in Afghanistan, for which the United States used two military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for military supplies. 8 Ellen Scholl and Kirsten Westphal, ‘European Energy Security Reimagined. Mapping the Risks, Challenges and Opportunities of Changing Energy Geographies’, SWP Research Paper, March 2017, 9. 9 ‘Vision and Actions’ Document, NDRC. 10 Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Christopher Marsh, Russian Foreign Policy. Interests, Vectors, and Sectors (London: SAGE, 2014), 124. 11 Both countries only agreed on a formal demarcation of their 2,600-mile border in 2008. 12 Steve Smith, Russia in Revolution. An Empire in Crisis. 1890–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 12. 13 Ibid., 13. 14 Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs. 1613–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016), 471. 15 Fu Ying, ‘How China Sees Russia’, Foreign Affairs 95, no. 1, January/February (2016). Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2015-12-14/how-chinasees-russia (accessed 15 March 2018). 16 Bruce A. Elleman, Diplomacy and Deception. The Secret History of Sino-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, 1917–1927 (Michigan: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). 17 Alexander Lukin, China and Russia: The New Rapprochement (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 35. 18 Xing Lu, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong. Transforming China and Its People (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), chapter 7. 19 Bobo Lo, Axis of Convenience. Moscow, Beijing, and the New Geopolitics (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 27. 20 Hugh de Santis and Robert A. Manning, ‘Gorbachev’s Eurasian Strategy: The Dangers of Success and Failure’, Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, Report, August 1989. Available at: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a228411.pdf.10 (accessed 10 October 2018). 21 Natasha Kuhrt, Russian Policy towards China and Japan. The El’tsin and Putin Periods (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), chapters 3 and 4. 22 Mark Galeotti, The Vory. Russia’s Super Mafia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 135–6. 23 On the migration-security nexus in Russia’s Far East, see Vilya Gel’bras, ‘Na vostochnom napravlenii’, Svobodnaya mysl’, no. 11, November (1997): 45–55. 24 Author’s interview with Bai Lianlei, China Institute for International Studies, Beijing, 15 June 2018. 25 Erica S. Downs, ‘The Chinese Energy Security Debate’, The China Quarterly 177 (2004): 25. 2

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26 Marcin Kaczmarski, Russia-China Relations in the Post-Crisis International Order (London: Routledge, 2015), 78. 27 Vladimir Portyakov, ‘The Russian Vector in Global Chinese Migration’, Far Eastern Affairs, no. 1 (2006): 47–64. 28 Paul Stronski and Nicole Ng, ‘Cooperation and Competition. Russia and China in Central Asia, the Russian Far East, and the Arctic’, Moscow Carnegie Center, February 2018, 21. 29 Valdai Discussion Club, ‘Toward the Great Ocean 4: Turn to the East. Preliminary Results and New Objectives’, Valdai Discussion Club Report, 2016. Available at: http:// valdaiclub.com/files/11431/ (accessed 6 August 2018). 30 Lo, Axis of Convenience, 54–72; Richard Weitz, ‘Superpower Symbiosis: The RussiaChina Axis’, World Affairs Journal, November–December (2013): 1–4; Alexander Korolev, ‘The Strategic Alignment between Russia and China: Myths and Reality’, The Asan Forum, 30 April 2015. Available at: http://www.theasanforum.org/the-strategicalignment-between-russia-and-china-myths-and-reality/ (accessed 15 March 2018); Aldo Ferrari and Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti, eds., ‘Russia and China: Anatomy of a Partnership’, ISPI Report, 3 May 2019. 31 Precious Chatterje-Doody, ‘Competition for Co-Operation: Roles and Realities in Russia’s “Multivector” Foreign Policy’, in The Eurasian Project and Europe: Regional Discontinuities and Geopolitics, ed. David Lane and Vsevolod Samokhvalov (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 203–17. 32 Ibid.; Michael O. Slobodchikoff, Building Hegemonic Order Russia’s Way: Order, Stability, and Predictability in the Post-Soviet Space (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014). 33 Russia and China held bilateral land-based Peace Missions in 2005, 2009 and 2013; multilateral Peace Missions within the SCO in 2007, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018; bilateral sea-based missions annually since 2012; and missile defence exercises in 2016 and 2017. In 2018, China for the first time participated in Russia’s large-scale Vostok military exercise. Both also increased interoperability during the 2019 ‘Tsentr’ exercises under SCO auspices. 34 Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘SCO Fails to Turn into an “Eastern NATO”’, Eurasia Daily Monitor 8, no. 116, 16 June 2011. Available at: https://jamestown.org/program/scofails-to-turn-into-an-eastern-nato/ (accessed 24 August 2018). 35 Roy Allison, ‘Protective Integration and Security Policy Coordination: Comparing the SCO and CSTO’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics 11, no. 3 (2018): 299; 322. 36 Joshua Kucera, ‘Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, Tajikistan Deepen “Anti-Terror” Ties’, Eurasianet, 4 August 2016. Available at: https://eurasianet.org/afghanistan-chinapakistan-tajikistan-deepen-anti-terror-ties (accessed 18 June 2020). 37 Margarete Klein, ‘Russia’s Military Policy in the Post-Soviet Space. Aims, Instruments and Perspectives’, SWP Research Paper, January 2019, 33. 38 Teemu Naarajärvi, ‘China, Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: Blessing or Curse for New Regionalism in Central Asia?’, Asia-Europe Journal 10, no. 2/3 (2012): 114. 39 Roy Allison, ‘Regionalism, Regional Structures and Security Management in Central Asia’, International Affairs 80, no. 3 (2004): 463–83; Roy Allison, ‘Virtual Regionalism, Regional Structures and Regime Security in Central Asia’, Central Asian Survey 27, no. 2 (2008): 185–202; Anna Matveeva, ‘Russia’s Changing Security Role in Central Asia’, European Security 22, no. 4 (2013): 478–99; Mikhail A. Molchanov, Eurasian Regionalisms and Russian Foreign Policy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); Elena

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Kropatcheva, ‘Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation: Multilateral Policy or Unilateral Ambitions?’, Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 9 (2016): 1526–52. 40 Mariya Y. Omelicheva, ‘Central Asia’, in Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Andrei Tsygankov (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 327; Ruth Deyermond, ‘The Collective Security Treaty Organisation’, in Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Andrei Tsygankov (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 426; Alexander Frost, ‘The Collective Security Treaty Organisations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and Russia’s Strategic Goals in Central Asia’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly 7, no. 3 (2009): 86. 41 Jean-Marc F. Blanchard and Colin Flint, ‘The Geopolitics of China’s Maritime Silk Road Initiative’, Geopolitics 22, no. 2 (2017): 235. 42 Alessandro Arduino, China’s Private Army. Protecting the New Silk Road (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Mathieu Duchatel, Olivier Braeuner and Zhou Hang, ‘Protecting China’s Overseas Interests: The Slow Shift Away from Noninterference’, SIPRI Policy Paper, no. 41 (2014). Available at: https://www.sipri.org/ publications/2014/sipri-policy-papers/protecting-chinas-overseas-interests-slowshift-away-non-interference (accessed 15 April 2020). 43 Author’s interview with Russia’s plenipotentiary ambassador for the Asia-Pacific, Moscow, 31 August 2017. 44 Mikhail A. Molchanov, ‘The Eurasian Economic Union’, in Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Andrei Tsygankov (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 418. 45 Cooley, Great Games, Local Rules, 88. 46 Thomas Ambrosio, ‘The Architecture of Alignment: The Russia-China Relationship and International Agreements’, Europe-Asia Studies 69, no. 1 (2017): 135. 47 Bobo Lo, Russia and the New World Disorder (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2015), 81. 48 Maria Raquel Freire, ‘The Shanghai Cooperation Organization’, in Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Andrei Tsygankov (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018), 403. 49 Allison, Virtual Regionalism, Regional Structures and Regime Security in Central Asia, 186. 50 Allison, Protective Integration and Security Policy Cooperation. 51 See EAEU website: http://www.eaeunion.org/?lang=en#info. 52 Kataryna Wolczuk and Rilka Dragneva, ‘The Eurasian Economic Union: Deals, Rules, and the Exercise of Power’, Chatham House Report, 2 May 2017. Available at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/eurasian-economic-union-deals-rulesand-exercise-power (accessed 16 February 2019). 53 Nargis Kassenova, ‘Kazakhstan and Eurasian Economic Integration: Quick Start, Mixed Results and Uncertain Future’, Paris: Ifri, Russie.Nei.Reports Nr. 14 (2012), 25. 54 Wolczuk and Dragneva, The Eurasian Economic Union, 6. 55 Ibid., 13; 16; 20. 56 Jeanne L. Wilson, ‘The Eurasian Economic Union and China’s Silk Road: Implications for the Russian-Chinese Relationship’, European Politics and Society 17, no. 1 (2016): 113–32. 57 Omelicheva, Central Asia, 333. 58 Viacheslav Inozemtsev, ‘Osobennosti natsionalnoi nostalgii’, The New Times/Novoe Vremia 7, no. 398, 26 February 2016. Available at: https://newtimes.ru/articles/ detail/108380 (accessed 6 August 2018).

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59 Wolczuk and Dragneva, The Eurasian Economic Union. 60 Viktoria Akchurina and Vincent Della Sala, ‘The European Union, Russia and the Post-Soviet Space: Shared Neighbourhood, Battleground or Transit Zone on the New Silk Road?’, Europe-Asia Studies 70, no. 10 (2018a): 1543–51. 61 Ibid., 147; Gvosdev and Marsh, Russian Foreign Policy, 188–91; Peter J.S. Duncan, ‘Ideology and Interests in Putin’s Construction of Eurasia’, in The Eurasian Project and Europe: Regional Discontinuities and Geopolitics, ed. David Lane and Vsevolod Samokhvalov (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 107. 62 Nicu Popescu, ‘Eurasian Union: The Real, the Imaginary and the Likely’, Working Paper 132 (2014), Paris: Institute for Security Studies; Alexander Libman, ‘Russian Power Politics and the Eurasian Economic Union: The Real and the Imagined’, Rising Powers Quarterly 2, no. 1 (2017): 81–103. 63 Qoraboyev and Moldashev, The Belt and Road Initiative and Comprehensive Regionalism in Central Asia, 126. 64 ‘Clinton Calls Eurasian Integration an Effort to “Re-Sovietize”’, Radio Free Europe, 7 December 2012. Available at: https://www.rferl.org/a/clinton-calls-eurasianintegration-effort-to-resovietize/24791921.html (accessed 24 January 2018). 65 David Lewis, ‘Geopolitical Imaginaries in Russian Foreign Policy: The Evolution of “Greater Eurasia”’, Europe-Asia Studies 70, no. 10 (2018): 10. 66 Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow. The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 249–332. 67 Marlene Laruelle, ‘Russia as a “Divided Nation,” from Compatriots to Crimea: A Contribution to the Discussion on Nationalism and Foreign Policy’, Problems of PostCommunism 62, no. 2 (2015): 90; Andrei Tsygankov, ‘Uses of Eurasia: The Kremlin, the Eurasian Union, and the Izborsky Club’, in Eurasia 2.0: Russian Geopolitics in the Age of New Media, ed. Mikhail Suslov and Mark Bassin (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 63–80. 68 Moritz Pieper, ‘Russkiy Mir: The Geopolitics of Russian Compatriots Abroad’, Geopolitics, published online 25 May 2018. 69 Evgeny Vinokurov and Alexander Libman, Eurasian Integration: Challenges of Transcontinental Regionalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 70 Vladimir Putin, ‘Novyi integratsiionnyi proyekt dliya Yevrazii – budushcheye, kotoroye rozhdayetsiya segodniya’, Izvestia, 3 October 2011. Available at: https://iz.ru/ news/502761 (accessed 28 April 2019). 71 Lewis, Geopolitical Imaginaries in Russian Foreign Policy. 72 Lo, Russia and the New World Disorder, 135–40. 73 Iver Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe. A Study in Identity and International Relations (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017). 74 Andrei Tsygankov, ‘What Is China to Us? Westernizers and Sinophiles in Russian Foreign Policy’, Paris: IFRI, Russie NEI-Visions (2009); Alicja Curanovic, ‘Why Don’t Russians Fear the Chinese? The Chinese Factor in the Self-Identification Process of Russia’, Nationalities Papers 40, no. 2 (2012): 221–39. 75 Victor Larin, ‘Russia’s Eastern Border: Last Outpost of Europe or Base for Asian Experiment?’, Russian Expert Review 18, no. 4 (2006). 76 ‘EU Restrictive Measures in Response to the Crisis in Ukraine’, EU Council. Available at: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/sanctions/ukraine-crisis/ (accessed 15 April 2020). 77 ‘Treasury Sanctions Russia over Continued Aggression in Ukraine’, US Treasury Department, 15 March 2019. Available at: https://home.treasury.gov/news/pressreleases/sm629 (accessed 15 April 2020).

