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Emerging triangles:
Russia-Kazakhstan-China
By Robert M
Cutler
The significance of the agreements on
energy cooperation achieved during Russian President
Vladimir Putin's recently completed visit to Kazakhstan
is only an indicator of the consolidation of deeper
tectonic shifts in Eurasian security and economic
affairs. A new triangle is emerging in East Central
Eurasian geo-economics among Russia, Kazakhstan and
China. (It is being complemented by the emergence of
another such triangle in West Central Eurasia among
Russia, Turkmenistan and Ukraine.) Energy cooperation is
a linchpin of each of the the emerging triangular
ententes, but the ententes themselves go far beyond
energy.
There is every reason to believe
that the agreements signed by Putin and Kazakhstan's
President Nursultan Nazarbaev are not mere diplomatic
boilerplate, but instead concrete joint undertakings to
be followed through on and implemented. The list of such
accords includes an agreement for Russia to continue to
rent the Baikonur cosmodrome until mid-century,
delimitation of 98 percent of the two countries' common
border, provisions for enhancing "military-technical
cooperation", and an affirmation of bilateral
cooperation within a host of multilateral forums - the
Eurasian Economic Community (including the Single
Economic Space), the Commonwealth of Independent States
(CIS - including the CIS Collective Security Treaty
Organization), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence
Building Measures in Asia.
To this inventory are
then to be added the agreements on energy cooperation,
ranging from Russian transit for Kazakhstani oil to
world markets - not only the Caspian Pipeline
Consortium's route to the Black Sea, but also the future
prospect of a Baltic outlet through Russia - to the
consolidation of electrical power networks, and, last
but not least, the confirmation of bilateral cooperation
in the development of oil deposits near the border
between the two countries' offshore national sectors of
the Caspian Sea.
Like Moscow, but with less
success, Beijing has sought to use major domestic energy
corporations to extend political influence into
Kazakhstan. In this perspective, Kazakhstan's profile as
a marchland acquires a new dimension. Kazakhstan,
historically a borderland between Russia and South Asia,
is now equally so between western China and the expanded
post-Soviet Middle East stretching from North Africa to
the South Caucasus. If in mid-2000, among the three
issue areas of energy development, anti-terrorism and
economic cooperation, Russia's relations with Kazakhstan
were implicated in the first and the last, it is now
implicated in all three; but if at that time China was
implicated only in the last, it, too, is now also
implicated in all three.
If from the north a
Russian bear hug threatens to smother Kazakhstan, then
from the east the Chinese dragon equally imperils its
breathing space. Over the past 12 years, Nazarbaev has
acted as if he believed there was no alternative to
acquiescence before China's varied importunings. These
have included insistence on the suppression of domestic
Uighur social organizations and, in violation of
Kazakhstan's international treaty undertakings, the
forced return of Uighur refugees to certain death in
Xinjiang. China has also accomplished the seizure, by
diplomatic means, of the greater part of the Black
Irtysh river headwaters in the course of negotiations
over border delimitation in the 1990s.
Most
recently, Astana has acceded to Beijing's pressure to
grant long-term leases to large numbers of Han Chinese
for agricultural development of Kazakh lands with a view
towards exporting foodstuffs to China. This last runs up
against domestic social opinion in Kazakhstan, for which
land tenure has been an extremely sensitive political
issue since the early 1990s and which has resented
illegal Han immigration from China beginning in the
later part of that decade.
So far Kazakhstan's
bilateral relations of Russia and China have been
reviewed. The latter pair of countries are the two
vertices defining the third side of the triangle. It has
not happened, as some analysts feared, that Chinese and
Russian troops find themselves together in Central Asia
at the core of a military and political bloc built
around a joint CIS-SCO "anti-terrorist center" in
Bishkek (which was to have been established following an
August 1999 summit of the SCO's precursor, the
Shanghai-Five grouping). Still, an early 2001 "Treaty on
Good-Neighborly Relations, Friendship and Cooperation" -
the first major bilateral Sino-Russian treaty in half a
century - has provided for greatly increased Russian
arms sales to China, particularly advanced technology
transfers, and the training of increased numbers of
Chinese officers at Russian military schools.
Russia and Kazakhstan are potential competitors
for China's energy import market, but China would
probably take them both as partners if it could get
them. However, Russia has a better chance, as the
Siberian deposits are closer and the pipeline projected
from western Kazakhstan to western China looks no closer
to realization today than it did in the mid-1990s when
it was first discussed.
The dynamics within this
emerging triangle appear to conform to Putin's
geopolitical vision, which he explained to a dinner
companion during his last visit to Brussels by drawing a
map on a napkin. In that worldview, Putin grouped Russia
and China together, while lumping his European hosts in
with (as he put it) "your American cousins". So doing,
he mentioned in passing his view that the ongoing
demographic Arabization of Europe was strongly analogous
to the historical Africanization and contemporary
Latin-Americanization of the United States population.
Putin's candor in sharing this view suggests that he may
possibly believe Russia should more closely emulate a
variation on the Chinese "model" of political, if not
also economic, maldevelopment.
Dr Robert M Cutler <>
is Research Fellow, Institute of European and Russian
Studies, Carleton University, Canada.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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