Green berets are reportedly now present on the Taiwanese island of Kinmen a mere three miles off the coast of mainland China, and tensions continue to increase between Beijing and Taipei.
The US is possibly downgrading its attempt to isolate Russia (opting instead for “containment”) and turning its full attention towards China. There have been think tank missives arguing for this for years, at least some have read the departure of Project Ukraine leader “Toria” Nuland from the State Department and the installation of more China hawks as evidence that this shift is finally underway.
Judging from Washington think tank world, the plan for China is essentially a rehash of the effort to isolate Russia. Goad China into a US proxy war over Taiwan and/or the South China Sea, and then enact the isolation efforts. The fact this strategy failed against Russia did not work does not seem to be causing any serious rethink in Washington. In fact, the Ukraine fiasco is presented as the first step in the coming conflict with China. A team of analysts from the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) mention this in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs:
A U.S. containment strategy toward Russia would pay additional dividends in Asia. Russia’s unprovoked war has been a quagmire. Washington’s continued support of Ukraine impedes Russia’s military ambitions and dilutes its potential to support Chinese aggression in the future.
Translated, terms like “unprovoked war” and “aggression” simply mean the ability to withstand Western pressure, but we can see the Washington hive mind at work here. Maybe it would have made sense to knock off Russia first, thereby eliminating a key supplier of fossil fuels and raw materials to China and allowing the West to push into Central Asia disrupting China’s land supply chains and hypothetically blockade it on all sides. The idea of isolating China is so far-fetched it is perhaps understandable that the West would undertake the gambit to defeat Russia and extend its control there and into central Asia. The problem is it not only didn’t work, but the opposite happened.
It isolated Russia from Europe, but forced Moscow to forge stronger ties with the rest of the world, especially China. And if it didn’t work against Russia, how should it be expected to work against a much larger and globally interconnected economy like China? The answer from CSIS:
Still, the United States and its allies have leverage with China. Whereas Chinese-Russian trade stood at $240 billion in 2023, China’s trade with the EU amounted to about $800 billion, and China’s trade with the United States was more than $660 billion. China has more at stake in its economic relationships with the United States and the EU than it does with Russia.
Yes, but what do the US and EU have at stake? Just to mention the obvious, an attempt to isolate China would mean circles of hell pain in the West, which could shatter their economies and societies. As the Chinese President Xi Jinping said in the April 2 phone call with Biden, Beijing “is not going to sit back and watch” is the US keeps pushing. If the preferred method of warfare from the US is a proxy war coupled with an economic war, the contest is an attritional one to see whose system cracks first. And we can see that so far, the European vassals are the biggest losers. (Although I can’t help but think the Ursulas and company of the EU see this as an opportunity to grab more power while capital gets to feast on the underfunded and collapsing welfare states).
Who knows, maybe the West believes it can destabilize China before its own structures crumble. Either way, the aristocrats appear doomed to try. And their strategy is only getting more difficult as China gets to watch and learn from the West’s efforts to “isolate” Russia.
China’s Preparations in Central Asia
China has already broken the US chip blockade. It now prepares to do the same with whatever other efforts emerge from the West. The same CSIS arguing for the US to take on China also admits the following:
China’s defense industrial base is operating on a wartime footing, while the U.S. defense industrial base is largely operating on a peacetime footing. Overall, the U.S. defense industrial ecosystem lacks the capacity, responsiveness, flexibility, and surge capability to meet the U.S. military’s production and warfighting needs. Unless there are urgent changes, the United States risks weakening deterrence and undermining its warfighting capabilities. China is heavily investing in munitions and acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the United States. China is also the world’s largest shipbuilder and has a shipbuilding capacity that is roughly 230 times larger than the United States. One of China’s large shipyards, such as Jiangnan Shipyard, has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.
Let’s take a look at energy. Foreign Policy Research Institute notes that “for China a war over Taiwan would cause a severe economic disruption for Beijing, and the country would need to turn to Central Asia for energy and to keep important supply chains open.”