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78 Richard Connolly, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: Economic Statecraft and the Securitisation of Political Economy in Russia’, Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 4 (2016): 750–73. 79 Tatiana Romanova, ‘Sanctions and the Future of EU-Russian Economic Relations’, Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 4 (2016): 775. 80 Richard Sakwa, Russia against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 177. 81 ‘Energeticheskaya Strategiya Rossiyskoy Federatsii Na Period Do 2035 Goda’, Russian energy strategy until 2035, Russian Energy Ministry, 13 November 2009. Available at: https://minenergo.gov.ru/node/1026 (accessed 15 April 2020). 82 ‘Strategiya natsional’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii do 2020 goda’, Russian National Security Strategy until the year 2020, Kremlin, 13 May 2009. Available at: http://kremlin.ru/supplement/424 (accessed 15 April 2020). 83 ‘Kontseptsiya vneshney politiki Rossiyskoy Federatsii’ (2016 Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation), Russian Foreign Ministry, 30 November 2016. Available at: http://www.scrf.gov.ru/security/international/document25/ (accessed 24 November 2017), paragraph 78. 84 Michal Makocki and Nicu Popescu, ‘China and Russia: An Eastern Partnership in the Making? European Union Institute for Security Studies’, Chaillot Paper No. 140, December 2016. 85 Gaye Christoffersen, ‘Sino-Russian Accommodation and Adaptation in Eurasian Regional Order Formation’, Asian Perspective 42, no. 3 (2018): 439–62. 86 Gilbert Rozman, ‘The Russian Pivot to Asia’, The Asan Forum. November–December (2014). Available at: http://www.theasanforum.org/the-russian-pivot-to-asia/ (accessed 15 March 2018); Fiona Hill and Bobo Lo, ‘Putin’s Pivot: Why Russia Is Looking East’, Foreign Affairs, 31 July 2013. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs. com/articles/russian-federation/2013-07-31/putins-pivot (accessed 15 March 2018); Makocki and Popescu, China and Russia, 25. 87 Michal Makocki, ‘The Silk Road Goes North: Sino-Russian Economic Cooperation and Competition’, in China and Russia: Gaming the West? China Analysis, European Council on Foreign Relations, October 2016: 7; Alexander Gabuev, ‘Friends with Benefits? Russian-Chinese Relations after the Ukraine Crisis’, Moscow Carnegie Center, June 2016. 88 Connolly, The Empire Strikes Back. 89 Alexander Gabuev, Friends with Benefits?, 6; Marcin Kaczmarski and Witold Rodkiewicz, ‘Russia’s Greater Eurasia and China’s New Silk Road: Adaptation Instead of Competition’, OSW Commentary, Nr. 2019, 21 July 2016. 90 See the ‘Power of Siberia’ section on Gazprom’s website at: http://www.gazprom.com/ about/production/projects/pipelines/built/ykv/. 91 However, these talks had stalled prior to this announcement, and it is unclear whether the Altai pipeline will be built, not least because of growing competition with Central Asian gas supplies to Western China. 92 Marcin Kaczmarski, ‘The Asymmetric Partnership? Russia’s Turn to China’, International Politics 53, no. 3 (2016): 418. 93 Lo, Russia and the New World Disorder, 144. 94 Natasha Kuhrt, ‘Asia-Pacific and China’, in Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Tsygankov, 256. 95 Finbarr Bermingham, ‘China Funds Mega Yamal LNG Project‘, Global Trade Review, 4 May 2016. Available at: https://www.gtreview.com/news/europe/china-fundsmega-russian-lng-project/ (accessed 15 April 2020).

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96 On 15 March 2016, Yamal LNG and the Silk Road Fund agreed on a $1.1 billion deal. See ‘NOVATEK and China’s Silk Road Fund Conclude Selling 9.9% Stake in Yamal LNG’, Novatek Press Release, 15 March 2016. Available at: http://www.novatek.ru/en/ press/releases/index.php?id_4=1165 (accessed 15 April 2020). 97 Gabuev, Friends with Benefits, 20. 98 Paul J. Bolt and Sharyl N. Cross, China, Russia, and Twenty-First Century Global Geopolitics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 95. 99 The other two members were the National Transportation Engineering Design Institute of Moscow and the Nizhny Novgorod Metro Design AG. See Gabuev, Friends with Benefits, 22. 100 ‘Rosneft and Beijing Gas Close the Deal for Sale and Purchase of 20 Per Cent Shares in Verkhnechonskneftegaz’, Rosneft Press Release, 29 June 2017. Available at: https://www.rosneft.com/press/releases/item/187075/ (accessed 15 April 2020). 101 Stronski and Ng, Cooperation and Competition. Russia and China in Central Asia, the Russian Far East, and the Arctic, 4. 102 ‘RMB Clearing Bank in Russia Officially Launched’, ICBC News, 6 April 2017. Available at: https://www.icbc.com.cn/icbc/en/newsupdates/icbc%20news/ RMBClearingBankinRussiaOfficiallyLaunched.htm (accessed 15 April 2020). 103 Ibid., 20. 104 Maximilian Hess, ‘The Politics of Chinese Loans in Russia’, Riddle, 12 July 2019. Available at: https://www.ridl.io/en/the-politics-of-chinese-loans-in-russia/ (accessed 19 April 2020). 105 Gabuev, Friends with Benefits, 21. Western threats to exclude Russia from the SWIFT banking system have also led to speculations that Russia could launch an alternative payment system. Ksenia Yudaeva, first deputy of the governing board of the Russian Central Bank, refutes such views and argues that ‘Mir’ is simply a complementary system of communication which could also be extended to other EAEU members. Conversation with the author, Astana Finance Days, Astana, 3 July 2018. 106 Ibid., 17. 107 ‘U.S. Dollar’s Share Collapses in Payments for Russia-China Exports’, The Moscow Times, 26 July 2019. Available at: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/07/26/ us-dollars-share-collapses-in-payments-for-russia-china-exports-a66587 (accessed 8 June 2020). 108 Pavel K. Baev, ‘Russia’s Pivot to China Goes Astray: The Impact on the Asia-Pacific Security Architecture’, Contemporary Security Policy 37, no. 1 (2016): 100. 109 Bolt and Cross, China, Russia, and Twenty-First Century Global Geopolitics, 95. 110 Author’s interview with Russia’s plenipotentiary ambassador for the Asia-Pacific, Moscow, 31 August 2017. 111 Artyom Lukin and Rens Lee, ‘The Russian Far East and the Future of Asian Security’, Orbis 59, no. 2 (2015): 171. 112 Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road, 9. 113 Dmitri Trenin, ‘China, Russia Need Shared Vision for Eurasia’, Global Times, 3 July 2017. Available at: http://carnegie.ru/2017/07/03/china-russia-need-shared-visionfor-eurasia-pub-71441 (accessed 15 August 2018). 114 ‘Sovmestnoye zayavleniye Rossiyskoy Federatsii i Kitayskoy Narodnoy Respubliki o sotrudnichestve po sopryazheniyu stroitel’stva evraziyskogo ekonomicheskogo soyuza i ekonomicheskogo poyasa shelkovogo puti’, Kremlin, 8 May 2015. Available at: http://kremlin.ru/supplement/4971 (accessed 10 August 2018).

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115 Alexander Gabuev, ‘Crouching Bear, Hidden Dragon: “One Belt One Road” and Chinese-Russian Jostling for Power in Central Asia’, Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies 5, no. 2 (2016): 61–78. 116 Author’s interview with Zhao Mingwen, China Institute of International Studies, Beijing, 21 June 2018. 117 Kaczmarski, Non-Western Visions of Regionalism. 118 ‘Meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’, Kremlin, 25 May 2017. Available at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/54576 (accessed 10 May 2018). 119 Sergey Karaganov, ‘Eurasian Way Out of the European Crisis’, Russia in Global Affairs, 8 June 2015. Available at: http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/pubcol/Eurasian-WayOut-of-the-European-Crisis-17505 (accessed 30 June 2017). 120 Valdai Discussion Club, ‘Toward the Great Ocean 3: Creating Central Eurasia: The Silk Road Economic Belt and the Priorities of the Eurasian States’ Joint Development’, Valdai Discussion Club Report, June 2015. Available at: http://valdaiclub.com/a/reports/ toward_the_great_ocean_3_creating_central_eurasia/ (accessed 16 February 2019). 121 ‘Xi Jinping yu Eluosi zongtong Pujing juxing huitan dazao Daouya huobanguanxi’ (Xi Jinping conducted talks with the Russian President Putin on establishing relations of Greater Eurasian partnership), Ifeng, 27 June 2016. Available at: http://news.ifeng. com/a/20160627/49247845_0.shtml (accessed 2 August 2018). For an overview of Chinese views on a possible Sino-Russian condominium over Eurasia, see also Nadège Rolland, ‘A China-Russia Condominium over Eurasia’, Survival 61, no. 1 (2019): 7–22. 122 Li Xin, Liu Zongyi, Qian Zongqi and Wang Yuzhu, ‘Sichouzhilu jingjidai duijie Ouya jingji lianmeng gongjian Ouya gongtong jingji kongjian’ (The SREB Docking to the EAEU: Co-Creating a Common Eurasian Economic Area), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (SIIS), March 2016. 123 Ferguson, China’s Eurasian dilemmas, 162. 124 Lukin, China and Russia, 166. 125 Vladimir Putin, speech at the Belt and Road international forum, Kremlin, 14 May 2017. Available at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/54491 (accessed 10 August 2018). 126 2016 Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. 127 Author’s interview with Kazakhstani official, London, 28 February 2018. 128 Gabuev, Crouching Bear, Hidden Dragon. 129 Lewis, Geopolitical Imaginaries in Russian Foreign Policy, 18. 130 Ibid. 131 Xi, ‘Full Text of President Xi’s Speech at Opening of Belt and Road Forum’, Xinhua, 14 May 2017. Available at: http://www.xinhuanet.com//english/201705/14/c_136282982.htm (accessed 16 February 2019). 132 Dmitri Trenin, ‘From Greater Europe to Greater Eurasia? The Sino-Russian Entente’, Carnegie Moscow Center, April 2015, 18.

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This chapter is based on an article version previously published in International Politics (published online on 11 May 2020). That work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Available at: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The chapter has been modified and expanded. Rafis Abazov, The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 40–1.

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Ibid., 56–7. Christopher Robbins, In Search of Kazakhstan. The Land That Disappeared (London: Profile Books, 2008). 5 Otto Hoetzsch, Russland in Asien. Geschichte einer Expansion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt), 77. 6 Rico Isaacs, ‘Informal Politics and the Uncertain Context of Transition: Revisiting Early Stage Non-Democratic Development in Kazakhstan‘, Democratization 17, no. 1 (2010): 12–14. 7 ‘Baikonur Will Remain Leased to Russia Till At Least 2050’, Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 12 April 2019. Available at: https://www.kazpravda.kz/en/news/society/baikonurwill-remain-leased-to-russia-till–at-least-2050 (accessed 10 June 2020). 8 Jonathan Aitken, Kazakhstan: Surprises and Stereotypes after 20 Years of Independence (London, New York: Continuum, 2012), 146. 9 Yelena Zabortseva, Russia’s Relations with Kazakhstan: Rethinking Ex-Soviet Transitions in the Emerging World System (New York: Routledge, 2016); Mikhail Alexandrov, Uneasy Alliance: Relations between Russia and Kazakhstan in the PostSoviet Era, 1992–1997 (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 1999). 10 Reuel Hanks, ‘Multi-Vector Politics and Kazakhstan’s Emerging Role as a GeoStrategic Player in Central Asia’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 11, no. 3 (2009): 257–67. 11 Talk by Deputy Foreign Minister Roman Vassilenko, Konrad Adenauer Foundation conference, attended by the author, Astana, 6 July 2018. 12 In March 2019, Nazarbayev stepped down from the post of president and was followed by his political ally Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. As a tribute to Nazarbayev, the capital Astana was almost immediately renamed after him and is since called NurSultan. 13 Bulat Sultanov, ‘Kazakhstan and Eurasian Integration’, in Eurasian Integration – The View from Within, ed. Richard Sakwa and Dutkiewicz, Piotr (London: Routledge, 2015), 97–110; Golam Mostafa, ‘The Concept of “Eurasia”: Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Policy and Its Implications’, Journal of Eurasian Studies 4, no. 2 (2013): 160–70. 14 Lain, The Potential and Pitfalls of Connectivity along the Silk Road Economic Belt, 6. 15 Adil Kaukenov, ‘Der Strategiefaktor “Ein Gürtel, eine Straße” in der Politik Chinas gegenüber Kasachstan’, in Transformation der Wirtschaft Kasachstans, ed. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (Astana, 2017), 145. 16 Author’s interview with Kazakhstani diplomat, Moscow, 29 August 2017. 17 Kemal Kirişci and Philippe Le Corre, ‘The Great Game That Never Ends: China and Russia Fight over Kazakhstan’, Brookings Brief, 18 December 2015. 18 Author’s interview with Kazakhstani diplomat, Moscow, 29 August 2017. 19 Ibid. 20 Asian Development Bank, ‘Kazakhstan: Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation Corridors 1 and 6 Connector Road (Aktobe–Kandyagash) Reconstruction Project‘, Project 52286–001. Available at: https://www.adb.org/ projects/52286-001/main (accessed 16 April 2020). 21 Interview with Nurlan Igembaev, president of CILT Kazakhstan (Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport), Astana, 2 July 2018. 22 Holslag, The Silk Road Trap, 82. 23 Jochec and Kyzy, China’s BRI Investments, Risks, and Opportunities in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, 72. 24 Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road, 55.

