The last Russian troops returned home from Kazakhstan on Wednesday, having quelled violent protests in the central Asian country. But for Kazakhstan’s other big neighbour, the trouble has only just begun.
For China, the crisis in Kazakhstan presented the latest challenge to its cautious approach to foreign interventions. A principle of Beijing’s foreign policy is non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs — a stance that has repeatedly come into conflict with the need to protect its growing global interests.
In Kazakhstan, China is an outsized economic presence as the country’s largest trading partner and a big investor in infrastructure projects. But when a political crisis erupted on January 2, with demonstrations that soon turned violent, Beijing seemingly stood aside.
It was not until a week later, after the bloody suppression of the unrest, that Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, publicly announced that Beijing was ready to increase “law enforcement and security co-operation” with Kazakhstan and help oppose external interference.
Mukhtar Tleuberdi, Kazakhstan’s foreign minister, indicated on Tuesday that Beijing may have offered security support early on, but was rebuffed by the Kazakh authorities who argued that there was no legal basis for accepting troops sent from countries other than the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russia-led bloc Kazakhstan belongs to.
As China insists that any security engagement abroad must happen on request of the relevant government, that would have blocked Beijing out.
Zhang Xin, a Russia and central Asia expert at East China Normal University, added: “I don’t read [Wang’s message] as a very clear offer that China will send a security presence into Kazakhstan.
“There is strong consensus that Russia’s approach was effective, and that it has shown the relevance of the CSTO to mobilise traditional military forces to manage stability. But opinion is very divided here as to whether this is good for China.”
The CSTO had not been viewed as a significant alliance until its intervention in Kazakhstan.
Several scholars who study Chinese security engagement in central Asia for the government declined to comment. But some Chinese analysts have argued that Beijing might take a more active role in Kazakhstan.
“We must [ . . . ] raise our ability to respond to such blows and challenges not just internally, but also pay close attention to this in our neighbourhood,” said Shen Yi, a professor of international politics at Fudan University in Shanghai, in a video blog.
“Not just realising China’s own domestic security and stability but also helping other countries deal with threats and challenges of this kind should become a completely new phase and an entirely new important strategic task.”
For more than a decade, China’s foreign policy experts have debated how to adapt its non-interference mantra to the realities of a globalising world, and Beijing’s increasingly prominent role in it.
Although China fears that acquiescing to intervention elsewhere risks undermining its own sovereignty and the Communist party’s power by inviting others’ interference, the government has experimented with security engagement abroad.
In 2005, Beijing supported a UN push to allow external intervention in cases of genocide or war crimes. China’s increasingly global trade and investment ties have also encouraged it to mediate crises and it has become the most active participant in UN peacekeeping missions. In 2015, its navy extracted 225 Chinese nationals and 600 foreigners from Yemen.
More recently, China set up paramilitary outposts in Tajikistan to stem the flow of militants, weapons and drugs across its borders with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Tajikistan into Xinjiang, where Beijing suppresses the indigenous Muslim Uyghur population.
Last month, Beijing pledged to help train police in the Solomon Islands, following riots in the impoverished Pacific island nation.
But Beijing’s tentative foreign security forays have also come at a cost.
“China’s peacekeeping experience informs their evolving approach to broader foreign security engagement,” said Courtney Fung, an associate professor at Macquarie University.
“China maintains a positive public record for its peacekeeping activities. However, China’s recent combat troop deployment experiences in Mali and South Sudan, where Chinese troops were attacked and killed, reinforce China’s view that contested consent and militarised, domestic quagmires are dangerous conditions for interventions.”
In Kazakhstan, China has embraced Russia’s narrative of calling the protests a colour revolution fomented by western powers and blaming the violence on foreign terrorists. But some of China’s most seasoned central Asia experts contest that account.
“I believe that this incident in Kazakhstan was mainly caused by domestic contradictions, we should not take external factors too seriously,” Yang Shu, head of the Central Asia Research Institute, told Russian news agency Sputnik.
Zhang, from East China Normal University, said: “Some see the crisis in Kazakhstan as an opportunity for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to show its relevance, and for China to show its ability and interest to help promote and secure regional stability.” The SCO is a regional China-founded body focused on counter-terrorism co-operation.
“But the Chinese state is not completely ready to put on this sort of traditional military hat, like Russia does,” Zhang added.
Kazakhstan crisis challenges Beijing’s reticence to interfere abroad
Pinoy Variant