Below is a complete transcript of the live Sinica Podcast with Raffaello Pantucci.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get, well, access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but to all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and I’ll be doing a number of interviews in the coming months to assess its successes and failures across the last decade, as well as the future of the initiative. To kick things off, I’m very pleased to welcome Raffaello Pantucci, who is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is the co-author of a book published last year called Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire, which he wrote with the late Alexandros Petersen. The book was researched both before and after the formal announcement in 2013 of the Belt and Road Initiative. And for that reason, it offers a rare window into the evolution of China’s strategy, if indeed it can be said to have one, in Central Asia. Raffaello, welcome to Sinica, and thank you so much for taking the time.
Raffaello Pantucci: Well, thank you so much for the kind invitation to come and talk to you. I have listened to the podcast, and it’s great to finally come onto it.
Kaiser: Oh, it’s wonderful to have you. I think that our conversation has to start with the personal tragedy that’s at the heart of the book, Sinostan. Could you talk about how you set out writing it with your co-author Alexandros Petersen and about his murder in Kabul in 2014, in a terror attack in a restaurant when Alex was still, I think he was only 29 when that happened, right?
Raffaello: He was incredibly young. I mean, he was an incredibly brilliant young man who was really cut down in his prime. And if you do a Google of his name, you sadly find a lot of obituaries that were written at the time by the sort of vast range of people who he’d come across in Washington, both friends and professional acquaintances, all of whom were sort of expecting this young man to rise up to be a really sort of brilliant and top scholar in international relations. I knew Alex for years before that. In fact, it was very funny because I actually didn’t know how old he was for a very long time because he was very coy about his age, recognizing he was quite young and the work he was doing was sort of pushing him ahead in a way.
And in a field where seniority is often smiled upon, he sort of found this is the best way to do it. But Alex was a really good friend, and the two of us, I can’t actually remember exactly where we first met, but we overlapped in Washington, D.C. when we were both doing kind of intern stuff there in the early 2000s. And then we both were living in London where he was doing a PhD at the London School of Economics, and I was working to think tank there. We’d sort of hang out and chat. And then I moved out to China and I went to work at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences — 上海社科院 Shànghǎi Shèkēyuàn, where I was based for about four years.
And while I was there, the two of us had talked a lot about doing a big project, looking at China in Central Asia, really interested in Central Asia. We both loved traveling around the region. So, we decided to have a go and bid for a big project to try to basically go travel around the region to try to understand what was happening in terms of Chinese relations there, because it was certainly, we could see, seemed to be starting to emerge. The narrative that you really found around Central Asia tended to be a very Russian dominated one. And the two of us actually found, as we did reading and research around it, that actually the part that was coming up that no one seemed to be staring at was China. And so we thought, well, let’s do a big project on this.
And so we bid, we luckily won the money and then we spent basically the better part of a year, year and a half, two years really, me from my base in China, his, from his base in Europe. And then later out in the region, he got a job working in the American University in Bishkek — traveling around Central Asia, traveling around Xinjiang, going to Russia, going to all these neighboring countries to basically try to understand what was happening with China in the region. And having done all this research, having talked to lots of people, having gathered lots of information, we then started to commit pen to paper and to publish what was the report for a project that we’d had funded, but ultimately we thought we’d turn it into a book. And it was at that point when we were kind of in the process of writing the book, we had, I think, about 50 or 60-ish, 50,000 words down on paper, so it’s enough to start taking around to publishers.
Sadly, Alex had this wonderful opportunity to go work at the American University in Kabul, and he was sadly in the Taverna Restaurant, a Lebanese restaurant in Kabul with a colleague actually in American University. And the two of them were sadly killed, murdered in this terrorist attack, which, in terms of attacks within a war-torn country was sadly not surprising. But the attack itself did mark a bit of a shift that we saw in the insurgency, unfortunately. After that, I was in this awkward, well, awkward and this difficult situation where a dear friend had died in this horrible way and I had this project that we’d been working on which was nearing some sort of maturity but wasn’t quite there. And then, frankly, I found it a bit difficult to turn to for a while, but eventually I decided, I really should do this.
And in the intervening period, I continued to work on the subject because it was one that I found really interesting and I wanted to keep working on. So, when eventually I finally got my act together, frankly, and life, of course, got in the way in between as well with family, marriage, children, house, all that, I actually finally finished writing the manuscript, going back to what we had, and then adding new material that I’d been gathering I was going along. And it only felt appropriate that the final book should come out with his name as well because it was an idea that we really conceived together. A lot of the stories and adventures were ones that I remember doing with him. And even when I went back to do them again, I was sort of trying to repeat experiences that I had with him because it was such an invigorating experience to travel with a dear friend like that.
Kaiser: Yeah, it must have been difficult. And then you made the decision to continue to use the pronoun ‘we,’ even for the parts of the book that are pretty clearly reported posthumously.
Raffaello: Yes. I mean that was really for cleanliness in the sense that I thought the reader would go crazy if every meeting was being redefined as he was present. In some cases, it was me alone. In other cases, I traveled with other colleagues because I was doing different projects. So, the book becomes kind of an amalgam. And there are a couple of colleagues, and one particular colleague who I actually mentioned in the preface who will probably recognize some of the encounters because she was there. But I pleaded. I’ve written a lot of other projects and stuff with them, so I didn’t feel too guilty about it, but it just felt cleaner, frankly, to just go ahead and do it like that rather than sit down each and every time to say exactly who was present.
Kaiser: Yeah. And just to be clear, you spell all this out really clearly in the preface, so I mean, I don’t think there’s anything at all problematic about it. And it’s a really interesting book. Xinjiang is, of course, the focus of the first section of the book, and really threads through the whole thing. And you lay out how central Xinjiang is to Beijing’s policy and its ambitions for Central Asia, you basically argue that Chinese policy in Xinjiang is ultimately all about Central Asia and that Chinese policy towards Central Asia is ultimately about Xinjiang, I think if I’ve put your central case correctly. Can you unpack this a bit and talk about what led you to this conclusion?
Raffaello: So, our experience from traveling around on the ground and from talking to people and from looking at how the policies have played out is that Xinjiang is really crucial. It’s the key part. And if you go back and look at the beginning of China’s relations with contemporary Central Asia, which is the end of the Cold War, the first thing that happens is they create this Shanghai Five grouping, which is basically a kind of border delineation structure. China found itself at the end of Soviet Union situation of suddenly sharing a border with four new countries. It used to be the Soviet Union, and then suddenly it becomes the Russian Federation, Kyrgyzstan. Kazakhstan, Tajikistan. And so, those borders were already very remote; they were already very ill-defined. These are the nether regions of the most distant parts from Moscow and Beijing of the Soviet and Chinese empires. And so the borders were a bit fluid, and suddenly you had these new countries, and everyone wanted to make sure, well, hang on, where actually is the line? And so on and so forth.
And so that’s the Shanghai Five. And that really is the first delineation. Of course, from a Chinese perspective, that’s really about defining Xinjiang’s borders with Central Asia, right?
Kaiser: Right.
Raffaello: And so that’s kind of the first component of it, and so that’s where Xinjiang is right next door and it’s part of it. The other thing that’s worth remembering within that context is that we talk about Xinjiang and we tend to talk about it very much in a case of Han versus Uyghur. But actually, of course, there’s huge Central Asian communities or ethnic Central Asian communities living there as well. There’s like around a million ethnic Kazakhs within China’s borders. There are large Kyrgyz and Tajik communities if you go up near the sort of Kyrgyz and Tajik borders. If you go up there, you can find these villages, which you walk through them and it feels like you’re in a completely different land because the people look entirely different from Han Chinese.
And yes, the road signs are in Chinese characters and have sort of local script underneath, but it feels like a completely different land. And really, it is closer very much in culture and ethnicity and language to the countries that it’s next to than China. So, China, in many ways, has a lot of Central Asia within it as much as it having this kind of border of land. So, Xinjiang is really tied into this region. And of course, you’ve got huge Uyghur diasporas that exists in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. So, there’s a very deep intermingling that goes into this region. And after the Shanghai Five creation, the next big kind of moment I would say in China’s relations with the region comes in ‘94 when then Premier Li Peng does a big tour of the region.