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25 Author’s interview with Kazakhstani official, Kazakhstani embassy London, 28 February 2018. For the same reason, Kazakhstan had engaged with European initiatives like the Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia (TRACECA) launched in 1993 under the EU Tacis technical assistance programme for eastern Europe and Central Asia and turned into an intergovernmental commission in 1998. The objective of TRACECA had been to attract international funding for the improvement of the former Soviet transport infrastructure. 26 Aitken, Kazakhstan, 141. 27 This is done on the Kazakhstani side if the containers come from China, and in China if the containers come from Kazakhstan. 28 The actual shares of COSCO shipping lines in the dry port are 24.5 per cent since this is a combined 49 per cent stake with the Jiangsu Lianyungang Port Co. Author’s interview with Nurlan Toganbayev, director of Commercial Operations, Khorgos Gateway, Khorgos, 27 July 2018. 29 Author’s interview with Nurlan Toganbayev, director of Commercial Operations, Khorgos Gateway, Khorgos, 27 July 2018. 30 Ibid. 31 Lain, The Potential and Pitfalls of Connectivity along the Silk Road Economic Belt, 9; Kaukenov, Der Strategiefaktor “Ein Gürtel, eine Straße” in der Politik Chinas gegenüber Kasachstan, 140. 32 Wade Shepard, ‘Khorgos: Why Kazakhstan Is Building a “New Dubai” on the Chinese Border’, Forbes, 28 February 2016. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/ sites/wadeshepard/2016/02/28/will-a-place-called-khorgos-become-the-nextdubai/#6be6614f4b7e (accessed 16 April 2020). 33 See a list of investment projects with Chinese funding at: ‘55 kitajskih proektov: chto stroitsja v Kazahstane’, LS, 16 September 2019. Available at: https://lsm.kz/55kitajskih-proektov-chto-stroitsya-v-kazahstane (accessed 19 April 2020). Examples of projects with the highest investment volume are: an aluminium production plant in Pavlodar (Chinese partner funder/companies: Exim bank, China Nonferrous Metal Industry’s Foreign Engineering and Construction Co Ltd), a water power plant at the Tsharyn river (Chinese funder: CDB), a chemical complex in Karaganda oblast (China Kingho Energy Group, China Tianchen Engineering Corporation), an oil refinery in Atyrau (Exim bank, China National Chemical Engineering Co Ltd), an oil refinery in Shymkent (CPECC, a subsidiary of CNCP), a gas chemical plant in Aktobe (Exim bank, CITIC Construction Co Ltd and China New Era Group Corporation). Six new projects were added to the list in September 2019. See ‘Kakiye eshche predpriyatiya s kitayskim kapitalom otkroyutsya v Kazakhstane’, LS, 16 September 2019. Available at: https://lsm.kz/kakie-eshe-proizvodstva-s-kitaemhotyat-zapustit-v-kazahstane (accessed 19 April 2020). 34 Nargis Kassenova, ‘China’s Silk Road and Kazakhstan’s Bright Path: Linking Dreams of Prosperity’ in China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from along the Silk Road, Asia Policy 24, July, Roundtable (The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2017), 112. 35 Conversation with the author, Astana Finance Days, Astana, 4 July 2018. 36 Assel G. Bitabarova, ‘Unpacking Sino-Central Asian Engagement along the New Silk Road: A Case Study of Kazakhstan‘, Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 162. 37 Richard Rousseau, ‘Kazakhstan: Continuous Improvement or Stalemate in Its Relations with China?’ Strategic Analysis 37, no. 1 (2013): 44. 38 Heathershaw et al., Centred Discourse, Decentred Practice, 1450.

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39 John Tsang, Former Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, on ‘Infrastructure Investment as an Asset Class’, Astana Finance Days, Astana, 3 July 2018. 40 Reeves, China’s Silk Road Economic Belt Initiative, 506. 41 Kairat Kelimbetov, AIFC governor, Astana Finance Days, Astana, attended by the author, 3 July 2018. 42 Joanna Lillis, Dark Shadows. Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 172–4. 43 Bhavna Dave, ‘Silk Road Economic Belt: Effects of China’s Soft Power Diplomacy in Kazakhstan’, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Central Asia Program Report, 2018), 103. 44 Jones and Zeng, Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’. 45 Franck Billé, ‘Territorial Phantom Pains (and Other Cartographic Anxieties)‘, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2014): 163–78. 46 in: Lain, The Potential and Pitfalls of Connectivity along the Silk Road Economic Belt, 7. 47 Azad Garibov, ‘Contemporary Chinese Labor Migration and Its Public Perception in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan’, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia, ed. Marlene Laruelle (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Central Asia Program Report, 2018), 145. 48 Filippo Costa Buranelli, ‘One Belt, One Road and Central Asia: Challenges and Opportunities’, in The Belt and Road Initiative in the Global Arena. Chinese and European Perspectives, ed. Yu Cheng, Lilei Song and Lihe Huang (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 221–2. 49 Author’s interview with Azhar Serikkaliyeva, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, 26 June 2018. 50 Author’s interview with Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security studies at RUSI, London, 29 February 2018. 51 Oyuna Baldakova, ‘Protests along the BRI: China’s Prestige Project Meets Growing Resistance’, MERICS Blog – European Voices on China, 12 October 2019. Available at: https://www.merics.org/en/blog/protests-along-bri-chinas-prestige-project-meetsgrowing-resistance (accessed 19 April 2020). 52 Natalie Koch, ‘Kazakhstan’s Changing Geopolitics: The Resource Economy and Popular Attitudes about China’s Growing Regional Influence’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 54, no. 1 (2013): 127. 53 Kemel Toktomushev, ‘One Belt, One Road: A New Source of Rent for Ruling Elites in Central Asia?’, in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact in Central Asia, ed. Laruelle, Marlene (Washington, DC: The George Washington University, Central Asia Program Report, 2018), 77–85. 54 Toktomushev, One Belt, One Road: A New Source of Rent for Ruling Elites in Central Asia, 82–3. 55 Garibov, Contemporary Chinese Labor Migration and Its Public Perception in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, 150. 56 Konstantin Syroezhkin, ‘Social Perceptions of China and the Chinese: A View from Kazakhstan’, Journal of Eurasian Studies 7, no. 1 (2009): 29–46; Aziz Burkhanov and Yu-Wen Chen, ‘Kazakh Perspective on China, the Chinese, and Chinese Migration’, Ethnic and Racial Studies Review 39, no. 12 (2016): 2129–48; Sébastien Peyrouse, ‘Discussing China: Sinophilia and Sinophobia in Central Asia’, Journal of Eurasian Studies 7, no. 1 (2016): 14–23.

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57 Reid Standish and Aigerim Toleukhanova, ‘Kazakhs Won’t Be Silenced on China’s Internment Camps’, Foreign Policy, 4 March 2019. Available at: https://foreignpolicy. com/2019/03/04/961387-concentrationcamps-china-xinjiang-internment-kazakhmuslim/(accessed 19 April 2020). 58 Author’s interview with Kairat Moldashev, Narxoz University, Almaty, 29 June 2018. 59 Andrew Grant, ‘Crossing Khorgos: Soft Power, Security, and Suspect Loyalties at the Sino-Kazakh Boundary‘, Political Geography 76 (2020): 1–10. 60 Elzbieta Pron and Emilie Szwajnoch, ‘Kazakh Anti-Chinese Protests and the Issue of Xinjiang Detention Camps’, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 31 October 2019. Available at: https://www.cacianalyst.org/publications/analytical-articles/item/13593kazakh-antichinese-protests-and-the-issue-of-xinjiang-detention-camps.html (accessed 6 December 2019). 61 Duarte, China in the Heartland: The Challenges and Opportunities of OBOR for Central Asia, 18. 62 Wolczuk and Dragneva, The Eurasian Economic Union, 21–2. 63 ‘Agreement Signed on Trade and Economic Cooperation between EAEU and PRC’, Eurasian Economic Commission, 17 May 2018. Available at: http://www. eurasiancommission.org/en/nae/news/Pages/17-05-2018-5.aspx (accessed 29 June 2020). 64 ‘Ekonomicheskiy poyas Shelkovogo puti mozhet vygodno svyazat’ platformy SHOS, EAES i ES – Nazarbayev’ (Nazarbayev: ‘The Silk Road Economic Belt could benefit from linking the SCO, EAEU, and EU’), Interfax, 15 May 2017. Available at: https:// www.interfax.by/news/world/1224262 (accessed 15 April 2019). 65 Author’s interview with Kazakhstani official, Moscow, 29 August 2017. 66 Author’s interview with Russia’s plenipotentiary ambassador for the Asia-Pacific, Moscow, 31 August 2017. 67 Conversation with the author, Astana Finance Days, Astana, 4 July 2018. 68 Andrei Devyatkov, ‘The EAEU’s International Ties up to 2025’, in Special Issue, Working Paper: EAEU Development Prospects up to 2025 (Moscow: Russian International Affairs Council, 2018), 88. 69 Author’s interview with Kazakhstani diplomat, Moscow, 29 August 2017. 70 ‘Nazarbayev podverg kritike Rossiyu v svyazi s Tamozhennym soyuzom’ (Nazarbayev criticized Russian in connection with the Customs Union), Radio Azzatyq, 25 October 2013. Available at: https://rus.azattyq.org/a/custom-union-nazarbayevcriticized-putin/25147552.html (accessed 6 August 2018). 71 Ibid. 72 Franciso G. Carneiro, ‘What Promises Does the Eurasian Customs Union Hold for the Future?’, Economic Premise, No. 108, February (2013), World Bank. Available at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/17034 (accessed 14 July 2018). 73 Kassenova, Kazakhstan and Eurasian Economic Integration, 20; Elena Alekseenkova, ‘The EAEU by 2025: Priorities and Expectations of the Member States’, in Special Issue, Working Paper: EAEU Development Prospects up to 2025 (Moscow: Russian International Affairs Council), 18. 74 Vyacheslav Dodonov, ‘Die Aussichten und Risiken der Eurasischen Wirtschaftsunion’, in Transformation der Wirtschaft Kasachstans, ed. Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (Astana, 2017), 121. 75 Ibid., 120. 76 Author’s interview with Kazakhstani official, Moscow, 29 August 2017.

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77 ‘Vladimir Zhirinovskij: “Posle Ukrainy my zahvatim Kazahstan”’ (Vladimir Zhirinovsky: ‘After Ukraine, We Will Take Over Kazakhstan’), Haqqin, 29 August 2014. Available at: https://haqqin.az/news/29045 (accessed 5 September 2018). 78 Diana T. Kudaibergenova, ‘The Use and Abuse of Postcolonial Discourses in PostIndependent Kazakhstan’, Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 5 (2016): 917–35. 79 Marlene Laruelle, Dylan Royce and Serik Beyssembayev, ‘Untangling the Puzzle of “Russia’s Influence” in Kazakhstan’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 60, no. 2 (2019): 211–43. 80 Lillis, Dark Shadows, 189–90. 81 Reeves, China’s Silk Road Economic Belt Initiative, 508. 82 Author’s interview, London, 28 February 2018. 83 Lo, Russia and the New World Disorder, 265. 84 However, Kazakhstan also bought Chinese drones. See Makocki and Popescu, China and Russia, 22. 85 In an interview, a Kazakhstani official underlines that the CSTO remains the most important security provider in the region, but stresses that Kazakhstan ‘also has different venues like NATO or the US. We also have held joint military exercises with the UK’. Author’s interview, London, 28 February 2018. Through the Partnership for Peace programme, Kazakhstani officers have been sent for training in the United States, and Kazakhstan began to conduct exercises with the United States, China and India. 86 Duarte, China in the Heartland: The Challenges and Opportunities of OBOR for Central Asia, 15. 87 Reeves, China’s Silk Road Economic Belt Initiative, 508. 88 Author’s interview with Kazakhstani official, Kazakhstani embassy London, 28 February 2018. 89 Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but also Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, for example, have historically had simmering tensions over access to water and energy deliveries that have spilled over into other policy domains and complicated inter-state relations. 90 Alexander Diener, ‘Parsing Mobilities in Central Eurasia: Border Management and New Silk Roads’, Eurasian Geography and Economics 56, no. 4 (2015): 376–404. 91 Schiek, Bewegung auf der Seidenstraße. 92 Peterson, Eurasia’s Shifting Geopolitical Tectonic Plates, 140; Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw, Dictators without Borders. Power and Money in Central Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). 93 Cooley, New Silk Route of Developmental Cul-de-Sac?, 4. 94 Ibid., 5. 95 ‘Shavkat Mirziyeyev nazval prioritety vo vneshney politike Uzbekistana’ (Shavkat Mirziyoyev names priorities in Uzbekistan’s foreign policy), Tengri News, 9 September 2016. Available at: https://tengrinews.kz/sng/shavkat-mirzieev-nazvalprioritetyi-vneshney-politike-301901/ (accessed 20 January 2020). 96 Schiek, Bewegung auf der Seidenstraße, 23. 97 ‘New Leaders but Same Course for Kazakhstan as Top Cabinets Filled with Fresh New Politicians’, The Astana Times, 6 May 2020. Available at: https://astanatimes. com/2020/05/new-leaders-but-same-course-for-kazakhstan-as-top-cabinets-filledwith-fresh-new-politicians/ (accessed 22 May 2020). 98 Markey, China’s Western Horizon, 98–104.

