Lakhasly

1 Eurasia’s ‘Southern Corridor’: Uzbekistan between Russia, China and West Asia
Introduction
The lands of today’s Uzbekistan were the hub of the ancient Silk Roads. Caravan towns sprang up from the desert, religious facilities flourished and offered physical and spiritual recovery to exhausted travellers. Before the advent of Islam in Central Asia, Buddhism spread from India to China, Zoroastrian mixed with Buddhist art along the Silk Road, and Iranian Buddhists mingled with Nestorian Christians from the Near East.1 With the rise of Islam in the region, Islamic institutions and architecture began to replace the hitherto dominant Buddhist and Christian influences. The cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan became symbols of the Islamic imprint on the Silk Road. In Bukhara, the teachings of Ibn Sina in the early eleventh century, known as Avicenna in Latin and widely seen as the father of modern medicine, became an illustration for a cross-cultural knowledge generation that surpassed anything seen in western Europe during its Middle Ages.2
When the Silk Roads began to lose their importance, Uzbekistan’s geographical location in the heart of the Eurasian continent imposed a relative isolation on the country and its people. Independent Uzbek khanates were further weakened by wars with Persia and Northern Nomads. Briefly subjected to the Persian empire in the first half of the eighteenth century, the Khanates of Bokhara, Khiva and Kokand came into contact with the Russian empire as the latter was pushing southwards in the nineteenth century.3 The Uzbek khanates were eventually incorporated as protectorates into the Russian empire by 1876.4 The gradual territorial expansion of the Russian Tsarist empire and the incorporation of diverse religious, ethnic and cultural communities turned Russia itself into a profoundly multi-ethnic state.5 The conquered territories were opened to Russian commerce and administered by Russian governors, but retained some self-administration at the local level.6 With the advent of the Bolsheviks, Uzbekistan oscillated between limited autonomy and a Russification of Uzbekistan’s politico-administrative culture that began with the imposition of Soviet rule after 1920.7
After independence in 1991, Uzbekistan had to develop new neighbourhood relations with the other newly independent republics in Central Asia, set relations with Russia on a new footing and establish relations with other actors across the globe. It did so only gradually with an inclination to view initiatives aimed at regional integration with a dose of suspicion. Today, Uzbekistan is not a member of the EAEU, and has served as a test case of a Central Asian state that has been engaging selectively also with other Russian-dominated multinational institutions: Uzbekistan has an ambivalent relation with the CSTO, as it did not prolong the treaty in 1999, re-joined the organization in 2006 and left again in 2012.
Economically, Uzbekistan perpetuated a system of institutionalized rent-seeking under President Karimov.8 The economy was only partially opened to foreign investors, the outflow of capital was tightly controlled by the state and an import-substitution policy was adopted for manufactured goods that encouraged domestic production. Strategic sectors like energy, transportation or agriculture remained under state planning and control. Following Karimov’s death in November 2016 and the coming to power of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who had already served as prime minister for thirteen years, the Uzbek economy has been experiencing an unprecedented opening-up and liberalization.9 An exchange rate reform liberalized the currency, the Uzbek Sum, in 2017, which for many years had been kept artificially low. This was an important milestone in the reform process initiated under Mirziyoyev. Trade and regulatory barriers were lifted and a tax reform introduced.
Overcoming the legacy of a neo-patrimonial authoritarian regime is an arduous task. Yet, the year 2017 marked the beginning of a transition from a closed, state-centred economic model and illegal corporate raids to an open market economy. An insider to the system, Mirziyoyev knew which issues needed to be urgently addressed, and how to go about doing that. Once elected the president, he began to institute reforms at a pace that surprised even long-time Uzbekistan watchers. Under his watch, Uzbekistan made it into the world’s top twenty business climate improvers. In the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) ‘Doing Business’ report for 2016, Uzbekistan climbed from the 105th place to the 42nd in the ‘credit system’ ranking category.10 In 2019, Uzbekistan was named country of the year by The Economist.11
Uzbekistan’s opening up also started to kick off at a time when China’s interest in Central Asia grew in the wake of its BRI. China’s BRI discourse in the early stages of the initiative made Uzbekistan a natural choice as a partner country, as the narrative then focused on rejuvenating cross-regional connections along the routes of the ancient Silk Roads. In a sense, turning to Uzbekistan meant re-activating the latter. Uzbekistan is a key transit state for China’s more southern corridors of the Silk Road Economic Belt stretching all the way to the Persian Gulf via the China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor. The SREB therefore not only increases China’s presence in Uzbekistan, but also has the potential to elevate Uzbekistan’s role as an inter-regional hub between China, Central Asia and West Asia.