He goes to four of the Central Asian capitals. He didn’t go to Dushanbe because it was suffering a horrible civil war at the time. It’s interesting because at each stop, there’s two things that he talks about. He talks about silk roads, new connectivity routes that they want to build, enhancing prosperity. And there’s a huge delegation that came with him. And he talks about worrying about dissidents and how he wants the Central Asians to work with China to try to stop dissidents from causing trouble there, recognizing that this is a language that the locals will understand because they’re just as worried about dissidents as well within Central Asia. In the same way that you have this bleed across the border of communities into China and into Central Asia, you have across Central Asian borders as well.
If you go to some of the big Uzbek cities that people know like Bukhara or Samarkand, these are majority ethnic Tajik cities really. So, there is a huge intermingling around there. And so they’re all very worried about separatists and dissidents and everything. But the key thing is that those are the two driving issues that Li Peng was talking about. And you look at his speeches at every stop, those are the ones he’d come up. And of course, that’s fascinating because those are pretty much the same things that China’s still talking about today. And both of those, in many ways, are very closely linked to Xinjiang.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Raffaello: Because the dissidents that China’s worried about, the ones that might cause trouble in Xinjiang. And then the silk route is really about trying to improve prosperity in Xinjiang because they think that is the kind of the long-term answer to basically dealing with these problems of instability in the region.
Kaiser: Yeah. Great. And we’ll come back to… I mean, I want to talk a little bit more about this central theme of yours. Because the way that the reporting shook out, it’s not an explicitly stated theme, and it’s one that you seem to have deduced rather than having sort of written it down from some public pronouncement. But we’ll get back to that. I think it’s important that… we’ve surfaced this right away. We’re all aware that Beijing, beginning, at least as early as 2017, probably earlier, erected or began erecting a very large system of so-called reeducation centers, which are involuntary. They’re highly coercive; they’re extralegal. These are commonly referred to as “camps” on a massive scale. And these have been the focus of a lot of criticism, at least in the West.
The U.S. is, among a number of countries, that have labeled the atrocity a genocide. So, one would think that the camps would have a huge impact on Beijing’s relations with Central Asia, if not with the governments of Central Asian countries themselves than at least certainly with perceptions among the people. Ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are among, as you all know, the people who were, or perhaps still are in the camps or elsewhere in the Chinese carceral system. And as Turkic peoples, the Uyghurs, you would think, with their very well-known plight would garner quite a bit of sympathy from some of their neighboring countries. But can you talk about what the impact has been both at a state-to-state level and at sort of the popular level of the news of the camps? I mean, this is now five years old.
Raffaello: Yeah, I mean, look, it’s a really difficult question, frankly speaking because we started looking at this topic, as you pointed out earlier, long before the Belt and Road, as well as these camps. And one thing that always struck me, but even before, frankly, if you go to Urumqi, you can see that, and you go to Kashgar, and you go around Xinjiang, you can see that it was difficult for Uyghurs living in Xinjiang even then. The camps is sort of the most extreme expression of this issue that we’re seeing, but it’s an issue that you could see before already. I remember one of the most notable things people ask me, I’ve been fortunate enough to go back and forth to Xinjiang since, I think it was 2010 or 2011 when I first went.
Basically, I went every year until about 2017. And the most notable thing from my perspective was how you saw visibly the security tighten and the sort of security visibility of it — armed guards on the streets and APCs, armed personnel carriers on street corners, big cages with guys sitting inside them with guns outside mosques, facial recognition into shops and everything. When I first went, it was pretty loose, frankly. You’d sort of see the airport sell security everywhere, but no one was checking. The second time I went, they were checking a little bit more. And then also, when you were flying in there from around China, what was fascinating about that was that the security intensity would start further and further back. The last time I went, I was essentially searched and my bag emptied out when I left on the plane in Shanghai.
Kaiser: Wow.
Raffaello: Even before I’d gotten into the plane to go out Urumqi, and then, of course, in Urumqi we had the same thing. It’s a really intense kind of… so, that was the most palpable thing you see. My point being that this is not a new narrative in some ways. And what we always found, so we were asking about, well, what do you think about Uyghurs? How do you think about them? Even from our first sort of visits there, and the strong impression we got, frankly, at a public level was, “Well, it’s not great. I don’t want to live there, but I don’t, so that’s that.” And at a government level, there was very much a sense of, well, the Chinese are the rulers of this domain and those people live within it, and so they treat their people how they want to treat their people. And that is kind of the end of it. And there was very much a sense of we don’t criticize, we leave it well alone because that’s what they do. One could make a case that there’s a question of you don’t want to throw stones in glass houses. Not all of these countries have spotless records in regards sort of political prisoners and human rights questions at home.
So, there’s a level of being a bit sensitive about that and not wanting to criticize because then the Chinese won’t criticize them. That’s one side of it. But then, at a public level, it did seem to shift a little bit, and we certainly had a lot more criticism, a lot more anger as we went along. But it was always fairly limited, to be honest with you. I really didn’t find that much of it. Recently, in some recent work I’ve been doing, I’ve noticed a lot of online chatter, mostly in Uzbekistan about this. But in other places, I really didn’t find much of it. And if you go back and look at history, these communities were warring with each other for the longest time. And there is a strong sense of ethnic nationalism in each of these countries in different kinds of ways.
And they each see themselves as better than the other group. And there is a kind of level of racism that you can sometimes even see between them. And unfortunately, I think the Uyghurs fall afoul of that as well. The Kazakhs are an interesting case study of a country that has tried to do something about this, and from my understanding, that have managed to get some movement on some of the Kazakhs who’ve gotten caught up in this system. The government lobbies for them and there is some reporting that some of them have been freed or their conditions have been made better. So, the Kazakhs do seem to be leaning into this. The Kyrgyz, as far as I can tell, do occasionally talk about it, but I think they’ve got no cards to play, frankly, and the Chinese will just kind of do what they want. And the Tajiks, actually I’m not sure it’s a problem that they necessarily encounter that much. It’s one of these horrible situations where I think that we look at this world and we say, “Oh, well, they’re all Turkic people, so they must feel some sort of solidarity,” but unfortunately they don’t necessarily feel that kind of solidarity in the way that we might think. And so, you see some bubbling underneath level of concern, but at the end of the day, they say, “Well, it’s not happening here, it’s over there. That’s not my issue.”
Kaiser: So Raffaello, you’ll own that it’s sort of an odd book, kind of hard to categorize. It’s not academic, strictly speaking. It’s certainly not a business book, but it’s also definitely a lot more than a travel log. I mean, it’s based on a lot of your firsthand observations and anecdotes about your travels with Alex throughout the whole region, talking to people, Chinese people, Chinese think tankers and officials. Tajiks, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, Kyrgyz, Turkmen from all walks of life about China’s presence in Central Asia. And as such, it makes for really great reading. There’s just a ton of really, really fun anecdotes, but it was also hard for me at least to get a sense of what one should conclude, except that China’s results have been decidedly mixed. Can you talk about your approach and the value that you saw in recounting, not the content of the interviews themselves, but also the context, the setting, the color in which these interviews and conversations were taking place?
Raffaello: I mean, I’m really glad to hear you say that frankly and describe it that way because that was exactly what we initially were going for and I ended up completing. And I’m glad it comes across like that.
Kaiser: Oh, it does, absolutely. Yeah.
Raffaello: I recognize it can maybe seem a bit impressionistic, but it was, because our sense of this was, there was no driving strategic plan, and it was really a kind of piecemeal thing that we saw happening in all sorts of different ways. And on the one hand, there were some parts which are very clearly state-driven, state-directed, state-owned in terms of enterprises, banks lending money to do specific projects, Chinese companies coming in to deliver them, Chinese workers coming to do that. But then there was another side of it, which was really interesting, was these random Chinese traders we would come across who would take a curiosity to these white guys who could speak a bit of Mandarin and were sort of curious about their lives. And they feed into that bigger story as well. It was our sense of actually this is a much bigger kind of picture and a much bigger canvas.