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Chapter 5 This chapter is derived in parts from an article published in Eurasian Geography and Economics, available online at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/153872 16.2020.1836985. 2 Christopher Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road. A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 201. 3 For an account, see John Man, Marco Polo. The Journey That Changed the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2014). 4 Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 197–201. 5 Smith, Russia in Revolution, 303. 6 Sergey S. Radchenko, ‘The Soviets’ Best Friend in Asia: The Mongolian Dimension of the Sino-Soviet Split’, in Working Paper No. 42, November 2003 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars). 7 Robert A. Rupen, ‘Mongolia in the Sino-Soviet Dispute’, The China Quarterly 16 (1963): 75–85. 8 Eric Her, ‘The “Great Game”: Mongolia between Russia and China’, The Mongolian Journal of International Affairs 4 (1997): 66. 9 Jargalsaikhan Enkhsaikhan, ‘Converting a Political Goal to Reality: The First Steps to Materialize Mongolia’s Nuclear-Weapon Free Status’, The Mongolian Journal of International Affairs 17 (2012): 20. 10 Richard Pomfret, ‘Transition and Democracy in Mongolia’, Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 1 (2000): 150. 11 Lukin, China and Russia, 105. 12 Morris Rossabi, Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 13 Ibid., 36. 14 Alicia J. Campi, Mongolia’s Foreign Policy. Navigating a Changing World (Boulder, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2019), 86. 15 Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road, 92. 16 Campi, Mongolia’s Foreign Policy, 112–23. 17 Catherine Putz, ‘Mongolia’s Mega Coal Mine Deal Likely to Stall, Again’, The Diplomat, 11 September 2015. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2015/09/ mongolias-mega-coal-mine-deal-likely-to-stall-again/ (accessed 18 April 2020). 18 Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road, 92. 19 Ibid. 20 T. Baatar, ‘External Factors of Mongolian Economy’, Pax Mongolica 2, no. 4 (2016): 27. 21 T. Munkh-Orgil, ‘Mongolia’s Economic Security: How Can Economic Development Further Support Mongolian National Security through Developing Its Mining Sector’, Pax Mongolica 3, no. 8 (2017): 101. 22 National Security Concept of 2010, § 3.2.2. Available at: http://www.nsc.gov.mn/sites/ default/files/images/National%20Security%20Concept%20of%20Mongolia%20EN. pdf (19 June 2019). 23 Campi, Mongolia’s Foreign Policy, 168; 179. 24 J. Dambadarjaa, ‘Oyu Tolgoi: Was It a Mistake?’, DeFacto, 17 June 2019. Available at: http://jargaldefacto.com/article/oyu-tolgoi-was-it-a-mistake (accessed 29 June 2020). 25 Ibid., 160. 26 National Security Concept 2010. 1

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27 Author’s interview, Mongolian embassy, London, 22 May 2019. 28 Jeffrey Reeves, ‘Sino-Mongolian Relations and Mongolia’s Non-Traditional Security’, Central Asian Survey 32, no. 2 (2013): 175–88. 29 Author’s interview with Dr Dorj Shurkhuu, former director of the Institute of International Relations at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Division of Chinese Studies, Ulaanbaatar, 13 June. 30 Ibid.; a similar assessment was shared by a European ambassador in an author’s interview, Ulaanbaatar, 14 June 2019. 31 Mongolian ministry of education, culture, science and sports, ‘Towards Mongolia’s Long-Term Development Policy Vision 2050. Advancing Education Quality, Efficiency and Outcomes’, 2020, 78. Available at: http://documents1.worldbank. org/curated/en/801531597033753381/pdf/Towards-Mongolia-s-Long-TermDevelopment-Policy-Vision-2050-Advancing-Education-Equity-Efficiency-andOutcomes.pdf (accessed 10 February 2021). 32 Author’s interview at the International Think Tank for Landlocked Developing Countries, Ulaanbaatar, 14 June 2019. 33 Author’s interview with Dr. Batbayar Tsedendamba, Mongolian Foreign Affairs Ministry, Ulaanbaatar, 18 June 2019. 34 Author’s interview with Dr. Batbayar Tsedendamba, Mongolian Foreign Affairs Ministry, Ulaanbaatar, 18 June 2019. 35 Alicia J. Campi, ‘Transforming Mongolia-Russia-China Relations: The Dushanbe Trilateral Summit’, The Asia-Pacific Journal 12, no. 45 (2014): 1–7. 36 Ibid., 3. 37 Asian Development Bank, ‘Rail Infrastructure Tariffs. Enabling Private Sector Development in Mongolia’s Railway Sector’, Managing for Developments Results, 2014. Available at: https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/31216/railinfrastructure-tariffs-mongolia.pdf (accessed 18 April 2020). 38 ‘Russian Railways to Modernize Mongolian Rail System, Tap Transit Potential – Putin’, TASS, 2 September 2019. Available at: https://tass.com/economy/1075970 (accessed 19 December 2019). 39 Jeffrey Reeves, ‘Mongolia’s Place in China’s Periphery Diplomacy’, The Asan Forum, 7 April 2016, 3. 40 Campi, Mongolia’s Foreign Policy, 271. 41 Reeves, Mongolia’s Place in China’s Peripheral Diplomacy, 7. 42 ‘Xi Proposes to Build China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor’, Chinese Defense Ministry, 12 September 2014. Available at: http://eng.mod.gov.cn/ TopNews/2014-09/12/content_4536947.htm (accessed 15 November 2019). 43 ‘Mongolia Starts the “Prairie Road” Plan to Revitalize Economy’, Chinese Ministry of Commerce, 27 September 2014. Available at: http://www.mofcom.gov.cn/article/i/ jyjl/j/201409/20140900746042.shtml (accessed 15 November 2019). 44 ‘V Mongolii ochen’ khorosho otnosyatsya k Rossii’ (“Mongolia Is Treating Russia Very Well,” Aide to the Mongolian Prime Minister in an Interview), Kommersant, 15 May 2020. Available at: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4346954 (accessed 17 May 2020). 45 Campi, Mongolia’s Foreign Policy, 187. 46 ‘China Proposes Economic Corridor with Russia and Mongolia’, RT, 2 April 2015. Available at: https://www.rt.com/business/246281-china-russia-mongolia-corridor/ (accessed 14 November 2019). 47 While the Trans-Siberian railway connection from Moscow to Vladivostok was completed in 1916, the Trans-Mongolian railway from Erenhot at the Sino-

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Mongolian border to Ulan-Ude in Russia, east of Lake Baikal, was completed only in 1961. In 2015, the Mongolian Ministry for Transportation and RŽD agreed on projects to modernize the 1,100-km-long Transmongolian line, which includes electrification and possible construction of a second track. See ‘Ulaanbaatar Railway Modernisation Strategy’, Railway Gazette, 4 September 2014. Available at: https:// www.railwaygazette.com/infrastructure/ulaanbaatar-railway-modernisationstrategy/39937.article (accessed 2 February 2020). 48 ‘Groundbreaking Ceremony for the Russia-Mongolia-China Highway Held’, UB Post, 2 June 2015. Available at: http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=14782 (accessed 2 February 2020). 49 ‘Ulaanbaatar Railway Modernisation Strategy’, Railway Gazette. 50 ‘Vision and Actions‘ Document, NDRC. 51 ‘Xi Jinping Attends Second Meeting of Heads of State of China, Russia and Mongolia’, Chinese Foreign Ministry, 10 July 2015. Available at: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ mfa_eng/topics_665678/2015zt/xjpcxjzgjldrdqchwhshhzzzcygyslshdswchy/t1280848. shtml (accessed 2 February 2020). 52 National Development and Reform Commission, 2016. Available at: http://www. sdpc.gov.cn/xwzx/xwfb/201609/t20160913_818347.html (accessed 4 February 2020). 53 Author’s interview with Mongolian foreign ministry official, Ulaanbaatar, 21 June 2019. 54 Campi, Transforming Mongolia-Russia-China Relations, 5. 55 Reeves, Mongolia’s Place in China’s Periphery Diplomacy, 10. 56 This became possible after the Mongolian parliament had approved of the Law on Economic Zones in 2007. 57 Reeves, Mongolia’s Place in China’s Periphery Diplomacy, 8. 58 Author’s interview with Mongolian foreign ministry official, Ulaanbaatar, 21 June 2019. 59 Alicia J. Campi, ‘Mongolia and the Dilemmas of Deepening Eurasian Continentalism’, The Mongolian Journal of International Affairs 20 (2018): 3–25. 60 Michael Kohn, ‘Mongolia’s Central Bank Plans to Double Currency Swap with China’, Bloomberg Business, 29 March 2014. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2014-03-20/mongolia-s-central-bank-plans-to-double-currency-swap-withchina (accessed 2 February 2020). 61 See Trade Facilitation Agreement Database: https://www.tfadatabase.org/members/ china. 62 D. Ulambayar, ‘A New Paradigm in Mongolia’s “Third Neighbor” Diplomacy and Soft Balancing’, Pax Mongolica 3, no. 8 (2017): 27. 63 Author’s interview, Mongolian embassy, London, 22 May 2019. 64 Alicia J. Campi, ‘Mongolia and the Dilemmas of Deepening Eurasian Continentalism’, The Mongolian Journal of International Affairs 20 (2018): 9–10. 65 Sharad K. Soni, ‘The Geopolitical Dilemma of Small States in External Relations: Mongolia’s Tryst with “Immediate” and “Third” Neighbours’, The Mongolian Journal of International Affairs 20 (2018): 43. 66 Author’s interview with Prof. J.Bayasakh, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, 21 June 2019. 67 Author’s interview with Dambadarjaa Jargalsaikhan, deFacto institute, Ulaanbaatar, 18 June 2019. 68 Author’s interview with Dr. Batbayar Tsedendamba, Mongolian Foreign Affairs Ministry, Ulaanbaatar, 18 June 2019. 69 ‘Japan-Mongolia Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA)’, Japanese Foreign Ministry, 7 June 2016. Available at: https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/economy/fta/mongolia.html (accessed 18 April 2020).

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70 ‘Mongolia’s Elbegdorj Proposes Mini UN, Forum of Asia’, Nikkei Asian Review, 21 May 2015. Available at: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Mongolia-s-Elbegdorjproposes-mini-UN-Forum-of-Asia (accessed 18 April 2020). 71 Bolor Lkhaajav, ‘Mongolia’s Small-Country Diplomacy and North Korea’, The Diplomat, 28 September 2016. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2016/09/ mongolias-small-country-diplomacy-and-north-korea/ (accessed 20 July 2019). 72 Author’s interview with Ambassador Dr. J. Enkhsaikhan, Ulaanbaatar, 20 June 2019. 73 Jargalsaikhan Enkhsaikhan, ‘Prospects and Challenges for Establishing a NEANWFZ’, Pax Mongolica 2, no. 4 (2016): 23–4. 74 Munkh-Ochir Dorjjugder, ‘Same Rules, New Dimensions for Mongolia’s National Security: Adapting to the New Geo-Economic Environment’, Brookings, Op-ed, 20 October 2009. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/same-rules-newdimensions-for-mongolias-national-security-adapting-to-the-new-geo-economicenvironment/ (accessed 15 July 2019). 75 Mongolia withdrew all troops in September 2008. 76 Reeves, Mongolia’s Place in China’s Periphery Diplomacy, 7. 77 ‘China Slaps New Fees on Mongolian Exporters amid Dalai Lama Row’, Reuters, 1 December 2016. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chinamongolia/china-slaps-new-fees-on-mongolian-exporters-amid-dalai-lama-rowidUSKBN13Q3I7 (accessed 18 April 2019). 78 Griffiths, Revitalising the Silk Road, 95. 79 Author’s interview with Dr. Batbayar Tsedendamba, Mongolian Foreign Affairs Ministry, Ulaanbaatar, 18 June 2019. 80 Author’s interviews, Beijing, June 2018. 81 Reeves, Mongolia’s Place in China’s Periphery Diplomacy, 9. 82 Ibid., 14. 83 Ibid., 13. 84 Author’s interview with International Think Tank for Landlocked Developing Countries, Ulaanbaatar, 14 June 2019. 85 Author’s interview with Mongolian foreign ministry official, Ulaanbaatar, 21 June 2019. 86 Franck Billé, Sinophobia: Anxiety, Violence, and the Making of Mongolian Identity (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015). 87 Jeffrey Reeves, ‘Sino-Mongolia Relations’, in Chinese Foreign Relations with Weak Peripheral States. Asymmetrical Economic Power and Insecurity, ed. Jeffrey Reeves (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 188–204. 88 Uradyn E. Bulag, Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 89 Boldsaikhan Sambuu, ‘Mongolia Just Elected a Former Wrestler as Its President, after Its Most Divisive Election Ever’, Monkey Cage, The Washington Post, 13 July 2017. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/13/ mongolia-just-elected-a-former-wrestler-as-its-president-after-its-most-divisiveelection-ever/ (accessed 15 April 2019). 90 Connor Judge, ‘What Does the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor Mean for Mongolia?’, Belt and Road Blog, 30 September 2018. Available at: https://beltandroad. ventures/beltandroadblog/china-mongolia-russia-economic-corridor (accessed 15 April 2019). 91 Campi, Mongolia’s Foreign Policy, 200.