Activating the potential of Uzbekistan’s geographic location, however, depends not only on the nature of Uzbek-Chinese relations, but also on the future trajectory of Uzbekistan’s relations with its Central Asian neighbours in the new, post-Karimov era. Against this background, this chapter analyses how China’s growing profile in the region is received in a Central Asian state that, like Kazakhstan and Mongolia as examined in the two preceding chapters, has a historically close but ambivalent relationship with Russia, is not a member of the EAEU (unlike Kazakhstan, but like Mongolia), and has been undergoing a rapid domestic reform programme since the death of long-time President Islam Karimov in 2016 and the coming to power of a new president. How this puts the country in a special position at the crossroads of new transnational corridors will be the subject of the pages that follow. The first part of the chapter traces the evolution of the Uzbek perspective on questions of transnational policy coordination, before the second section outlines how the BRI and the domestic changes within Uzbekistan intersect. The chapter then turns to an analysis of how the geographic location of Uzbekistan as a hub between Central and West Asia impacts on the views of outside actors like Russia and China on these dynamics.
Uzbekistan between pendulum diplomacy and regional integration initiatives
Uzbekistan twice joined and left the CSTO. This organization was initially founded as the Tashkent Collective Security Agreement at the initiative of President Islam Karimov at the CIS summit in Tashkent on 15 May 1992. It was Karimov who brought Russia into a Central Asian defence organization because, so he thought, the continued presence of Russian troops in Central Asia would serve as a powerful protection against Islamist fundamentalism.12 In 1999, however, Uzbekistan’s decision to withdraw from the agreement was triggered by anger over Russia’s response to the Tashkent bombings on 16 February. The Kremlin had considered the explosions of five bombs in the Uzbek capital on that day a domestic matter and therefore outside the purview of the Tashkent Collective Security Agreement. The Uzbek government, however, blamed the attack on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and expected Russian solidarity in the face of a movement it considered not only a domestic, but a transnational threat. Uzbekistan’s withdrawal from the organization in protest led to the renaming of the agreement as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which has remained its designation until today. Both during its membership and after it left the organization, Uzbekistan displayed a principled reservation about Russian influence in Central Asia.
One of the drivers of Uzbek foreign policy post-independence was to position Uzbekistan as an independent power pole in the region, independent of the attempted tutelage of external powers – a ‘sub-regional hegemon’, as Ruth Deyermond has called it.13 Allergic to the idea of joint military forces under Russian control, Uzbekistan did not support the creation of the Rapid Reaction Forces as a collective defence mechanism within the purview of the CSTO (and to which other members like Kazakhstan had responded positively). The RRF, it was felt, could have been used as a pretext to interfere in the domestic affairs of states in the region.14
The insistence on the notion of national independence and the rejection of foreign bases on Uzbek territory as guiding foreign policy principles were relaxed when Tashkent offered the Karshi military base near Khanabad to the Americans north of the Afghan border in a broader foreign policy alignment with the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Joint military exercises between NATO and Uzbekistan had already been held before, in mid-2001. The signing of the Declaration on the Strategic Partnership and Cooperation Framework with the United States in 2002 further illustrated this period of security alignment between Uzbekistan and the United States, which also saw Uzbekistan participating actively in the United States’ notorious ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme that included extrajudicial rendition and torture of ‘enemy suspects’. The international outrage over the Andijan massacre in May 2005, when troops killed hundreds of anti-government protesters at daylight, then put an end to this brief tactical cooperation, and Uzbekistan quit the generally pro-Western GUUAM grouping the same year (which Uzbekistan had joined in 1999).15 However, Uzbekistan had already begun to distance itself from Western partners some two years before, when critiques of Uzbekistan’s poor economic performance and abysmal human rights record did not abate.
As the gap between Uzbekistan and its Western partners widened, Tashkent sought closer alignment with other regional partners like China and Russia. At the 2003 SCO summit, Uzbekistan’s observer status was raised to full membership, and China expressed its support for Uzbekistan’s fight against the ‘three evils’ – separatism, terrorism and extremism.16 In 2004, in addition, Russia and Uzbekistan signed a Treaty on Russian-Uzbek Strategic Partnership. A treaty on Uzbek-Russian alliance relationship followed in November 2005.17 Uzbekistan also re-joined the CSTO in 2006 (but left again in 2012). Uzbekistan’s obstructionism within the CSTO meant that the country’s departure from the organization in 1999 and again in 2012 removed a sceptical veto player, but also presented the organization with the challenge of being ‘hollowed out in Central Asia’.18 ‘Uzbekistan lost one important, albeit weak, multilateral platform for international engagement; the CSTO lost one important, albeit stubborn, member’, Farkhod Tolipov neatly summarized in 2013.19 Uzbekistan even allowed NATO to redeploy its Central Asian Liaison office from Astana to Tashkent in March 2013.20
Yet, while Uzbekistan suspended its participation in the CSTO in June 2012, the Russian and Uzbek presidents had signed a Declaration on the Further Consolidation of Strategic Partnership and a memorandum of understanding on Measures of Uzbekistan’s accession to the CIS just two weeks before.21 Sceptical of intra-regional institutionalized cooperation, Uzbekistan preferred to channel policies that could tie the government in a treaty-based organization via bilateral contacts.22 The 2012 Foreign Policy Concept of Uzbekistan put this into writing by proclaiming the country’s right to withdraw from any international organization in case that organization were to turn into a more formal politico-military bloc.23
It becomes clear already from this brief overview why Uzbek foreign policy has been compared to a pendulum, which in the timeframe of two to three years was said to move back and forth between the West on the one hand and Russia and other CIS states, but also China, on the other.24 Other scholars have referred to the notion of multi-vectoralism to describe Uzbekistan’s strife to diversify its foreign policy options.25 Uzbek foreign policy during that time bespoke a deep suspicion of states seen to be pursuing a hegemonic agenda in Central Asia. Conceptually, this was encapsulated in the notion of ‘Mustaqillik’ or the ‘self-reliant idea’ (mustaqillik g’oyasi) as an organizing principle for the country’s foreign policy outlook.26 Bernardo Fazendeiro argues that under the reign of Karimov, this self-reliance was rather defensive, ‘marked by five key trends: the relentless pursuit of equality; a focus on bilateral relations; an energetic defence of Uzbekistan’s national image; a drive for self-sufficiency; and a reluctance to embrace expansionist ideological agendas’.27 In 2012, reminiscent of a similar formulation in China’s public diplomacy, Uzbekistan’s Foreign Policy Concept listed its four ‘no’s’: no to deployment of foreign bases in Uzbekistan, no to membership in any military block, no to participation in international peace-keeping operations, and no to the mediation of any external power in the resolution of regional conflicts in Central Asia.28 Naturally, this hermit mentality also had a bearing on the country’s views on regional economic integration initiatives.
