Turan Research Center

For years, Russia was Central Asia’s unquestioned economic anchor. That era is over. China has overtaken Russia in trade, investment, and industrial development in the region. Yet beneath the headline numbers lies a more complicated picture. Beijing now dominates balance sheets, but Moscow still shapes livelihoods and continues to wield significant soft power as a result.

China’s growing economic presence is also driving backlash. Locals are concerned about growing debt burdens, deepening dependence, environmental damage from Chinese-backed projects, and encroachments on sovereignty by the region’s powerful eastern neighbor. But, as higher-value, affordable Chinese consumer goods become more widely available and Beijing increases the returns of its investments to local communities, this picture is starting to shift.

China’s Rising Trade

China’s rise as Central Asia’s dominant external economic actor has been swift. Beijing was a minor economic player in the region during its first decade of independence, but overtook Russia in total trade with the five Central Asian republics in 2009. The divergence has only grown since. In 2025, trade between China and Central Asia exceeded $100 billion for the first time. Trade with Russia was roughly half that at around $51 billion.

The scale of the transformation is hard to overstate. Turkmenistan now sends the bulk of its gas eastward. China–Turkmenistan trade approached $10 billion in 2025 alone, making Beijing by far Ashgabat’s most important commercial partner. Chinese investment stock across Central Asia has reached nearly $36 billion, making it the largest investor in the region. More than 11,000 enterprises with Chinese capital operate across the five states. Chinese firms build highways, operate mines, assemble cars, and increasingly manufacture electric vehicles inside the region.

The transformation is visible in smaller ways too. Walk through a bazaar in Bishkek or Dushanbe and Xiaomi phones line every stall. Chinese brands command over half of the regional smartphone market. The increasingly busy roads of the region are now dominated by Chinese electric vehicles.

Anti-Chinese Sentiments on the Rise

But familiarity can breed contempt. As China’s presence in Central Asian economies has grown, so has anti-Chinese sentiment. Between 2018 and 2021, 70% of protests targeting foreign governments and businesses targeted China, according to data collected for our recent book Backlash. Data from the Central Asia Barometer highlights a significant deterioration in perceptions of China in recent years. Suspicion towards China has especially risen. By 2023, 38 percent of Kazakhstanis, 27 percent of Kyrgyz, and 64 percent of Uzbeks expressed negative opinions of China, up from 16 percent, 23 percent, and 5 percent respectively in 2017.

Several factors are driving rising skepticism towards China’s economic role in the region.

Debt has skyrocketed alongside investment. Tajikistan owes roughly $800 million to China out of $3.2 billion in total external debt. Kyrgyzstan’s obligations to China’s Export-Import Bank amount to about $1.7 billion — more than a third of its foreign debt. Uzbekistan’s liabilities to China approach $3.8 billion. These figures do not necessarily signal imminent crisis, but they do bind governments to Beijing over the long term, and populations have taken notice. By 2023, 80% of Kyrgyz and two-thirds of Uzbeks were concerned about growing debts to China.

Chinese land investments have raised concerns about eroding sovereignty. When Kazakhstan’s government proposed amendments to the Land Code in 2016, which would have allowed foreigners to buy or lease land, the largest protests in the country’s history to that point broke out. Many feared Chinese citizens would purchase land as part of a plan to take over parts of the country. The amendments were quickly scrapped.

Such fears are not wholly unfounded. The border disputes China pursued across Central Asia traced their origins to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Russian Empire absorbed territories Beijing regarded as historically contested. Those claims persisted through the Soviet period, and following the USSR's collapse, China moved to settle them through bilateral negotiations — on terms that consistently favored Beijing. Kazakhstan was the first to yield, ratifying a border treaty in 1999 that ceded roughly 43 percent of the 34,000 square kilometers of territory China had claimed as disputed. Kyrgyzstan's government followed, ratifying a border deal with China in 2002, ceding 1,250 square kilometers, sparking vocal opposition. Tajikistan followed in 2011, relinquishing 1,000 square kilometers — a figure its government presented to the public as a concession, noting it amounted to just five percent of what China had originally sought. In both cases, officials framed the territorial transfers as a pragmatic price for stability, arguing that yielding a portion of the disputed land was preferable to prolonged friction with a far more powerful neighbor.