Well, that is exactly what Beijing is doing well in advance. Russian energy supplies to China have gone through the roof. Russia is now China’s top oil supplier, sending a record 107.02 million metric tons of crude oil to China in 2023, far more than other major oil exporters such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Gas through the Power of Siberia pipeline reached roughly 22 billion cubic meters (bcm) last year and is likely to hit its capacity of 38 bcm/year next year. The Power of Siberia 2 pipeline has hit a snag as China tries to take advantage of its dominant buyer position and Russia’s limited seller options. Still, according to the China Natural Gas Development Report 2023 published by the National Energy Administration, pipeline gas imports from Russia saw a remarkable 54 percent increase in 2022.
Last year, China began to speed up the building of the final leg of the Central Asia-China pipeline, which will transport natural gas from Central Asian countries – primarily Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan – into China. Turkmenistan is already China’s top supplier, and the Central Asia Gas PipelineChina is the biggest supplier of China’s imported gas. Total capacity through the pipelines once line D is completed will be 85 bcm – the equivalent of nearly two Nordstreams.
The Central Asian nations have in recent years been forced to reduce exports to meet surging domestic demand, however, especially during the winter. In response, Beijing is considering Russia’s plan to supply gas to Central Asian countries to meet domestic demand, leaving them with enough to supply China and even carry Russian gas to China.
Russia and China are also both working to solidify friendly governments in Central Asia, thereby securing and rapidly expanding land supply chains through the region. This includes Afghanistan. From Indian Punchline:
Moscow estimated that Taliban rule has stabilised the Afghan situation significantly and it is in Russian interests to help the Kabul administration to effectively counter the extremist elements in the country (especially the Islamic State, which is known to be a legacy of the US occupation of Afghanistan.) Russia leveraged its influence with the Central Asian states to ensure that western-backed anti-Taliban ‘resistance’ forces did not get sanctuaries.
Of course, the strategic objective is that the western intelligence will not be able to manipulate free-wheeling Afghan elements to destabilise the Central Asian region or the Caucasus all over again.
Taliban has been most receptive to the Russian overtures aimed at strengthening the Afghan statehood. Recently, Taliban went to the extent of boycotting a UN-sponsored conference on Afghanistan on February 18-19 in Qatar, which was, in reality, an invidious attempt by the US to re-engage the Taliban on the pretext of promoting “intra-Afghan dialogue” (which essentially meant the return of the West’s Afghan proxies living in exile in Europe and America.)
Should that development continue, it could become a key piece of the Eurasia rail network. Beijing, too, hopes that its incoming aid, including the building of a wide range of infrastructure, will help stabilize Afghanistan and the region.
Russia, China, and Kazakhstan also just announced an initiative to improve their transport and logistics infrastructure, including a direct transport link connecting Xi’an with Moscow.
The Southern Transport Corridor is an example of a plan to hedge against any efforts of “deterrence” by the West. The route, which will connect Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China via the Caspian Sea, could be viewed as a contingency plan in case the shorter Kazakhstan connection is disrupted.
China’s trade with the Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan) hit $89.4 billion in 2023, a 27 percent increase over 2022. That puts the central Asian states collectively in 10th place on the list of China’s top trading partners and has them poised to overtake the Netherlands and Germany, with whom trade is rapidly declining.
China is also working towards fortifying sanction-proof supply chains in Africa. But the threat of sea trade issues stemming from western isolation efforts remains.
Reuters reports recently how oil tankers from the Middle East crossing the Indian Ocean, as well as other shipments headed to China from Africa and Brazil, would “lack protection in a naval theatre dominated by the U.S.” How dominant the US really is in that theater is a question, but more from Reuters::
A dozen military attaches and scholars say that vulnerability is now being scrutinised as Western military and academic strategists discreetly game scenarios about how a conflict with China over Taiwan, or elsewhere in East Asia, could evolve or escalate.
In a major war, Chinese oil tankers in the Indian Ocean “would find themselves very vulnerable”, said David Brewster, a security scholar at the Australian National University…Four envoys and eight analysts familiar with discussions in Western and Asian capitals, some speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, said this enduring weakness gives China’s adversaries a ladder of escalatory options, especially in a drawn-out conflict, like Russia’s war on Ukraine. These scenarios range from harassment and interdiction operations against Chinese shipping that could divert Chinese naval vessels to the region, up to a blockade and beyond.
If telegraphing such plans – whether an attempt in the high seas or at the Strait of Malacca – and providing a case study with the efforts to isolate Russia weren’t enough to prepare China, the West added even more incentive with the Red Sea fiasco.