Attempts to institutionalize regional cooperation were made when the formation of a Central Asian Union was proposed in 1994 between Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The proposal for a Central Asian Economic Community (CAEC) followed, renamed to the Central Asian Cooperative Organization (CACO) in 2002, which merged into the Eurasian Economic Community in 2005. Despite these attempts, Central Asian states continued to pursue their own trade and tariff policies.29 Uzbekistan was sceptical when the idea of a Eurasian Economic Community was first raised by Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev in the 1990s,30 but joined the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), a precursor of what would later morph into the EAEU, in 2006.
Neighbourhood relations, as a consequence of these policies, were tense. After independence, Central Asian states ‘engaged in the game of bypass your neighbors’, as Ivan Safranchuk writes.31 Especially relations with neighbouring Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan deteriorated. Uzbekistan’s trade tariffs used to be the highest in the region, with potential arbitrage gains for Uzbek traders and authorities from different regulatory and customs regimes. Corruption and local graft at the border crossings between Uzbekistan and its neighbours were blossoming.32 Relations between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were tense, as were relations between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, though for reasons that had more to do with what Jonson and Allison have characterized as a hidden rivalry for regional hegemony between the region’s economic locomotive (Kazakhstan) and the region’s most populous country (Uzbekistan).33 Most notoriously, the irrigation needs of the three states located downstream of the Central Asian rivers (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan) clashed with the energy needs of the two states located upstream (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan). Concerns on the Uzbek side were raised that Tajikistan could negatively impact agriculture in Uzbekistan by controlling cross-border irrigation.34 When Tajikistan proposed to build a hydroelectric dam on the Rogun river, Uzbekistan reacted by closing its border with Tajikistan. The ‘ghost of intra-Eurasian isolationism’ had cast long shadows.35 An unexpected impetus for change then came from within Uzbekistan in 2016.
Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda and the BRI
After the passing away of long-time President Karimov in September 2016, a new political culture began to be introduced under the new President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. In February 2017, Mirziyoyev signed a decree (Ukaz) espousing a ‘New Strategy for Development’ for the years 2017–21 that includes political reforms and an economic opening-up.36 In Uzbekistan, presidential decrees are legally binding and serve as guidelines for the further development of implementation of policy by parliament and the respective ministries. This strategy singled out privatization, addressing red tape in the economy, and incentives for greater competition and modernization of Uzbek industries as key policy challenges to address. By way of presidential decree, the president also introduced measures aimed at strengthening the independence of the judiciary, reforming public administration and introducing civil liberties.
The new reform process did not leave foreign policy unaffected either. Mirziyoyev declared already in September 2016 that improvement of neighbourhood relations was a key foreign policy priority for Uzbekistan.37 The ‘New Strategy for Development’ of February 2017 dedicated a section (5.2) to foreign policy issues, which foresees the ‘creation of a security, stability and good neighbourliness belt around Uzbekistan’. The president himself, as well as key ministers of his cabinet, embarked on a tour to visit all of Uzbekistan’s Central Asian neighbours. This charm initiative was meant to reopen channels of communication and put neighbourhood grievances behind. This was a marked departure from the past practice when regional leaders only met in the presence of foreign powers.38
When Mirziyoyev assumed the presidency, the level of Sino-Uzbek cooperation also leapfrogged. The BRI appeared to be fortunate timing at a time when Uzbekistan opened up to regional markets in the wake of its reform agenda. On his visit to China in May 2017, Mirziyoyev underlined the important role that the BRI plays in the further development of economic cooperation. In a striking similarity to the docking frenzy between the BRI and complementary domestic programmes seen in Kazakhstan and Mongolia (the ‘Nurly Zhol’ and ‘Steppe Road’, respectively), Uzbekistan began to work on a ‘docking’ of its ‘New Strategy for Development’ for the years 2017–21 and China’s Silk Road Economic Belt, with similar hopes to unleash the potential for the domestic labour market.39 In January 2020, China even opened an office for economic cooperation in Tashkent, which is affiliated with the Uzbek ministry for investments and external trade.40
However, China’s economic involvement in Uzbekistan predates the presidency of Mirziyoyev. A first MoU on Uzbekistan’s cooperation with the SREB was already signed by President Karimov in 2015, one year before his death.41 But as elsewhere across Central Asia, China’s growing presence also predates the announcement of the BRI. A Declaration on Strategic Partnership with China, concentrating on economic cooperation, was signed in 2012.42 Already prior to the BRI, China’s primary interest in Central Asia lay in the energy sector. In December 2009, the first section of the Central Asia-China gas pipeline from Turkmenistan was opened via Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which directly transports gas to western China. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have even linked their national gas systems to this pipeline.43 In 2013, construction started on a third spur (Line D) from Uzbekistan to China. Under the heading of a ‘Green Central Asia’, in addition, Chinese investments now also flow into renewable energies. In Bukhara, for example, the Chinese firm Lioaning announced its plans to invest in a wind power project worth $1.8 billion.44 The main interest of the Chinese government in Uzbekistan continues to be in the energy sector, and in Uzbekistan’s consumer market as an export destination for Chinese manufactured goods.
