China’s Rise Reverberates in Tajikistan

From 2014, when The Diplomat Magazine’s first issue was published, to today there has been no story bigger than that of China’s ongoing rise. Its geopolitical gravity, sheer economic weight, and unavoidable presence have had innumerable impacts in countries throughout Asia. In Central Asia, especially, China’s story has dovetailed with the region’s autocratic atmosphere and desperate development needs. Tajikistan is a prime case study. 

On the cover of Issue 31 (June 2017), Christian Bleuer marked the 20th anniversary of the end of the devastating Tajik Civil War. “Tajikistan is at peace,” he wrote, “but its future remains bleak.” Later, in Issue 52 (March 2019), Till Mostowlansky surveyed the country’s troubled Pamir region and noted the interplay between kleptocratic systems, resource extraction, and unrest; the latter a theme revisited by myself in Issue 91 (June 2022). In Issue 87 (February 2022), Sher Khashimov shed light on Tajikistan’s energy struggles, a product of rising demand, dilapidated infrastructure, and government mismanagement.

In the following article Khashimov returns to highlight the myriad ways China has deepened its involvement in Tajikistan, tying many of the previously explored domestic circumstances to geopolitics in a story that echoes many we have followed across Asia.

– Catherine Putz

“This place has changed quite a bit, right?” says Dilshod on a bumpy, dusty drive up to Iskanderkul, arguably Tajikistan’s most famous lake, in July 2022.

As Iskanderkul shows up from behind a mountain ridge, people in the car marvel at how murky its waters look. “It’s probably because of everything they’re dumping into the river that feeds the lake,” comments Dilshod, who works in tourism around Iskanderkul (and who asked not to use his real name). He points at a collection of buildings and machinery barely visible in the southeast corner of the lake.

The buildings are part of Kanchoch, a collective name used by locals to describe a group of antimony and gold deposits being developed by Talco Gold. Created in 2015, Talco Gold, a subsidiary of Tajikistan’s state-owned aluminum company, is evenly split between the government of Tajikistan and the Chinese mining giant Tibet Hua Yu Mining. Hua Yu invested $200 million and brought in 150 workers from China in 2018 to build out the infrastructure required for mining gold and antimony at high altitude. The project finally went online in early 2022, but it has been transforming the heart of Tajikistan’s pristine Fann mountains for the past several years.

“They made the roads wider and brought in electricity lines to Sarytag. We now have electricity more often than not,” says Dilshod about his village, located just a few kilometers west of Kanchoch. But he is torn over whether the presence of the China-bankrolled project is good for the area, as the environmental impacts – increased dust and noise from trucks, diversion and pollution of the rivers that feed Iskanderkul, deforestation – are hard to ignore.

“There are rumors that [the Chinese] are going to mine for coal near Khayronbed and Dizhik too,” Dilshod adds with a sigh, speaking about the villages located downstream from Iskanderkul.

Kanchoch is one of countless manifestations of how the relationship between China and Tajikistan is shaping the poorest country in the former Soviet space.

What started as a limited economic investment in the early 2000s has turned into a full-blown dependency: 60 percent of Tajikistan’s $3.3 billion foreign debt is owed to China’s state-run Export-Import Bank. Of the $132 million Tajikistan repaid to its foreign creditors in 2021, over $65 million went to China; almost $22 million of the money paid to China that year was interest accrued.

The China Index, a database created by the Taiwan-based research organization Doublethink Lab, ranks Tajikistan as ninth most dependent on China out of 82 other countries across the world. The index concludes that Tajikistan’s dependency on Beijing in terms of technology and the economy make it one of the most vulnerable countries to Chinese government influence. Many believe that such influence amounts to debt-trap diplomacy – ensnaring developing countries with debt and then translating that debt into geopolitical power.

“Making the government in Tajikistan beholden to Beijing accomplishes several things for China,” says Bruce Pannier, a Central Asia expert based in Europe. “It ensures a friendly regime on China’s border, which is important when one remembers China also borders India and Vietnam, two countries with whom China has aggravated relations. Chinese companies get access to precious metals from Tajikistan and take them on the short trip back to China.”

Tajikistan’s alarmingly all-encompassing dependence on China is a regional story.

