Xi Jinping plans his first foreign trip since the start of the pandemic
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskMr Xi stopped travelling abroad when China closed its borders in order to keep covid-19 out. The government still tries to contain the virus through strict controls at home. But Mr Xi has decided that diplomacy, at least, must start returning to normal.
There had been much speculation about where Mr Xi would go. Kazakhstan makes sense. It is where Mr Xi, in 2013, launched the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-building scheme. China has invested tens of billions of dollars in Kazakhstan, which sends back oil and gas through pipelines co-owned by the two countries’ biggest state oil companies.
Kazakhstan is important to China for another reason: it borders the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where more than a million Uyghurs, as well as ethnic Kazakhs, have been thrown into camps for “re-education”. Much of the early evidence of those camps came from victims who escaped to Kazakhstan, where they were interviewed by activists—until the Kazakh government pressed the activists to stop. In public it has remained mostly quiet on the matter. China wants it to stay that way.
China has ambitions across Central Asia, where it has tried to build land-based trade and energy links as an alternative to sea-based routes dominated by Western powers. It long deferred to Russia on political and security matters in the region, but that is changing, says Niva Yau of theAcademy, a research centre in Kyrgyzstan. “Everything that Russia does in Central Asia, China does too, just on a smaller scale,” she says. For example, thousands of Kyrgyz military officers train in Russia.
For Mr Xi the summit is a chance to reaffirm his support for Mr Putin, and thumb his nose at the West, while avoiding the tricky optics of a state visit to Moscow. He will also have the chance to mingle with other leaders who, to varying degrees, share China’s world-view.
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