Besides China’s earlier investments in natural gas reserves and gas transportation infrastructure, Chinese companies have only in recent years begun to invest in the transport and other industrial sectors. According to the Uzbek ministry of investment and foreign trade, a total of investment projects worth over $30 billion were being implemented in the spring of 2020.45 There is talk of industrial parks, car manufacturing, cement plans, hydropower projects and of upgrades to Uzbekistan’s telecommunications technology. In 2019, China Development Bank for the first time gave out a loan of 500 million yuan to Uzbekistan in China’s currency instead of in US dollars.46 If this does not remain an isolated event and becomes more common practice, it will reflect both China’s objective to de-dollarize regional payments and Uzbekistan’s growing confidence in Chinese banks as lenders.
In terms of infrastructure development, China has pledged investments in railways, roads and tunnel development. While details of projects officially subsumed under the BRI are scarce, the public fanfare aims to convey the message that the BRI is expected to boost China-Uzbekistan relationship.47 President Xi Jinping was the first foreign head of state to address the Oliy Majlis, Uzbekistan’s parliament, on 22 June 2016. ‘A new era of strategic Chinese-Uzbekistan partnership has begun,’ Xi Jinping announced as he addressed the assembled deputies, ‘Both nations should stand side-by-side to unlock new opportunities for cooperation.’ In 2015, China had already become Uzbekistan’s largest trading partner, surpassing Russia, with a total trade volume of $3 billion.48
The ‘flagship project’, which again highlights both the popular attraction with the ‘iron’ Silk Road and the focus on infrastructure development in Central Asia as the BRI’s focus during its early phase, is a train connection from China to Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan, for potential further extension to Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey. A trilateral working group on the construction of this railway project was set up in 2017.49 Plans for such a connection, however, predate the BRI. China had been advocating the construction of this trinational railway since 1997. The Chinese-proposed railway would meet the gauge standard of Chinese (and most European) rail gauges, but not the wider Russian one. With the aim of preventing an alternative route to the Trans-Siberian railway, Russia persuaded Kyrgyzstan to reject the Chinese proposal, which it eventually did in 2013.50 The China Railway Tunnel Group was tasked with the construction of the 124 km Angren-Pap line, which was completed in 2016. The line includes the almost 20-km Kamchiq railway tunnel going through the Qurama mountains, a mountain range shared by Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. This makes it the longest railway tunnel in Central Asia and the first of its kind in Uzbekistan.
Infrastructure development could potentially be a job and wealth creator for the Uzbek economy. Eldor Aripov, director of the institute of Strategic and Regional Studies under the auspices of Uzbekistan’s president, writes that Uzbekistan could make profits from transit through its territory, and that transport links with Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Russia would have positive effects on regional economic development.51 With a common border with all other Central Asian republics, as well as Afghanistan, Uzbekistan wants to make use of its central geographic location. As a double-landlocked country, Tashkent has started to see the liberalization of its external economic relations and the link to cross-regional corridors stretching up to the Gulf countries and Iran as an asset.52 However, the image of Central Asia as a flourishing transit zone linking western China to the Middle East is complicated by the fact that Uzbekistan’s trade with the outside world is heavily dependent on transit through neighbouring states, in particular Kazakhstan. It also depends on the easing of Uzbekistan’s previously conflictual relations with its neighbours – a process which has been started under President Mirziyoyev, but which cannot be enforced by outside governments.
Uzbek officials recognize that good neighbourhood relations are also beneficial for China’s trade interests, but emphasize that the new regional engagement started under Mirziyoyev was not a process initiated in order to create good conditions for the BRI. ‘We lived in the same state for 70 years. We need to learn to live with each other now’, an Uzbek diplomat noted in an interview as he outlined the motivations for his government’s new neighbourhood diplomacy.53 The fact that Uzbekistan finally demarcated its border with Tajikistan in January 2020 after years of tense border diplomacy should be seen as encouraging news in this context.54 Tashkent’s policy of opening up to its neighbours could also have a positive impact on economic development especially in southern Kyrgyzstan.
