When the Chinese view Central Asia, they see a region potentially primed for long-term economic growth but prone to short-term political instability. Chinese officials and academics consider a reduction in local wars and terrorism an essential prerequisite for the region’s long-term prosperity. They particularly worry that the recent political upheavals in the Middle East could spread to the Muslim-majority countries of Central Asia, a region of even higher priority for Beijing. They express interest in working with the international community, including Western governments, to reduce the negative effects on Central Asia of both the political disorders in the Middle East and the terrorism and narcotics trafficking related to Afghanistan.

BACKGROUND: During the last week of August, this author conducted interviews and participated in roundtables with Chinese academics and government officials specializing Central Asia and the Middle East. Chinese scholars and policy makers tend to address the two regions together, perhaps due to their Muslim-majority populations and energy resources. That said, Chinese interlocutors often considered Central Asia more important than the Middle East due to its proximity to China, the regional narcotics trafficking networks that extend into China, and the greater openness shown by Central Asian governments to Chinese direct foreign investment and other business activities compared with most Middle Eastern countries, where European and American firms have already established strong positions that constrain Chinese opportunities.

Chinese academics and officials specializing in the Middle East identify a range of social and economic problems that contribute to the political upheavals there. These sources of instability include slow economic growth resulting in elevated rates of unemployment, widespread illiteracy and poverty, a paucity of educational opportunities, and high birth rates resulting in a bulging cohort of alienated young people. In addition, Chinese specialists cite pervasive corruption and inefficiency, extensive state control over national economic activities, as well as a yawning wealth and income gap between the few extraordinary rich Arabs and the large number of poor people living in the same countries.

Chinese analysts see Central Asian countries as potentially vulnerable to similar political disorders. Despite their nominal commitment to Marxist doctrine, the assessments of China’s Central Asia specialists of the sources of regional instability for the most part resemble those of non-Chinese experts. “Since the independence of the Central Asian countries, there has been a rapid deterioration in the economy and also in people‘s lives,” writes one scholar. “This sharpens the social conflicts and threatens the social stability. Frequent crime activities, combined with widespread government corruption and lack of democracy have offered a hotbed for Islamic extremism and terrorism.”

In the near term, the main Chinese fear regarding Central Asia is that religious and other ties could serve as a transmission belt for moving Middle Eastern chaos into the Muslim-majority nations of Central Asia. A resurgence of the Taliban and other Afghan-based Muslim militants could contribute to that transmission taking a violent turn. Chinese experts believe that worsening instability in Central Asia would adversely affect their own country’s security, including by endangering the PRC’s regional energy and economic interests and perhaps by promoting instability in Xinjiang, which has a large Muslim Uighur minority and has experienced deadly anti-Beijing terrorism and ethnic strife.

IMPLICATIONS: Chinese policy makers and scholars are ambivalent about the large NATO and U.S. military presence in Central Asia. Many Chinese officials and academics express concern about the long-term Western ambitions in the region. A common fear is that the U.S. is trying to sustain a military presence in Central Asia, to China’s west, as an element in its Asia-wide containment strategy against the PRC that also includes India, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and other countries. The location of the U.S. air base at Kyrgyzstan’s Manas International Airport only 200 miles from the PRC-Kyrgyzstan border, combined with Washington’s longstanding military cooperation with Japan and Taiwan and growing security ties with India, engendered Chinese fears of U.S. encirclement and containment. PRC officials endorsed the 2005 SCO leadership declaration calling on coalition forces to establish a timetable for reducing their military presence in Central Asia. PRC leaders have thus far avoided directly challenging the U.S. military presence in Central Asia, but their concerns could mount if a U.S./NATO combat withdrawal from Afghanistan occurs without a corresponding departure of Western troops from Central Asia.

Yet, while most Chinese strategists want U.S. forces to depart Afghanistan at some point, they fear that the planned 2014 withdraw date may be premature. There was a widespread sentiment that Americans “created this mess and now you are leaving it to us to clean up.” Many Chinese experts fear that a complete NATO military withdrawal from Central Asia would contribute to regional instability and terrorism. They see advantages in having the U.S. heavily involved in suppressing terrorism in Central Asia. Chinese analysts recognize that, during the past decade, U.S. and other foreign forces have helped suppress the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other Eurasian-based terrorist movements that at times have attempted to subvert Beijing-friendly regimes in Central Asia and supported Uighur militants seeking to end Beijing’s control over Xinjiang. PRC analysts are also uncertain how well China could manage the consequences of a complete and rapid U.S. military disengagement from the region. The precipitous U.S. security withdrawal from Afghanistan in the early 1990s weakened regional stability, partly at Beijing’s expense.

Chinese officials and academics also worry that the withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign forces could make Chinese investment in Afghanistan more vulnerable to attacks by the Taliban or other extremist or criminal groups. Through several major deals, PRC companies have rapidly become the leading foreign investors in Afghanistan. A resurgence of regional terrorism and instability would also threaten to disrupt the oil and natural gas that flows from and through Central Asian countries into China. PRC policy makers consider these import routes especially valuable since they do not come from the volatile Middle East or arrive via vulnerable maritime routes. The growth in Chinese economic ties with Central Asia and Afghanistan has proven particularly beneficial for Xinjiang, which borders several Central Asian countries. Beijing has sought to raise living standards in Xinjiang to weaken ethnic tensions there, especially among Uighurs who believe that they have not benefited sufficiently from PRC rule.

The U.S. has also generously supported Pakistan, Beijing’s closest ally in Central and South Asia, with billions of dollars of economic and military assistance. This aid has considerably exceeded the sums China has provided Pakistan. The withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops would deprive Pakistanis of the large sums of money they receive for transporting supplies by truck from Pakistan’s southern port of Karachi to the U.S. and other NATO military contingents fighting in Afghanistan. Other U.S. assistance to Pakistan might also decline, as occurred after the Soviet military withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late 1980s. While defending Pakistan’s anti-terrorism record against Western criticism, PRC representatives continue to urge their Pakistani officials to cooperate with NATO regarding Afghanistan despite U.S.-Pakistani tensions over the capture of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and other issues.

CONCLUSIONS: To compensate for the anticipated withdrawal of many or all NATO combat troops from Afghanistan in the next few years, many PRC officials and scholars want the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to play a greater but not exclusive role in stabilizing Central Asia. They have proposed various mechanisms to deepen SCO-NATO and SCO-U.S. cooperation, which could make Western governments more comfortable with the SCO’s assuming a more prominent regional security role. These include exchanging liaison officers, allowing observers from the SCO and NATO to monitor each other’s exercises, engaging in joint training activities, and expanding existing bilateral Western-Central Asian security activities into multilateral mechanisms involving all SCO members. Another proposal is to establish a formal SCO external dialogue structure, perhaps initially just focused on counterterrorism issues. Depending on Western interest and other factors, the institution might include the SCO plus the U.S., the SCO plus NATO, or even the SCO plus NATO, the EU, Japan, and other dialogue partners. This last variant would resemble the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which allows important non-ASEAN countries to engage regularly with ASEAN collectively on issues of mutual concern.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Richard Weitz is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute. He is the author, among other works, of Kazakhstan and the New International Politics of Eurasia (Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, 2008).