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92 Author’s interview with European ambassador, Ulaanbaatar, 14 June 2019. 93 Author’s interview with Dorj Shurkhuu, former director of the Institute of International Relations at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Division of Chinese Studies, Ulaanbaatar, 13 June 2019. 94 Michael Kohn, ‘Russia Stalls China’s $1 Billion Hydropower Loan for Mongolia’, Bloomberg Business, 11 July 2016. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2016-07-10/russia-stalls-china-s-1-billion-hydropower-loan-for-mongolia (accessed 19 March 2019). 95 Alicia J. Campi, ‘Mongolian Mega Construction Projects Push for Energy Security, Regional Connectivity’, Eurasia Daily Monitor 13, no. 23 (2016): 1–4. 96 National Security Concept, 2010, § 3.2.4.3. 97 Author’s interview with Dorj Shurkhuu, former director of the Institute of International Relations at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Division of Chinese Studies, Ulaanbaatar, 13 June 2019; author’s interview with Ambassador J. Gulgou, retired Mongolian diplomat, Ulaanbaatar, 19 June 2019. 98 ‘Groundbreaking Ceremony for Erdenet Thermal Power Plant Expansion Takes Place’, UB Post, 30 March 2016. Available at: http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=19031 (accessed 15 February 2020). 99 ‘Eg River Hydroelectric Power Plant Construction Approved’, UB Post, 19 November 2013. Available at: http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=6654 (accessed 15 February 2020). 99 ‘Eugene Simonov, China’s Silk Road Construction Stops Short of Harming Lake Baikal – Expert’, Russia beyond the Headlines, 20 May 2016. Available at: https:// www.rbth.com/opinion/2016/05/20/chinas-silk-road-construction-stops-short-ofharming-lake-baikal-expert_594785 (accessed 15 February 2020). 101 Alicia J. Campi, ‘New Sino-Mongolian Oil Deal Undercuts Russia’s Old Role’, China Brief 13, no. 10 (2013): 13–16. 102 Author’s interview, Mongolian embassy, London, 22 May 2019.

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4

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Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads, 55–62. S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightment. Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, ‘Systematic Conquest, 1865 to 1884’, in Central Asia. 130 Years of Russian Dominance, a Historical Overview, ed. Edward Allworth (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994), 131–50. Matthias Golbeck, Doppelter Aufbruch. Russlands Vordringen nach Turkestan und in neue Räume der Autobiografik (Bonn: Bibliothek der Rheinischen FriedrichWilhelms-Universität, unpublished manuscript), 23–57. For an introductory overview of Russia’s advent in Central Asia, see Christoph Baumer, The History of Central Asia. The Age of Decline and Revival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 138–44. Andreas Kappeler, Rußland als Vielvölkerreich. Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (München: C.H. Beck, 1992). Alexander Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868–1910. A Comparison with British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 151–71. For a critical re-reading of Russia’s conquest of Central Asia, see Alexander Morrison, ‘Introduction: Killing the

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Cotton Canard and Getting Rid of the Great Game: Rewriting the Russian Conquest of Central Asia, 1814–1895’, Central Asian Survey 33, no. 2 (2014): 131–42. 7 Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Aleksey Lobanov-Rostovsky, Russia and Asia (Ann Arbor: The George Wahr Publishing Company, 1951), 317. 8 David Lewis, ‘Tackling Corruption in Uzbekistan: A White Paper’, Open Society Eurasia Program, June 2016. Available at: https://www.opensocietyfoundations. org/uploads/ff271daf-1f43-449d-a6a2-d95031e1247a/tackling-corruptionuzbekistan-20160524.pdf (accessed 4 May 2020), 9–11. 9 Andrea Schmitz, ‘Uzbekistan’s Transformation. Strategies and Perspectives’, SWP Research Paper 12, September 2020. 10 ‘Doing Business 2016. Measuring Regulatory Quality and Efficiency’, Economy Profile 2016, Uzbekistan, World Bank. Available at: http://documents.worldbank.org/ curated/en/762451468197975673/pdf/100874-WP-Box393250B-PUBLIC-DB2016UZB.pdf (accessed 18 April 2020), 13. 11 ‘The Economist’s Country of the Year’, The Economist, 21 December 2019. Available at: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/12/21/which-nation-improved-themost-in-2019 (accessed 18 April 2020). 12 Dilip Hiro, Inside Central Asia. A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran (New York and London: Overlook Duckworth, 2009), 152. 13 Ruth Deyermond, ‘Matrioshka Hegemony? Multi-Levelled Hegemonic Competition and Security in Post-Soviet Central Asia’, Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 151–73. 14 Farkhod Tolipov, ‘CSTO: Collective Security or Collective Confusion?’, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 1 September 2009. Available at: http://www.cacianalyst.org/ publications/analytical-articles/item/11896-analytical (accessed 20 December 2019). 15 Craig Murray, Murder in Samarkand. A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror (Edinburg and London: Mainstream Publishing, 2007). 16 Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, ed., ‘Tsentral’naya Asiya: prostranstvo shelkovoy diplomatii: kitayskaya initsiativa “poyas i put’” (Central Asia: Space of ‘Silk diplomacy’. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative) (Almaty, FES, 2018), 24. 17 Farkhod Tolipov, ‘Will the U.S. And Uzbekistan Revisit Their Strategic Partnership’, The Central-Asia Caucasus Analyst, 27 March 2013. Available at: http://www. cacianalyst.org/publications/analytical-articles/item/12683-will-the-us-anduzbekistan-revisit-their-strategic-partnership.html (accessed 14 December 2019). 18 Allison, Virtual Regionalism, Regional Structures and Regime Security in Central Asia, 193. 19 Farkhod Tolipov, ‘Uzbekistan without the CSTO’, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 20 February 2013. Available at: https://www.cacianalyst.org/publications/analyticalarticles/item/12652-uzbekistan-without-the-csto.html (accessed 10 December 2019). 20 Vadim Romashov, ‘Uzbekistan’s Balancing Act: A Game of Chance for Independent External Policies’, in The Regional Security Puzzle around Afghanistan. Bordering Practices in Central Asia and Beyond, ed. Helena Rytövuori-Apunen (Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2016), 179. 21 Visit to Uzbekistan, Kremlin, 4 June 2012. Available at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/ president/transcripts/15548/photos (accessed 12 February 2020). 22 Romashov, Uzbekistan’s Balancing Act, 171.

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23 Ibid., 172. 24 Murat Laumulin, ‘Virtual Security of Central Asia’, Russia in Global Affairs, no. 3 (7 October 2012). 25 Aleksandr Pikalov, ‘Uzbekistan between the Great Powers: A Balancing Act or a Multi-Vectoral Approach?’, Central Asian Survey 33, no. 3 (2014): 297–311. 26 Bernardo Teles Fazendeiro, ‘Uzbekistan’s Defensive Self-Reliance: Karimov’s Foreign Policy Legacy’, International Affairs 93, no. 2 (2017): 412. 27 Ibid., 416. 28 Farkhod Tolipov, ‘Uzbekistan’s New Foreign Policy Concept: No Base, No Blocks but National Interests First’, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 9 May 2012. Available at: http://www.cacianalyst.org/publications/analytical-articles/item/12557-analyticalarticles (accessed 15 November 2019). 29 Dina Rome Spechler and Martin C. Spechler, ‘Uzbekistan among the Great Powers’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009): 364. 30 Ibid., 365. 31 Ivan Safranchuk, ‘Central Asian Regimes. Stability and Reform’, in Eurasia on the Edge. Managing Complexity, ed. Piotr Dutkiewicz, Richard Sakwa and Fyodor Lukyanov (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018), 183. 32 Cooley, New Silk Route of Developmental Cul-de-Sac?; Cooley and Heathershaw, Dictators without Borders. 33 Lena Jonson and Roy Allison, Central Asian Security: The New International Context (Washington: Brookings Institution Press/Chatham House, 2001), 8–9. 34 Frederick Starr, ‘Change and Continuity in Uzbekistan, 1991–2016’, in Uzbekistan’s New Face, ed. Frederick Starr and Svante E. Cornell (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 24. 35 Safranchuk, Central Asian Regimes, 190. 36 Schmitz, Uzbekistan’s Transformation. 37 ‘Shavkat Mirziyeyev nazval prioritety vo vneshney politike Uzbekistana’ (Shavkat Mirziyoyev Names Priorities in Uzbekistan’s Foreign Policy), Tengri News, 9 September 2016. Available at: https://tengrinews.kz/sng/shavkat-mirzieev-nazvalprioritetyi-vneshney-politike-301901/ (accessed 15 February 2020). 38 Frederick S. Starr and Svante E. Cornell, ‘Uzbekistan: A New Model for Reform in the Muslim World?’, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 12 May 2018: 10. 39 Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, ed., ‘Tsentral’naya Asiya, 26. 40 Yau Tsz Yan, ‘Chinese Business Briefing: Yuan Welcome, but Flights Cancelled‘, Eurasianet, 4 February 2020. Available at: https://www.eurasianet.org/chinesebusiness-briefing-yuan-welcome-but-flights-cancelled (accessed 8 August 2020). 41 ‘Zhongguo yu wuzibieke sitan qianshu gong jian “sichou zhi lu jingji dai” hezuo wenjian’ (‘China and Uzbekistan Signed a Cooperation Document for the Joint Construction of the “Silk Road Economic Belt”’), Ministry of Commerce, 17 June 2015. Available at: http://www.mofcom.gov.cn/article/ae/ai/201506/20150601014939. shtml (accessed 8 April 2020). 42 ‘Uzbekistan, China Sign Joint Declaration on Strategic Partnership’, Uzbekistan National News Agency, 6 June 2012. Available at: http://uza.uz/en/politics/uzbekistan-china-signjoint-declaration-on-strategic-partnership-06.06.2012-2769 (accessed 8 April 2020). 43 Kaczmarski, The Asymmetric Partnership, 424. 44 Eugene Gerden, ‘Chinese Developer Plans Uzbekistan Site’, Wind Power Monthly, 30 September 2019. Available at: https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1661021/ chinese-developer-plans-uzbekistan-site (accessed 9 April 2020).

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45 ‘Kitayskiy vektor uzbekskoy ekonomiki’ (The Chinese Vector in the Uzbek Economy), Review.uz, Analytics, 9 April 2020. Available at: https://review.uz/ru/post/ kitayskiy-vektor-uzbekskoy-ekonomiki (accessed 15 June 2020). 46 Umida Hashimova, ‘Uzbekistan Increasingly Turns to China for Development Loans’, Eurasia Daily Monitor 16, no. 118 (2020): 1–3. 47 ‘BRI Cooperation Boosts China-Uzbekistan Partnership’, Xinhua, 31 October 2019. Available at: http://www.china.org.cn/world/2019-10/31/content_75358846.htm (accessed 19 April 2020). 48 ‘Uzbekistan & China: Friends in a Time of Need’, Eurasianet, 23 June 2016. Available at: https://eurasianet.org/uzbekistan-china-friends-time-need (accessed 16 December 2019). 49 ‘Rossiya i Uzbekistan pomogut postroit’ zheleznuyu dorogu “Kitay-KyrgyzstanUzbekistan”’ (‘Russia and Uzbekistan Help to Build the “China-KyrgyzstanUzbekistan” Railway’), Ozodlik, 5 November 2019. Available at: https://rus.ozodlik. org/a/30252983.html (accessed 19 April 2020). 50 ‘Jíierjisi sitan zongtong: Quanli zhichi sichou zhi lu jingji dai jianshe’ (President of Kyrgyzstan: Full support for the construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt), 29 December 2014, State Council Information Office. Available at: http://www.scio.gov. cn/31773/35507/35510/35524/Document/1527562/1527562.htm (accessed 18 April 2020). 51 Eldor Aripov, ‘“Odin poyas, odin put”: megavozmozhnosti – megaproyekt’ (One Belt, One Road: Mega Opportunity – Mega Project), Narodnoye Slovo, Nr. 144, 16 June 2019. Available at: http://www.isrs.uz/ru/maqolalar/odin-poas-odin-putmegavozmoznosti-megaproekt (accessed 6 May 2020). 52 Author’s interview with Uzbek diplomat, Berlin, 5 February 2020. 53 Ibid. 54 ‘Uzbekistan razminiroval granitsy s Tadzhikistanom’ (Uzbekistan Demarcated Border with Tajikistan), Ozodlik, 4 January 2020. Available at: https://rus.ozodlik. org/a/30360271.html (accessed 19 April 2020). 55 Cooley, New Silk Route of Developmental Cul-de-Sac?, 6. 56 Lain, The Potential and Pitfalls of Connectivity along the Silk Road Economic Belt, 8. 57 Zhiqun Zhu, China’s New Diplomacy. Rationale, Strategies and Significance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 136. 58 Reeves, China’s Silk Road Economic Belt Initiative, 515. 59 Nurlan Aliyev, ‘China’s Soft Power in Central Asia’, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 19 December 2019. Available at: https://www.cacianalyst.org/publications/ analytical-articles/item/13599-chinas-soft-power-in-central-asia.html (accessed 11 June 2020). 60 Millward, The Silk Road, 29. 61 Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, ed., Tsentral’naya Asiya, 31. 62 ‘Full Text of China’s Arab Policy Paper’, The State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 13 January 2016. Available at: http://english.www.gov.cn/archive/ publications/2016/01/13/content_281475271412746.htm (accessed 15 June 2020). 63 Qian Xuming and Jonathan Fulton, ‘China-Gulf Economic Relationship under the “Belt and Road” Initiative’, Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies 11, no. 3 (2017): 12–21. 64 ‘Zhongguo-hasake sitan-tukuman sitan-yilang di yi lie huoche shi yunxing’ (ChinaKazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran First Train Trial Operation), Chinese embassy Turkmenistan, 15 February 2016. Available at: http://tm.mofcom.gov.cn/article/ jmxw/201602/20160201255557.shtml (accessed 15 April 2020).