In the long term, infrastructure investments need to be weighed against the costs of maintenance as well as the required political capital involved in seeking to shape a transnational economic space. The sequencing between building transport links and facilitating border stability with places like Afghanistan is not made explicit in the more optimistic accounts of the benefits that the BRI will bring to the region. More importantly, however, as with other partners elsewhere in Central Asia, the perennial question of local ownership will determine the progress of the linkage between the BRI and Uzbekistan’s New Strategy for Development. The further development of China’s Silk Road Economic Belt depends not only on governmental declarations, but also on Central Asian inter-state relations as well as societal perceptions, and China’s presence in the region has not been without criticism. A proposed China-KyrgyzstanUzbekistan railroad project met resistance among Kyrgyzstani government officials because it was seen as a potential trigger for renewed rivalries between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan (the site of deadly ethnic clashes in 2010).55
In Uzbekistan, labour laws on paper are relatively strict and regulate that Chinese companies can only send management personnel, not labourers.56 In practice, however, such laws are undermined from both Chinese and Uzbek contract partners.57 Other roadblocks complicating China’s evolving Eurasian profile relate to the limits of Chinese public diplomacy initiatives across the region. Confucius Institutes in Tashkent and Samarkand, cultural events like music and film festivals, and language training already in secondary schools aim to enhance China’s soft power in the country.58 As in neighbouring southern Kazakhstan, however, what complicates crossborder people-to-people ties are not only ethnic tensions and reserved attitudes about China’s economic embrace of Uzbekistan especially on the part of the ethnically Turkic and Muslim populace, but a lack of cultural familiarity that could serve as a basis for genuine societal dialogue.59
The reception of Chinese actors is naturally conditioned on societal links between China and its Central Asian partner countries, and this is a long-term process that central governments can try and nudge in a particular direction, but can never fully control. Finally, the BRI and Uzbekistan’s reform agenda are two separate, while potentially mutually reinforcing, processes – pending the handling of negative associations with China’s economic power projection at a popular level. It would therefore be misleading to read the changing geopolitical landscape around Uzbekistan as a by-product of the advent of the SREB to the region. The reasons for Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda originated from a domestic setting. As the latter is transforming itself and its neighbourhood, however, the transnational networks thus created can become a valuable asset for any actors with an interest in pushing the discursive trope of unhindered Eurasian corridors.
Uzbekistan as a hub between China and West Asia
With the expansion of the Sassanid empire along the ancient Silk Roads and the establishment of Samanid rule in Transoxania, Persian became widely spoken, especially along more southward-lying routes traversing nowadays Uzbekistan.60 Today, the Middle East and Iran in particular play an important role in China’s regional connectivity initiatives, as the China-Central Asia-West Asia corridor under the Silk Road Economic Belt is supposed to stretch from western China to the Persian Gulf via Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The geographical location of Uzbekistan explains why the country becomes relevant from a Chinese perspective for the SREB in a broader regional context, as Uzbekistan constitutes a bridge to West Asia. Already in 2011, an agreement on the construction of a transport corridor from Uzbekistan to Iran and Oman was signed.61
The importance of the Middle East for China’s external economic policies is to be explained by its energy hunger and the vast resources that the region holds. The majority of China’s oil imports come from the Middle East, yet energy deliveries into China depend on overseas supply lines. The majority of Chinese oil supplies from the Middle East pass through the Strait of Malacca, a maritime strait between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, linking the Indian to the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. The Chinese government has come to regard this strait as a strategic chokepoint that makes the passage of its cargo ships both dependent on external actors’ benevolence and vulnerable to potential attacks. Enabling overland transportation thus becomes a motivation to encourage ‘corridor diplomacy’ between Central and West Asia.
To deepen relations with Middle Eastern states, China has signed memorandums of understanding with Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran to ‘jointly build the Belt and Road’, and has begun free trade area negotiations with the GCC and Iran, respectively. Five out of the six GCC states (with the exception of Bahrain) are also founding members of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Based on these memorandums, geo-economic and geostrategic effects of the SREB on the Persian Gulf are mostly logistical in nature, even if the stated ambition extends beyond infrastructure: At a ministerial meeting of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in June 2014, President Xi proposed the ‘1+2+3’ formula that would henceforth capture the preferred pattern of cooperation between China and Arab states, whereby energy cooperation constitutes the core (1), infrastructure construction, trade and investment facilitation are the two wings (2), and the three high-tech fields of nuclear energy, aerospace and new energy are labelled ‘the three breakthroughs’ in China’s official Arab policy paper.62 Chinese construction firms are busy building projects such as new railways, aided by the Chinese Development Bank.63 Such an infrastructure development is not only in the corporate interests of the Chinese construction firms involved, but also furthers the Chinese government’s long-term plan to deepen political ties via economic cooperation.