China was among the first to recognize the independence of the Central Asian states from the Soviet Union and to establish diplomatic relations with them in the early 1990s. That decade saw a gradual and uneventful strengthening of the economic relationships between the region and its eastern neighbor, which was interested in Central Asia merely as a market for its goods and a source of raw materials and energy. These limited economic ties created a foundation for what later would become the Belt and Road Initiative – a vast collection of development and investment initiatives that stretch from East Asia to Europe. The BRI has been shaping China’s relationship with its Central Asian neighbors (albeit in different ways) for the past decade.

The events of the early 2000s – the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the following invasion of Afghanistan, the Tulip Revolution of 2005 in Kyrgyzstan, and the Andijan Massacre in Uzbekistan that same year – changed the way China understood Central Asia. The region suddenly become a source of extremism, a potential terrorism threat to China, which was already worried about separatism among the Uyghurs – the Muslims populating Xinjiang, China’s westernmost region that borders Central Asia. Heavy investments in the economic stability of the region made in order to ensure its political stability – and, in turn, to make Central Asia into a buffer zone between Afghanistan and Xinjiang – has become China’s modus operandi, in many ways inspired by the West’s War on Terror.

2006 saw the first wave of serious Chinese investments in Tajikistan – a $1 billion package to rehabilitate the Dushanbe-Khujand-Chanak highway, construct two cross-country power lines, and plan for construction of a hydropower plant on Tajikistan’s Zarafshan river. The next billion-dollar package came in 2009, meant for reconstruction of the Dushanbe-Dangara highway and construction of a cement plant and a coal plant in Dushanbe and a hydropower plant Nurabad-1.

“I remember that year very clearly. Construction was everywhere,” says Zafar, who then worked for the city government of Dangara, a town in the south of Tajikistan and the birthplace of Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon.

Zafar, who asked not to use his real name and who has since relocated to Dushanbe, was among the city officials told to streamline construction permitting paperwork when Chinese investment came to town. “We were told [by higher-ups] not to ask any questions,” he recalls. 

These first waves of Chinese investment in Tajikistan – and Central Asia in general – were a convenient arrangement for the region’s authoritarian governments. Unlike the region’s Western partners (which usually demand domestic democratic reforms in exchange for investments) and Russia (the recent colonial metropole, which insists on a prominent cultural and military role in the region), China presented a convenient counterbalance. At first, all China wanted in exchange was recognition of the “One China” principle (typified by an acknowledgement of Taiwan and Tibet as inseparable parts of China) and support against the “Three Evils” of terrorism, extremism, and separatism in the region.

Tajikistan’s elites, in turn, got to boast about the country’s economic progress and tap into the investment streams for personal gain, either by straight up embezzling from the incoming funds or implementing infrastructure projects using their own businesses.

“We were promised prosperity – new roads, hospitals, electricity access in remote villages – but I also remember certain officials [in Dangara] with construction businesses getting filthy rich,” says Zafar during an exchange with The Diplomat via Telegram.   

“Both the Tajik and the Chinese governments are authoritarian and understand each other’s needs intuitively,” explains Temur Umarov, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a research fellow at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek. “China can compete with the U.S. and the West economically but, unlike them, doesn’t require democratic progress from its partners. Hence the trust between the political elites of Tajikistan and China.”

China’s demands for regional unity against terrorism and extremism also play well into Tajikistan’s domestic politics. Since the end of Tajikistan’s civil war in 1997, the country’s authoritarian government has used the threat of instability and risk of a new domestic conflict to justify intensifying restrictions on civil rights as necessary to hold the country together. Any external threat, whether real or purely theoretical, to the country’s stability, be it the unrest in Afghanistan or Uyghur separatism in Xinjiang, just bolsters the Tajik regime’s self-proclaimed role as the guarantor of peace and adds another layer of understanding between Dushanbe and Beijing.

The evidence submitted to the International Criminal Court in 2021 alleging that Tajikistan deports Uyghurs to China thus came as no surprise. The regime in Dushanbe itself engages in transnational repression to silence its critics abroad and suppresses expressions of Islam at home.

“[China’s investments] buy the Tajik government’s silence over internal Chinese affairs such as the crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang,” confirms Pannier in an email exchange with The Diplomat.

In light of its domestic considerations, Tajikistan became a willing partner as China started coupling its economic investments in Central Asia with increasing military and security cooperation.

