Why China, unlike Russia, won’t be drawn on civil unrest in Central Asia
- China has taken a taciturn approach to recent civil unrest in at least three nations in Central Asia, despite huge investment interests there
- A hands-off approach allows Chinese projects to weather instability as well as negative public perception, analysts explain
Deadly protests erupted in Tajikistan in May and also in Kazakhstan in January, the latter settled with the help of Russian troops at the request of Kazakh authorities through the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Russia’s Putin visits ‘friendly’ Central Asia on first trip during war
This geopolitical agnosticism, analysts said, allowed China’s infrastructure projects to weather instability and political change.
“It’s not like China likes political instability: it’s negative for them, it’s negative for their investments, and they would want stability because stability is better to do stuff in,” Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said.
“But at the same time, what they’re not going to do is get in, then … bring that stability or force that stability.”
China and Uzbekistan have also been each other’s “comprehensive strategic partner” since 2016, which recognised common security interests, including not allowing any group to harm national security within their borders.
Sana Hashmi, a visiting fellow at the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation in Taipei who researches the SCO, said the low-key response was consistent with China’s long-held principle of non-interference.
“Specifically under the SCO, and with the bilateral relationship, they always say that there is no interference in countries’ internal affairs, and specifically, these protests are considered as part of a country’s internal affairs,” she said.
The protests in Karakalpakstan were considered to be within the realm of domestic politics, she said.
Pantucci said the lack of experience and negative public perception of China in Central Asia also deterred Chinese interventions along the lines of Russia’s in Kazakhstan earlier this year.
Never before in the 30-year history of the CSTO had troops intervened to settle a conflict in another member state.
“Considering the kind of antipathy that there is towards China at a public level in large parts of the region … it’s probable that the presence of Chinese soldiers [would] only make the situation worse,” he said. “And I think both the [Uzbek] government and the Chinese recognise that.”
While Beijing leads the SCO, an Eurasian economic and security grouping whose security mandate is tackling the “three evil forces” – namely, terrorism, separatism and extremism – pragmatic concerns would not allow it to send in troops under the mechanism.
Revamped Turkic group ‘adds to extreme uncertainty’ at China’s door
Despite the security component of the SCO, Beijing has always been fixated on pushing economic goals rather than security, Pantucci pointed out.
“[China is] never really going to trust security to an organisation like this because it’s unreliable. If there’s a security issue, they’re going to do it themselves bilaterally,” he said.
02:04
China’s President Xi visits far western Xinjiang region for first time in 8 years
The need to create the counterterror Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism in 2016 between Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and Tajikistan, Pantucci said, revealed distrust in the SCO as a security organisation when most of its members were already part of the bloc.
But the SCO was still needed, albeit not as a military alliance but a dialogue mechanism for regional security, said Zhu Yongbiao, an international relations professor at Lanzhou University.
“The three evil forces in Xinjiang have been controlled but that’s not the case in Central and South Asia, where most SCO members are,” he said. “And they still could have a direct or indirect impact on China.”