Pollution linked to Chinese-backed projects has repeatedly triggered local backlash. In Kazakhstan, residents near Chinese-operated oil and chemical facilities in Atyrau and Aktobe provinces have staged demonstrations over air emissions and fears of toxic discharge, accusing authorities of failing to enforce environmental standards. In Kyrgyzstan, protests have erupted around Chinese-run gold mining operations, including at the Solton-Sary site in Naryn province, where local residents blocked roads and clashed with workers over concerns about water contamination and livestock deaths. While not all environmental grievances can be independently verified, and some incidents are amplified by broader geopolitical suspicion, the pattern is clear: as China’s industrial footprint has expanded, so too have anxieties about pollution, transparency, and regulatory oversight.

China is also viewed as fueling corruption. The most striking example came in 2018. Having just undergone a $386 million renovation by Tebian Electric Apparatus Stock Co. Ltd, the Bishkek Thermal Power Plant broke down in the dead of winter, leaving the capital city with no heating or hot water for almost a week. A later investigation uncovered that the Chinese company and Kyrgyz officials had skimmed over $100 million from the project by inflating costs. While Chinese investors and corrupt officials profited, residents suffered.

Chinese companies have been accused of unsafe work conditions, poor pay, and preferential treatment of Chinese workers. There are widespread perceptions that Chinese investments take jobs from locals rather than creating them. This is particularly acute in Kyrgyzstan, where job shortages force many to migrate abroad. In November 2025, a mass brawlbroke out between locals and Chinese workers from Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) in Chui province after a dispute over access to a quarry. President Sadyr Japarov was quick to downplay the incident, saying, “such everyday conflicts should not be elevated to the level of interstate problems.” Foreign Minister Jeenbek Kulubaev dismissed claims that Chinese laborers are “flooding” Kyrgyzstan and stealing local jobs.

Russian Resilience

Despite impressive gains by China, Russia remains the primary bill payer for a significant share of the region’s population. Remittances are the most powerful reminder. In 2024, Tajik labor migrants in Russia sent home $5.8 billion — roughly 45 percent of Tajikistan’s GDP. Between one and 1.2 million Tajiks continue to work in Russia. Kyrgyzstan received roughly $3.5 billion in remittances in 2025, about 15 percent of its GDP, overwhelmingly from Russia. Uzbekistan-bound remittances reached nearly $19 billion in 2025, $15 billion of which came from Russia — around 12 percent of Tashkent’s GDP.

Russia’s popularity has suffered from its invasion of Ukraine and a generational shift, as younger Central Asians carry no memory of the Soviet Union. By 2023, negative views of Russia and China in Kazakhstan were roughly level. One-fifth of Kazakhstan’s population is ethnically Russian, concentrated in the country’s north near its long border with Russia. Russian nationalists have claimed these areas to be historically Russian territory, leading to concerns about a potential invasion. In 2014, shortly after annexing Crimea, President Putin claimed Kazakhstan "never had any statehood" before 1991. Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, former President Dmitry Medvedev called Kazakhstan an “artificial state,” arguing the north of the country is made up of “former Russian territories.” More recently, TV host Vladimir Solovyov called for “Special Military Operations” in the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Such moves have sparked anger in the region, especially in Kazakhstan. But elsewhere, Russia remains more popular: just 15 percent of Kyrgyz and 36 percent of Uzbeks hold negative attitudes toward Moscow, roughly half the number opposed to China.

Despite experiencing xenophobia and harsh working conditions in Russia, migration remains a lifeline. Strong personal connections to Russia mean that, although declining, at least a basic grasp of the Russian language remains essential for many Central Asians. Coupled with the ongoing influence of Russian media, this keeps perceptions of Russia largely positive across the region.

China cannot match Russia in this regard. Migration levels to Russia dwarf anything Beijing offers. Remittances from China are negligible, with almost no Central Asian labor migrants working in the country. Most Central Asian citizens residing in China are among the roughly 35,000 students.

How China is Trying to Make Itself More Attractive

Beijing is working to improve its image with a series of initiatives aimed at boosting human capital and delivering higher-value projects. China opened its first Luban Workshop, a vocational training center, in Tajikistan in 2022. Further centers have since opened in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, focusing on practical local needs hydropower in Kyrgyzstan, land surveying in Tajikistan, information technology and logistics in Uzbekistan, and artificial intelligence in Kazakhstan. Such programs help China frame its role as providing real value to the local population.

As the region seeks to harness AI to drive growth and enhance governance, Beijing is a willing partner. Kazakhstan’s Academy of Sciences received $143 million from Zhejiang University of Technology to establish the Laboratory of Spatio-Temporal Artificial Intelligence and Sustainable Development, a project aimed at developing AI capacity and boosting computing speeds. Chinese tech company LinkWise is partnering with Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Digital Technologies to build a Modular Intelligent Computing Center and plans to open two data centers in the country. These moves address local needs and move China beyond extraction towards more valuable investments.

