The Quiet Conquest: How China is Replacing Russia in Central Asia

By Matthew Parish

Monday 31 August 2026

There are moments in international affairs when the location of a diplomatic meeting tells us almost as much as what is said inside it. President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Bishkek on 30 August 2026 for a state visit to Kyrgyzstan and the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is one of them. Xi described relations between China and Kyrgyzstan as entering a “golden period”. President Vladimir Putin is likewise in Kyrgyzstan for the summit. Yet the contrast between the two visitors is becoming difficult to disguise: China arrives offering roads, railways, investment, markets and an increasingly elaborate diplomatic architecture. Russia arrives carrying the memory of an empire — and the burdens of a war that has consumed much of her political, economic and military attention.

For most of the modern history of Central Asia, this would have seemed an improbable reversal. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan were components of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Russian remains widely spoken. Millions of Central Asians have worked in Russia. Military establishments were built upon Soviet foundations. Railways pointed north. Political elites studied in Moscow and Russia regarded the region — sometimes rather proprietorially — as her blizhnee zarubezh’e, or “near abroad”.

China was on the other side of the mountains. Now the mountains are proving rather less formidable than history. The transformation of Central Asia is becoming one of the most important geopolitical consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is happening without battles, revolutions or dramatic declarations of allegiance. Indeed Moscow and Beijing continue publicly to describe themselves as strategic partners. Nevertheless beneath the ceremonials of Sino-Russian friendship something rather more uncomfortable for the Kremlin is taking place. Russia is progressively losing Central Asia to China.

The geography of power

The explanation begins with a simple fact of geography. China shares long borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Immediately beyond them lie Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Western China therefore opens naturally onto a vast continental corridor stretching towards the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus, Turkey, Iran and ultimately Europe.

President Xi understood the significance of this geography remarkably early. In 2013, during a speech in Kazakhstan, he announced the concept that developed into the overland component of the Belt and Road Initiative. Central Asia thereby ceased to be merely China’s western frontier. It became China’s bridge towards the rest of Eurasia.

Since assuming power, Xi has visited Central Asia fifteen times — more than any previous Chinese leader. The China-Central Asia summit mechanism, inaugurated in 2023, is particularly revealing because it brings Beijing together with the five Central Asian republics without Russia being present. That is a small diplomatic innovation with enormous geopolitical implications.

For two centuries Russia imagined Central Asia as territory extending southwards from Moscow. China increasingly imagines precisely the same territory as extending westwards from Beijing. The Central Asians, understandably, prefer to imagine it as their own. This is why the current transformation should not be understood simply as one empire replacing another. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian governments have become increasingly sophisticated practitioners of multi-vector diplomacy. They want China, Russia, Turkey, Europe, the Gulf States and where possible the United States competing for their attention.

Nevertheless there is no disguising which outside power currently possesses the greatest economic momentum. It is China.

Kyrgyzstan as the crossroads

Kyrgyzstan provides an unusually revealing example. She is a small mountainous country of approximately seven million people occupying one of Eurasia’s great geographical junctions. She borders China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Russia retains an airbase there. Kyrgyzstan remains a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union. On paper this looks like Russian strategic territory. On the ground things increasingly look different.

Ahead of Xi’s visit, Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Jeenbek Kulubaev publicly described China as one of Kyrgyzstan’s principal strategic partners. In July President Sadyr Japarov told Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi that developing relations with China remained a priority of Kyrgyz foreign policy and emphasised cooperation in trade, investment, agriculture and infrastructure. The most important physical expression of this relationship is the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. Railways are rarely just railways in Central Asia. The Soviet railway system was deliberately constructed around an imperial economic geography in which Moscow occupied the centre. Goods, people, bureaucracies and political influence travelled along infrastructure designed to integrate the Soviet republics with Russia.

The China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway represents almost the precise opposite idea. It creates an east-west artery connecting China through Kyrgyzstan into Uzbekistan and potentially onwards towards the Caspian, Iran, Turkey and Europe. Xi specifically identified the railway among the major bilateral projects upon his arrival in Bishkek. Every kilometre of track therefore has a geopolitical meaning. The old lines pointed towards Moscow. The new ones increasingly point towards China.

Russia’s Ukrainian catastrophe

None of this means that China suddenly decided in February 2022 to expel Russia from Central Asia. Beijing’s expansion in the region has been developing for decades. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine accelerated the process dramatically. War consumes power. It consumes money, soldiers, diplomatic attention, intelligence resources, industrial capacity and political imagination. Russia has poured all of these things into Ukraine. The opportunity cost is enormous.

Every Russian military formation required in Ukraine is one that cannot reinforce Moscow’s position elsewhere. Every billion roubles spent replacing destroyed armoured vehicles cannot finance infrastructure in Central Asia. Every Russian diplomat occupied with circumventing Western sanctions has less time for cultivating elites in Tashkent or Astana.

The decline has become particularly apparent in security affairs. Analysis of Russian influence in the region has found the CSTO weakened as Moscow concentrates upon Ukraine, even while Central Asian governments diversify their relationships with China, Turkey and Western states.

There is an irony here. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in substantial part because he feared the erosion of Russia’s historic sphere of influence. The invasion has accelerated the erosion of that sphere virtually everywhere.

China’s different proposition

Beijing also offers Central Asian governments something Moscow increasingly struggles to provide: a vision of the future. Russia’s political appeal is predominantly retrospective. It offers Soviet connections, Russian language, migrant labour markets, security institutions, hydrocarbons, military equipment and historical familiarity. These things remain important. Russia is far from disappearing from Central Asia and predictions of her imminent irrelevance would be foolish. She retains substantial military infrastructure and institutional connections, and Russian security influence remains deeper than China’s in several respects.