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65 Bakhtiyor Mustafaeva, Center for Regional Studies (Tashkent), presentation at the Uzbek embassy, attended by the author, Berlin, 25 February 2020. 66 Brown, China’s World, 190. 67 Naarajärvi, China, Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, 122. 68 Matteo Fumagalli, ‘Alignments and Realignments in Central Asia: The Rationale and Implications of Uzbekistan’s Rapprochement with Russia’, International Political Science Review/Revue Internationale de Science Politique, June (2007), 255. 69 Russian Foreign Ministry, Briefing by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova, Moscow, 14 May 2020. Available at: https://www.mid.ru/en/web/guest/ foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4122532#15 (accessed 19 May 2020). 70 Hiro, Inside Central Asia, 185. 71 Olzhas Auyezov and Polina Nikolskaya, ‘Russia and Uzbekistan Launch Work on Nuclear Power Plant’, Reuters, 19 October 2018. Available at: https://www.reuters. com/article/uk-uzbekistan-russia-putin-nuclear/russia-and-uzbekistan-launchwork-on-nuclear-power-plant-idUKKCN1MT1PT (accessed 19 December 2019). 72 ‘Russia to Develop Two Large HPPs in Uzbekistan’, Vostock Capital, 14 December 2018. Available at: https://www.vostockcapital.com/en/hydropower/russia-todevelop-two-large-hpps-in-uzbekistan/ (accessed 19 December 2019). 73 ‘Dmitry Medvedev’s Visit to the Republic of Uzbekistan’, Transcript, 30 May 2019, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. Available at: http://government.ru/en/ news/36864/ (accessed 19 December 2019). 74 ‘$27 Billion Trade, Investment Deal at First Uzbek-Russian Inter-Regional Forum’, 19 October 2018, Efe.com. Available at: https://www.efe.com/efe/english/ business/27-billion-trade-investment-deal-at-first-uzbek-russian-inter-regionalforum/50000265-3785617# (accessed 17 March 2020). 75 Evgeniy Abdullaev, ‘Labour Migration in the Republic of Uzbekistan: Social, Legal and Gender Aspects’, 2008. Available at: http://www.gender.cawater-info.net/ publications/pdf/labour-migration-uzbekistan-en.pdf (accessed 8 August 2020); ‘Uzbekistan prodolzhayet lidirovat’ po kolichestvu migrantov v Rossii’ (Uzbekistan continues to lead in terms of the number of migrants in Russia), Eurasia Daily, 14 November 2018. Available at: https://eadaily.com/ru/news/2018/11/14/uzbekistanprodolzhaet-lidirovat-po-kolichestvu-migrantov-v-rossii. (accessed 18 March 2020). 76 Author’s interview with Uzbek diplomat, Berlin, 5 February 2020. 77 Klein, Russia’s Military Policy in the Post-Soviet Space, 28. 78 Fozil Mahsrab, ‘Uzbekistan Turns to Russia in Search of Modern Weapons’, Eurasia Daily Monitor 14, no. 19, 15 February 2019. 79 Stefan Hedlund, ‘Uzbekistan Emerging from Isolation’, Geopolitical Intelligence Services, 15 February 2019. Available at: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/ uzbekistan-emerging-from-isolation,politics,2801.html (accessed 20 February 2020). 80 Klein, Russia’s Military Policy in the Post-Soviet Space, 36. 81 Bakhtiyor Mustfaeva, Center for Regional Studies (Tashkent), presentation at the Uzbek embassy, attended by the author, Berlin, 25 February 2020. 82 Author’s conversation with Umid Abidhadjaev, Center for Economic Research and Reform, Berlin, 25 February 2020. 83 ‘Safoyev: O’zbekiston bugun Markaziy Osiyo nomidan gapiradi’ (Safoyev: Uzbekistan speaks on behalf of Central Asia), VOA, 25 October 2019. Available at: https://www. amerikaovozi.com/a/5138311.html (accessed 15 March 2020). 84 Author’s interview with Uzbek diplomat, Berlin, 5 February 2020.

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85 Farkhod Tolipov, ‘History Repeats Itself: Uzbekistan’s New Eurasian Gamble’, The Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, 22 November 2019. Available at: https://www. cacianalyst.org/publications/analytical-articles/item/13596-history-repeats-itselfuzbekistans-new-eurasian-gamble.html (accessed 8 December 2019). 86 Sam Bhutia, ‘Can Uzbekistan Gain from EAEU Membership?’, Eurasianet, 10 January 2020. Available at: https://eurasianet.org/can-uzbekistan-gain-from-eaeumembership (accessed 19 May 2020). 87 Author’s conversation, Berlin, 25 February 2020. 88 Umida Hashimova, ‘Uzbekistan Temporarily Chooses Observer Status Instead of Full Membership in Eurasian Union’, Eurasia Daily Monitor 17, no. 37, 23 March 2020. Available at: https://jamestown.org/program/uzbekistan-temporarily-choosesobserver-status-instead-of-full-membership-in-eurasian-union/ (accessed 19 May 2020). 89 ‘Press Statement Following Russian-Uzbek Talks’, Kremlin, 10 December 2014. Available at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/47216 (accessed 7 April 2020). 90 ‘Postanovlenie Prezidenta Respubliki Uzbekistan. Kontseptsiya kompleksnogo sotsial’no-ekonomicheskogo razvitiya Respubliki Uzbekistan do 2030 goda’ (Decree of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan. Concept of Social and Economic Development of the Republic of Uzbekistan until the year 2030). Available at: https:// regulation.gov.uz/ru/document/8839 (accessed 19 May 2020). 91 Author’s interview with Uzbek diplomat, Berlin, 5 February 2020. 92 Starr and Cornell, Uzbekistan, 10. 93 Ibid., 13. 94 Dina Esfandiary and Ariane Tabatabai, Triple Axis. Iran’s Relations with Russia and China (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). 95 ‘Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Remarks and an Answer to a Media Question at a News Conference Following a Meeting of the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers’, Astana, 21 April 2017, Russian Foreign Ministry. Available at: http://www.mid.ru/ ru/sanhajskaa-organizacia-sotrudnicestva-sos-/-/asset_publisher/0vP3hQoCPRg5/ content/id/2734712?p_p_id=101_INSTANCE_0vP3hQoCPRg5&_101_ INSTANCE_0vP3hQoCPRg5_languageId=en_GB (accessed 19 July 2019). 96 Mohsen Shariatinia and Hamidreza Azizi, ‘Iran and the Belt and Road Initiative: Amid Hope and Fear’, Journal of Contemporary China 28, no. 120 (2019): 984–94.

Chapter 7 1

Frederick S. Starr and Andrew Kuchins, eds., ‘The Key to Success in Afghanistan: A Modern Silk Road Strategy’, in Silk Road Papers (Washington, DC: Central AsiaCaucasus Institute, 2010). 2 Another motivation was a closer regional integration of Afghanistan as a way to stabilize the country and pivoting towards India and Pakistan. 3 Cooley, New Silk Route of Developmental Cul-de-Sac?, 2. 4 Frankopan, The New Silk Roads. 5 Bob Woodward, Fear. Trump in the White House (London: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 196; Peter Marton, ‘Is Afghanistan in the Way or on the Way of the New Silk Road?’, in The Belt and Road Initiative in the Global Arena. Chinese and European

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Perspectives, ed. Yu Cheng, Lilei Song and Lihe Huang (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 238. 6 Markey, China’s Western Horizon, 9. 7 Felix Heiduk and Gudrun Wacker, ‘Vom Asien-Pazifik zum Indo-Pazifik. Bedeutung, Umsetzung und Herausforderung’, SWP Research Paper 9, May 2020. 8 Peter Navarro, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon – A Global Call for Action (New Jersey: Upper Saddle River, 2011). 9 Joseph R. Biden, ‘Why America Must Lead Again’, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2020. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-01-23/whyamerica-must-lead-again (accessed 12 November 2020). 10 Amrita Narlikar, ‘Introduction. Negotiating the Rise of New Powers’, International Affairs 89, no. 3 (2013): 563. 11 Khanna, The Future Is Asian, 11. 12 Mayer, China’s Rise as a Eurasian Power, 27. 13 Nadine Godehardt, ‘Wie China Weltpolitik formt. Die Logik von Pekings Außenpolitik unter Xi Jinping’, SWP Research Paper, 19, Oktober 2020. 14 Callahan, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the New Eurasian Order, 2. 15 Rolland, China’s Vision for a New World Order, 14. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Marcin Kaczmarski, ‘Convergence or Divergence? Visions of World Order and the Russian-Chinese Relationship’, European Politics and Society 20, no. 2 (2018): 207–24. 18 ‘Sovmestnoye zayavleniye Rossiyskoy Federatsii i Kitayskoy Narodnoy Respubliki’, Kremlin, 24 April 2010. Available at: http://kremlin.ru/supplement/531 (accessed 6 April 2020). 19 ‘Declaration of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the Promotion of International Law’, Russian Foreign Ministry, 25 June 2016. Available at: http://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/ content/id/2331698 (accessed 18 April 2020). 20 Gilbert Rozman, The Sino-Russian Challenge to World Order: National Identities, Bilateral Relations and East versus West in the 2010s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 21 John W. Garver, China’s Quest: A History of the Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 540. 22 Elizabeth Wishnick, ‘In Search of the “Other” in Asia: Russia–China Relations Revisited’, Pacific Review, 7 July (2016): 114–32. 23 National Security Strategy of the United States of America. December 2017, White House. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSSFinal-12-18-2017-0905.pdf (accessed 18 September 2018), 25. 24 Summary of the 2018 National Defence Strategy of the USA: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2017), 1. 25 Gerard Toal, Near Abroad. Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 26 Andrew Monaghan, The New Politics of Russia. Interpreting Change (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016), x. 27 ‘Statement by Sergey Lavrov’, Munich Security Conference, 18 February 2017. Available at: https://securityconference.org/en/medialibrary/asset/statement-bysergey-lavrov-1300-18-02-2017/ (accessed 20 April 2019). 28 Chatterje-Doody, Competition for Co-Operation: Roles and Realities in Russia’s ‘Multivector’ Foreign Policy.