Yemen’s blockade due to the West’s backing of Israel forced China to increase its attention to Central Asia even more. With commercial shipping forced companies to circumnavigate Africa to preserve trade links between Asia and Europe, it highlighted the importance of Central Asia as a secondary route between China and Europe.
In response, Beijing recently committed to expediting the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway project. According to the Foreign Policy Research Institute, immediately after Russia started its war on Ukraine, the incidence of Chinese cargo trains opting to bypass Russia by going through Kazakhstan (then to Azerbaijan via ferry on the Caspian Sea) increased six times. Those routes continue to develop and increase transit levels. While not as attractive as sea routes, a 2021 report from China Railway describes such routes as important “emergency measures” should unexpected events affect sea-based trade.
Of course, all of these links with Central Asia go through China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang. Without getting into the weeds on the particulars of the debate over Xinjiang, it’s probably safe to say that the West would like nothing more than to use the province as a destabilizing force inside China while Beijing is eager to not see that happen.
From China’s perspective, building up its sanction- and blockade-proof supply chains is killing two birds with one stone. Not only does it help ensure the free flow of goods in case of difficulties with maritime routes, but it is also an effort to stabilize Xinjiang province (should the economic benefits flow to the region’s Uyghurs).
Xinjiang Efforts
Beijing is working rapidly to link Central Asian economies into a China-centered trading network that runs through Xinjiang and are turning the US-sanctioned region into an export gateway to Central Asia with free-trade hubs revealed late last year.
“There will be more support to Xinjiang in undertaking what used to be the country’s eastern region’s focus in exports, especially labour-intensive industries,” a statement from the state council said.
Electric vehicles, lithium batteries and solar cells have replaced electromechanical products, apparel, shoes and hats as Xinjiang’s main exports in recent years, and Beijing’s added focus on Xinjiang will likely only accelerate that trend.
Beijing is also planning to increasingly use the yuan for cross-border trade between Xinjiang and Central Asia.
China’s policies in Xinjiang and how they are viewed in Central Asia, plays a role in Beijing’s ability to sustain ties. While elites in Central Asia are likely to follow the money, the wider populations might be more likely to express sympathy with Xinjiang uyghurs if they feel they are being mistreated by Beijing.
Put simply, China cannot have an ethnic rebellion in its west while facing potential supply chain issues on the seas from a conflict with the US/NATO.
What the US is Doing in Central Asia
The US, of course, realizes the importance of Central Asia as well, but what can the Americans really offer? Even RAND admits that “the United States is unlikely to outspend China or even Russia” in Central Asia. Case in point: last year Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and announced that the Biden administration would add $20 million to the Economic Resilience Initiative in Central Asia (ERICEN). That brought the total funding up to $50 million since it was launched in September 2022. [1] The total value for Chinese projects in Central Asia is more than $63 billion. Russia, too, plays a major role in the Central Asian economies, including the construction of nuclear power plants, thermal and hydropower plants, as well as the export of oil, gas, electricity, and wheat.
Western analysts seem to think they can emphasize Moscow’s alleged imperial ambitions and stir up fear in Central Asia that Russia will soon turn its attention to regaining its Soviet territory to its south, but does anyone outside the West buy this?
Similarly, the US will likely point to the threat an increasingly powerful China poses, but what does that mean aside from Beijing driving a hard bargain on, say, the price it’s willing to pay for imported natural gas from Turkmenistan?
Any elected official in Central Asia looking out for their country’s best interest is going to try to maintain strong economic ties with Russia and China, as well as a good relationship with the US for whatever benefits that could provide. The trouble is, as always, the US’ with-us-or-against-us stance in such cases.
And impatience typically leads to Washington’s preferred military solutions. RAND notes that “another avenue where the United States can provide greater assistance is counterterrorism. Deploying large numbers of U.S. forces could antagonize Russia or China.”
To what end?
Notes
[1] RAND claims the US private sector has invested over $31 billion in commercial ventures throughout the region but doesn’t provide adequate sourcing. If that number is accurate, much of it is likely made up of ExxonMobil and Chevron operations in Kazakhstan and their status as the largest shareholders in the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which carries oil from Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk and onto the global market. Moscow briefly shut down the CPC terminal in 2022. The majority of the CPC exports go to Europe and have historically provided about six percent of the EU’s total crude imports.