And also, even within the five countries, it’s a very, very different story, you know? And so, in a way, the idea of telling it in this mix of travel log and analysis and research and empirical data from World Bank or wherever, was basically to try to reflect that, that kind of mixed picture we were sort of finding and seeing on the ground. And in some ways, I think it reflects also the bigger story, which goes back to the reason that we started looking at this in the first place was our sense was China’s influence was growing, and so we wanted to try to understand that more. And then since we started doing the research, it’s only grown further, but it hasn’t grown in a sort of clean way. It’s grown in lots of little ways. And so, if you stand back and look at it now and say, “Okay, what is China’s relation to Central Asia?”
There’s a reason Xi Jinping made this the first region to go to after he decided to start traveling from COVID because it’s a region they feel very comfortable in. It’s a region they feel they’ve got a very strong powerful role and very strong relationships with, but yet it’s still a region where Russia’s very influential as well. And so there’s a whole sort of underlying thing to that. But you go back 20 years, well, you go back to when Li Peng first visited, he was really going there, introducing himself and his country, in some ways, to these countries. So, it’s just a real transformation that’s happened, but it hasn’t happened in a sort of clean, overnight way. It’s been this gradual piecemeal bit by bit by bit to this point where China is now really, I would argue probably the most consequential power in the region.
Kaiser: So, both in the blend of sort of large state owned and state-directed efforts and this chaos of small traders and individuals. It reminds me an awful lot about China’s presence in Africa. I think that we can look at the two in much the same way. I mean the same kind of approaches, some of the same focus, like on the extractive industry, many of the same tensions, that same kind of bifurcation between attitudes among leaders who generally welcome the investments and the trade and a populace that is often quite suspicious. Do you think there’s some parallel there?
Raffaello: It’s an interesting comparison and it’s one I’ve thought about it a lot. To be honest with you, I think there’s a critical difference which we can’t escape, which goes back to your first question, which is Xinjiang, and the fact that this is a region that China’s neighbor to. This is a region that, in a large part, the big state-driven push. And also actually a lot of the smaller economic opportunity you see does flow from the bigger push that you’ve seen within China to try to make Xinjiang a prosperous place. And so, that’s at the core of kind of China’s interest. Now that means that this is tied to a core domestic Chinese security concern unlike Africa. Africa is far away. If a project goes wrong in Africa, you shut up shop, you go back home, you say, “We’re not going to do that again,” and move on to the next one.
If you do that in Central Asia, you’re doing that in a region that you’re right next door to. And if that leads to massive instability in that country, if that leads to chaos and trouble, well, that’s chaos and trouble that could potentially overspill into your borders and have direct domestic concern in a place where it’s incredibly sensitive to China.
Kaiser: That’s right.
Raffaello: It was sensitive even before it became the focus of international sanction. I think that’s where the difference in some way lies from my perspective. In Africa, a project in Zambia goes wrong, oops, let’s cut that one off, go to another one, not do that again. It doesn’t matter in the same way. Whereas in Xinjiang, in Central Asia, it does matter because it could have this kind of direct knock-on effect back home.
Kaiser: China has had something of an obsession, as you know, with this concept of soft power, an obsession that’s all out of proportion with its actual ability to project it, at least in many parts of the world. What is it trying in Central Asia and how successful has it been? I know it’s been very uneven. Again, I want to come back to this question of how different countries are… There’s quite different approaches and different outcomes, but generally speaking, maybe how would you characterize China’s soft power approach across the region?
Raffaello: I mean, in many ways, you could say it’s fairly crude, by which I mean it’s done in a way that they think is the way that you see them doing everywhere else, which is essentially building Confucius Institutes, offering scholarships for young people from the region to come to China and study. But they offer a lot of other sort of scholarships. There’s all sorts of programs that they’ve developed with local governments to try to get officials to come and work in China — security officials. There’s all sorts of programs that they’re running with sort of border and interior ministry forces through the Shanghai Corporation Organization, also separately, to try to bring people back. And there’s this kind of soft power component to that as well. And all of this is those elements which you can see them doing in other contexts as well.
And then beyond that, their ambassadors write op-eds in the local newspapers to try to sell the local Chinese line. The embassies are kind of present there and do cultural events and God knows what. By crude, I mean that this is the basic stuff that they think will make and shape the local environment. The question is how does this all land? And this is one which is more complicated because our impression was never that it landed hugely well. I think a big part, I remember, on a recent visit in Central Asia late last year, there’s a Chinese chap who I met years ago in Tajikistan, and I’m actually in touch with him, and I was in Uzbekistan, and we caught up with each other there. And he’s moved to his Uzbekistan now, and he said, “It’s much better here since China’s just kind of arrived. They don’t hate us as much.” He says, “Tajikistan now they really don’t like us. It’s really miserable there, it’s not fun.” In Kyrgyzstan, you hear all sorts of stories about fights happening in the streets between workers, the Chinese embassy complaining, and there’s all sorts of sort of spats at that level. So, the soft power isn’t landing very well there is the point.
And in Kazakhstan as well, you hear these stories similarly less, kind of violent in some ways in Kyrgyzstan, because in Kazakhstan there is a kind of state apparatus that’s able to maintain some level of control, which in Kyrgyzstan’s a bit more fluid, let’s say. But it’s not really landing well. And to look at the other one, which is interesting in this, a whole chapter about it in the book, which is Confucius Institutes, where we were fortunate to visit a lot of the Confucius Institutes. In fact, since we went, more have been built. But at the time that we wrote it, when I first handed the manuscript, I think I’d visited all of them actually. But since then, there’s more that have appeared. But in each one we visited, we’d find these very diligent young students who are on, the best example comparison I always thought was like a kind of Peace Corps experience.
These kind of American students at a certain age who decide to go do an experience in a foreign country and some sort of state thing, and they’re trying to teach the locals Mandarin. And then you had the old professors who were sent there from the university that their Confucius Institute’s paired with, who were just there. And these are the guys who were at the front line of this soft power push. Some of them were like, “Ugh, these people are so lazy and it doesn’t work.” Other of them were like, “I love this place.” And they were trying to learn the local language. So, it was a real mix in that regard as well. But then the other side, of course, the students. And the students is interesting because we struggled often to find many students who were like learning it, learning Chinese because they wanted to read 孙子 sūnzǐ in the original language or watch Chinese films or something.
But we did find a lot who were doing it because either their parents had told them to, or because they thought, well, there’s a job probably at the end of this. So, it was a very sort of commercial appeal. This is not an adoration. This isn’t learning America because you want to go to Hollywood and see New York or something. This is learning English, not because of the culture but because you just think there’s an economic opportunity at the end of it. So, it’s a very transactional kind of relationship. And that I think undermines it… Actually, a more recent project I’ve been working on with some Kyrgyz researchers is looking at the experience of Kyrgyz who have learned Mandarin for this reason. And actually, a lot of them now are complaining that they’re not finding the jobs they thought they would. And so actually that worm is turning a little bit as well, which is, I think, an interesting new twist on the story, which I think will be one to watch going forwards.
But in essence, what China’s doing is kind of the very traditional approach that it tries, which is these very sort of, crude is maybe a cruel, an unfair word to use, but I think it’s just these sort of blunt tools. We’ll offer scholarships, we’ll try to bring people back to us, we’ll give them language courses, and that that will make them more friendly towards us. It doesn’t necessarily always win hearts and minds.
Kaiser: So, one thing that I found really valuable in the book, and possibly because it wasn’t so rigorously empirical or anything, it was more impressionistic, was the sense of the attitudes of various Central Asian peoples toward the Chinese or toward the Chinese state. But also impressions of what your Chinese interlocutors, like, there’s this Mr. Zhang, who was in Bishkek, I believe, and their attitudes toward Central Asian people. There’s obviously a lot of prejudice that goes in both directions. Can you talk a bit about the prevailing prejudices that different parties have toward one another?
Raffaello: Sure. I mean, of course, I’ve prefaced this with a caveat, of course, not everyone necessarily thinks the same, but to broadly speak about these communities, you’re entirely right. I mean, I think, on the Chinese side, that particular Professor Zhang, he was quite blunt frankly, and he said he found Central Asia incredibly lazy. He’d latched onto one particular student who was a very bright and lovely young man who was ethnic, Han, but brought up in Kyrgyzstan. He was very dismissive and found him very lazy. And frankly, a lot of other Chinese I found who were there often had this same kind of impression. They found the Central Asians generally quite lackadaisical. They were very difficult to work with. And they said, this is why Chinese companies, when we talked to contractors and Chinese firms that were trying to do projects there, one of the questions that would always come up would be like, “Well, why are you bringing in Chinese workers?”
