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China has invested billions of {dollars} into the pipelines, highways and railways that assist convey Central Asia’s wealthy reserve of pure assets into China. Many Chinese language cities depend on pure gasoline from Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan has a number of the world’s largest oil fields outdoors the Center East.
In 2013, Mr. Xi selected Kazakhstan as the location of the speech the place he outlined the imaginative and prescient for his Belt and Highway Initiative, a $1 trillion plan to construct infrastructure tasks in creating international locations to attract them nearer to China’s orbit. Final 12 months, Mr. Xi visited Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan for his first abroad journey for the reason that pandemic began.
Nonetheless, the connection has not at all times been clean. A number of Belt and Highway tasks within the area have stalled or been embroiled in scandal, together with an influence plant breakdown in 2018 that left a lot of Kyrgyzstan’s capital with out warmth or electrical energy. Native residents have protested over considerations that their international locations have gotten too indebted to China, and over China’s internment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
And Mr. Xi’s ambitions within the area are difficult by his friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and by the 2 international locations’ shut ties. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, has unnerved Central Asia, stirring considerations that Russia may attempt to seize different locations previously a part of the Soviet Union, or encourage separatists.
Theresa Fallon, director of the Middle for Russia Europe Asia Research in Brussels, stated China is engaged in a “robust diplomatic faucet dance” of attempting to achieve an edge with Central Asian international locations with out angering Mr. Putin.
“China and Russia share an anti-Western narrative, however there are numerous areas of potential friction,” Ms. Fallon stated.
Antony J. Blinken, the USA secretary of state, additionally visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan this 12 months, hoping to encourage the Central Asian international locations to withstand offering financial support to Russia within the face of Western sanctions.
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