Click here for the entire issue in PDF format
Letter from the Editors
Matthew Oresman and Malia K. Du Mont
Let us begin by thanking you for choosing to read the inaugural issue of our new journal, the CEF Quarterly. We believe you will find it extremely informative and useful to your work and studies. Furthermore, we hope you find it a change in the right direction from our original CEF Monthly newsletter. The analytical articles in this first issue offer an exceptional assortment of views from American, Chinese, Kazakh, and Canadian writers. You will notice that several of the articles address the evolving relationship between the so-called “external powers,” China, Russia, and the United States, and the Central Asian States.
The Tashkent Summit Meeting: The Steady Advance of the SCO
Pan Guang
If the Moscow summit meeting last year represented the progress of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) from its preliminary stage to a stage of stable development, then the Tashkent summit meeting this year demonstrates that the SCO is now, more than ever, focused on practical cooperation amidst its steady advance in an all-around manner. Security cooperation and economic cooperation are still the two key pillars in the SCO architecture, yet humanistic cooperation is also gathering importance. Meanwhile, the SCO, as an open structure, is now developing widely its cooperation with other countries and other international organizations.
Russia, China, and Central Asia: The Strange Alliance
Stephen Blank
Formally Russia and China are alliance partners through their membership in the Shanghai Cooperative Organization (SCO). Similarly, both states regularly profess that they share a convergence or even identity of interests on Asian security issues going beyond Central Asia, such as development on the Korean Peninsula. Russia is also the largest seller of arms to China; indeed its defense industry might even collapse without such arms sales. So there is also a striking convergence of interest between the two states’ armed forces and defense industries. Yet on closer inspection this alliance or partnership is a decidedly strange one, rife with mutual mistrust and suspicion that prevents it from serving the aims for which it was created in Central Asia: fighting terrorism, separatism, and radical Islam and checking U.S. power and influence in Central Asia and in the world at large.
Global and Regional Aspects of Sino-Kyrgyz Security Cooperation
Marat Yermukanov
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and outbreak of armed conflicts in neighboring countries, China, uncertain about the security of its western borders, sought to establish good-neighborly relations with the newly independent Central Asian states. China focused its attention primarily on Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which had been areas of border disputes during the Cold War. Not surprisingly, China was among the first states that recognized the independence of Kyrgyzstan and established diplomatic relations with its neighbor. From the early stages of relations Chinese leaders tried to derive from their Kyrgyz counterparts political support for their moves in the international arena, even on issues, which were of no regional or bilateral interest for Kyrgyzstan.
Paying the Price for Security: The Central Asian Republics and the “Great Powers”
Alex Wooley
Central Asia is a strategic backwater no more. The region borders four of the world’s eight nuclear powers (China, Russia, India, Pakistan), and will be five-for-eight if Iran acquires its own bomb. Two of the three original Axis of Evil states are neighbors, and the lands to the south are the center of gravity for the worldwide Islamist terrorist movement. This heady mix of state and non-state threats to international security means that the region as a whole is likely to be of interest to the great powers for some years to come, despite claims by the United States that its basing needs are short-term only.
If this were not enough, the five Central Asian republics have become geo-strategic focal points themselves, thanks to enormous oil, natural gas, and mineral reserves. In security terms, the five republics are faced with both opportunities and challenges for which they are ill prepared.
Where Four Worlds Meet: Russians, Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and Han Chinese in the PRC-Kazakhstan Border Zone
Ross Perlin
At the border town of Dostyk (“Friendship” in Kazak), not far from where some of the most severe Sino-Soviet border clashes of yesteryear took place, Kazakh passport control officers continue the old struggle peacefully. Palms extended, they gently extract 1000 tenge “fines” (US$8) from Han businessmen returning home on the Almaty-Urumqi train. The 40-hour Almaty-Urumqi train odyssey, a link first opened in 1992, symbolizes growing contacts—both personal and commercial—across the Kazakh-Chinese border. In Almaty’s barrakholka (a vast bazaar on the outskirts of the city), it is commonly acknowledged that—whatever labels may say—everything there is made in China, and much of it in Xinjiang. Indeed, Chinese goods from refrigerators to cheap sandals are more apparent all over Central Asia than they were just a few years ago.
