China’s relationships with Central Asian borrowers are hardly one-size-fits-all. Chinese financial players have adapted and used different models, demonstrating the country’s flexibility as a lender.
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Evan Feigenbaum, Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Temur Umarov, Nicole Grajewski, and Asel Doolotkeldieva focus on strategic dynamics in continental Asia and how regional players—not the United States or the transatlantic West—are driving both diplomacy and regional integration.
The political elites of Central Asia view the invasion of Ukraine through the prism of their own interests, top of which is the preservation of their own regimes. For this reason, they will continue to show loyalty to Putin.
By continuing to rely on Russia’s ethnic minorities and foreign labor migrants to do its dirty work in Ukraine, the Kremlin is inadvertently damaging ties to its former colonies.
Moscow had every opportunity to make the Central Asian nations gravitate toward it of their own accord. Yet now Russian soft power in Central Asia is dissipating before our eyes.
All the crises that have erupted in Central Asia this year have the same underlying causes: weak political institutions, and governments that dismiss public frustration until it erupts into bloodshed on the streets.
The region is dependent on Russia but wary of endorsing Moscow’s actions.