And they say, “Well they work really hard and they will live in poor conditions because they just want the paycheck, get the project done and then go back home.” Whereas they’re like, “If I hire locals, it’s going to cost me, it’s going to take forever, they won’t do it, they’ll complain, they will want to go pray. They’ll want to eat certain things. It’s just a nightmare.” And of course, that plays into a funny way into the sort of relationship with the governments as well, actually. Because often you’ll find all these countries have rules around local hire, local hires. You have to hire X amount of locals to deliver a project. But sometimes the Chinese companies seem to get around these. One of the anecdotes I heard was that, well, they would go to the government and say, “Well, look, you want this project in six months, right?”
And the government say, “Yes.” And they say, “Well, if you want it in six months, we need to bring in this many Chinese guys to do it, do it.” And say, “Oh, well, that’s not going to fit the local quota.” And they say, “Well, okay, then it’ll take us a year.” At which point the government’s like, “Well, in six months, I have an election which I want to have something to present at. So, please proceed quickly.” You know what I mean? They would just kind of get a pass. The impression was the locals are kind of lazy and so on. In terms of the other way, there was, yeah, I mean it was the most basic kind of Sinophobic narratives you could imagine, to be honest with you. This kind of idea of yellow peril. This wave of, I’m using horrible language here and I apologize, this sort of ants coming over the border and taking us over, and we’ve got the huge empty countries, and they just want to swallow us up. There’s a huge phobia in some ways at that very basic level.
I remember one of our early trips to Tajikistan when actually you couldn’t find many Chinese, we really struggled, in fact. It was funny. And we couldn’t find anyone who’s really working with China. And to go now, it’s a complete shift. It’s an interesting shift to have watched over the past few years. But one of the stories, someone said, “Oh, the Chinese company came to build,” I can’t remember right now if it was a road or tunnel, “and all of the animals disappeared right down to the snakes because those people eat everything.” Really? So, it’s those kinds of narratives which, unfortunately, do persist. To be honest, those were pretty universal. What I did notice was that the further you got from China’s border, the softer those narratives became. By the time you get to Turkmenistan, for example, there’s just kind of almost no engagement or conception or caring frankly about China.
Even in Uzbekistan, the first few times you visited, there was a sense of “oh, that place is far away, it doesn’t really matter, it’s whatever.” But when you get to the border countries, you find a lot of these kinds of very basic kind of racist narratives really coursing through the kind of public discourse. And then, of course, if you’re dealing with someone who is ethnically a Uyghur or Dungan, which is a kind of Chinese community that lives in the region, you get a different impression from them as well — usually quite a negative one to be honest.
Kaiser: Beijing is not unaware of these attitudes and the sort of backlash against its presence there. They’re not, I assume, not oblivious to it anyway. Is Beijing trying to do anything about this image problem or is it just fully aware and simply willing to accept that cost?
Raffaello: I mean, I know that they have discussions. And the problem is that sometimes these issues boil up to impact projects in a negative way. The two examples that kind of immediately spring to mind is in Kazakhstan, there’s been a big effort over a few years of a big Chinese agribusiness to go there. And part of that was basically to change the local laws so that foreigners could essentially rent land or potentially own land for long periods of time. And this caused a huge reaction domestically, large protests showing up in the streets saying, “Oh, you’re giving away our land.” And of course, these are relatively young countries. They’re 30 years young. So, the idea of nationhood and territory is really important to them. And it’s still forging that kind of national story in many ways.
And so, within that context, the idea that your government’s signing laws to give away your territory to this giant beast next door it’s one they don’t like. That led to those projects essentially being shelled or having to be hidden away. In Bishkek, there was a big project a couple of years ago, a big transit logistics point that was going to build, which had to get shelled because the local protest was so strong that the company actually just decided this just isn’t worth the grief and walked away from it.
Kaiser: Wow.
Raffaello: In Tajikistan, the interesting project was, years and years ago, there was a big agribusiness, which was going to do a project in the south of the country. Now, we heard from people who work in the industry that the territory was fallow, essentially. It was not being used by anybody and you couldn’t do anything with it. And the Chinese had actually some interesting desalination equipment that they could bring, and that would deal with the problems and actually become useful arable land again. And so the Chinese company came and did that. But this project, of course, was going to touch all these rails, land, China. In the end, you saw the local government completely tried to squash any information and squashed a few protests that took place. And the Chinese actually censored any discussion around it as well to try to stop any sort of stories filtering out.
I mean, I think Beijing’s very aware of this, and they bring it up at the sort of official engagements. I remember the Kazakh, including some Kazakh MFA officials, and we raised this point to them, and they said, “Yep, it is a problem. We’re aware of this problem.” And when we try to say, “Well, what do you do about it?” And they say, “Well, yeah, we have to manage it.” I think everyone, they’re all very aware of it, but they don’t really, I think, have an answer. And from a Chinese perspective, I never had a sense that they were like, “Well, we’re just going to convert these people.” I have heard that increasingly over time they have become much more pressuring on local authorities. I know in Kyrgyzstan in particular, I heard a number of stories of things happening to the local Chinese community, the Chinese embassy getting involved. And essentially the Chinese embassy publicly rebuking the local authorities, which is a pretty scandalous situation. An embassy is there as a guest of the host country.
The stories I heard was that the ambassador at one point had actually summoned ministry officials to the embassy to give them a dressing down over something that had happened. I remember another anecdote in a different ministry in Tajikistan where actually the ambassador had taken umbrage to something an official of the very institution he was sitting in had said, and asked that person to leave the room. Just imagine some Chinese official going to the State Department and telling some State Department official in the meeting, “I don’t like what you just said. Just get the hell out of the room.” This is scandalous stuff. I have heard growing numbers, these sort of suggest to me that Chinese are starting to throw their weight around. And that will probably have an effect on some of these issues because you’ll find the complaints from the Chinese state will probably get a lot more aggressive and rude, frankly, behind closed doors.
Kaiser: I want to come back to this idea about your central theme, and apologies in advance, I’m going to pack a lot into this question. You wrote, talking about the early days of the BRI, what was equally striking about our conversations in Xinjiang and similar discussions we had in Beijing and Shanghai was that no one could articulate to us what the actual plan was. You report having met with blank stares by academics and think tank types in Beijing and Shanghai when you laid out your ideas of what you thought that bigger strategy might be. But at the same time, whether or not they were able to articulate it, you do describe well, you ascribe to Beijing kind of a strategy for building out all this connective infrastructure and so forth. Predating the BRI, you wrote, “the point of creating regional connectivity at its most basic was to open up Xinjiang’s manufacturing and markets to its neighbors, and therefore to help the region to prosper and eventually to stabilize.”
This idea that for China Central Asia is all about Xinjiang and Xinjiang is all about Central Asia, is this something that at least subconsciously is understood by the main actors in this? Are you able to, in the end, to ascertain whether China’s overall endeavor in Central Asia, is it driven by this larger overarching geopolitical strategy that is presumably present in the minds of Xi Jinping and the people closest to him? And maybe, to what extent is it really just an agglomeration of actions by individual enterprises whether SOEs or private sector? I mean, are these guys reading Mackinder? Are they thinking Great Game, and is this affecting their… I can’t imagine that that’s the case. So, it’s hard for me to get a sense for the level of policy coordination here versus just sort of gold rush land grab.
Raffaello: Yeah, it’s a difficult question and it’s one that is fundamental in some ways to the book and the thinking that kind of went into it. I mean, I think our sense was always that, as I said, when we asked people, “Oh, look at all these things that are happening and this is what we think the vision is and this is what the plan is.” The response was like, “No, China doesn’t have such ambitions.” I think they were interpreting in this sense that we were thinking — China’s going to try to take over this region. And they were saying, “Oh, no, that’s not China’s plan at all. We’d never dream of doing these things. Of course not, we’re just doing stuff, and this stuff is going in that direction and there we go.” But when you talk to researchers in Xinjiang, you got a stronger sense that actually they could see the importance of Central Asia to them and the importance of its sort of economic opportunities and that kind of sense of understanding the communities and the cultures. It was clearly more tied to domestic stability. I think the kind of grander vision, in some ways, I would say it probably traces back to the kind of march westwards idea, right? Which you see going back to Jiang Zemin, right? The idea of develop the West.