In November 2015, the China Railway Corporation proposed the construction of a high-speed line from Urumqi to Iran via Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. For this line, the standard gauge of 1435 mm would be used throughout, making gauge changes similar to the one at the Chinese-Kazakhstani border unnecessary. An additional container train line from Yiwu (in East China) to Iran via Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan was launched in February 2016.64 This reduced the usual twenty-five-day journey from China to Iran by sea to a total of fourteen days on the land route. Iran also wants to facilitate the transfer of goods between the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. Not every infrastructure project in the region, however, is a ‘BRI’ one, as Uzbekistan plans railway connections from Iran to Uzbekistan at a bilateral level – via Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan.65 Likewise, Russia and Iran have been eyeing ambitious infrastructure projects separate from the BRI, such as a transport link from St. Petersburg through Kazakhstan to Bandar Abbas in Iran.
An impediment for China’s attempts to ‘connect’ Central Asia with purported parts of the Silk Road Economic Belt further west along its southern route is the fact that China has previously paid little attention to the complexities of Middle Eastern politics and lacks the expertise that other governments, like Russia, have built up during long decades of involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. Observing a discrepancy between China’s wish to ‘keep things simple’ in its public discourse on the Middle East and the region’s complexity, Kerry Brown writes that ‘the world’s second biggest economy has little geopolitical imagination when it comes to trying to solve the problems of a region to which it has increasing material links’.66 Its involvement in the Middle East and attempts to ‘connect’ the Persian Gulf and Central Asia therefore force China, already by nature of its economic weight, to mature into some sort of global power status that forces it to take positions on security issues and politics of seemingly faraway places. This would also be commensurate with the global underpinning of the BRI as from 2015.
In such ponderations about Eurasian ‘corridor diplomacy’, Uzbekistan becomes central, as it sits geographically in the centre of the region, and as Uzbek minorities are present in all other Central Asian countries.67 Leaving aside Uzbek motivations as laid out above, the ‘utility’ of Uzbekistan, as seen by China in light of the SREB, therefore lies in connecting regions. In this sense, the country carries more weight seen from a Chinese perspective than other Central Asian states like Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, even though any overland connections from China via Uzbekistan have to pass through these two Central Asian countries first. Yet, if the narrative of connecting Asia and Europe is taken as a central objective of the BRI, then the logistically more useful connections lie further north, through Kazakhstan and Russia, simply because the transit through one common customs area would be faster than through various Central and West Asian tariff zones. The emphasis on several economic corridors branching out from the Chinese mainland, including one through the more southern routes of Central Asia, therefore appears to reconfirm that the intention to bind China’s Eurasian neighbourhood closer to the Chinese political economy for domestic industrial reasons is more important than the idea of connecting to far-away European markets (at least for manufactured goods). In this context, the Russian government’s interest in Uzbekistan also increases again.
Russia’s re-engagement with Uzbekistan
Following post-Soviet independence, Uzbekistan ushered in a process of deRussification which assigned greater importance to the Uzbek language. Russian and Cyrillic street signs were removed, and the country sought ways of becoming less dependent on Moscow.68 A draft law in 2020 by the Uzbek justice ministry that foresees fines for Uzbek officials not using the state language Uzbek in their jobs was indirectly criticized by the Russian foreign ministry with the comment that ‘the preservation of the Russian language in formal matters fully corresponds to the spirit of the history and current quality of our relations’.69 Infrastructural links and economic interdependence proved to be more sticky obstacles in Uzbekistan’s quest to steer the country away from Soviet legacies. Under Karimov, Russia was therefore described as a ‘priority partner’ in the economic sphere. This, however, mainly meant that Uzbekistan was the main source of cotton for Russian textile factories.70
With new economic opportunities after the Karimov era and in the context of a growing Chinese presence in the country, Russia has begun to express a renewed interest in forging ties with Uzbekistan. In 2018, Russia and Uzbekistan signed an agreement for the construction of Uzbekistan’s first nuclear power plant with a stated capacity to cover 20 per cent of the country’s energy needs, and to be financed largely by a soft loan from Russia. The launch of this project was the culmination of President Putin’s state visit to Tashkent, which also saw the signing of other agreements in the energy sector, including production-sharing agreements for the Dzhel gas field between Gazprom and Uzbek state firms.71 In the same year, Russia and Uzbekistan began to cooperate in the field of hydropower, as the Russian company RusHydro expressed an interest in building new hydropower plants on the Pskem river in Uzbekistan.72
A number of memorandums of understanding and cooperation agreements in a range of sectors were signed during Mirziyoyev’s visit to Russia in 2017, Putin’s visit to Uzbekistan in October 2018 and Prime Minister Medvedev’s visit to Uzbekistan in May 2019. This high-level travelling activity between both sides served to underline solid relations between ‘strategic partners’, as was expressed during a meeting of the RussiaUzbekistan Joint Commission at the level of heads of government on Medvedev’s visit to Uzbekistan in 2019.73 Putin’s visit to Uzbekistan was the largest ever to the country: Accompanied by an enormous business delegation, Putin oversaw the signing of deals reportedly worth $27 billion.74 This amount outstripped the $23 billion negotiated between China and Uzbekistan one year before.