China is also increasingly partnering with local companies to produce goods in Central Asia. In Uzbekistan, Chinese-backed automobile and electric vehicle plants are no longer proposals — they are production lines. The first car manufactured by Chinese EV giant BYD rolled off a new $160 million facility in 2024. Kazakhstan has seen a similar rise in Chinese-funded factories. Three Chinese automakers — Great Wall Motor, Changan, and Chery — are planning to open car factories there.

Where infrastructure cannot be owned, China is exporting high-quality consumer technologies. Cars account for about 10 percent of all Chinese exports to Central Asia. By 2024, almost half of all cars sold in Kazakhstan were Chinese brands. China is also coming to dominate Uzbekistan, the region’s largest market, where it accounts for 80 percent of car imports. Chinese smartphone manufacturers hold over half the regional market, offering an affordable alternative to Apple and Samsung.

Combined, these shifts are helping China blunt some of the criticisms directed at it. But the effort remains a work in progress. Local backlash has forced Beijing to adapt its approach, and China’s footing in Central Asia is far from assured. The deeper challenge is structural: until China can offer the kind of direct livelihood connections that Russia provides through migration and remittances, its social acceptance will continue to lag behind its economic dominance.

Edward Lemon is President of the Oxus Society and Research Assistant Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, Washington DC.

Bradley Jardine is a political risk analyst and managing director of the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs.

Shortly after midnight on January 18, Tajik security forces killed four armed militants who had crossed into southern Tajikistan from Afghanistan. According to official accounts, the group, described only as members of an unnamed “terrorist organization,” refused to surrender after a brief exchange of fire near the strategic Pamir Highway, a vital corridor linking Tajikistan to China.

Beijing has grown increasingly uneasy about the uptick in violence along its southern frontier with Tajikistan. Last November, an assault by an armed drone launched from Afghanistan killed three Chinese nationals working at a gold mining site in the Shamsiddin Shohin district of southern Tajikistan, prompting public demands for stronger protection of Chinese workers and investments.

Efforts by Tajik and Afghan officials to defuse border tensions quickly faltered. A day after the first attack, a Taliban delegation traveled to Tajikistan's restive Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO) – the stretch of territory that covers most of the shared border – to discuss de-escalation. The talks quickly broke down. Four days later, two more Chinese workers of the China Road and Bridge Corporation were killed near the village of Shodak in the Darvaz district.

The violence is already disrupting major investment projects.

Construction of the Dushanbe-China international highway in the Darvaz district, the site of the second attack, was suspended "to ensure the safety of Chinese workers" and will remain paused until the "security situation is fully restored." Although construction resumed in January, future attacks could trigger new delays.

These incidents illustrate how seemingly isolated acts of violence are reshaping China’s threat assessments and recasting Tajikistan from a cooperative partner into a frontline security concern within Beijing’s broader strategy to stabilize its western periphery.

China’s Strategic Interests in Tajikistan

China’s security engagement with Tajikistan is driven less by ambitions of regional power than by a desire to manage perceived vulnerabilities along its western frontier. At the center of Beijing’s concerns lies the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), where Chinese authorities have long emphasized the risks posed by separatist movements. Since the early 1990s, Chinese officials have consistently framed neighboring Central Asia — and Tajikistan in particular —as part of a broader security buffer designed to shield Xinjiang from what they call the “Three Evils” of separatism, extremism, and terrorism.

Tajikistan is a key security link.

Its long, mountainous border with Afghanistan is notoriously difficult to police, and overlooks the Wakhan Corridor, the narrow Afghan strip that connects directly to China. During a 2014 tour of Xinjiang, President Xi Jinping warned that Uyghur fighters returning from Syria could exploit Afghanistan as a staging ground to launch attacks on China through this corridor.

The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) has demonstrated a growing capacity to target Chinese interests in Afghanistan, leveraging both operational partnerships and ideological narratives to advance its campaign. The group has cultivated tactical relationships with Uyghur Islamist militant organizations, most notably the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), to execute attacks against Chinese nationals and assets operating within Afghan territory.

Beyond these operational linkages, ISKP has sought to instrumentalize Beijing's policies toward Uyghur populations in Xinjiang as a mobilizing grievance, framing its anti-China agenda within a broader narrative of Muslim persecution. Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained an estimated one million or more Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in extrajudicial internment facilities, imposed extensive surveillance and movement restrictions, and pursued policies that the United States and several other governments have characterized as genocide and crimes against humanity.

