For much of the post–Cold War period, Central Asia operated as a “managed condominium”—a geopolitical arrangement where Russia supplied the hard-security umbrella and China functioned as the dominant economic partner.
The war in Ukraine has not broken this Sino-Russian partnership, but it has fundamentally altered its internal balance. The condominium has evolved into an asymmetric interdependence, where China’s economic networks dictate the terms of regional order and Russia’s ability to exercise a regional veto has rapidly diminished.
China is not muscling its way into Eurasia — it is wiring it. By controlling key network nodes across logistics, energy, finance and digital governance, Beijing is engaging in a form of “weaponized interdependence.” China is shaping the very infrastructure and rules within which smaller states operate, expanding its freedom of action as Russia’s relative power declines.
The asymmetry in this partnership is starkly quantifiable. According to Chinese customs data, bilateral trade reached a record 1.74 trillion yuan (US$252.3 billion) in 2024. While two-way trade fell 6.5% to 1.63 trillion yuan in 2025 amid lower global crude prices and weaker Russian demand for Chinese vehicles, the trade flows were still decidedly in Beijing’s favor.
This glaring disparity heavily constrains Moscow’s ability to contest Chinese initiatives in its own self-declared “near abroad.” Beijing has leveraged this bargaining position to institutionalize a multilateral architecture in Central Asia that entirely bypasses Russian-led formats.
The 2023 Xi’an China–Central Asia Summit launched a standing mechanism to establish a permanent secretariat in China. Two years later, the Astana summit produced a package of cooperation documents and a Treaty on Good-Neighborliness, deepening routinized leader-level coordination completely outside Moscow’s orbit. By establishing these “default” pathways for policy coordination, China is exercising profound structural power.
Infrastructure and standard setting serve as the second channel of China’s quiet primacy. Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects are often fundamentally about path dependence. Once a corridor is built, trade patterns and regulatory choices become anchored to a Chinese technical and financial ecosystem.
The Central Asia–China gas pipeline system, with a capacity of roughly 55 billion cubic meters per year, permanently ties upstream producers to Chinese demand and pipeline governance. Logistics hubs like Khorgos on the Kazakhstan–China border re-map the region’s economic geography, locking in supplier networks and technical specifications that privilege Chinese firms.
Digital infrastructure runs deeper than cables and servers. Telecommunications equipment, surveillance platforms, and fintech payment rails are, at their core, governance architectures.
As Central Asian autocracies expand their internal security capabilities, Chinese-provided systems embed interoperability with Chinese data practices and training ecosystems. For regimes whose survival depends on managing domestic dissent, China is supplying the ultimate tools of contemporary state control.
To be sure, Russia retains influence through cultural ties, elite networks and coercive economic tools. Millions of Central Asian citizens work in Russia, making remittances crucial for national stability.
In Tajikistan, personal remittances reached roughly 47.9% of GDP in 2024, and Kyrgyzstan remains highly sensitive to Russia’s labor market. Yet these levers are better suited for episodic pressure than reversing long-term economic reorientation, and heavy-handed enforcement often generates counterproductive security risks.
Russia’s deeper problem is reputational. Spheres of influence are maintained by credible deterrence, but Russia’s military entanglement in Ukraine has shattered perceptions of Moscow as a credible security provider. Central Asian elites now treat Russia merely as a provider of baseline stability, carefully hedging their bets by avoiding rigid commitments and diversifying partnerships.
Financial connectivity reveals how this transition occurs below the threshold of open geopolitical confrontation. Following the invasion of Ukraine, settlement in Chinese yuan surged in Russia’s trade, rising from under 2% to nearly 40% by early 2024. By offering alternative financial rails that keep commerce moving when Western systems are constrained, China is rapidly reinforcing its structural power in the monetary domain.
The Iran war adds a new accelerant to this Central Asia dynamic. As the conflict escalates, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of global oil and LNG flows, has come close to a standstill, with large numbers of vessels reportedly delayed or anchored amid rising risk.
By March 5, Brent crude had jumped above $84 per barrel as traders priced in disruption risk and potential supply outages. For China, this is not a distant shock. It is a stress test of a core vulnerability: reliance on seaborne energy routes that can be disrupted, deterred or politically “taxed” during wartime.
In the short run, this shock can increase Russia’s importance as an energy backstop without changing the deeper bilateral asymmetry. China has been the dominant buyer of Iran’s shipped crude, purchasing over 90% of Iran’s seaborne exports—or about 1.38 million barrels per day on average in 2025—making any prolonged disruption around Iran a direct hit to China’s marginal barrels.
The quickest hedge is to lean harder on supplies that do not transit Hormuz, meaning Russian crude (often discounted), pipeline-delivered gas and other non-Gulf sources. That may give Moscow some tactical bargaining room on pricing and timing at the margin.
But it does not restore a Russian “veto” in Central Asia, because Russia still depends on Chinese demand far more than China depends on any single supplier and because Beijing’s leverage is rooted in network control, not episodic commodity scarcity.
Over the medium term, the more important implication runs in the opposite direction: an Iran-driven chokepoint shock strengthens China’s rationale for building a Eurasian architecture that reduces maritime exposure, making Central Asia more, not less, central to Beijing’s strategy.
Central Asian governments are not passive objects in this great-power competition. They have long practiced “multi-vector” diplomacy, arbitraging security and development ties. Today, as Russia’s economic pull weakens and Western engagement remains constrained, Beijing simply offers the most credible package of capital and connectivity.
While leaders in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan continue to cultivate the “Middle Corridor” and court investment from Turkey, the Gulf and Europe where feasible, a layered order has emerged. China is the default economic platform, while other partners provide niche diplomatic optionality.
This layered order is stabilized by the logic of the Sino-Russian partnership itself. Shared anti-Western signaling and a mutual preference for regime stability act as the “glue” of the condominium. Moscow tolerates China’s expanding footprint because contesting it would jeopardize a broader alignment useful for resisting the United States.
If Central Asia is consolidating into a Chinese-led sphere of influence, the evidence will continue to manifest in three domains: institutional autonomy (permanent secretariats and treaties bypassing Russia), network embeddedness (standardizing infrastructure around Chinese protocols), and monetary integration (expansion of the yuan).
None of this implies Russia will become irrelevant in Central Asia. Rather, a new Eurasian equilibrium has arrived. Russia will continue to supply a security shadow and historical legitimacy, while China exercises the far deeper power of the architect. In the contemporary geopolitical arena, the country that builds the infrastructure writes the rules.
Md Obaidullah is a visiting scholar at Daffodil International University, Dhaka. He is also a graduate assistant at the Department of Political Science, University of Southern Mississippi. He has published extensively with Routledge, Springer Nature, and SAGE, as well as media outlets like The Diplomat, Asia Times, East Asia Forum, The Business Standard and Dhaka Tribune.