China’s proposition is different. She talks about tomorrow. High-speed railways. Logistics centres. Pipelines. Electricity grids. Digital infrastructure. Industrial development. Trade corridors. Artificial intelligence. Access to the enormous Chinese market. None of this is altruistic. China expects political accommodation in return. Beijing wants secure western borders, protection against separatist movements, reliable energy supplies, commercial access and governments willing to support — or at least not obstruct — Chinese diplomatic positions.

Chinese infrastructure can also generate dependencies of its own. Indeed there are uncomfortable similarities between the economic dependencies Beijing is constructing through infrastructure and those Moscow inherited from the Soviet Union. Central Asians understand this perfectly well. They nevertheless perceive something increasingly obvious: China has considerably more money to spend than Russia does. And unlike Russia, China is not currently destroying her economic surplus in a gigantic European land war.

The junior partner arrives in Bishkek

This makes the symbolism of the current Bishkek summit particularly striking. Putin and Xi are meeting in a country where Russia maintains a military base but where China’s economic and political presence is rapidly expanding. Contemporary assessments increasingly describe Russia as becoming the junior partner in its relationship with China, while Moscow’s economic dependence upon Beijing grows. This is surely not the outcome Vladimir Putin intended.

For years the Kremlin appeared to assume that Russia and China could maintain an informal division of labour in Central Asia: Russia would remain the principal security power while China became the principal economic one. That arrangement always contained an obvious weakness. Economic power eventually becomes political power. If China finances the railway, buys the minerals, supplies the machinery, builds the telecommunications systems, purchases the energy and provides the largest prospective market, then Central Asian presidents will inevitably pay very close attention to what Beijing thinks.

And security influence may follow. Recent research suggests that Chinese involvement in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan has already begun evolving from predominantly economic engagement towards a broader security role, with the process accelerating markedly since 2022. Empires seldom announce their retirement. Their telephones merely stop ringing quite so often.

Moscow’s remaining advantages

Russia nevertheless retains several cards. Language is one. Millions of Central Asians speak Russian while relatively few speak Mandarin. Migration is another. Russia remains an important destination for Central Asian workers whose remittances sustain families and sometimes substantial portions of national economies. There are also cultural ties, mixed families, educational connections, military institutions and commercial relationships accumulated over generations.

China cannot manufacture two centuries of historical familiarity overnight. Nor should we assume that Central Asians universally welcome growing Chinese influence. Fear of excessive Chinese economic penetration exists throughout the region. Questions surrounding debt, land, migration and China’s treatment of Turkic Muslim populations in Xinjiang inevitably complicate Beijing’s diplomacy. This is precisely why Central Asian governments are unlikely simply to exchange Moscow for Beijing. Their preferred strategy will be to balance them. Yet balancing becomes easier when the two great powers are no longer equal. And increasingly they are not.

The disappearance of the Russian hinterland

There is a still larger historical transformation underway. Russia has traditionally been a Eurasian empire. Her extraordinary geographical depth gave it strategic weight far beyond the productive capacity of its economy. Moscow exercised influence across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and portions of the Middle East because all these regions existed within networks created by Russian imperial expansion. Those networks are gradually dissolving.

Ukraine has decisively rejected Russian political domination. Moldova is moving towards Europe. Russia’s position in the South Caucasus has weakened dramatically. Azerbaijan and Armenia increasingly pursue policies independent of Moscow. Central Asia is turning towards China, Turkey and other partners. What remains is an enormous Russian Federation increasingly squeezed between a prosperous Europe it has chosen to antagonise and a vastly more populous China upon which it is becoming economically dependent. This is not the restoration of Russian greatness. It is the liquidation of the Russian imperial inheritance.

The patient empire

China’s method is particularly effective because it seldom demands theatrical submission.

There are no Chinese tanks rolling into Bishkek. Instead there are railway engineers.

There are trade delegations, construction contracts, ministerial meetings, pipelines, scholarships and investment conferences. The contrast with contemporary Russia could scarcely be greater. Moscow demonstrates power by destroying infrastructure in Ukraine. Beijing demonstrates power by constructing infrastructure in Central Asia.

One creates refugees. The other creates customers. That distinction is unlikely to be lost upon the governments of Eurasia. Nor is Beijing necessarily seeking the formal exclusion of Russia. China has little interest in provoking an unnecessary confrontation with Moscow when Russian weakness already serves Chinese interests admirably. The two governments share hostility towards American predominance and continue to cooperate extensively; serious analyses caution against assuming that competition in Central Asia necessarily means an imminent Sino-Russian rupture. China can afford patience. Time currently runs in Beijing’s favour.

The view from Bishkek

President Xi’s visit to Kyrgyzstan therefore deserves attention far beyond the diplomatic communiqués that accompany it. A Chinese President has arrived in a former Soviet republic to discuss infrastructure, investment, strategic partnership and the future architecture of Eurasia. The Russian President is there too. But they arrive from different directions in history. Xi represents a country accumulating economic power and seeking routes through Central Asia towards the wider world.

Putin represents a country spending enormous quantities of accumulated power attempting to reconstruct a sphere of influence that has already disappeared. The irony is exquisite.

Russia began its war against Ukraine insisting that great powers were entitled to spheres of influence and that smaller neighbouring countries must respect geopolitical realities.

Central Asia is now teaching Moscow exactly the same lesson. There is always a greater power. And increasingly, east of the Caspian Sea, that power is China.