Besides Russian companies investing in Uzbekistan, labour migration remains an area where Russia continues to be the top destination for Uzbeks going abroad and sending remittances back home.75 Russia continues to enjoy social leverage within Uzbek society and Russian remains widely spoken. As with other Central Asian countries that emerged from the Soviet Union, Russia’s cultural influence remains strong. Similar technical standards, language familiarity and a common history are still cited as reasons for a proximity between Uzbekistan and Russia that facilitates dialogue.76
Militarily, Uzbekistan is re-engaging with Russia after years of treading carefully, given Karimov’s strong views on Uzbek independence and his corresponding reluctance to align the country with any kind of defence bloc or any other single country. Today, joint exercises between Russian and Uzbek soldiers have been taken up again. Uzbekistan is also again making use of Russian training assistance.77 Uzbekistan signed a joint military cooperation plan with Russia in 2017.78 At the same time, the Uzbek government purchased Chinese-produced HQ-9 air defence systems to replace Russian S-200 surface-to-air missiles in 2015.79 In its arms procurement, Uzbekistan does not solely lean on Russia, even though Putin’s visit to Uzbekistan in 2018 led to additional arms purchases from Russia. But Uzbekistan continues to refuse to deploy Uzbek troops beyond its national territory, and is guarded when it comes to formalizing defence relations with either Russia or China.80 Having settled its border disputes with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan has made progress on formulating a joint anti-terror policy with Dushanbe, Bishkek and Nur-Sultan.81
Perhaps the most noteworthy development regarding possible closer institutional ties with Russia is the debate that has begun in Uzbekistan about a potential EAEU membership in the future. If neighbouring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan serve as a comparison, this would increase Russian leverage. At the same time, common institutional membership in a Russian-dominated organization would also be a way of hedging against China’s growing presence. As Uzbekistan is not yet a member of the WTO, concerns have been raised over possible legal complications if the country were to join the EAEU first. A working group has been set up under the presidential administration to study the effects of WTO access.82 Mirziyoyev’s foreign policy advisor Sodiq Safoyev rejects the idea that EAEU membership would curtail Uzbekistan’s foreign economic policy options, and points out that current EAEU members have navigated possible complications between EAEU trading rules and WTO membership as well.83 Other officials at a working level appear more circumspect with a view to Russia’s ‘quasi-hegemonic role’ within the EAEU and have taken note of Kazakhstani and Belarusian complaints to that effect.84
Farkhod Tolipov likewise argues that an Uzbek EAEU membership would increase Russia’s leverage over Uzbek policies. If Uzbekistan were to become an EAEU member, he holds, this would raise ‘questions related to its real independence, the geopolitics of great powers, and non-economic driving forces of genuine integration such as democratic values and common security interests’. This is, he argues, precisely because the EAEU is not just an economic union.85 Among the possible advantages are the free movement of labour, goods, capital and services that access to the economic union would entail. While free movement of labour might be first and foremost an advantage for the Russian market which is in need of cheap labourers, membership in the EAEU could also be beneficial for social security reasons of the many Uzbek migrant workers in Russia. Free movement of goods has already been a controversial issue for EAEU members Armenia and Belarus, which had to raise tariffs upon accession, making the import of goods from outside the bloc more expensive. Finally, the movement of capital and services has been improving within Uzbekistan largely thanks to Mirziyoyev’s reform agenda. For Uzbek markets, therefore, little might change in relevant sectors if the country were to join the EAEU.
The possible advantages are thus carefully considered in light of the possible negative trade-offs, namely loss of control over external trade policy.86 Umid Abidhadjaev from the Centre for Economic Research and Reform under the presidential administration argues that gaining observer status would give Uzbekistan the chance to study the dynamics within the EAEU from within before making a decision on a possible full membership.87 On 6 March 2020, that decision was officially taken, when Uzbekistan’s cabinet of ministers approved the decision to apply for observer status.88 Free trade areas at Uzbekistan’s borders could also be a way of easing cumbersome customs regimes in Central Asia short of membership in a common customs area. In December 2014, Presidents Putin and Karimov had already alluded to the possibility of a future agreement on the creation of a free trade zone between Uzbekistan and the EAEU.89 Such a prospect would also align with Uzbekistan’s Concept of Social and Economic Development until 2030.90
Uzbek officials, however, add for consideration that some of the country’s neighbours (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) are members of the EAEU, where different tariff regimes complicate the establishment of such free trade areas.91 Full EAEU membership might eventually even impact negatively on Uzbekistan’s trading relations with other partners. Despite Mirziyoyev’s attempts to balance relations with China and Russia, the primary audience to hear the signals from Uzbekistan’s reform agenda is supposed to be the West and ‘advanced economies like India, Japan, and South Korea’, Frederick Starr and Svante Cornell argue.92 Here, Russia’s policy outlook of defensive regionalism can add irritants. Uzbekistan’s policy of balancing regional and extra-regional partners could be intentionally misread in Moscow, and Foreign Minister Lavrov already hinted at that possibility by alluding to the conflation of a new regionalism in Central Asia as efforts to ‘exclude Russia’ from Central Asia’.93 Such a language is reminiscent of Russian perceptions of Ukraine’s negotiations over an Association Agreement with the European Union, the consequences of which engulfed Russia and the West in a violent crisis in 2014. Deliberately misconstruing Mirziyoyev’s ambitious reform agenda and effort to re-design regional relations, however, would more likely be disadvantageous for Russia – under the assumption that Moscow is keen to shed its image as a disruptive actor with a declining attraction for its Central Asian partners.