China’s got these underdeveloped western regions, we need to develop them — how do we do that? Well, it’s a long way from those places to the sea so we need to kind of push inland instead. But that kind of never went anywhere. It’s always interesting to look back to 1999 in the creation of the Bangladesh, China, India, and Myanmar corridor, which was sort of inaugurated back then, which in some ways is a prelude to the BRI. That was founded very much out of the same ideas. And you could look at Yunnan and craft a very similar narrative of Yunnan and the regions it’s next to, Southeast Asia. It was happening then. And Xinjiang is another expression of that in a way because it’s westward. Then in 2012 we have the great dean of Beida, 王辑思Wang Jisi right? This famous article where he talked about marching westward, which it’s an interesting article because if you read it, the narrative he’s really digging into is this idea that he thinks basically Beijing is obsessing too much about the U.S. and the seas, and they’re missing this important opportunity here.
And he says, and this important opportunity, of course, is tied to us importantly domestically, and so we need to open up in this direction. And that I think was probably quite an important document in terms of shaping the thinking that then goes into the BRI. So, in many ways, our sense was always that what you see with BRI is kind of a name being put on something that had already been happening and kind of crafting a seeming strategy and vision after the horse is bolted and after things have happened. And then once that’s happened, you say, “Okay, well, that’s how this model worked. Let’s replicate it, let’s boost it, let’s make it bigger.” And in many ways, the kind of model of building infrastructure, using your companies to do all that infrastructure, offering your loans to do that, the interesting thing about that model is it’s one where Beijing in some way controls all the levers, right? Because it’s their policy banks, it’s their companies.
The only kind of non-actor that they control is a local authority. And now you just kind of negotiate with them and then come to a deal. It seems to me like an easier strategy for Beijing to articulate and envision. And at the end of it, it’s a vision which is basically saying, “Let’s all make money together.” And that is quite an easy sale, in many ways, abroad. How does that all tie back in and is there an actual plan underneath all of this when we talk about Central Asia and Xinjiang. I do still think it really is about Xinjiang and about making Xinjiang prosperous and stable.
And I think in some ways that’s probably what it always comes back to in Beijing’s considerations. I think increasingly you’ll see how does this fit into the U.S.-China clash also play a role because of the kind of increasing centrality of Xinjiang sanctions, the kind of stuff you see the U.S. and other western powers doing in Central Asia. The clash the west is having with Russia. Afghanistan, where they blame the Americans and now think the Americans are meddling in some way. And Pakistan where they’re constantly worried about the kind of American relationship with Islamabad. Increasingly, I think that U.S. narrative and U.S. conflict narrative is coming in as well. But ultimately all of that, they’re worried about that because they’re worried that that could come back in again and destabilize Xinjiang. That’s their weaker point, let’s say, and they’re worried that that is an area where someone could kind of turn the screws on them from outside and cause damage domestically, which would have worrying repercussions. I do think it still all boils back down to Xinjiang at the end of the day and how it all kind of comes back there, and that’s ultimately the goal and the vision.
Kaiser: Earlier in our conversation, you gave us a sort of early history of the sort of border five, the Shanghai Five, which was kind of the progenitor of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. And you took us up through a point where they were focused primarily on demarcating borders, right? Let’s give a potted history of how this nascent organization went from that kind of modest task to becoming kind of an anti-terrorist coalition on the eve of September 11th.
Raffaello: Yeah. The SCO’s a fascinating organization in many ways. So, it was born out of Shanghai Five. The Shanghai Five kind of proceeded along until 2001. And in 2001, they decided to change and Uzbekistan joined, it became the Shanghai Corporation Organization. Uzbekistan, of course, doesn’t share a border with China, which is why it was always a kind of observer and distant participant. It was also at the time ruled by a man, Islam Karimov, who actually liked to keep his cards quite close to his chest and liked his country to be cut off and isolated and just kind of his domain. And he wanted to kind of control everything. So, he was always very reticent, and he was even very reticent about joining some of the Russian organizations that came out of the Soviet Union, like the Commonwealth of Independent States or the Collective Security Treaty Organization or what’s now called the Eurasian Economic Union.
So, he was always very reticent. But anyway, in 2001, he decided to join the SCO, and it became the SCO in June 2001. And the idea was to try to build on what they saw, which was a successful grouping where they’d managed to achieve the goals that they wanted to achieve, which was basically to define their borders and kind of normalize relations between China and this new group of countries. And so then goes into June, 2001, it becomes the SCO. And of course, September of that year, 9/11 attacks happened and the world turns on an axis, and suddenly the United States coming heavy into Afghanistan. Now, what’s interesting about this, from the SCO perspective, is that terrorism was always an issue for the SCO and was an issue with the Shanghai Five as well because all of these countries were worried about terrorists and dissidents, and that was one thing they could all agree on.
When you look at the SCO in its first inception, and yeah, the Russians used to… Terrorists were referred to as that counterterrorism grouping. It was because terrorism was the one thing they could all agree on. They all didn’t like basically anyone who was against the state. And they had pretty broad definitions of that in each and every case. And that was kind of their thing that they could all get together. And the first thing that the SCO actually does is essentially create something called the Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure. The RATS Center, which is based in Tashkent, which is essentially a way where they could-
Kaiser: An unfortunate acronym.
Raffaello: Very unfortunate acronym. As a Russian diplomat jokingly said to me, he said, “This is what happens when there’s no native English speakers in the room.” But the organization, focus around CT, counterterrorism, is the thing that they can all agree and all can work together to do. In tangible terms, I don’t know that they do much in terms of countering actual terrorism, but it’s useful to say, “Okay, we’re going to do military exercises together, its counterterrorist. We’re going to create a database of terrorists who we don’t like, and we can share that database and do something about it. Maybe if they come…” It was a good subject in general to gather around. But then 9/11 came along. And then, of course, the funny thing is that immediately all of them essentially turned instead to the United States. When you actually, if you look at the SCO’s foundation doctrine, it says, “We will work as a group. We will not let other powers come in and meddle in our region.”
And then that’s exactly what the United States did, and they actually encouraged it, in fact. There’s an interesting dissonance. And some very prominent Chinese academics have made some interesting points about this, and they said, “Well, the SCO stumbled at its first trial.” 9/11 was its first trial, and they kind of immediately didn’t fall into line and come together as a group, but instead scattered and went to the U.S.” But then when Xi happened in about 2005, there was well, in 2003, people may not remember it, there was a uprising in Georgia, in the caucuses called the Rose Revolution. And then in 2004, you had the first round of Ukrainian protest, the Orange Revolution. And then in 2005, you had two events in, in Central Asia. You had some…
Kaiser: The Tulip.
Raffaello: You had a large unrest in Andijan, in Uzbekistan in the south of the country, where a large protest was essentially shut down with aggressive force by the security forces. A number of people killed. We don’t know how many. In Kyrgyzstan, you had what was at the time called the Tulip Revolution, which wasn’t quite the same actually as what we’ve seen happen in Georgia and Ukraine, but because it came after them, it was tagged within the same kind of bracket. And their interpretation of all of these actions across the region, and in China and Russia, was that, well, this was western democracy meddling and causing problems, and ultimately leading to instability. And they don’t like that. And so then you see the SCO shift a little bit and become a much more closed organization and much more hostile towards the United States and towards the west. But it continues on and continues to meet, but doesn’t actually achieve a huge amount.
