How China Is Leveraging Security Cooperation in Central Asia

The July 2024 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in in Astana, Kazakhstan provided China with another platform to highlight its vision for global governance and security. While the SCO has expanded to include states beyond Central Asia, the organization’s focus on fighting terrorism, separatism and extremism — the so-called “three evils” — is particularly relevant for China in Central Asia, where Beijing looks to test and advance its security cooperation strategies. The SCO, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Global Security Initiative (GSI) are key components of China’s ambition to offer an alternative to what it calls “Western hegemony” and to resist external interference in the domestic affairs of SCO states.

Launched in April 2022, the GSI promotes China’s long-standing normative preferences for international affairs, with an emphasis on territorial sovereignty and noninterference. In the last two years, China has sought to position the GSI as an alternative to the U.S.-led security order. It has also begun associating bilateral and regional security efforts — like counterterrorism and policing assistance — with the GSI. It is here that we see the GSI’s potential to expand and become firmly rooted in Central Asia.

Solidarity Against Separatism

Central Asia’s majority Turkic population and China fought a series of wars dating back to China’s Han Empire, which was established around 200 B.C. China’s image as a historical adversary of Kyrgyz nomadic tribes is widely expressed through Kyrgyz folklore, particularly in the “Epic of Manas,” a 500,000-line poem chronicling centuries of history. In the modern era, Central Asians largely understood their relationship with China through a Russian-led discourse, given the history they shared with the Soviet Union and the extensive use of the Russian language in knowledge production in Central Asia.

Amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and Central Asian countries’ subsequent independence, the Uyghurs — a Turkic-speaking people who primarily reside in China’s western Xinjiang province — launched an independence movement. Beijing responded to the movements’ violent uprisings with brutal repression. Since then, China has continued to persecute the Uyghurs, implementing draconian policies that many have called genocide.

China’s security concerns over Xinjiang accelerated its foreign policy and diplomatic engagement in Central Asia, which largely shares the same Muslim, Turkic cultural identities with Uyghurs. Despite some signs of protests over events in Xinjiang across Central Asia, Chinese-led strategies and high-level diplomacy prevented the emergence of Central Asian solidarity with Uyghurs, while cooperation between China and the region took a step forward in the context of security.

Indeed, the governments of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan face their own “separatist movements” in Karakalpakstan and the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province, respectively. These shared concerns engender solidarity between Tajik and Uzbek political elites and China over noninterference in internal affairs and assisting each other to combat ethnic minorities’ dissident movements.

China has been able to effectively lobby Central Asian elites to not raise questions over Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs.

In addition, authorities in Kyrgyzstan — the most politically unstable country in the region which frequently sees mass unrest and protests — find common ground with Beijing in the fight against and prevention of “color revolutions.” A 2016 car bomb attack on the Chinese Embassy in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, galvanized bilateral cooperation between their intelligence services. Frequent protests at Chinese enterprises throughout the country have also enabled China to bring its private security companies to operate in Kyrgyzstan to protect its investments. Through these mutual concerns of suppressing opposition forces, a shared SCO security framework, and the implementation of large-scale economic initiatives through the BRI, China has been able to effectively lobby Central Asian elites to not raise questions over Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs.

Expanding the GSI in Central Asia

Beijing’s newly launched China-Central Asia mechanism, the C+C5, further strengthens the dialogue between China and the region. This is the first multilateral platform between China and the region that excludes Russia. The inaugural summit in May 2023 emphasized mutual support for national interests deemed “core” by China, such as sovereignty, independence, security and territorial integrity. In doing so, China again called for opposition to external interference, which it says is the source of “color revolutions,” and to fight the “three evils” under the GSI.

The decision to hold the summit in Xi’an — which historically marked the Silk Road’s eastern end — was an example of Chinese leaders’ well-developed strategy to develop ambitious concepts that articulate a vision of the great rejuvenation of the nation with references to the historical achievements of ancient China. In Xi’an, China emphasized its shared history with the region via the Silk Road, introducing cooperation with Central Asia as a continuation of a thousand-year friendship — overlooking cultural and religious identity-related differences.

Against the backdrop of similar cooperation formats, such as the U.S.-led C5+1, South Korean C5+K, and European C5+EU, the Xi’an Summit demonstrated China’s particular devotion to the region. This sustained commitment will no doubt strengthen China’s position in Central Asia, while Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shaken perceptions about Russia and Western countries still see the region as peripheral. This also allows China to pull the Central Asian countries to its side when confronting “Western-centric” liberal values.

In addition to high-profile multilateral meetings, China has significantly advanced its economic and security connections to Central Asia, including support for strategic infrastructure, equipment provision, joint military exercises, military degree programs in China and the deployment of Chinese private security companies. With another active and powerful security actor in the region in Russia, it is hard to assess the direct systematic impact of China’s security efforts in the region.

Nevertheless, China’s footprint in digitizing security stands out. Central Asian authorities have been adopting China’s surveillance experience as part of their own “safe city” projects. Chinese security technology transfer is, in part, justified by its investment flows to the region to protect its own citizens. Human rights watchers are concerned that this reinforces the power of authoritarian regimes.

Central Asian leadership sees Beijing’s non-interference principle as a “win-win” situation, allowing them to maintain power while signing big economic deals with China.

Central Asian leadership sees Beijing’s non-interference principle as a “win-win” situation, allowing them to maintain power while signing big economic deals with China. Enabled by China’s support, these leaders face no pressure from independent media to uphold human rights, with various online and in-person forms of civic activism actively suppressed throughout the region.

Chinese projects also suffer from transparency issues, as evidenced by a Chinese-Tajik pact over security concerns in Afghanistan, which resulted in a military base in GBAO first reported in 2016. In July 2024, it was reported that the alleged military facility has been expanding, as new satellite pictures show. Both Chinese and Tajik authorities have denied the existence of any military base and disclosed little on their cooperation on this issue.

Despite China’s increasing security presence in the region, news reports and a recent study surveying Chinese academic articles in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure database show that the GSI does not appear on the frontline of China-Central Asia relations, where much focus is given to economic activities and humanitarian aid. As shared by a several political insiders, most security-related cooperation is addressed bilaterally, and most Central Asian perspectives see no broader conceptual framework attached yet.

The SCO’s expansion and the ongoing development of the BRI evidence that the GSI also has the potential to be an important aspect of China-Central Asia relations. Building economic and security cooperation with limited transparency and without liberal conditions is attractive for Central Asian leaders with authoritarian inclinations. This provides ample opportunity for Beijing to promote its GSI as it continues to expand its engagement in Central Asia.