Xi Jinping spoke slowly and carefully as he addressed the inaugural China-Central Asia Summit in May. With the flags of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan draped neatly behind him, China’s paramount leader described the need to “renew our millennia-old friendship and open up new vistas for the future.”

Xi was leaning heavily on China’s historical ties to the region, choosing to host the summit, for instance, in Xi’an, the eastern terminus of the ancient Silk Road and what Xi called “an important cradle of the Chinese civilization and nation.” Thanks to its New Silk Road Economic Belt, part of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has invested heavily in Central Asia over the past decade, although its relationship with the region has undergone some strain in recent years due to China’s strict Covid policies, which partially froze the nations’ trade.

With the first ever China-Central Asia Summit, Xi was in Xi’an to make nice — and also to capitalize on an opportunity. 

“Transformations of the world unseen in a century are unfolding at a faster pace,” he told the Central Asian leaders. “The international and regional situation is undergoing complex and profound changes.”

Xi wasn’t exaggerating. Until recently, Russia has been the undisputed power in the region, with the Central Asian nations culturally and linguistically tied to Moscow. But with their giant northern neighbor distracted and seemingly weakened from its invasion of Ukraine, the five countries are experiencing something of a power vacuum — one China, their giant eastern neighbor, might be interested in filling. 

“The pattern now for about ten years has been that China has been displacing Russia as both the top trade partner and the top source of foreign investment in Central Asia,” says Jeffrey Mankoff, a senior associate with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security. “But the things that have happened [with Russia] over the last 15 months have reinforced these developing historical patterns. Russian influence has taken a hit, and it’s a hit that it’s probably not going to recover from.”

China is becoming the big foot in the region. There are consequences of that — with great power comes great responsibilities.

Raffaello Pantucci, author of Sinostan

This geopolitical shift has been a long time coming. Mankoff notes that, until recently, many of Central Asia’s leaders spoke Russian and were educated and brought up in a system that saw Russia as the center of the universe. The younger generation of leaders has no such focal point or cemented allegiance, as they proved at the 2023 UN Security Council meeting when the five Central Asian countries abstained from voting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a slap in the face for Russia, which expected their support.

Beijing’s relationship with Central Asia — a region larger in size than India, encompassing 75 million people and stretching from the Himalayas in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west — has also been changing for the past decade, ever since it launched the New Silk Road. With connections to the five Central Asian countries dating back thousands of years, the region plays a vivid role in China’s national imagination. China’s westernmost Xinjiang Autonomous Region, home to the ethnically Turkic Uyghur people, is much closer to Central Asia than to the Chinese heartland in the east, with close linguistic, ethnic and religious ties to the rest of the region; and considerable numbers of ethnic Kazakhs, Tajiks, Kyrgyz and Uzbek people still live on the Chinese side of the border. 

But only recently has China started making massive investments in Central Asia, remaking economies and physical infrastructure in the process and drawing the region closer to Beijing’s orbit. China has invested more than $40 billion in Central Asia since launching the Belt and Road Initiative, according to Akhmet Yassawi University’s Eurasian Research Institute in Kazakhstan — roughly equivalent to 12 percent of the Central Asian nations’ combined annual GDP. At his Central Asia summit earlier this year, Xi Jinping pledged an additional $3.6 billion in financial support and aid to the region. When U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Central Asia in March, he promised just $25 million to “expand regional trade routes, establish new export markets, attract and leverage greater private sector investment.”

China, which is reluctant to intervene in other country’s security matters, has mostly kept its relationship with Central Asia an economic one to date. But as Raffaello Pantucci notes in Sinostan, his 2022 book on China’s relations with Central Asia, the effect of Beijing’s investment in the region has been the creation of an “accidental empire.”

“China is becoming the big foot in the region. There are consequences of that — with great power comes great responsibilities,” he told the Wire. “But so far, you see no evidence of China stepping in to play that role.”