Now, throughout this entire period, right up to today in some ways, you can see the Chinese are always really keen on economics within this organization. If you go back and look at Jiang Zemin’s speeches before when it was the Shanghai Five, he was talking about it as a much larger organization than just a counterterrorism grouping. He was talking about this was going to be the kind of the political, the economic, the security shore, the cultural, the everything, saying that he captures this idea of Shanghai spirit. But then, and the economics one was the one that they were really interested in trying to do, but they can never get off the ground, frankly. The Chinese have suggested a Shanghai Corporation Organization Free Trade Area, a development bank, a joint account, all sorts of trade agreements. None of it’s really sort of come about. They’ve now started to do some more limited ones. And even more recently in the digital and domain, you can actually see a lot from happening, which is quite interesting. A lot of it’s happening through the SCO.
Kaiser: Hang on one second here. I want to come back to finish out our history of the SCO and to talk about sort of the divergent visions of what it should be, especially in the context of this old kind of this canard that Russia does security and China does economics, but we’ll come back to that in a second. Since we were on the subject of counterterrorism, I think it’s important that we talk a little bit about the true extent of it. You are an expert in counterterrorism. What do you make of China’s claims as to the size and to the scale of the terror threat that was emanating from Uyghurs, whether from the group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement or from any other? Because there’s a lot of debate. I mean, there are people who are completely dismissive of it and say the ETIM didn’t ever exist or was just sort of in name only and was never actually responsible for any attacks, or that they were extremely limited.
There are other people who see this as much bigger and think that we’ve irresponsibly sort of denigrated the extent of the threat. Where do you come down on all this?
Raffaello: Well, I mean, like a good academic hedge. No, I’d say, to be honest, I think it’s somewhere in between is the grim truth. I think on the one hand, there is a narrative question with China where China considers an awful lot of people, terrorists, who are really not, and they end up grouping an awful lot of things together. So, you’ll get everything from the World Uyghur Congress to ETIM which actually calls itself TIP, the Turkestan Islamic Party, Hizbul Islam Li-Turkestani. And they’ll say, “All of these people are terrorists, and all of them need to be dealt with.” Well, of course, they’re not. You know what I mean? And the dissident community is one side of it. And there is a group of people out there who are terrorists, and you can go back and look at Al-Qaeda, and you can see that Al-Qaeda had members, Uyghurs members of TIP on its Shura Council, it’s kind of governing council.
There were some very important TIP leaders who were very important influential figures in Pakistan when Al-Qaeda was there and sort of brokering relationships with the local tribes for the group to survive and operate there. And in Afghanistan, there have been contingent there for some time, and they are still present. The leader Abdul Haq, I think in the last video that emerged in Eid of last year was celebrating it in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s protection. There is also a sizable contingent that operate in Idlib Province in Syria, which, at the moment, of course, is suffering through a horrible earthquake. But there is a few thousand is believed to be the number that are there. So, this is an organization that exists. Now, has it committed terrorist acts against China? I mean, that’s where it becomes very difficult. And that’s where, frankly, there isn’t much evidence for them doing much for quite a while. If you go back and look at the years basically between 2009, in the wake of the riots in Urumqi, all the way to about 2016, where there was a lot of violence around Xinjiang, which the government was reporting as terrorism…
Kaiser: You had the Kunming Train Station attack. You had the Tiananmen incident.
Raffaello: Yeah. Well, that’s the thing. So, some of them, I think it would be incorrect to not classify them as terrorist acts. It was basically building bombs and throwing them in public places. But in other cases, you would see it was a local village somewhere near Yarkant or something where the local community got pissed off that the local cops, for whatever reason, and did that, or someone destroyed a mosque and, of course, the locals got very angry about that. And that’s all classified as kind of terrorist incidents. So, it’s difficult because there was clearly something. How much of all of that that we saw happening in Xinjiang was connected to outside. I think there was one incident in 2011 where there was evidence to point to that because there was an individual who’d been seen at a training camp who then was involved in an attack in Kashgar.
And we know that there was people in training camps in Afghanistan during the Taliban time before 2001, and then in Pakistan after that because Western recruits who went there actually saw them and said, “Oh, those are the Chinese guys, the Turkestanis,” and they would say, “There’s a lot of them.” So, we know that they were there, and we know that some of those guys may have had the aspiration to do that. But yeah, I think it is an issue that exists, but I don’t think it’s anywhere necessarily at the scale. And I think, in some ways, China’s approach of capturing an awful lot of things under that banner ends up, frankly, diluting the actual group that does exist out there.
Kaiser: Back to the SCO, Russia started off pretty dismissive of the SCO, as you’ve argued, and actually saw the SCO as a way to actually exert some control over China’s activities in the region, ironically, to circumscribe China’s inroads. And maybe that didn’t quite work out as planned. I’ve seen people suggest that with the inclusion of India and Pakistan as members now, I think since 2017, the mission is even more narrow, and the organizing principle of the organization is even less clear. And you write in Sinostan about conversations that you’ve had in D.C. about the SCO that are either mainly schadenfreude or general dismissal of the organization, but your own take is much more subtle. How would you describe what the SCO is today if you had to sort of put it in a nutshell?
Raffaello: I mean, I think it’s an organization that I think we look at through the wrong lens. We look at this organization, I say we in the royal Western sense, and we say, “Well, this organization has all the trappings of a kind of NATO, has all the trappings of an organization that has a secretariat, meets regularly, does these military exercises, is supposed to be doing this counterterrorism corporation and economic stuff as well. Therefore, what are its results? What are its outputs?” And if you look and you say, “Well, actually it’s not a huge amount.” Tangibly speaking, the organization hasn’t delivered much. It hasn’t got NATO-style battalions that have been built. It hasn’t got that kind of level of coordination. It hasn’t got a kind of joint currency that you get in the European Union.
It hasn’t got sort of harmonization of tax regimes as you get within the Eurasian Economic Union. I mean, it hasn’t got some of the stuff that ASEAN’s got. It’s got none of that actually. The outputs are really quite limited. But then I think that misses the point, which is that actually what you’ve had through this organization is essentially the increasing normalization of China’s role as a power and as a great power with a relationship with all of these countries. And the fact that more and more countries want to continue to join reflects the fact that actually this organization, this idea, which is basically that we’re going to meet up together on a regular basis, engage, talk about stuff to do, maybe think about things we want to work on together, not necessarily set ourselves hard deliverables, which we then have to sort of do and will cause us all to have arguments about what we should or shouldn’t, what we agree and what we don’t agree with, but actually just kind of continue to move in the same direction together.
It does create a kind of sense of harmonious thinking. I think the critical thing it’s done is really, is normalize China’s role as a big power in the Eurasian land mass. And I don’t think that’s a small feat in itself.
Kaiser: No, indeed.
Raffaello: Yeah, I think that’s its biggest success in many ways.
Kaiser: But it’s one that might ultimately prove threatening to another actor that has traditionally seen Central Asia as it’s backyard, right? I mean, your book, as I said, goes after that easy characterization of the two big continental powers in Central Asia. China does economics, Russia does security. In fact, China’s security footprint in Central Asia is substantial and it’s growing. Can you talk about, first of all, the purpose of China’s security presence in the region? I mean, it’s everything from border stations to actual arm sales, maybe instantiate that a bit. Talk about what are the biggest things that most people are missing? And then maybe talk about what the significance of this is, especially vis-à-vis Russia.
Raffaello: Sure. I mean, I think China’s security presence in the region is a growing story. And it’s interesting because it’s a growing story that’s very focused on, in terms of the presence on the ground, on the People’s Armed Police, which I think again reflects the Xinjiang narrative because the People’s Armed Police, of course, is primarily a domestic security force, the fact that they’re the ones leading a lot of the engagements. You can see the base that the Chinese have built in Tajikistan is a PAP base. A lot of the engagements that you see happening around the region are PAP-led. The PLA does have a role as well. There was an organization called the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism that was created under the Republic government in Afghanistan which basically brought together the Chiefs of Army Staff of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan.
It is basically focused on the Wakhan Corridor, which is that the little panhandle of land that basically means Afghanistan touches China and separates Tajikistan from Pakistan. It was done during the kind of Russian-British conflict times to define their two empires. The PLA does have a role, but it’s one where you can see the PAP is really important. And I think that’s because CT and domestic security concerns are really what underpins a lot of what China does and thinks about towards this region. The arms sales is an interesting one because that is something that you’ve seen increasing over the years. And there was a couple of sales, there was a big airplane, the, I forget it now if it was the Y-2 or the Y-4, the Chinese won a contract, it’s a big heavy lift airplane military aircraft that the Chinese won the contract with the Kazakhs having beaten out the Russians.
