The EconomistJuly 27th 2019 151T
he palace of officersin Dushanbe,
the capital of the former Soviet republic
of Tajikistan, acts among other things as a
hotel for visiting dignitaries. It is marked
out by tinted windows, purple neon and an
excellent Chinese restaurant. The last is
not all that surprising. The distinctly
swanky edifice was built and presented to
the Tajik ministry of defence by the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China.
It is not the only such gift. The imposing
new government palace and the accompa-
nying parliament now under construction
come courtesy of the Chinese Communist
Party. One Western diplomat recalls that
the voicemail system at the ministry of for-
eign affairs, another such gift, used to talk
to callers in Mandarin. China has built
schools, paved roads, bored tunnels and
lent Tajikistan $1.3bn—nearly half its for-
eign debt. It mines the country’s gold and
silver and heats its homes with a large coal-
fired combined heat and power plant. It
supplies its cctvand traffic cameras; the
logo on Dushanbe’s shiny police cars says
“China Aid”.Tajikistan is the poorest of the Central
Asian states, lacking the natural resources
of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkme-
nistan, and has been further debilitated by
civil war. That makes China’s munificence
stand out. But it can be seen in the better-
off neighbours, too.
There are various reasons for this lar-
gesse. China is suppressing and interning
people from Muslim ethnicities, most no-
tably Uighurs, on a vast scale in the Xin-
jiang autonomous region, which borders
Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. To buy influ-
ence in nearby largely Muslim countries
makes sense. And Central Asia is as impor-
tant to China’s new silk road, the Belt and
Road Initiative (bri), as it was to the origi-
nal one. So China has piled in. “China is do-
ing what the Soviet Union used to do,” a for-
mer Tajik official says.
What does that mean for the Soviet Un-
ion’s successors? Russia still considers
Central Asia, which the tsars colonised in
the 19th century, its backyard, especially in
military matters. Hence Tajikistan’s mem-
bership of the Collective Security Treaty Or-
ganisation, a Russian-led alliance. As long
as China’s interest in the region remained
mostly in the realm of investment, it was
tolerable to Russia, even welcome.
But by 2016, if not before, Chinese army
units had begun to appear in Tajikistan, os-
tensibly to watch over the Wakhan Corri-
dor—a strip of Afghanistan that separates
Tajikistan from Pakistan. Later that year
China staged a war game with the Tajik
army, some of whose younger officers have
been trained in Shanghai.
China and Tajikistan deny China’s mili-
tary presence in the country. “Remember,
you never saw us here,” a uniformed Chi-
nese soldier told a Washington Postreporter
who came across a Chinese outpost near
the town of Murghab. But military attachés
have spotted dozens of Chinese military
personnel, training camps and guard posts
in the Pamir mountains, which have
played a role in grand strategy since the
days of Alexander the Great.
This increased military activity rattled
Moscow, says Alexander Gabuev, a sinolo-
gist at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a
think-tank. But as an Indian diplomat
points out, it could hardly complain: “Rus-
sia cannot confront China, because it de-
pends on it.” Instead it showed off. In 2018
Russia pointedly brought its most modern
kit to Tajikistan for its own war games close
to the site of the Chinese ones. Sergei
Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, recently
visited Dushanbe’s Palace of Officers when
in Tajikistan to inspect the 7,000-strong
201st Motor Rifle Division, Russia’s largest
foreign deployment. Perhaps he stopped
for some duck and glass noodles under the
watchful eye of China’s president, Xi Jinp-
ing, whose picture is proudly displayed onThe junior partner
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