THE DRAGON IN CENTRAL
ASIA PART 1: The hunt for friends, and
oil By Jeremy Bransten and Michael
Lelyveld
Despite its geographic proximity, China
for the past century played only a marginal role in
Central Asia. Economically, politically and culturally,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan were firmly in Russia's orbit. But
independence in 1991 brought changes, among them the
opening of the "Bamboo Curtain" to the East. Initially,
it was shuttle traders bringing consumer goods from
China who began to fan out across Central Asia. Then
came big business and senior politicians. In just over a
decade, China - with its booming economy and growing
political clout - has become a major player in the
region.
Chinese pop music blares from
loudspeakers, mixing with the cries of Chinese traders
at a busy local market. Welcome to China? No, in fact,
we are in Kazakhstan's commercial capital, Almaty, at
the Ya-Lian bazaar.
Since it opened in 1997, the
Ya-Lian has become one of the city's largest market
places, attracting thousands of shoppers to its stalls,
which offer everything from household appliances and
clothes to consumer electronics.
It is a scene
repeated at hundreds of Chinese markets across Central
Asia. Initially, the traders were locals bringing in
scarce goods from just across the border to sell. But in
recent years, they have been replaced by an influx of
Chinese tradesmen who have set up more permanent shops
and become a fixture of Central Asian urban life.
This street activity is just one sign of China's
growing presence in the region. But at higher levels,
Chinese officials and business leaders have been
crisscrossing the region, signing cooperation agreements
and contracts that aim to expand Beijing's foothold.
China's interest in countries such as Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan is motivated to a large extent by its need
for their energy resources. China's economy is booming,
but its domestic oil and mining industries cannot keep
pace with demand.
Chinese officials, as a
result, have fanned out across the globe, including into
Central Asia, in search of suppliers, as Xu Yihe, senior
reporter with the Dow Jones News wires in Singapore,
told RFE/RL. "Chinese oil companies are almost
everywhere in the world," Xu said. "They're dispatching
teams of oil experts to negotiate oil projects,
especially upstream projects in Asia, the Middle East,
Africa and North America."
Those efforts are
beginning to bear fruit. In May, after seven years of
negotiations, China and Kazakhstan agreed to build a
1,000-kilometer pipeline from Kazakhstan's central
Karaganda region to China's northwestern Xinjiang region
by the end of 2005. The pipeline will be a key link in a
3,000-kilometer project that aims to join China to the
Caspian Sea. China has also offered to help Uzbekistan
develop its small oil fields in the Ferghana Valley.
Chinese investment is also going into other
energy resources, such as hydroelectric projects in
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, with scores of additional
plans up for discussion.
Niklas Swanstrom is
executive director of the program for contemporary Silk
Road studies at Sweden's Uppsala University. Speaking to
RFE/RL from Beijing, where he is a guest lecturer at
Renmin University, Swanstrom said the quest for natural
resources shapes China's policies in Central Asia, but
the quest is not the whole picture.
China is
rapidly emerging as a world power. In a decade or two,
it might directly challenge the supremacy of the United
States, Japan, and Europe. But before this happens,
Beijing's leaders are trying to create a zone of
friendly and stable countries around China's borders
that will give them political support, as well as
economic leverage in the future.
This has led
Beijing to set up trade missions in every Central Asian
country, invest in local enterprises, donate money to
aid projects, and give a high profile to new
organizations, such as the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization that group the region's countries, plus
China and Russia.
"The Chinese do want natural
resources," Swanstrom said. "They do want oil and gas
because China is in desperate need of these as its
economy grows. But it goes deeper than that. They want
to secure the borders. They want to make sure that
Central Asia is a stable region. Because if Central Asia
runs into military conflicts, it is likely to spread
over to Xinjiang, China's westernmost province. And that
would be a problem for the Chinese government. So part
of this is to create stability in the Central Asia
region because stability in Central Asia means stability
for China. And also, it's in the Chinese interest to
develop these markets, to create the infrastructure in
Central Asia."
On the security front, Beijing
has found eager partners in Central Asia's authoritarian
leaders, who share its worries about Islamic militancy,
as international affairs expert John Garver, a professor
at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United
States, noted. "I think there is a meeting of the minds
between China's leaders on the one hand and the leaders
of the post-Soviet Central Asian states on the other.
And cooperation in this area takes the form of
intelligence exchanges, police cooperation, training of
police, training of military forces, and the design of
military operations targeting terrorist activities,"
Garver said.