The January 19 assault on a Chinese restaurant in Kabul — for which ISKP claimed responsibility, resulting in at least seven casualties — underscores the operational seriousness of this threat. The attack was followed by a coordinated media campaign across ISKP -aligned channels, disseminated in eight languages, explicitly threatening further strikes against Chinese interests. This sophisticated information operation signals both the group's intent to sustain pressure on Beijing and its capacity to project messaging to diverse audiences across multiple regions.

Yet the threat to Chinese nationals in the region extends beyond ideologically motivated terrorism. Beijing's security concerns are not entirely unfounded, but they must be understood within a more complex local context — one in which Chinese commercial activities have themselves become a source of instability.

The Tajik-Afghan border has grown increasingly volatile over the past year. Tajik officials reported 10 armed incidentsalong the frontier, including the attacks on Chinese workers noted earlier. Between November 2024 and January 2026, at least 20 people have been killed in firefights in this area between Tajik border guards and militants from the Afghan side. Much of the violence has stemmed from the activities of Chinese mining companies diverting the course of local rivers and causing ecological damage. Despite armed conflicts centered on the village of Dovang in August and October, our sources indicate the Chinese company has expanded its operations — apparently emboldened by security guarantees from Dushanbe — further aggravating local tensions.

Attacks on Chinese nationals working in Tajikistan — including deadly assaults near the Afghan frontier — have underscored the risks facing Chinese personnel and investments. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon “sharply condemned the illegal and provocative actions of Afghan citizens,” framing the incidents as a direct threat to national stability. On December 4, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization also “strongly condemned” the violence, stating that Afghanistan"should not be used to create a threat to the security of neighboring countries and the region as a whole." Two days earlier, the Chinese embassy ordered its workers near the Afghan border to evacuate and urged Tajik authorities to take the “necessary measures” to ensure their protection.

The move was intended to pressure the Tajik government to step up its response and to signal to the Taliban that China was taking the threat with growing seriousness. Rather than deploying large numbers of Chinese forces, Beijing has relied on a low-visibility approach: funding infrastructure at remote border outposts, strengthening surveillance and monitoring systems, and embedding its security cooperation within bilateral and multilateral frameworks such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

To date, China has been careful to avoid any appearance of encroaching on Russia’s traditional security primacy in Tajikistan. Moscow remains Dushanbe’s principal security guarantor through its military base in the country and its leading role within the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) of which Tajikistan is a member. Russian border guards were stationed on the Tajik-Afghan border until 2004. After the most recent attacks,  Reuters published a piece saying that Tajikistan and Russia were in talks to conduct joint patrols on the border. But the article was quickly retracted. Such rumors are frequent, often started by Russian officials seeking to push the Tajik side to do more.

Chinese officials rarely frame their security activities in Tajikistan as a substitute for Russia. Instead, Beijing consistently portrays its role as complementary — focused on border management, counterterrorism, and protecting economic projects — while leaving conventional defense and crisis response to Moscow. In 2017, Beijing even invited Russian policy analysts to assess its intentions firsthand, making great efforts to reassure them that China's facility in the Pamir Mountains served logistical rather than military purposes.

Taken together, China’s security interests in Tajikistan are best understood not as a bid to supplant Russia, but as a calibrated effort to manage specific threats Beijing perceives along Xinjiang’s border. By prioritizing border security, counterterrorism cooperation, and quiet capacity-building — while deferring to Russia’ security primacy — China has sought to reduce risk without provoking geopolitical pushback. The result is a strategy aimed at preserving Tajikistan as a stabilizing buffer rather than as a contested security arena.China’s Growing Security Presence

Russia provides almost all of Tajikistan’s military hardware and stations more than 6,000 troops in the country. Yet China’s role as an arms provider has grown over the past decade. Since 2018, Beijing has gifted Tajikistan a range of military equipment, including Norinco VP-11 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, Shaanxi Baoji Tiger vehicles, Norinco CS/VN3 light tactical armored vehicles, Type 56-3 7.62 mm assault rifles, LR2 12.7 mm rifles, and CS/SS4 82 mm self-propelled mortars. Beyond hardware, China has invested in physical infrastructure for Tajikistan’s security apparatus, building or renovating at least 15 military facilities over the past decade.

Border insecurity has been a major driver of this policy. In 2016, China’s Ministry of Public Security established asurveillance facility in Tajikistan’s Pamir region, roughly ten miles from the Afghan border. Designed to house 50 personnel and equipped with a helipad, it represents China’s first security facility in Central Asia and the first outside its national territory. It was an early signal of the broader expansion that later produced Chinese military facilities in Djibouti, Cuba, and Argentina. In 2021, Tajikistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs invited Beijing to finance a newreconnaissance facility in the Wakhan Corridor, directly adjacent to Afghanistan.

