CHINA'S NEW REGIONAL ORDER IN CENTRAL ASIA

China’s President Xi Jinping celebrated his 72^nd birthday laying the foundation of new regional order in Central Asia. Anchoring China as the primary driver of strategic engagement in the region and Central Asia as a priority within China’s neighbourhood diplomacy, Xi delivered a “pioneering initiative in China's diplomatic engagement with its neighbors” by signing the Treaty on Eternal Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation.

The Treaty, coupled with China’s broad economic, diplomatic and security engagement of Central Asian states, has cultivated a sphere of influence for China to advance its regional and global interests. It heralds the development of a highly institutionalised, China-led regional order with implications for its global profile and the participation of extra-regional powers in Central Asia.

Summitry and Treaty

Regional orders are built on treaties, institutions, integration and coordination of strategic vision and action. The 2^nd China-Central Asia Summit held in Astana in June witnessed several significant agreements and announcements define the contours of China’s new regional order in Central Asia. Most importantly, the 15-article Treaty on Eternal Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation brings Central Asian states into the club of countries that China shares the highest levels of strategic coordination with; Russia and Pakistan. It advances China’s interests by ensuring that no coalition or alliance targeting China can emerge on its northwestern doorstep, institutionalises a high degree of strategic coordination, enshrines support for China’s core national interests and secures Central Asia’s support for Beijing’s economic and diplomatic strategies.

Such developments highlight the reality that Central Asia and China are now more closely aligned on core interests and willing to coordinate their rhetoric and action on strategic issues like alliances, terrorism and economic development. Furthermore, the recently signed treaty is just one component of China’s infrastructure for a regional order, best understood as a legal framework working to orient Beijing’s institutionalised cooperation mechanisms which were on show at the China-Central Asia Summit.

These high-level engagements are supported by the China-Central Asia Secretariat, established in 2024 to formalise and sustain cooperation. China’s mini-lateral engagement is parallelly operationalised by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), creating a layered institutionalisation that embeds China’s strategic engagement. These arrangements are pillars and platforms of China’s regional order, vehicles to implement the vision and actions underpinning cooperation.

Beijing has also keenly deployed issue-based cooperation mechanisms at the Summit that leverage its strengths in connectivity, trade and poverty alleviation. China-Central Asia centers for cooperation on poverty reduction, educational exchange, desertification prevention and trade facilitation are instituting cooperation on regional priorities to build influence and goodwill.

Engagement for Interests

Deriving from treaties and institutional mechanisms in place to structure and execute initiatives and agreements, China’s regional order is underpinned by a dense web of interests. Advancing these economic, security and diplomatic interests anchors China’s leverage firmly when it comes to integration with the region. At the China-Central Asia summit, China signed 58 agreements worth nearly 25 billion USD, adding to the trade facilitation and connectivity infrastructure already established by the BRI.

Trade facilitation infrastructure in the form of China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway and Zhetysu container terminal has cultivated deep economic interests and ensured China’s integration in the region, reflected in the trade balance of countries. China’s exports to Central Asia were 64.2 billion USD in 2024, accounting for two third of total trade and emerging as the region’s largest trade partner. In concert with trade dependency, energy imports are another major element enabling China’s integration in the region, creating significant leverage and influence.

Beijing’s railways, roadways, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and other connectivity-centric engagements give Chinese enterprises access to the region’s energy resources. China’s energy security depends on creating secure access routes to energy hubs that partially insulate its economy from volatility in West Asia. Turkmenistan is its largest natural gas supplier and China accounts for around 80% of Uzbek gas exports. Projects like Line D of the China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline will deliver 85 billion cubic metres of natural gas, strengthening Beijing’s economic and energy security.

China is also moving into the renewable energy sector in Central Asia, facilitating a shift away from oil and gas resources and thus reducing Russia’s influence, enhancing its own leverage and relevance to the region’s own energy transition ambitions.

Nonetheless, while trade and energy interests bring Beijing closer to Central Asia, security concerns have always remained central to the strategic rationale of China’s Central Asia policy. As detailed in the Treaty on Eternal Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation and the 2025 Astana Declaration, terrorism, extremism, and separatism are the “three forces” of priority concern for China, whose Xinjiang province shares 3,300 km of land borders with Central Asia. Compounding this is the regions vulnerability to political instability and social unrest, which could take the form of color revolutions that risks a spillover of instability into Xinjiang.

At the multilateral level with the Global Security Initiative (GSI), and at the bilateral level through comprehensive strategic partnerships with all five Central Asian states, Beijing is pushing for security coordination with Central Asian states in a variety of ways. From bilateral military exercises, arms exports, military education and even security outposts, China is pursuing a security engagement to guarantee the stability of its neighbourhood, interests and emerging regional order.

Regional Order and Global Implications

Cushioned by treaties, institutionalised cooperation and wide-spectrum engagement, Beijing’s attempts at forging a regional order come up against very limited competition from resident powers like Russia or global powers like USA. Russia’s war with Ukraine has forced adaptations in the Kremlin’s strategic engagement with Central Asian states, and the US’s lack of visible presence in the region coupled with unpredictability of its policy initiatives has created the strategic space for Beijing to deepen its strategic engagement. Filling this space, Beijing has packaged its engagement within diplomatic frameworks like the Community of Shared Future for Mankind and GSI to project China as more than a reliable regional partner, and also a global one.

Beijing’s ambitions to craft a regional order in Central Asia dovetail with its broader objectives of presenting China as a stable and predictable global actor capable of taking on leadership roles in creating and maintaining regional orders. These efforts are presented in contrast to the US; Xi Jinping’s veiled reference to the US in his comments at the Summit confirm this diplomatic objective.

China’s strategy for building a regional order in Central Asia converges with its playbook in sub-regions across the Global South, like Latin America, Africa and South Asia. The substance and optics of its Latin America Summit and Xi Jinping’s tour of Southeast Asia in the last few months reflect this strategy. With a China led regional order in Central Asia quickly taking shape with treaties, institutions and integration, Beijing’s interests are likely to be embedded for the long term and emerge as preeminent. Without competitive alternatives to China’s regional order construction, other regional, extra-regional and global powers are likely to play catch-up for influence in Central Asia.

Image: China News Service