Elsewhere in Eurasia, the presence of Russian and Chinese contract partners has already led to a subtle competition between the Russian and Chinese government for influence.94 Russia’s reaction to Chinese outreach in ‘West Asia’ was to try and dilute the presence of Chinese actors by institutional means: At the December 2016 summit of the EAEU, it was decided that free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations with Iran should be started. If implemented, an FTA between Iran and the EAEU (as has already been implemented with Vietnam and Israel) could serve to tie the Iranian and Russian economies further together. In other regional organizations, Russia has also welcomed the inclusion of Iran into broader inter-regional arrangements: Russia has expressed support for Iran’s membership application to the SCO. Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov noted following a meeting of the SCO foreign ministers in Astana on 21 April 2017 that Iran fully meets the SCO membership criteria after UN-level sanctions had been lifted after 2016.95 Besides its potential benefits for Russian-Iranian relations, welcoming Iran into the SCO is also a Russian policy to counter China’s growing influence in the region, comparable to Russia’s motivation for the admission of India. Iranian policymakers, for their part, have acknowledged the potential advantages that come with Iran’s inclusion in the Silk Road Economic Belt. However, they seem to prefer a balanced integration into different markets, including European ones, rather than an exclusive alignment with Chinese or Russian geo-economic interests, which may even have negative net results for Iran.96 Policymakers in Tashkent are following such debates with interest, as different degrees of interaction with the EAEU in different places across Eurasia can provide useful indicators for Uzbekistan’s own decision on which policy course to opt for.
Conclusion
China’s economic outward projection in the wake of the SREB meets favourable politico-economic conditions in Uzbekistan, as the unprecedented domestic reform programme started under President Mirziyoyev positively affects not only the economic framework conditions for foreign direct investment flowing into Uzbekistan, but also Central Asian inter-state relations. China’s SREB predates this development, but it has accelerated ideas to link Uzbekistan’s own development strategies with Chinese connectivity plans. If the discourse surrounding the BRI translates into changed political realities, one might be led to believe that the advent of Eurasian integration schemes and of China’s ‘new Silk Roads’ can help to alleviate the historically conflictual relations between Uzbekistan and its neighbours. Past grievances would then take a backseat as a transnational belt of economic activity ties people across the region closer together. The ‘new development strategy’ for Uzbekistan also aims to improve relations with neighbours after years of self-imposed isolation. The current Uzbek leadership, however, ushered in its reform programme on the basis of intrinsic motivations to overcome a governance system in need of an overhaul after the death of long-time President Islam Karimov. Uzbek officials do not want this to be misconstrued as a mere reaction to Chinese talk of cross-border trading links.
On a parallel track, China’s increased engagement with the Central Asian countries has triggered Russian renewed interest in Uzbekistan. Beyond the beaten path of imperial legacies, Moscow sees a potential for a re-definition of its relations with the ‘post-Soviet space’. Here, however, the often-repeated division of labour between China and Russia in Central Asia should be questioned. Although Russia does enjoy primacy in matters of security governance in the region, China does not have a prerogative on investment and finance. Uzbekistan has no interest in re-joining the CSTO, even though joint military exercises between Russia and Uzbekistan have been taken up again of late.
While Chinese investments in infrastructure, energy and other sectors continue to grow, Putin’s visit to Uzbekistan in 2018 in particular highlighted the fact that the Russian leadership has taken note, and will not renounce on economic competition with Chinese investors in sectors of the economy. As Uzbekistan continues to open up to the world, Tashkent hopes for foreign direct investment to come from Western partners more than from China or Russia. Any talk of exclusive competition and cooperation between China and Russia in Uzbekistan neglects the fact that domestic preferences might lie elsewhere. Uzbekistan is ‘emerging’ into a geo-economic landscape where neither a socialization into liberal market economies nor an association with a Chinesedominated regional trading system should be assumed as a historical necessity.
Finally, Central Asia and Uzbekistan in particular are important as transit zones along the envisioned southern routes of the SREB, which are supposed to enable stronger links between the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. This, however, depends on a range of factors that the Chinese central government alone cannot control. The further development of the SREB’s southern routes depends not least on Central Asian interstate dynamics and infrastructure development with uncertain political conditions and an uncertain investment climate. Further west along the southern corridors of the Silk Road Economic Belt, there are hints of new forms of competition between China and Russia to win political trust and commercial contracts with partners in West Asia. There is potential for a growing Russian-Chinese competition at this westernmost point of the SREB, while both countries have a joint interest in de-dollarizing international finance and seeing the role of the United States in this part of Eurasia diminished. Beyond local governance and domestic preference formation, this latter aspect broadens the angle to the global governance level, to which the final chapter now turns.