Introduction: Encounters After the Soviet Collapse: The Contemporary Chinese Presence in the Former Soviet Union Border Zone

Abstract

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of the former Soviet Union’s borders, cross border interactions between the former Soviet Union states and China have augmented, and particularly the impetus given by the Chinese authorities to the Belt and Road Initiative has increased the presence of various Chinese actors in the countries along China’s western border. Notably, China’s ‘going global’ has received increasingly scholarly attention in the past few years. Hitherto comparative analyses or in-depth case studies on the Chinese presence in the states along China’s western border are yet sparse. By focusing on specific actors and on the ground interactions, this special issue, which includes case studies of the interactions between Chinese and Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik actors, aims to show a) the diversity in scope, actors and modalities of involvement, and b) the sometimes ambiguous goals and interests within China’s going out strategy in the region. At the same time, it aims to present a more close-up study of the responses of the population in the host states. Through a focus on encounters on the ground, imaginaries, and perceptions, we aim to get deeper insights in the character and consequences of China’s involvement in the post-Soviet border region.

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Acknowledgments

The foundation of this special issue was a workshop at Leiden University in February 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://reconnectingasia.csis.org/database/events/president-xi-jinpings-speech-nazarbayev-university/ (accessed February 5, 2020).

2. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/26/WS5cc26932a3104842260b8863.html (accessed February 5, 2020).

3. This special issue also does not include case studies on the Chinese presence in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the two other Central Asian states. Both countries do not share a border with China. Note that Turkmenistan remains much more isolated than the other Central Asian states, and insights into the Chinese presence in Turkmenistan’s economy and society remain limited due to the difficulty of conducting research and journalism in that country.

4. Further, the scant history of international studies on the region, due to the isolation caused by the sharp borders between the Soviet Union on the one hand, and both China and the West on the other, has not been conducive to fieldwork.

5. Alden and Large (2015, 125) however argued that China’s engagement with African countries is undergoing change, from a “norms taker” to a “norms maker.”

6. See for instance the growing divergence between farms in highland and lowland Tajikistan (Hofman 2019) or the sharp divergences between herding farms in Mongolia and border regions in Russia following the Soviet collapse (Visser and Schoenmaker 2011).

7. Mongolia’s national income grew at some 5–6 percent annually in the 1970s–1980s, with 37 percent of GDP coming from Soviet subsidies (Sneath 2015).

8. The magnitude and importance of outmigration to Russia is illustrated most of all by Tajikistan, which has become one of the most remittance-dependent economies in the world.

9. The longer-term cost constituted the environmental effects.

10. The long border between Russia and Mongolia remained more permeable. While not being part of the Soviet Union, it was part of the Comecon and strongly interlinked with the Soviet Union.

11. Chinese investment in the Tajik mining industry has substantially increased in the past decades, including in the mountainous Pamir region.

12. It should be noted that the Chinese population will soon start to decline, projected to reach a peak of 1.44 billion in 2029 according to predictions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Gonzalez 2019).

13. This expression used to denote the growing Chinese presence is also used in Pakistan (personal communication with Professor Matthew Erie, October 2019).

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful for the financial support by Leiden University’s Asian Modernities and Traditions (AMT); Leiden University’s Central Asia Initiative; the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS); the Leiden University Fund (LUF), and the Eurasian Agrofood and Land Initiative (EURAL) based at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, which enabled the organization of this workshop.