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29 Angela Stent, ‘Russia and China: Axis of Revisionists?’, Brookings Report, February 2020. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/research/russia-and-china-axis-ofrevisionists/ (accessed 8 June 2020). 30 Makocki and Popescu, China and Russia, 11. 31 Fu, How China Sees Russia. 32 Lo, Axis of Convenience, 54; James Bellacqua, The Future of China-Russia Relations (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2009); Niklas Swanström, ‘SinoRussian Relations at the Start of the New Millenium in Central Asia and Beyond’, Journal of Contemporary China 23, no. 87 (2014): 480–97; Arkady Moshes and Matti Nojonen, Matti, eds., Russia-China Relations: Current State, Alternative Futures, and Implications for the West (Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Relations, 2011). 33 Xiang Yijun and Zhang Jinping, ‘Zhong e quyu jingji hezuo zhanlve duijie de zhangai yu chongtu’ (The Obstacles and Conflicts in Merging Sino-Russian Regional Economic Strategy), Zhongguo Jingmao 1 (2016): 33–8. 34 ‘Territorial Integrity of Ukraine: Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly’, United Nations Digital Library, Voting Data, Resolution A/RES/68/262. Available at: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/767565?ln=en (accessed 8 June 2020); ‘Security Council Fails to Adopt Resolution on Tribunal for Malaysia Airlines Crash in Ukraine, Amid Calls for Accountability, Justice for Victims’, United Nations Meetings Coverage, 7498th Meeting, 29 July 2015, SC/11990. Available at: https://www.un.org/ press/en/2015/sc11990.doc.htm (accessed 8 June 2020). 35 ‘Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Qin Gang’s Remarks on Russia’s Recognition of the Independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia’, Permanent Mission of the PRC to the UN, 27 August 2008. Available at: http://www.china-un.org/eng/fyrth/t509344.htm (accessed 15 September 2018). 36 Zhiqun Zhu, ‘Interpreting China’s “Wolf-Warrior Diplomacy”’, The Diplomat, 15 March 2020. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/interpreting-chinas-wolfwarrior-diplomacy/ (accessed 3 January 2021); Godehardt, Wie China Weltpolitik formt. 37 Author’s interview with Xing Guangcheng, Beijing, 15 June 2018. 38 Yan Xuetong, Inertia of History: China and the World in the Next Ten Years (Beijing: China CITIC Press, 2013). 39 Author’s interview, Beijing, 21 June 2018. 40 Lukin, China and Russia, 53–4. 41 Heinrich August Winkler, Zerbricht der Westen? Über die gegenwärtige Krise in Europa und Amerika (München: C.H. Beck, 2017). 42 Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakaria, the End of the Liberal Order? Transcript from ‘Is This the End of the Liberal International Order?’, Niall Ferguson versus Fareed Zakaria, moderated by Rudyard Griffiths, The Munk Debates (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017); Dani Rodrik, The Globalisation Paradox. Why Markets, States, and Democray Can’t Co-exist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 43 Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, ‘The New European Disorder’, Essay, 20 November 2014. European Council on Foreign Relations. 44 Rolland, China’s Eurasian Century, 149. 45 Robert D. Kaplan, The Return of Marco Polo’s World. War, Strategy and American Interests in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Penguin, 2018), 7. 46 Teresa Coratella, ‘The Dangers of Crisis Diplomacy: Italy, China, and Russia’, European Council on Foreign Relations, Commentary, 17 April 2020. Available

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at: https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_the_dangers_of_crisis_diplomacy_italy_ china_and_russia/ (accessed 11 November 2020). 47 ‘Chinese FM Hosts C+C5 Foreign Ministers Video Meeting’, Xinhua, 16 July 2020. Available at: www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-07/16/c_139218224.htm (accessed 31 August 2020). 48 Alexander Gabuev, ‘The Pandemic Could Tighten China’s Grip on Eurasia’, Foreign Policy, 23 April 2020. Available at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/23/ coronavirus-pandemic-china-eurasia-russia-influence/ (accessed 5 May 2020). 49 ‘Russian Defence Minister Chairs Joint Meeting of SCO, CIS and CSTO Defence Ministers in the Moscow Region’, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 7 September 2020. Available at: https://eng.sco-russia2020.ru/news/20200907/710791/RussianDefence-Minister-chairs-joint-meeting-of-SCO-CIS-and-CSTO-defence-ministersin-the-Moscow.html (accessed 13 February 2021). 50 On Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of this term, see Milan Babic, ‘Let’s Talk about the Interregnum: Gramsci and the Crisis of the Liberal World Order’, International Affairs, published online 21 January 2020. 51 Richard Griffiths, The New Silk Road. Challenge and Response (Leiden: HIPE Publications, 2019), 39. 52 Author’s interview with Uzbek diplomat, Berlin, 5 February 2020. 53 Callahan, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the New Eurasian Order, 4; see also Richard Ghiasy and Jiayi Zhou, ‘The Silk Road Economic Belt: Considering Security Implications and EU-China Cooperation Prospects’, SIPRI, no. 51 (2017). 54 Author’s interview at EU delegation to China, Beijing, 13 June 2018. 55 Holslag, The Silk Road Trap, 58. 56 ‘China – Partner and Systemic Competitor. How Do We Deal with China’s StateControlled Economy?’, Federation of German Industries, BDI Paper, January 2019. Available at: https://english.bdi.eu/media/publications/#/publication/news/chinapartner-and-systemic-competitor (accessed 15 April 2019). 57 ‘China’s New “Silk Road” Cannot Be One-Way, France’s Macron Says’, Reuters, 8 January 2018. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-france/ chinas-new-silk-road-cannot-be-one-way-frances-macron-says-idUSKBN1EX0FU (accessed 17 April 2020). 58 Suffice to recall that before Greece, Italy and Portugal signed MoUs, China and 16 European governments had already created the 16+1 format as a platform for cooperation back in 2012. 59 ‘EU Nations Breaking Rules in Bilateral Trade Deals with China’, Euractiv, 10 September 2020. Available at: https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/ eu-nations-in-bilateral-trade-deals-with-china/ (accessed 18 September 2020). 60 Holslag, The Silk Road Trap, 124. 61 Ian Bond, ‘The EU, the Eurasian Economic Union and One Belt, One Road. Can They Work Together?’, Centre for European Reform, March 2017, 8. 62 ‘Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions and the European Investment Bank, Connecting Europe and Asia – Building Blocks for an EU Strategy’, Brussels, 19 September 2019. Available at: https://eeas.europa.eu/sites/eeas/files/ joint_communication_-_connecting_europe_and_asia_-_building_blocks_for_an_ eu_strategy_2018-09-19.pdf (accessed 10 April 2020). 63 ‘Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the European Council and the Council: EU-China – A Strategic Outlook’, EU Commission, High Representative

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of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, 12 March 2019. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/sites/beta-political/files/communication-eu-chinaa-strategic-outlook.pdf (accessed 15 April 2019). 64 ‘The Road Less Travelled: European Involvement in China’s Belt and Road Initiative‘, European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, January 2020. Available at: https://www.europeanchamber.com.cn/en/publications-archive/762/The_Road_ Less_Travelled_European_Involvement_in_China_s_Belt_and_Road_Initiative (accessed 18 February 2020), 3. 65 ‘EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment’, EU Commission, Factsheet, 30 December 2020. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/ en/FS_20_2544 (accessed 31 December 2020). 66 Ronald L. Tammen and Jacek Kugler, ‘Power Transition and China-US Conflicts’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics 1, no. 1 (2006): 35–55. 67 For readings of a Chinese ‘revisionist’ foreign policy before the advent of the BRI, see Gregory Chin and Ramesh Thakur, ‘Will China Change the Rules of Global Order?’, The Washington Quarterly 33 (2010): 119–38; Aaron L. Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Jonathan Holslag, Trapped Giants. China’s Troubled Military Rise (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). 68 Hameiri, Jones and Heathershaw, Reframing the Rising Powers Debate. See also Jeremy Garlick’s analysis of the regional impact of the BRI that uses a theoretical framework drawing on ‘complex eclecticism’. Jeremy Garlick, The Impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. From Asia to Europe (London: Routledge, 2019). 69 I thank Hanns W. Maull for sharing this observation in a conversation with the author. 70 Kevin Rudd, ‘The Coming Post-COVID Anarchy’, Foreign Affairs, 6 May 2020. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-05-06/ coming-post-covid-anarchy (accessed 28 May 2020). 71 Amitav Acharya, The End of the American World Order (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 9. 72 Ibid., 105. 73 Flockhardt, ‘The Coming Multi-Order World’, 3. 74 Ibid., 24. 75 Khanna, The Future Is Asian, 13. 76 Yu, ‘Motivation behind China’s “One Belt, One Road” Initiatives and Establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’, 357.

Epilogue 1 Frankopan, The Silk Roads. 2 James Brookes, ‘Russia’s Choice: Power Balancer or China’s Canada?’, Voice of America, 10 August 2013. Available at: https://blogs.voanews.com/russiawatch/2013/08/10/russias-choice-power-balancer-or-chinas-canada/ (accessed 10 April 2020). 3 The financial geography literature has also highlighted the role of financial actors (such as law firms, financial regulators, offshore centers) and capital markets which

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interact in regional and global networks and explain ‘locational advantages‘ beyond the purview of central states. See Karen P.Y. Lai, Shaun Lin and James D. Sidaway, ‘Financing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): Research Agendas beyond the “DebtTrap“ Discourse‘, Eurasian Geography and Economics 61, no. 2 (2020): 109–24. 4 Shambaugh, China Goes Global, 13–44. 5 Khanna, The Future Is Asian, 19. 6 Moritz Pieper, Hegemony and Resistance around the Iranian Nuclear Programme: Analyzing Chinese, Russian and Turkish Foreign Policies (London: Routledge, 2017). 7 See also the findings from a similar study with a case study selection of East and Southeast Asian actors: Mischa Hansel, Sebastian Harnisch and Nadine Godehardt, Chinesische Seidenstraßeninitiative und amerikanische Gewichtsverlagerung. Reaktionen aus Asien (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2018), 313–28.

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Index Afghanistan 15, 30, 40, 53, 81, 82, 84, 91 AktobeMunayGas 47 Alibaba 100 Amu Darya 8 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation 13, 34–5 Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank 17, 63, 70, 83 Azerbaijan 32, 45, 91, 98 Bactria See Kushans Bat-Erdene, Dashdemberal 68 Battulga, Khaltmaagiin 62, 67, 70 Belt and Road Initiative 2017 international forum 39 becoming part of constitution 21 China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor 6, 76, 83 China-Mongolia-Russia economic corridor (see Mongolia) China-Pakistan economic corridor 10, 12, 19 as Chinese Marshall Plan 20 Chongqing-Duisburg line 11, 114 n. 31 community of shared destiny narrative 20, 93, 99 continental railway lines 11 diffusion of standards 12, 21, 100 digital Silk Road 12 health Silk Road 2 iron Silk Road 12, 45 Maritime Silk Road 10, 11, 37 Moscow-Kazan highspeed line 36 New Eurasian Land Bridge 6, 10, 51 Power Silk Road 12 Silk Road Fund 11, 17, 48 Biden, Joe 92 BRICS 2014 summit in Fortaleza 17 2015 summit in Ufa 17, 65 New Development Bank 17 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 25

Central Asia advent of Islam in 75 Chaghatai khanate in 59 as chessboard 3, 4, 25 gas pipeline to China 46, 80 Great Game metaphor 4, 44, 45 hydrocarbon sector of 26, 47 investment gap in 98 regional energy exploration in 25–6 regionalization in 31, 79 security governance in 29, 30, 53, 77, 91, 106 Soviet history of 5, 25, 43, 53, 85 as transit zone between China and the Middle East 81 ‘virgin lands’ campaign in 53 water disputes in 50, 54 China 17+1 platform 13 1919 May Fourth movement 27 2014 Boao Forum 38, 118 n. 110 accession to International Road Transports (TIR) Convention 46 Alashankou Pass 16 Arab policy paper of 83 ASEAN plus 13 and the ‘century of humiliation’ 26, 93 China-ASEAN Interbank Association 17 China Dream 21, 101 communist revolution in 27 concessional loans of 17–18, 48, 49 Confucius Institutes 53, 82 cultural diplomacy 53, 69, 82 debt sustainability 19, 23 discursive power of 20–2 Great Western Development Campaign (see Zemin, Jiang) guanxi 49 Haijin edict in 9 Han Dynasty in 7 industrial overcapacity in 14, 17

Index Inner Mongolia as province of 19, 65, 70, 71 Kashgar 16 Ming dynasty 8–9 Ministry of Commerce of 10, 26 minzu 15–16 National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) 10, 26, 47, 113 n. 21 as normative power 20–2, 93 ‘opening to the West’ 12 outward direct investment of 18, 51, 52, 99 People’s Liberation Army of 53 peripheral diplomacy of 16, 63, 67 policy banks of 11, 18–19, 36, 45–6, 70–1, 81, 127 n. 32 ports of Guangzhou and Qingdao 15 port of Lianyungang 47, 127 n. 27 presence in the Middle East 83–84 and private security companies 30 ‘Remake the West’ campaign 16 renminbi internationalization 17, 36, 48, 66 Shanghai Stock Exchange 17, 48 State Council of 28, 113 n. 21 Taiwan and 18, 96 Tang dynasty 8 Taxkorgan airport construction 15 Tibet and 18, 22, 96 Transportation Association 11 Urumqi 15–16, 50, 84, 116 n. 72 Uyghurs 8, 15–16, 18 WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement and 66 Wu Tong 10 Xinhai revolution 59 Xinjiang 13, 14–16, 22, 25–7, 30, 50, 96 Yuezhi 7 Zheng He 8 Clinton, Hillary 33, 91 CNOOC 28 CNPC 28, 35–6, 47 Collective Security Treaty Organization Kazakhstan and 53, 130 n. 84 Mongolia and 68 Rapid Reaction Force of 29, 53, 77 Russian influence within 29–31, 53, 98 103 Uzbekistan and 76–8, 88

161

connectivity 2–3, 10–12, 15, 17, 20, 23, 41, 46, 54, 56, 63, 64, 72, 83, 93, 99, 105, 107–09, 110 n. 10, 115 n. 48 COSCO 46, 127 n. 27 Covid-19 pandemic 2, 98, 102 critical geopolitics 3 de-dollarization See China, See under renminbi internationalization digitalization 12, 21 dollar hegemony 17 Dubai 47 Dugin, Alexander 33 Dvorkovich, Arkady 36 E-commerce See digitalization East Turkestan independence movement 15 El’tsin, Boris 27, 94 Elbegdorj, Tsahiagiin 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69 Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) critique of politicization of 32, 52, 56 ‘docking’ with SREB 38, 56, 72 Eurasian Economic Community as precursor 31, 79 Free Trade Area proposal with Chin 39 tariff policies and 31–3, 50–2, 55, 86 working group with China 40, 51, 56 Eurasian order global interregnum and 98–102 as Sinocentric 2, 56, 63, 93, 100 spatiality and 6, 13 European Union (EU) 2018 Central Asia Concept of 99 2020 Chamber of Commerce BRI report 100 Central Asia strategy of 44 connectivity platform with China 99 Commission labelling China ‘systemic rival’ 100 Eastern Partnership Programme of 32, 87 Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreements of 99 ‘geopolitical Commission’ of 107 investment agreement with China 100 Trans European Transport Network of 99