And the plane that they sold them was essentially one, that was one that the Chinese had ripped off from the Russians years before. It was the cleanest example of a stealing a contract and using the guy’s stuff against them. But then it’s also a lot of high-end gear. So, if you look at sort of communications equipment, they tend to go Chinese. If you look at drones, but actually drones are an interesting one because now, of course, the Turks have started to develop a really interesting drone program, the Bayraktar, which is doing very well actually in the region, but all that kind of more higher-end technology missile tech, and cheaper missile tech is something that you can see the region increasingly buying from China.
So, you can see that the Chinese kind of inroads are starting to happen. But I think the other side to this, and this then maybe ties into the Russian side of the story, is that the Chinese interest is always very narrow. The Russian vision often of this region is that this region is our soft underbelly. They still have quite a paternalistic view of the region. And the Chinese just are sort of like, “Well, okay, we’re worried about our concerns, and our concerns are militants from Afghanistan coming back and causing us trouble. So, we want to make sure we have eyes on that.” And that, I think, is the primary purpose of that base because they don’t trust, essentially the Tajiks to completely deliver. And so they figure, “Well, if we’ve got some people there, then we’ll have a bit better sense of what’s actually going on in Afghanistan.” So, it’s always very focused on their kind of narrow security concerns. When they complain and when they ask about Chinese private security companies to be deployed, it’s about their companies that they’re worried about and their interests.
But the kind of wider instability, the wider problems that do exist in this region are not ones that China wants to get involved in. And they’re ones that Russia sometimes does get involved in. And of course, in January, just before the invasion of Ukraine, we saw Russia deploy in large size into Kazakhstan, exactly, to help sort of stabilize the country there. And I can’t imagine the context where the Chinese would do that, in part because the locals wouldn’t want it, but also because frankly, they just wouldn’t do it. They’d be like, “Well, why? You guys, if you’re going to overthrow your government, fine, then just whoever comes up in power next, we’ll talk to them instead.” It’s just a very, very, very different transactional relationship to Russia’s, which still has this sense of paternalistic and still has very strong relations with the region in a very important way, which will continue to mean that there will always be an important Russian component to it.
Kaiser: And so Moscow doesn’t feel threatened at all by China’s actions there?
Raffaello: That’s an interesting question because I have spoken to people in Moscow who will sort of tell me in great anxiety, in very conspiratorial terms, but people in Russia do love a good conspiracy.
Kaiser: They do.
Raffaello: That this is all some sort of giant Chinese plot, but then the more sober-minded ones I see, say, “Well, so what if the Chinese are present there as well? We still have a lot of influence that we can control. We still get what we want out of this relationship, and the Chinese are never going to go against us, if you will.” I think, in some ways, the story for me is about the two of them operating in parallel in a way, and just being always careful to not tread on each other’s toes but not really caring that much. Just sort of cracking on with their own business. At root, they basically just want the region to be stable and not cause them trouble and just to kind of make money off it. And that’s the end of it. That’s kind of their baseline. And whatever the governance structures looks like, they don’t care.
Kaiser: So, we’re not going to see “The Great Game” of the 21st century as one between Russia and China for control of Central Asia.
Raffaello: I don’t think so. I really don’t. I think the losers, frankly, in this are the Central Asians because the Central Asians love to talk about their multi-vector foreign policy and their ability to balance these great powers off each other. The problem with that, at the moment, is that the two great powers that have huge influence in their region, Russia and China, have an agreement with each other, spoken or unspoken, depends on how you interpret what they say to each other, to basically work together in geopolitical alignment against the West. And they won’t let anything impede that. And so, within that context, it becomes very difficult, if you’re a Central Asian country, to play the two off each other because you know that beyond a certain point, they will never go because they don’t want to undermine the overall relationship
Kaiser: Well, one pivotal country in the old Great Game was, of course, Afghanistan. And Afghanistan, you write, is a country “in which China is doomed to play a significant role, but it is a role that it is studiously avoiding taking.” And so, it’s really kind of the archetypal case of the inadvertent empire theme in your book. You have a chapter of the book called “Inheriting Afghanistan?” with a question mark. But if I’m not mistaken, your manuscript had already been turned in by the time of the American withdrawal, in August of 2021. The question that forms the chapter’s title nevertheless is still very much apt, right? At the time of the withdrawal, there were all sorts of pundits as you probably saw it and probably drove you crazy talking about how China was going to rush in to fill a vacuum. Is that what happened?
Raffaello: No, absolutely not. I think, well, what’s fascinating to me is the degree to which you’ve basically seen the same kind of Chinese policy roll on. In fact, I could even argue the case that China was happier, frankly, with the Republic in power up to a point, because there was a moment in the sort of later Trump years where you could see a tension coming into that relationship as well. But when they had the Republic government in charge, you had the Americans there who were kind of dealing with the security problems and keeping the security basically domestic and focused on them, frankly, in the Republic government. You had an environment where you had a kind of technocratic government that was kind of trying to issue contracts to do deals and projects to get mining going. You had lots of international financial institutions that were coming there to try to build infrastructure and, of course, needed contractors to do it.
And so you saw a lot of Chinese companies win those contracts because they were willing to work in these difficult environments, and they could, and they had credibility to do it. So, they were doing a lot of that building. The two biggest contracts that were signed under Republic were with Chinese companies. In Messina, there was a copper of mine. And then up in the north Amu Darya, there’s an oil field that CNPC won. So, the Chinese kind of had a very workable relationship. And even on the security side, the Republic government did not like Uyghur militants, and it was quite happy to go after anyone the Chinese said was a Uyghur militant because those people tended to be working with the Taliban who they were fighting. So, they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t like him either.”
I think they were quite content in some ways with that relationship. Now, when it all gets blown up and the Republic falls and the Taliban takeover, it did complicate that a lot because first, well, now they’ve got to reconstruct the relationship, but they’ve been laying the foundations of relationship with the Taliban for some time. But what they quickly have learned is that actually the Taliban are not an easy group of people to work with.
Kaiser: No.
Raffaello: And they are not men who are, frankly, going to suddenly turn on their Uyghur allies because Beijing demands them to do it. These guys have been fighting a war for the past 20 years, and they’ve just won against the world’s mightiest empire. This is their kind of analysis of the situation. So, why on earth should they turn over their allies to these perfidious neighbors who’ve done nothing to help them. There’s a kind of tension baked in there, but at the same time, the Taliban recognize and the Chinese recognize as well that they have this card to play, that there is a sudden opportunity in Afghanistan as well. The Taliban want the Chinese to come and invest. They want them to come and do more because who else is going to do it, frankly? The other neighboring countries are uninterested or very scared or just don’t have the resources. China’s this golden goose at the end of the rainbow that they think will come and buy everything and give them loads of money and make everything wonderful and prosperous.
But from a Chinese perspective, the Chinese are hesitant because the government, on the other hand, they don’t know how to handle projects. They haven’t dealt with these things before. So, you got to work through all those practicalities. The government is still very heavily sanctioned, so there’s a risk in terms of engaging with them, you might lose your investments. And actually, if you look, a lot of the economic activity we’ve seen since the fall has actually been driven mostly by Chinese entrepreneurs, private Chinese enterprise. A lot of businessmen or guys who notice that actually security in Afghanistan suddenly got much, much better. Afghanistan used to be a war-torn country. It’s not anymore. I mean, there is still violence, terrorism violence. It’s a dangerous place, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as it was before. So, violence has suddenly gotten much better, and they’re willing to have a go. And they recognize that there are large mineral deposits, there are precious jewels, there is potential agriculture.
