China’s assiduous courting of former Soviet Central Asian nations is stirring apprehension among Russia’s leaders

Slowly but surely, a four-lane highway is beginning to take shape on the sparsely populated Central Asian steppe. Soviet-era cars, trucks and ageing long-distance buses weave past modern yellow bulldozers, cranes and towering construction drills, labouring under Chinese supervision to build a road that could one day stretch from eastern Asia to Western Europe.

This small stretch of blacktop, running past potato fields, bare dun-coloured rolling hills and fields of grazing cattle, is a symbol of China’s march westward, an advance into Central Asia that is steadily wresting the region from Russia’s embrace.

Here the oil and gas pipelines, as well as the main roads and the railway lines, always pointed north to the heart of the old Soviet Union. Today, those links are beginning to point toward China.

“This used to be Russia's back yard,” said Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, “but it is increasingly coming into China's thrall.”

It is a shift that has shaken up the Russian leadership, which is watching China’s advance across the steppe with little apprehension. Moscow and Beijing may speak the language of partnership these days, but Central Asia has emerged a source of wariness and mistrust.

For China, the region offers rich natural resources, but Beijing’s grander commercial plans – to export its industrial overcapacity and find new markets for its goods – will struggle to find wings in these poor and sparsely populated lands.

In September 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) chose Kazakhstan’s sparkling, modern new capital, Astana, to announce what has since become a cornerstone of his new, assertive foreign policy, a Silk Road Economic Belt that would revive ancient trading routes to bring new prosperity to a long-neglected but strategically important region at the heart of the Eurasian continent.