162

Index

Fenghu, Fang 53 Fu, Ying 97 Genghis Khan 43, 59 Georgia 30, 32, 33, 45, 91, 94, 96 Globalization 2, 6, 20–2, 92–3, 96, 102, 105–06 Gorbachev, Mikhail 27 Greater Europe 32 Greater Eurasia 33–4, 38–9, 41, 55, 95, 105, 109 Gulf Cooperation Council 83 hegemonic power transition 3, 101–02, 103 Hindu Kush 7 Hu, Jintao 14, 20 Huawei 12, 22 Infrastructure cross-border 3, 11, 54–5, 65, 83–4 investment into 2, 22, 48, 72, 82 trans-Eurasian UN initiatives on 13 Iran China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor and See BRI free trade area negotiations with China 83 high-speed line to Urumqi 84 SCO membership application of 87–8 Isakov, Sapar 19 Japan Boxer rebellion and 27 investments in Mongolia (see Mongolia) war with China in 1894–5 27 Jiang, Zemin 12, 94 Karakorum Highway 16 Karimov, Islam 6, 76–8, 80, 85–6 Kashmir 16, 114 n. 27 Kazakhstan Almaty-Aktobe highway 45 Aral Sea 50 Association Agreement with the EU 44 Astana International Financial Centre 17, 48 Baikonur cosmodrome 43 Bright Road (Nurly Zhol) 3, 44, 46–7, 56, 80, 109 Chinese soft power in 53, 82

Coordination Committee on industrial and investment cooperation (CCIIC) 47 defence procurements 53 Dostyk border crossing 47 Dzhungars in 43 economic cooperation with China 45–50 fossil fuel exploration in 47 host for Iranian nuclear talks and Syrian conflict 44 informal economies and 54, 57 International Centre for Border Cooperation 19, 50 intra-elite competition in 54–5 Karakhanids 9 Kazakhstani-Chinese Business Council (KCBC) 47 Kokand 43, 75 Khorgos dry port 19, 46–7, 127 n. 27 KTZ Express 46 Kuryk port construction 46 labour laws in 49–50 lake Balkash 50 land reform bill in 48 membership in EAEU 50–2 multi-vector foreign policy 5, 44, 47, 54, 55, 106 neighbourhood policies 54 New Eurasian Land Bridge and (see BRI) port of Atyrau 45 protests in Kultuk and Zhanaozen 49 Russian influence in 51–3 Russophilia in 53 Samruk-Kazyna national fund 45–6 Semipalatinsk test site 43 Shymkent logistics center 46 Sinophobia in 49–50 Timurids in 43 as transit country 46, 48, 50, 55 Turkestan-Siberian railway in 43, 113 n. 19 visa regimes of 49 WTO accession of 33, 51 Kozyrev, Andrei 28 Kushans 7 Kyrgyzstan Bishkek electricity plant scandal 19

Index Naryn bazaar 16 remittance transfers to 32, 106 Tulip revolution in 30 Lavrov, Sergey 87, 88, 95 Li, Hongzhang 27 Li, Keqiang 39 Li, Peng 13 Li, Yuanchao 68 Mackinder, Halford J. 25 Macron, Emmanuel 99, 100 Manchuria 27 Masimov, Karim 48 Medvedev, Dmitry 39, 85 Mirziyoyev, Shavkat 2017 visit to China 80 2017 visit to Russia 85 reform process under (see Uzbekistan) Mongolia 2010 National Security Concept 61, 71 as ‘16th republic’ 60 agricultural land lease 69 Altanbulag Free Trade Zone 66 Blue Banner organization 68 Bogd Khan 60 China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor 64–6 coal industry in 61, 66, 72 in COMECON 60 comprehensive strategic partnership with China 63 Dalai Lama visit to 69 Democratic Party of 62, 70 demography of 62 Development Road Initiative 3, 40 Egiin Gol hydropower project 71 Erdenet Thermal Power Plant Erenhot 71–72 Foreign Investment Law of 61 ‘Forum of Asia’ proposal 67 Golden Horde 59 as independent country in 1945 27, 60 Ivanhoe Mines operating in 61 Khaan Quest exercise 68 Kublai Khan 8, 59 labour laws in 69–70 Manzhouli route 63 Marco Polo’s travels to 8, 59

163

Millennium Road project 64 Naushki 64 North Korean nuclear crisis and 68 Nuclear-Weapon Free Zone (NWFZ) status 68 oil imports of 61 Oyu Tolgoi mine 61 parliament 61–62, 65, 133 n. 55 Pax Mongolica 59 People’s Party of 60, 62 public debt of 61 railway gauge in 65–6 Rio Tinto operating in 61, 72 security policy of 68 Selenge river hydroelectric project 71 status within SCO 67 Steppe Road (Tallin Zam) plan of 63–64, 72, 80, 109 Strategic Entities Foreign Investment Law (SEFIL) 61 Tavan Tolgoi mine 61, 66 Third Neighbour Policy of 60, 62, 66–68, 72, 106, 108 Timurid empire 43, 59 Trans-Mongolian railway 64, 132 n. 46 as transit space 64, 70 Tuvan Uryankhay Republic 59 UBTŽ 63 Zamiin-Uud-Ulaanbaatar expressway 64 Zamiin-Uud logistics centre 66 multi-order world 6, 102, 107 Nasdaq 17, 48 NATO Central Asian Liaison office 78 Eastern expansion 28, 95 joint military exercises 77 New Silk Roads 2011 US initiative 33, 91 as geopolitical imaginary 11–12, 76, 91 Novatek 36 OECD 19 Oman 45, 83 One Belt, One Road See BRI OSCE 100 Otunbayeva, Roza 30 Pakistan CPEC See BRI port of Gwadar 19

164

Index

Pamir mountains 15–16 Persia Il-Khanate in 59 Parthians as rulers over 7–8 Sassanid dynasty in 8, 83, 113 n. 8 Persian Gulf as Western end of the SREB 6, 46, 76, 83, 89, 108 PetroKazakhstan 47 Poland Amber Road initiative of 40 Primakov, Evgeniy 35 Prokhanov, Alexander 33 Purevsuren, Lundeg 64 Putin, Vladimir 2014 visit to China 38 2018 visit to Tashkent 85–6, 89 announcing pivot to the East 35 attending 2017 Belt and Road international forum 39 congratulating Battulga on election victory 70 EAEU as landmark project of 31 on Eurasianism 34 meeting with Xi on sidelines of 2015 combined BRICS-SCO summit 65 political system under 28 remarks on Kazakhstani territorial integrity 52 Rosneft 28, 35, 36 Ruan, Zongze 38 Rudd, Kevin 101 Russia 2016 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 39 annexation of Crimea by 30, 33, 53, 64, 68, 95, 96 Baikal region 29, 71 Baikal-Amur railway 27, 37 as China’s ‘junior partner’ 40, 103 Chinese presence in Far Eastern regions of 28–9 communist revolution in 27 economic sanctions on 34, 36–7, 94 Energy Strategy to 2030 of 34 Federal Space Agency 43 Foreign Policy Concept of 39 import substitution as economic policy by 35 Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum 36 Mir payment system 36, 124 n. 104 as multi-ethnic state 75 Northeast Passage 37

perception of ‘China threat’ 28 port of Makhatshkala 46 and the ‘post-West’ 95 Primorsky region 28 public diplomacy on ‘Eurasianism’ 33–4 rapprochement with Japan 28 Romanov empire and 26 Trans-Siberian Railway 27, 37, 64, 66, 132 n. 46 ‘turn to the East’ of 34–5, 40–1 Ukraine crisis and 32, 35–6, 40, 52, 95–6 Vladivostok 26–7, 35, 36, 64 Yamal LNG project in 36 Russian International Affairs Council 52 RŽD 37, 63, 132 n. 46 Safoyev, Sodiq 86 Sechin, Igor 28 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) 2014 Dushanbe summit 62–3 2016 Tashkent summit 65 Development Strategy towards 2025 31 Free Trade Zone prospects 38 Indian admission to 31, 67, 73, 88 Iranian possible admission to (see Iran) SCO Interbank Association 17, 31 Shanghai Five 25 and the ‘three evils’ 29, 31, 68, 78 Shenhua Energy Company 61, 66 Shuvalov, Igor 38, 39 Siberia 26, 29, 35, 52 SIBUR 36 Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) See BRI Sino-Russian relations 1950 Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance and 27 1969 border clashes and 27 1997 Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World 94 2016 joint declaration on the promotion of international law 94 Altai pipeline and 35, 64, 123 n. 90 Amur river bridge and 36 arms purchases and 28 as asymmetrical 28–9, 36, 40 Continental Economic Partnership and 5, 39

Index and the ‘democratization’ of international relations 94 ‘de-Westernizing’ global governance 93–8 division of labour in Central Asia and 25–6, 88, 105, 106 Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean (ESPO) Oil Pipeline and 35 economic cooperation in 28–9, 34–7 and joint cooperation in the Russian Far East 37 and joint military exercises 29 ‘panda bonds’ and 36 joint perception of fairness in international relations 26, 93 popular narratives about 29 Power of Siberia pipeline and 35 ‘revisionist power’ debate and 94, 108 ‘strategic partnership’ in 28, 34, 40, 105 and treaties of Nerchinsk, Kyahta, Kulja 26 and ‘unequal’ treaties of Aigun, Peking, Tarbagati 26 Sinopec 28, 36 Sogdians 8 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 53 special economic zones 16, 19, 36, 47, 66 Spheres of influence Stalin, Joseph 27 Strait of Malacca 83 Suleimanov, Timur 47 Sumitomo Corporation 61 SWIFT 37, 124 n. 104 Syr Darya See Amu Darya Tajikistan Chinese investments in 16 Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism and 30 neighbourhood relations 54, 79, 82 Rogun river dam proposal 79 Russian military presence in 30 SCO summit in (see SCO) TBEA 19 Tencent 100 Tian Shan mountains 16 Timchenko, Gennady 28, 36 Tokayev, Kassym-Jomart 54, 126 n. 11 Transoxiana 2 Turkey Eurasianism and 33

165

Middle Corridor initiative of 40 SREB and 45, 81 US Central Asia strategy and 91 Turkmenistan gas exports from 46, 47, 80, 91 neighbourhood relations 54, 79 SREB and 45, 81, 83, 84 United Kingdom Northern Powerhouse initiative of 40 United States 2017 National Security Strategy 94 2018 National Defence Strategy 94 ‘America First’ doctrine of 101 Central Asia strategy under president Trump 25, 91–2 and the ‘liberal international order’ 93, 97, 102 ‘pivot to Asia’ 25, 33 promoting concept of ‘Indo-Pacific’ 3, 91–92, 94 rivalry with China 91–92, 96, 100–03, 107 as security actor in Eurasia 91–2 Uzbekistan 1992 CIS summit in 77 1999 Tashkent bombings 77 2017 New Strategy for Development 79–80, 82 Andijan massacre 78 Angren-Pap line 81 border demarcation with Tajikistan 82 as bridge to West Asia 83–5 Bukhara wind power project 80 China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor and (see BRI) de-Russification in 85 as double-landlocked 81 Declaration on Strategic Partnership with China 80 ‘docking’ with SREB 80 Dzhel gas field in 85 and Eurasian Economic Union 86–8 Foreign Policy Concept of 78–9 and GUUAM grouping 78 hydropower in 81, 85 incorporation into Russian empire 75 as independent power pole in Central Asia 75, 77–9 Islamic movement of 77 joint commission with Russia 85

166 joint military exercises with NATO 77 joint military exercises with Russia 88 Karshi military base 77 labour laws in 82 minorities abroad 84 multi-vectoralism of 77–9 neighbourhood policies 79, 87 nuclear power plant construction in 85 participation in US ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme 77–8 post-Soviet independence 75, 79, 85 reform process 79–80 remittance transfers to 85 Russian influence in 85–6 and SCO membership 78 security policies of 86 as source of cotton 85 Strategic Partnership and Cooperation Framework with the US 77 trade relations with China 80–1 trade tariffs of 79, 86–7 Treaty on Russian-Uzbek Strategic Partnership 78 Valevaya, Tatiana 51 Vassilenko, Roman 44 Verkhnechonskneftegaz 36

Index Vietnam free trade agreement with the EAEU 87 Two Corridors, One Economic Circle initiative of 40 Wang, Jisi 22 Wang, Yi 2, 38, 64 Wang, Yiwei 21 Wen, Jiabao 38 Witte, Sergey 27 Xi, Jinping addressing Uzbekistan’s Oliy Majlis 81 announcing the SREB in 2013 1, 9, 22, 44 crackdown on corruption 37 Thought as part of the Chinese constitution 21 Xinhua News Agency 10 Zedong, Mao Three World’s Theory of 27 Mongolia policy under 60 Zhang, Gaoli 39 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir 53 ZTE 12

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