Since 2002, China has conducted over three dozen joint military exercises with the armies of Central Asian countries, both within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and on a bilateral basis. At least 12 of those exercises involved Tajikistan. Over 30 Tajik military officers have undergone training at Chinese military academies since 2003, and China transferred at least $10 million in aid to the Tajik Ministry of Defense from 1991 to 2006 to cover salaries of military officers and border guards. The Tajik army continues to receive weapons and machinery from China.

Furthering this security cooperation, the Tajik government spent $22 million to implement Huawei’s “safe cities” system in Dushanbe in 2013. Besides monitoring traffic, over 800 Chinese cameras now watch over public spaces.

“Central Asian countries have been sending more military and security officers to study in China,” confirms Dr. Erica Marat, a Central Asia expert and a professor at the National Defense University in the United States. “This security cooperation between Central Asia and China is used to support the local regimes and not to protect the population. Especially in a country like Tajikistan, where the president is looking to appoint his son as a successor and is making sure that the security apparatus and both China and Russia support the power transition.”

As Tajikistan’s dependence on Chinese economic and security investment grew, it has predictably started eroding the country’s sovereignty.

The Chinese government pushed for return of what it saw as historically Chinese lands in Central Asia. Kazakhstan ceded over 14,000 square kilometers of disputed territory to China in 1999; Kyrgyzstan handed over 1,250 square kilometers of land in 2002. Tajikistan followed the trend in 2011 and offered China 1,158 square kilometers of territory in the remote Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) in exchange for Beijing writing off the country’s already mounting debt.

Such relinquishment of the country’s assets in exchange for debt forgiveness is a growing trend for Dushanbe. In 2007, China’s Zijin Mining received a 75 percent equity stake in the Zarafshan gold mine in northwestern Tajikistan, which accounts for more than 70 percent of the total amount of gold production in the country. China also has investments in the Kumargi Bolo and Duobai Sharqi gold mines in the northern Aini district and in 2019 received mining rights for the Yakjilva silver deposit near Murghab – a decision both the central government in Dushanbe and GBAO’s local government had to defend publicly after criticism by locals on social media.

One of the biggest swaps happened in 2018. The Chinese company TBEA received gold mining concessions for Tajikistan’s Kumargi Bolo and Duobai Sharqi mines until the 2016 loan of $331.5 million issued by the Export-Import Bank of China for the construction of the Dushanbe-2 power plant is paid back.

China has also started establishing a security foothold in Tajikistan in a more direct manner, imposing an agreement in 2016 to build a series of border posts and training centers along the Tajik-Afghan border. The first Chinese military base – the existence of which Dushanbe denied for several years – was constructed in GBAO’s Murghab district. Officially, the facility is a border guard station for Tajik troops built using Chinese funds, but soldiers reportedly seen at the Tajik-Afghan border were representatives of the Chinese People’s Armed Police Force, an internal paramilitary force similar to Russia’s National Guard Service that is responsible for maintaining public order and combatting terrorism during peacetime.

In late 2021, Tajikistan approved the construction of a new Chinese-funded base near the country’s border with Afghanistan, while also offering to transfer full control of the existing Chinese military base in Murghab to Beijing and waiving any future rent in exchange for more military aid from China.

The January 2022 unrest in Kazakhstan reinforced Beijing’s anxiety about potential toppling of Central Asia’s friendly regimes and the likelihood of regional instability. There is little doubt that more Chinese security and economic initiatives will follow within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative and beyond. While Beijing had paid little attention to Central Asia’s domestic politics and preferred to work directly with its long-term leaders before, increased Chinese attention to local politics is more likely now.

The ongoing war in Ukraine will also continue to push Central Asia away from Russia and closer to China, especially with the existing absence of friendly alternatives from the West. Tajikistan – with its strategic location between Afghanistan and Xinjiang, the impending dynastic transition of power, the similarities between its domestic politics and China’s, and already significant debt to China – is set to only grow its dependence on Beijing.

“Tajikistan is stuck with China. If Tajik authorities decide to reduce ties or not be so friendly, China could cut off funds, call for repayment of Tajikistan’s debt, or reroute trade along the road to Dushanbe to Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan,” concludes Pannier.

“Without China as an investor, Tajikistan’s economy would suffer greatly and there would be little, if any progress in realizing the many infrastructure projects Tajikistan still needs.”