With Russia’s role as peacekeeper in the region diminished, however, that could eventually change. Joint military exercises, new overseas military bases and new political summits like the one Xi just hosted in Xi’an suggest Beijing is shifting its strategy in Central Asia in light of Russia’s withering presence. Lu Gang, director of East China Normal University’s Center for Central Asian Studies, suggested as much in a Chinese-language thinkpiece published in June, saying that the “western regions of China and their neighboring areas should be viewed as an integrated entity.”

“The complex and fiercely competitive strategic situation in the Eurasian region will undoubtedly pose serious challenges to the stability and security of China’s western regions,” he wrote. “When observing the strategic situation surrounding the western regions, it is important not to confine the analysis to border security and social stability issues alone. Instead, a broader perspective should be adopted, encompassing factors such as economic development, cultural education, and other elements.”

China has long used private companies to link the fate of its western regions — namely the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region — and its ethnically-similar neighbors. For the past ten years, Beijing has funneled tens of billion of dollars, largely through loans issued by state-owned banks, through chosen corporations to carry out a two-pronged approach in Xinjiang: economic development and trade with Central Asia, and programs of assimilation, forced labor and surveillance that the U.S. government deems a genocide. 

In doing so, these private companies often carry a dual, nationalistic mission of “poverty alleviation” in Xinjiang and building infrastructure projects across the border. 

But with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now shifting the landscape in Central Asia, and Beijing upping its engagement with the five Central Asian countries, these companies are increasingly important power brokers. In the name of the New Silk Road, they have linked China’s crackdown at home and its infrastructure investments abroad. But can they deliver on the Silk Road’s prosperity?

‘THE GOLDEN THREAD’

Winters in Bishkek are always cold, but January of 2018 was especially frigid. Temperatures reached 16 degrees below zero, nearly a record low, when the Kyrgyz capital’s power went out. For four days, residents shivered and even workers inside the city’s power plant lit small fires to keep warm. 

The Bishkek Thermal Power Plant, responsible for the city’s electricity and the hot water for its radiators, was supposed to be in good working order before the 2018 incident. Although the coal-fired plant was nearly 60 years old, China had provided a $386 million loan to the Kyrgyz government in 2013, financed by the state-owned Export-Import Bank, to modernize the aging power station.

That loan came with a catch: Chinese officials insisted the Kyrgyz government choose a Xinjiang, China-based company called Tebian Electric Apparatus Stock Co., or TBEA, to undertake the modernization project. Although TBEA, a publicly-traded corporation on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, manufactures electrical infrastructure and works on energy systems across the world, Nurlan Omurkul, the former head of the Bishkek plant, told the New York Times in 2019 in that he was skeptical about accepting TBEA’s bid: Unlike competing firms, he said, it did not have experience with power station construction. TBEA’s bid also projected considerably higher costs than the other bidding contractors.

This kind of arrangement is common with the Belt and Road Initiative, according to Oyintarelado Moses, a data analyst with Boston University’s Global China Initiative. 

“Oftentimes, lending from state-owned institutions, such as the China Development Bank and the China Export-Import Bank, is accompanied with a Chinese contractor that is on a project,” she says. “And so this development finance lending — while it’s contributing to the development of a country through these specific development projects — it is also supporting China’s enterprises as they expand overseas.”

In the case of the Bishkek power plant, Kyrgyzstan complied with the Export-Import Bank’s request. But just five months after TBEA finished the four-year project in 2017, a boiler broke down, then six more, leading to the multi-day shutdown of the plant and Bishkek’s frigid January.

The Kyrgyz parliament conducted an investigation and concluded that the nation’s former Prime Minister, Sapar Isakov, engaged in corruption in the process of awarding the contract to TBEA. The former director of the plant estimated that $100 million of the Chinese loan was squandered by inflating supply prices; receipts emerged showing that TBEA purchased items like fire extinguishers, wrenches and office chairs at exorbitant prices. In 2019, Isakov was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in the corruption scheme.

“The whole project smelled bad from the start, but if there had not been an accident, nobody would have noticed,” Kyrgyz lawmaker, Iskhak Masaliev, told The New York Times in 2019.

