Posted on 12/16/2007 8:47:53 AM PST by charles m
A Chinese driver stands near his truck on the Kazakhstan-Chinese border in Khorgos, Kazakhstan, some 400 kilometers east from Almaty, Monday, Sept. 9, 2007. China's influence threatens to eclipse that of Russia in this former Soviet region. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)
KHORGOS, Kazakhstan (AP) — The driver of the 18-wheel tractor-trailer from China idling at the Kazakhstan-China border said apples were the cargo he brought to Almaty, Kazakhstan's booming commercial center.
For Kazakhs, there's a tart irony in the shipment.
Almaty's region is where the first apple trees were found and the first apple orchards planted. The city was a center of the Soviet Union's s fruit industry. Its very name means "Father of Apples."
In the past few years, Chinese fruit, vegetables, TV sets, T-shirts and tires have flooded markets along the old Silk Road in former Soviet Central Asia. Each day, all along the Chinese border, hundreds of tractor-trailers rattle west.
These goods are the most visible sign of Beijing's growing power here as China, Russia, the United States and others compete for financial and strategic advantage on the borders of some of the world's most turbulent countries — Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It's a struggle in which China seems to be gaining the upper hand.
At stake are oil, hydropower sources, strategic metals, pipelines, transit routes and access to markets. The chief prize is energy supplies: China needs them, Russia wants to control their distribution, and Western powers want to ensure they are not monopolized by Moscow or Beijing.
China today is reaching deep into Central Asia to tap oil and gas reserves, using pipelines and investments to challenge Russia's monopoly on gas shipments and to thwart Moscow's hopes of controlling a bigger share of the region's oil.
In recent years, China and Russia have forged a strategic alliance, as part of a group called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to squeeze the United States out of Central Asia, after the U.S. established military bases here. They have largely succeeded.
However, friction is developing between the two neighboring giants. And given China's 1.3 billion people and its economic strength, it seems certain that Russia, with its dwindling population and economy based narrowly on energy, will increasingly be on the defensive.
Of course, Russia's two-century presence in region gives it potent advantages in trying to preserve its influence.
But Niklas Swanstrom of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies argues China is succeeding in using "soft power" — judiciously apportioned aid, aggressive diplomacy and massive investment — to shove Russia aside.
"China will be the dominant player over time," he predicts.
Nowhere, perhaps, is China's presence more starkly evident than at Khorgos, straddling the Kazakh-China border.
On the Kazakh side sits a sleepy village, a mosque and arid steppes where shepherds ride horseback. On the Chinese side sprawls a city, its skyline punctuated by two construction cranes, the skeletons of several large buildings and a massive white arch topped by two scarlet Chinese flags.
Talipzhan Suleimanov, a captain in the Kazakh border service in Khorgos, stood outside his ramshackle post and pointed at the gleaming Chinese city across a dry riverbed.
"This looks like the U.S.-Mexican border," he said. "We are the Mexicans, because the Chinese are so much more advanced."
Central Asia — which includes Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan — was long regarded as the middle of nowhere, caught between Russia, China, Siberia and Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains.
The region emerged from isolation about 200 years ago as Russian imperial troops and British spies competed for influence in a rivalry that Rudyard Kipling called "The Great Game."
In today's Great Game, Russia finds itself struggling to shore up its influence through arms sales and energy contracts, dominance of mobile phone and TV networks, and shared language and culture — as well as the Kremlin's pledges of billions in fresh investment.
Above all, Moscow wants to preserve its monopoly on distributing Central Asian gas and its major role in other energy sectors. To this end, President Vladimir Putin proposed at an October regional summit in Tehran that all the Caspian Sea states have a veto on any new pipelines crossing the sea bed — apparently so Moscow can block plans to connect Kazakhstan's and Turkmenistan's rich oil and gas fields to the west, bypassing Russia.
But Moscow's dominance of the region's energy reserves is eroding. Despite Russian pressure, both Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have welcomed discussion of a trans-Caspian pipeline — and Putin's proposal was met with silence.
Twice in the past two years, Turkmenistan has signed contracts to ship natural gas west through Russian pipelines — only to turn around a month later and, in effect, promise to ship the same gas east to China.
Beijing is playing a subtler game. It is a customer, not a competitor, for Central Asia's hydrocarbons and other natural resources. It is playing offense not defense, buying oil companies and expanding its access to Middle Eastern gas and oil through a network of new highways, railroads and pipelines.