China has also prioritized improving interoperability with Tajik forces. A joint operation in 2014 involving more than 5,000 officers led to the arrest of thirty-eight drug smugglers. Chinese and Tajik forces have also conducted joint patrols along the border in 2017 and 2019 and Tajikistan has participated in nineteen of the thirty-six joint military exercises China conducted with Central Asia militaries between 2002 and 2023. Most of these were held under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with six conducted bilaterally. Across all formats, the exercises have centered on border security and joint counterterrorism – reflecting shared concerns about instability and militant spillover from the Tajik–Afghan border.

In 2023, Tajikistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and China’s Ministry of Public Security pledged to hold joint anti-terrorist exercises at least once every two years in another sign of the growing institutionalization of security cooperation. That commitment was reaffirmed in a bilateral meeting shortly before the November border clashes, during which both sides pledged to “carry out solid bilateral joint patrols, prevent the infiltration and spread of terrorist forces, and build a strong security shield for the development of both nations.”

China’s expanding role is not limited to state-to-state channels. A growing range of private security actors have also become involved. Tajik law does not regulate foreign private military companies, creating space for Chinese firms to operate under the supervision of national law enforcement agencies and local partners. For example, Three Lions International — a subsidiary of China Shield Security Group, which formed a strategic partnership with Tajik security firm Red Line. In 2022, Chinese security contractors trained and exercised with Tajik police to simulate the defense of a Chinese mine in Vahdat, a city in western Tajikistan. The rise of such private security contractors offers Beijing additional flexibility in safeguarding its Belt and Road projects while reducing political and operational risks for its companies.

The Future of China’s Engagement in Tajikistan

China is unlikely to dramatically expand its security role in Central Asia, not because of a lack of capacity, but because deeper involvement in security would expose Beijing to political backlash and strategic entrapment it has long sought to avoid. Beijing’s regional approach is built along three pillars - regime stability, economic leverage, and risk minimization. A more assertive security role would pull China into the region’s web of local grievances and succession politics, all of which are inherently volatile and costly to manage.

Public sentiment presents an additional constraint. Sinophobia remains one of Beijing's most significant challenges in Central Asia. State-backed media in both countries routinely celebrate the China-Tajikistan relationship, casting the two as “good neighbors, kind partners, and loyal friends.” Tajik elites often echo this enthusiasm, in part because many benefitdirectly from lucrative Chinese contracts and security assistance that keeps them in power. Yet these friendly narratives mask a more ambivalent public mood. Among ordinary Tajiks, China’s expanding presence has generated unease, skepticism, and at times outright hostility.

During our 2022 fieldwork for the book “Backlash: China’s Struggle for Influence in Central Asia,” we encountered a wide range of critical views of China – many of them shaped by rumor, mistrust, and conspiracy theories. In Khujand, Tajikistan’s second-largest city, one resident told us:” They come here building roads, but what do you think they are for? They are built to support the tanks of the Chinese army.” Similar anxieties surfaced in the Pamirs, where communities living near China’s strategic facilities voiced fears that Beijing intended to annex Tajik territory.

China is more likely to draw on the “best practices” it has refined along its East and Southeast Asian land borders than to adopt a heavy-handed security posture in Central Asia. Across its frontiers, Beijing has developed a series of low-visibility management strategies tailored to local political constraints rather than a single coercive model.

In Bhutan, Beijing has pursued what scholars describe as “friendly annexation”: incremental territorial advances paired with infrastructure construction, diplomatic engagement, and carefully calibrated restraint. This approach is designed to expand China’s presence while avoiding international backlash.

Along the Myanmar border, China has combined conflict mediation with selective tolerance of instability. By leveragingethnic Chinese armed groups and economic dependencies, Beijing maintains significant influence without assuming formal responsibility for security outcomes.

Taken together, these cases suggest that China’s future engagement in Tajikistan will mirror its broader playbook of quiet persistence rather than dramatic escalation. Beijing will keep tightening its grip through training, infrastructure, and intelligence cooperation. Still, it will stop short of assuming the responsibilities or liabilities of becoming a full-fledged security patron to avoid entanglement in domestic policies and regional rivalries.

Edward Lemon is President of the Oxus Society and Research Assistant Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, Washington DC.

Bradley Jardine is a political risk analyst and managing director of the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs.

Oleg Antonov is a Researcher at Södertörn University. His research focuses on authoritarian governance in Central Asia, in particular Russia and China’s influence in the region.