TBEA, which did not respond to the Wire’s requests for comment, emerged without being subject to criminal or civil charges in Kyrgyzstan. 

The Xinjiang-based company exemplifies the link between China’s economic strategy abroad and its crackdowns at home. For while TBEA is active in infrastructure projects outside of China, at home it is one of the most enthusiastic participants in Beijing’s Uyghur forced labor program, according to academic research from researchers at Sheffield Hallam University and an analysis of company executives’ public statements. 

“Xinjiang is the core issue for China in terms of its relation to Central Asia,” Pantucci says. “The issue of Xinjiang, the problems that flow from it, from domestic security problems to economic stability questions, all flow through in a golden thread that ties China with Central Asia.”

Founded in the mid-20th century, but restructured in the 1980s, TBEA has grown into a Xinjiang titan. It has more than 20,000 employees and an immensely diverse portfolio, including zero-carbon electrical infrastructure and the production of polysilicon for photovoltaics. Its chairman and largest shareholder, Zhang Xin, who is also the company’s party secretary, is politically connected, serving as a representative at three recent meetings of the National People’s Congress and the vice-chairman of the quasi-governmental All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. He is also, according to the Hurun Rich List, the third-wealthiest man in Xinjiang, with a net worth of $894 million as of 2022, thanks to his nearly 5 percent ownership stake in TBEA. 

Zhang Xin is surprisingly forthright — proud, even — about TBEA’s use of forced labor transfers. In the spring of 2020, Zhang gave a speech at the government’s annual Two Sessions conference, in which he promoted ‘Laodongli zhuanyi’ — the Chinese term which literally means “labor transfers” and which experts say refers to the forced transfer of Uyghur workers. 

TBEA also openly advertises its participation in a system of mass surveillance known as ‘pairing up and becoming family.’ As part of this initiative, more than a million Han Chinese Communist Party members have ‘become family’ with Uyghurs and lived on-and-off in their family homes. During their stays, the Han ‘family members’ monitor and indoctrinate their hosts, according to a recent U.S. State Department report.

In his speech at the Two Sessions meeting, Zhang Xin said, “Party members and cadres above the middle level of the company have carried out the ‘one-on-one’ ‘pair up and become family.’” 

Labor transfers do all the work of the genocide: they force people to change their behaviors, their lives and their minds.

Laura Murphy, a professor at Sheffield University who studies trafficking and modern slavery

Zhang Xin himself even ‘became family’ with a household in Hotan, Xinjiang. “Ever since pairing up and becoming family, I have been visiting their home several times every year, eating, living, feeding livestock, doing farm work, and checking on the progress of their three children’s studies,” he told journalists in 2020. “People of various ethnic groups work together as one family, laboring and getting rich together, which brings me great joy.”

Coverage of Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang often focuses on the disappearance and internment of more than a million Uyghurs. But experts say these lesser known tactics of assimilation, including when corporations take Uyghur workers to work in other parts of Xinjiang and across China, are just as powerful in transforming the region.

“Companies are a primary nexus through which the Chinese government is transforming Xinjiang’s Uyghur population,” says Laura Murphy, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University who studies trafficking and modern slavery. “Labor transfers do all the work of the genocide: they force people to change their behaviors, their lives and their minds. It forces [Mandarin] on them, forces them not to practice religion, and it separates families.”

Although the U.S. imposes sanctions on corporations and state-affiliated groups in Xinjiang that use forced labor, TBEA has so far evaded detection. The corporation even sells polysilicon to JA Solar, a Shanghai-based solar panel manufacturer, which sells its products in the U.S., according to data from analytics company FactSet and press releases. 

“The relevant sanctions imposed by the United States on Xinjiang’s labor force have no impact on the company at present, and the company has no plans to transfer its headquarters,” Zhang Xin said in a 2022 annual meeting with shareholders. 

That year, according to its earnings report, TBEA’s newly signed overseas contracts totaled $436 million.