Omurbek Tekebaev, leader of
Kyrgyzstan's opposition Atameken (Motherland) Socialist
Party, told RFE/RL that it was the US that involuntarily
helped China expand its presence in Central Asia. He
traced the rise to the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks against the US. "After 9/11, the United States
broke the old stereotype, sending its troops to Central
Asia and the Transcaucasus," Tekebaev said. "When the US
strengthened its position, China began to also show that
it was interested in Central Asia. So, recently, the
Chinese leadership told a meeting [of regional leaders]
in Tashkent that it will invest about US$4 billion in
the Central Asian countries. For example, Chinese
leaders spoke openly about their intention to pay the
full cost of about $1.5 billion for the construction of
a highway from China to Central Asia, via Kyrgyzstan."
Swanstrom of Uppsala University said Russia's
sometimes tenuous grip over the region has paved the way
for outsiders, including the Americans, to come in. But
the Chinese - because of their comprehensive regional
economic and security interests - have been the most
effective.
"It has to do with the Russian
domestic weakness to a certain extent, and that gives
the Chinese and many other actors - among them, of
course, the United States and Europe - an opportunity to
move in," Swanstrom said. "But the Americans and
Europeans have not taken that opportunity to the same
extent that the Chinese have."
Not everyone in
Central Asia is happy about China's interest in the
region. There is a latent fear, especially in the
countries bordering China, that Beijing is hungry for
land. And if that is the case, even a small immigration
of Chinese to the region would swamp the local
populations. Although it is vast in territory, for
example, Kazakhstan's population of some 14 million
people represents just over 1% of China's 1.4 billion
people.
The charge is dismissed out of hand by
Beijing officials. But Murat Auezov, a former Kazakh
ambassador to China, was less than diplomatic when
expressing his concerns. "I know Chinese culture. We
should not believe anything the Chinese politicians
say," Auezov said. "As a historian, I'm telling you that
19th-century China, 20th-century China and 21st-century
China are three different Chinas. But what unites them
is a desire to expand their territories."
Swanstrom was more optimistic. For now, Russia
continues to enjoy a decisive cultural and economic
advantage in Central Asia. But he argued that breaking
this monopoly could serve the Central Asians well.
"It doesn't necessarily have to be a zero-sum
game, but from the Central Asian states, there's also
interest in decreasing the Russian influence and to have
Chinese influence - maybe even Indian influence and
American influence and European influence," Swanstrom
said. "They have realized over the years that it's not
good to have one dominant power in the region. They
don't want it to be the Chinese or the Russians. They're
trying to diversify the influence over the region, and
they are very conscious about the fact that neither the
Russians nor the Chinese would be the perfect actor to
dominate the region."
The battle for oil
China is reaching out to Central Asia to feed
its growing appetite for energy resources. Although some
projects have languished for years, a new pipeline
project from Kazakhstan may turn into China's first
major Central Asian energy route. China is making
inroads into Central Asia as its need for energy imports
keeps climbing.
Spurred by an economy that grew
by nearly 10% in the first half of the year, China has
been seeking new oil sources in the region and around
the world. China's oil imports have already soared by
34% this year. China has been an oil importer since
1996, but its recent economic boom has pushed it past
Japan to make it the world's second-biggest oil
consumer, behind the US. High demand has driven the
country's state-owned oil companies into foreign markets
that seemed too distant only a few years ago.
Under the Chinese government's "go west" policy,
state companies have revived projects in Kazakhstan that
have languished since 1997, when China National
Petroleum Corporation promised to invest $9.5 billion in
pipelines and oil fields thousands of kilometers from
home.
Robert Ebel, who directs the energy and
national security program at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington, said the reason
for China's involvement in Central Asia is prompted both
by its higher domestic demand and its need to reduce the
risk of relying on the Middle East.
"I think
[China] sees that its requirements are going to be met
in the future only through imports, and so they're just
reaching out to wherever they can - whether it's
Azerbaijan, or Syria or Russia or Central Asia, or
Venezuela - to diversify these sources of imports, not
only to diversify their sources of supply but how the
oil gets to China," Ebel said.
Ebel said that
Central Asia offers China land routes that reduce the
vulnerability of depending solely on ocean transport.
But so far, the returns from Central Asia have been
small. For now, Kazakhstan is the only Central Asian
country that exports oil to China. Kazakh oil shipments
to China, which are sent by rail, account for less than
1% of China's imports. But that could soon change thanks
to an agreement in May to build a 1,000-kilometer oil
pipeline from Kazakhstan's central Karaganda region to
western China.
Tomorrow: Other
perils: Droughts and militants
Copyright (c)
2002, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty,
1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036. Radio Free
Asia contributed.