During much of the 20th century, Central Asia was a source of raw materials for Soviet factories and a captive market for shoddy Soviet goods. After the Soviet collapse, Russian goods vanished here, replaced first by merchandise from Turkey and now from China.
While Russia is now drenched in oil wealth, its hopes of restoring many of its industries — and weaning itself from reliance on sky-high oil prices — depend on regaining access to markets like those here.
Russia sees Central Asia as an inheritance from its imperial Czarist and Communist past. For China, with its appetite for raw materials and its awakening as a world power, Central Asia is the Wild West: a land of opportunity, a reservoir of resources and a corridor to the Middle East's oil fields and Europe's wealthy shopping districts.
China has been moving in quietly and steadily since the mid 1990s, when trucks loaded up on scrap iron, steel and copper at derelict Soviet factories and carted the metals back to China for recycling.
In the 1990s, China did relatively little trade with Kazakhstan — Central Asia's economic motor, an oil- and gas-rich nation of 15.2 million larger than Western Europe. But by 2006, China ranked third behind Germany and Russia in Kazakhstan's $35.6 billion export market and second after Russia in the nation's $22 billion import market.
The tiny, mountainous nation of Kyrgyzstan imported almost nothing from its giant neighbor to the East. By 2006, 57 percent of Kyrgyzstan's imports came from China — and only 15 percent from Russia.
In Khorgos, trucks leave China packed and typically return empty. The road to the border bears the scars of this one-way trade. The lane leading away from China is deeply rutted, the one leading back is smoothly paved.
In 2003, Beijing predicted a 30- to 50-fold increase in its trade with Central Asia within a decade.
China's growing clout makes many Central Asians anxious.
"Sometimes, it feels uneasy to be next to such a mighty neighbor," said Anastasiya Zhukova, a 24-year-old ethnic Russian and Kazakh citizen who works as a linguist for Chinese companies.
No one expects China to try to conquer Central Asia by military might. But some fear China may transform these countries into "vassal states" with little power to resist Beijing in conflicts over trade or foreign policy.
After Sept. 11, the United States seemed poised to vastly expand its influence here. But after establishing two military bases, it lost ground. It has been forced to close its base in Uzbekistan, and the other, in Kyrgyzstan, is under pressure.
What is the US going to do about this? It sounds like we are dropping the ball fast in the region.
Hopefully, nothing.
The universalist fantasy of ruling, or running, the planet is ruinous to our people and to our system of government.
What happens between Kazakhstan and China is none of our business, nor should it be.
Most excellent point.
The Chinese will eventually take over Siberia as well given Russia’s sinking population and the Chinese surplus of 300 million males.
The only question is will the Russian’s sell it ala Alaska or will they make the Chinese fight for it.
Article fails to mention that China has directly ruled parts of Central Asia for good chunks of the last 2000 years.
......What is the US going to do about this? It sounds like we are dropping the ball fast in the region.....
Where is your evidence we ever had the ball. We were never even in this game.
This new game is the result of the wane of communism in Asia.
Well, I supposed our base in Afghanistan would lend us a foothole in the region.
Why do we need to do anything in Central Asia? Let China and Russia fight over it. It'll keep them distracted and will destroy the progress they've made in working together to oppose us elsewhere. I blogged about this on an old, now-defunct blog over a year ago.
The region is in the Chinese and Russia sphere of influence. The USA should and will do nothing.
We will someday, need to get into the backdoor of these two bastards, China and Russia, using power politics and military presence to warn these two that US has access to the backdoor of the two, giving us more power to blackmail these two for any chance messing with democracy, freedom, and any other interests of US. We need to get rid of the dictators in the region, and keep on promoting democracy. Who cares about the sphere of influence of Russia and China. We are going to do the job what is neccessary. We should never repeat the mistakes of Nazi Germany by being isolationist and pacifist as well, only letting the situation going worse and worse.
Oil matters, oilfield leases preferably.
Russia can take care of herself. As long as you got weapons and energy, you got security.
China has the ability and the technical knowledge. They are proposing on the new $30 billion Alaska-Chicago Natural Gas Pipeline, and are building 50,000 miles of new Interstate Highway inside China.
—they aren’t afflicted with a 7th century religion, among other things—
One can say the same thing about Iraq, to a smaller extent of course. Look at how Saddam is doing now.
Iraq never had a weapons industry...and besides...they had to go up against america. That’s totally different.
btt
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