THE CHINA PIVOT

TBEA’s expansion into Central Asia, alongside its activities in Xinjiang, illustrate the way in which China’s economic and security goals in Xinjiang are intertwined with its foreign policy. Until the last 18 months, the country seemed primarily to be investing in the five Central Asian states to help secure its Western frontier and to buttress support for its policies in Xinjiang — without intending to displace Moscow’s role as a military power in the region. 

But now, experts disagree about Beijing’s future goals for its involvement in the region. Does China simply want to keep investing in Central Asian nations and enjoy the profits? Or does it want to become a regional hegemon and military presence? 

The answer may hinge upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Since the Central Asian republics gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, they have maintained a high degree of dependence on Moscow. Far away and distracted by other geopolitical hotspots, the U.S. has never been the great power in the region. “Take a look at a map,” Mankoff says. “Central Asia is landlocked. It’s far away from the U.S.,and it’s located right between Russia and China.” 

“These are countries that remain deeply tied to Russia economically, politically, that have in some cases Russian military presence on their territory,” he notes. Mankoff points to an incident in January 2022, when the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Moscow-based military alliance consisting of the armed forces of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan intervened in Kazakhstan to put down protests, preserving the country’s pro-Russian leadership. 

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the following month changed the geopolitics of the region. The Central Asian republics have not supported Russia publicly, and because “Russia’s military performance in Ukraine has been pretty abysmal,” Mankoff says, “some of the awe that maybe existed about Russia and Russian capabilities has dissipated.” 

Russia’s refusal to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty is another area of concern in Central Asia. Kazakhstan, for instance, has a substantial ethnic Russian minority. When Russia annexed Crimea and South Ossetia in Georgia, it used the local Russian population as its justification.

“That creates a level of anxiety among the Kazakh public, but also the government, towards Moscow,” says Pantucci. “That’s always kind of been there, lingering in the background. But what we’ve seen with the war in Ukraine is this sharpened sense of fear of what might the Russian bear suddenly do?”

Although Pantucci emphasized the importance of the continued economic relationship between Central Asia and Russia, Mankoff believes that “sanctions and the broader decline of the Russian economy will accelerate Eurasia’s economic pivot to China.” 

There is some evidence that the Central Asian states are also beginning to turn to China to provide security. The PRC conducts joint military training exercises in Tajikistan, and is rapidly increasing its arms transfers to Central Asia, according to a report from the Oxus Society. Although China supplied 1.5 percent of arms transfers to the region prior to 2014, since 2015 the figure has risen to at least 13 percent. The nature of China’s weapons have changed, too, from light weapons and uniforms to heavy vehicles and lethal weapons. In 2018, for instance, China provided QW-2 portable surface-to-air missiles to Turkmenistan and eight Shaanxi Y-8 transport aircraft to Kazakhstan.

China has also funded at least two military bases in Tajikistan, the first dating back to 2016, while a Washington Post reporter spotted Chinese soldiers from Xinjiang patrolling Tajikistan’s Afghan border in 2019. (Both China and Tajikistan denied the report.) These secretive patrols and joint military ventures allow China to grow their military presence in Central Asia without conspicuously usurping Russia’s role as regional police. 

You can’t just be the kind of big provider of infrastructure investment and development in these countries and not expect that they will come to you to try to fix their problems.

Raffaello Pantucci, author of Sinostan

In the end, Moscow may have no choice but to accept its diminished role in a region it once considered its own. With much of the world imposing sanctions on it, Russia has become more dependent on China, and its economy is now just 11 percent of China’s. If China continues to make inroads into Central Asia, Russia may find that pushing back against its friend “without limits” is increasingly difficult. 

For much of their history, of course, the Central Asian nations have found themselves engulfed in the long shadows of their neighbors’ empires. With China’s economic and military power expanding and Russia’s waning, they may now look to China, not just for infusions of cash, but also to police the region and guarantee their security.

“You can’t just be the kind of big provider of infrastructure investment and development in these countries and not expect that they will come to you to try to fix their problems,” Pantucci says. 

Especially, that is, when the power goes out. 

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