China’s Geoeconomic Strategy towards Central Asia

This master's thesis examines the relations between the People's Republic of China and the five post-Soviet Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. It is aimed at studying the relations from the geoeconomics perspective from the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 until mid-2026. The research objective is to study the paradox in relations. China has achieved enormous leverage in the region over the years. However, it did not achieve complete political compliance from the countries of the region. The study adopts the strategic geoeconomics framework that incorporates the insights of the critical geography school and small-state agency theories. In this way, this study analyzes the mechanisms of Chinese influence and the counterstrategies used by local authoritarian leaders. The study shows that China's influence in the region is instrumentalized through three layers. They include physical infrastructure, financial statecraft, and the Digital Silk Road. These tools create vulnerabilities that create high exit costs, constrain the fiscal sovereignty of the countries, and create dependencies. However, the Central Asian elites use the neopatrimonial veto through their domestic patronage networks. They are used to absorb the external capital and from the other powers. Finally, this work integrates the findings as the state of negotiated asymmetric hegemony, which explains regional stability and elite resilience under unequal relationships.