Courcy’s Intelligence Brief
Central Asia's ambivalence towards China on display
Russia’s Defence Minister General Sergey Shoygu has been emphasizing the importance of close military ties with China. But other indications this week have once again highlighted the ambivalence of Russia and other former Soviet republics towards China.
On 21 November, ahead of a meeting of the joint Russia-Chinese inter-governmental commission for military-technical cooperation, Shoygu said: “The closer cooperation between our countries is, military-technical cooperation in particular, the calmer it is in our region.” The day before, however, the chief researcher at the top Kazakh think tank, with links to the president, revealed how suspicious Russia and Kazakhstan remain of China’s influence in Central Asia.
Speaking at a meeting of the Institute of Political Decisions in the Kazakh capital of Almaty, Konstantin Syroyezhkin of the Kazakh Institute of Strategic Studies, which reports to the president, said: “In my view, strategically, everything should be done so that the presence of China in Central Asian space and the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] as a whole should be limited, not dominating. This is in our interests and in the interests of Russia.”
Syroyezhkin is of the view that rivalry between Russia and China in the region, currently confined to the energy sector, will broaden over time. He pointed out that at the last summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), “Russia blocked all proposals made by China...If a free trade zone were to be created on SCO space under the auspices of China, it would simply eat up all of us tomorrow.”
Syroyezhkin sees Eurasian integration as a way of deterring China’s expansion into Central Asia. He said: “If we are able to do this, they [the Chinese] will be talking to us differently. Individually we are nothing – neither Russia, nor Kazakhstan, nor Belarus.”
On the other hand, whilst emphasizing the threat posed by China, Syroyezhkin also pointed to its internal weaknesses, including the “acute crisis of legitimacy” being experienced by the Communist Party.