There are rare earths. There are opportunities there. And so why not try to have a go? And that’s, I think, that’s actually what’s driven a lot of the economic engagement. The Chinese state hasn’t actually been that involved, frankly. They’ve been very hesitant and very reticent because of the kind of potential traps that they can see themselves walking into. So, it’s this narrative of China filling a vacuum. I just have not seen it. There was a really interesting moment, actually at the end of last year, or late last year, where you saw the Taliban were really starting to get frustrated. The way that I remember when I used to talk to people in the Republic government would get very frustrated about the Chinese, where on the surface, they were always super positive and all about engagement. And yeah, we want the Chinese to come and…
But when you’re talking to them behind closed doors, they were like, “Oh God, it’s just not happening. I don’t know why we can’t get them to move. They signed the contract, they’re not delivering in it, now they’re complaining about this and they’re trying to do that.” And you saw Mullah Baradar, the kind of number two in the Taliban actually go to the Messina project, and the company that had won the project previously has been talking to the Taliban about restarting it now. Not that, by the way, they ever started it. They signed the contract in 2007. They did nothing. They turned around and said, Mullah Baradar actually went to the site and said, “Yeah, we really want you to start now, please.” Then there’s this narrative from Beijing that Afghanistan was key part of the Belt and Road, and the Minister for Trade and Commerce or the minister designate for Trade and Commerce did a sort of webinar in which again, he pleaded for the Chinese to please incorporate Afghanistan into the Belt and Road because they really wanted it. So, there’s a real pull, but it’s not being reciprocated.
And so, I think the Chinese are actually being quite hesitant in terms of moving forwards, even though logic dictates they will have to play a role of some sort because they share a border with this country. The problems of this country, if they get much worse, will impact Central Asia. They’re already impacting Pakistan quite negatively, and it’s probably going to happen north as well. These are places where China’s very heavily invested. And that’s kind of the worst-case scenario for China is that the whole neighborhood goes up in flames.
Kaiser: Your book laid out what, during the Republic, were four main pillars of Chinese concern over Afghanistan, the direct threat which Beijing presumes to be from the Uyghur groups exporting violence and Jihadism. And that’s still going on. The threat of Afghanistan destabilizing the region, and obviously that’s still a problem. The flow of narcotics — that’s still ongoing. The only one that’s really disappeared is that they used to complain about an American military presence right on their border. The others are…
Raffaello: But even that one, it’s funny, you look at some of the narratives that come out, the levels of paranoia, you can see around the American engagement with the Taliban, the fact that you’ve had the CIA chief go to Kabul. The deputy CIA chief met with the Taliban’s intelligence chief in Doha. Tom West meeting with Mullah Yaqoob and other senior officials. I even remember reading, actually hearing some folk in China telling me, that the fact that Zawahiri was killed in Kabul was evidence, Zawahiri being the Al-Qaeda leader, was killed in Kabul, is evidence of the fact that the Americans were working with the Taliban because they said, “Well, someone must have fingered him, and it must be the Taliban. So, the Taliban were working with the Americans.” Actually, that paranoia about bases, it’s still kind of rumbling in the background.
Kaiser: Okay. Finally, I want to ask you where we are right now with Belt and Road. You have doubtless heard the pundits who have pronounced it dead based on the relatively infrequent mentions of it in major speeches and in documents. Others have talked about it morphing into something else or suggesting that it’s still going forward, but just without quite as much fanfare, where are you on this?
Raffaello: I mean, I’ve always thought that the interpretation that’s often given to the Belt and Road of it being a project is incorrect. It’s a vision, right? This is Xi Jinping’s big foreign policy idea. It’s been enshrined in the Communist Party constitution, so it’s there. It’s his big contribution, his big idea. And within that context, I think they’ve left it always very purposely vague, because at the end of the day, that means the goalposts are malleable. It can always kind of move forwards. And I think it will kind of continue to. I think some of the interesting discussions recently you’ve seen around the Global Security Initiative and the Global Development Initiative, I would argue are developments off the kind of Belt and Road, but the fundamental concept of the Belt and Road vision, I think sort of preponderates. I think the hiccups we’re seeing now I would attribute to well, frankly, problems because they’ve spent an awful lot of money in countries where there’s, in a lot of cases, very little prospect of then getting it back.
So, they’re having to sort of retrench an awful lot. And also, because at home there’s a recognition that we can’t just keep spraying this money everywhere. That’s, I think, where this sort of pullback narrative comes from. But for me, it’s not really about the kind of dollars and cents. It’s really about a vision here. And the vision is, China wants to basically create prosperity around the world, create connectivity, make the world a kind of better place. And that underlying concept and idea is, I would argue, the core of the BRI. And within that interpretation, I don’t think that’s an idea that ever really necessarily goes away. It just sort of stays, the specific goalposts will just shift to suit the needs of whatever the situation is at that moment in time. I think it’s going to be interesting to see the upcoming Belt and Road Forum, which will, I think happen, I think it’s this year which should be really interesting to observe because it’s going to be the 10th year anniversary. And I think we’ll really get a big celebration of Xi Jinping’s wonderful contribution to the Party’s thinking.
Kaiser: That was very well put. Thank you very much.
Raffaello: Thank you.
Kaiser: Raffaello, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Once again, the book is called Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire, and its co-authors are Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen. Definitely give it a read. As you probably heard, it’s chock full of really, really great thinking and observation about China’s presence in Central Asia.
Raffaello: Thank you.
Kaiser: All right. Let’s move on to recommendations. First, a very quick reminder that if you like the work that we do with the Sinica Podcast and with the other shows in the Sinica Network, the very best thing that you could do to support our work is by subscribing to Access membership at The China Project. You go to The China Project website, find the subscribe button. It’s just a buck. I mean, $1 right now for your first month. And if you like it, keep subscribing. It’s really good. I think that you’ll find it to be enormously valuable. All right, let’s move on to recommendations. Raffaello, what do you have for us?
Raffaello: In terms of recommendations, if you’re looking for the kind of big books that are thinking about this region and these kinds of visions, I do think that Peter Frankopan’s book, The Silk Road book is well worth a read, frankly. It captures a big arc of this narrative, and in some ways paints a picture that we, I think, fleshed out specifically for Central Asia and a much wider kind of context about changing roles. And I think the…
Kaiser: The synthetic road.
Raffaello: The synthetic road, exactly right. I think it’s a really excellent book in terms of capturing that in a very readable and very substantial way. The other thing I’d always highly recommend people read is frankly Mackinder, Halford Mackinder, the great geographer who conceived this idea of the Eurasian heartland as being the pivot, the geopolitical pivot, of the world. I think it’s a really important text to read, and gives you a really interesting flavor and a good look at the world, which you can then… I think it’s increasingly overlooked, and I think increasingly in particular in policy circles in Washington, and in Europe actually, where people are so focused on the maritime questions that emanate from China that we miss this entire landmass and all the important things that are happening there.
Kaiser: All right. So, Peter Frankopan’s book, The Silk Road and Halford Mackinder.
Raffaello: Yes.
Kaiser: I want to recommend the book Volt Rush by Henry Sanderson, who’s going to be on the show in a week or two. It’s really an amazing book. It’s reported from all over the world. Looking at the complexity and the challenges of the electric vehicle, EV supply chain, specifically for the metals that make the batteries work. And we’re talking about not just lithium, but cobalt — really importantly. There’s a long, long, long section on cobalt and on nickel, of course. It’s really eye-opening. Don’t worry, the lesson is certainly not, “Well, it’s just as bad to drive an EV and not an internal combustion engine vehicle. So, don’t buy one.” No, definitely not. Jeremy and I will be speaking to him soon, and I think you would do well to pick up the book ahead of that interview, give it a read and then I think you’ll get more out of listening to us talk to him about it. Anyway…
Raffaello: It’s great to hear you say that because I’ve actually just bought it.
Kaiser: Oh good. You’re one step ahead.
Raffaello: Very perfect. Wonderful.
Kaiser: No, it’s really good.
Raffaello: Looking forward to it even more now.
Kaiser: I mean, it actually does remind me a little bit of yours because it does have just a ton of conversations with individuals, and there’s a lot of just sort of observation in it as well, which makes it extremely readable and a lot of fun.
Raffaello: Yeah. Well, Henry’s other book about China Exim Bank was fantastic.
Kaiser: Yeah, that he wrote with Mike Forsythe, right.
Raffaello: That’s right. Yeah.
Kaiser: Yeah. No, that’s a great book too. So, Raffaello, thank you once again. That was just terrific.
Raffaello: Thank you very much.
Kaiser: Really enjoyed having you.
The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com just to tell us how we’re doing, or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
