China "kicking butt" in the Great Game

Douglas Birch and Mansur Mirovalev of the Associated Press post their analysis of the Great Game to date, on the Moscow Times:

... In the past few years, Chinese fruit, vegetables, television 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....

...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....

... Niklas Swanstrom of John 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 said....

...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 among Russia, China 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."...

...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....

...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....

...Experts say the United States has retreated partly because of pressure from Russia and China, partly for a lack of interest: some American officials see Central Asia's oil and gas fields as too remote to meet U.S. energy needs.

Washington has alienated the region's authoritarian governments by criticizing human rights abuses. The Iraq war, meanwhile, raised concerns that the U.S. would push regime change to secure oil supplies -- a fear the Chinese have exploited.

"China does not pursue a policy of waging wars for energy resources, unlike the United States in Iraq," Dong Xiaoyang, a Chinese diplomat, told a September conference of scholars and diplomats in Almaty.

But China knows much of its future energy supply is here.

The state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. bought PetroKazakhstan in 2005 for $4.2 billion, then China's biggest foreign acquisition. In July 2006, the CNPC and Kazakhstan's KazMunaiGaz completed a $700 million, 962-kilometer oil pipeline across Kazakhstan to Alashankou in northwest China.

The pipeline, designed to supply up to 15 percent of China's oil needs, will serve the major new Chinese refinery in Karamay, to open in 2008. By some estimates, one-sixth of Kazakhstan's oil production will someday be pumped to China.

Turkmenistan in August started building a 7,000-kilometer natural gas pipeline through Kazakhstan to northwest China. When completed in 2009, the pipeline is expected to provide China with 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year....

...Tajikistan, with a per capita annual gross domestic product of just $1,300, desperately needs investment. Saifullo Safarov, deputy director of the Center for Strategic Research in Tajikistan, said that without Chinese money, his country cannot exploit its mineral wealth, locked in what he called "the treasure chest of the Pamir Mountains."

In July, the Chinese Zijin Mining Group bought 75 percent of Tajikistan's Zerafshan Gold, once controlled by a British company, and in late September it claimed to have increased the mine's production by 50 percent....

...All Central Asian nations are promoting their native languages at the expense of Russian, once the lingua franca here. The region used to share Moscow's secular faith in Marxism. Now, Russia is rediscovering its Orthodox Christian roots as Central Asia is gripped by a Muslim revival....

...Central Asian leaders say that in today's Great Game, the challenge for them is the same as in the past -- to benefit from the competition while ensuring none of the players becomes dominant.

"We will retain our independence," said Atambayev, "only if we maintain equally friendly relations with all the countries around us, and not be subdued by one of the powers around us."

Just take a pebble and cast it to the sea,

Then watch the ripples that unfold into me,

-- Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Take a Pebble