The People’s Republic of China (PRC) appears to be creating infrastructure dependencies through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is Beijing’s global infrastructure and connectivity strategy. The investments in energy and digital infrastructure across all five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) share structural similarities with Russia’s approach to its satellites during and after the Soviet era.

It is worth noting that Russia’s modern-day approach is grounded in the inherited Soviet-era dependencies, including a centralized state provider, cultural and economic links between states, and dependence on a single firm, among other things. This sectoral lock-in of certain sectors has provided a coercive geopolitical lever to use against these now independent, former Soviet states. The tactics and methods Beijing is using appear to have been updated to account for lessons learned from the ways states have extricated themselves from similar dependencies with Moscow (and the mistakes that the PRC has made under BRI 1.0). For instance, the PRC China appears to be actively embedding its companies and relationships throughout supply chains, The Caspian Post reports via the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Central Asian nations can learn from the example of post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe on how infrastructure dependencies can translate into geopolitical leverage, as well as the length of time and effort required to extricate themselves from these dependencies. This should also inform how the United States engages with Central Asia before these nations are locked into dependency on the PRC. It is in the United States’ interests to support diversification of Central Asia’s infrastructure financing, construction, and supply chains so that the region does not become a client state of the PRC.

The Belt and Road Infrastructure Strategy in Central Asia

Xi Jinping’s decision to announce what would become the BRI in Kazakhstan in 2013 was no accident. For thousands of years, Central Asia was the land corridor for the Silk Road. Kazakhstan, in particular, shares a just over 1,700-kilometer border with China and is positioned to offer the most direct land pathway from China to Europe. Reconnecting with Europe through Central Asia is not just a commercial or historical proposition; it is a hedge against maritime chokepoints that China does not control. So, while the commodities have changed, the underlying geographic logic and the power that flows from controlling the trade routes remain the same.

Since its inception, the PRC has inked over $1 trillion in investment and construction deals with BRI partner countries. But the types and structure of BRI investment have evolved from “BRI 1.0,” which prioritized scale and speed and created problems. Beijing appears to have recognized the threat these challenges posed to the BRI’s outcomes and began implementing course corrections around 2018. “BRI 2.0” instead focuses on outsourcing risk management to commercial banks and multilateral institutions, as well as a focus on smaller projects rather than massive flagship initiatives, though implementation gaps remain. This shift to BRI 2.0 is reflected in the focus of Chinese investments across Central Asia over the past decade, expanding to a focus on deeper industrial integration in partnerships.

In 2025, China signed a record $213.5 billion in new BRI agreements worldwide, representing a 75 percent increase over 2024. Central Asia ranked as the second largest regional recipient of PRC investment in 2025, with approximately $25 billion in the first half of the year alone. A large part of the PRC investment in Central Asia now focuses on metals and mining, not simply raw extraction, but also on processing and refining, suggesting a deliberate effort to embed Chinese-controlled supply chains. Beyond metals and mining, Chinese wind power and solar companies have signed multibillion-dollar agreements across Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, ensuring that energy infrastructure is tethered in multiple ways, including technology, capital, and engagement to the PRC.

Uzbekistan’s state telecoms operator signed contracts with two PRC firms for the installation of telecom infrastructure that forms the backbone of the country’s national network. These same two firms hold contracts for more than 50 percent of their network deployments and serve as the nation’s primary supplier for AI cloud infrastructure. Both these PRC firms have been designated as a national security threat by the Federal Communications Commission. One of these firms also holds the majority of Kazakhstan’s telecommunications infrastructure.

The PRC also holds debt for many Central Asian countries. For example, the PRC holds more than a quarter of Tajikistan’s external debt as of 2026, making it the single largest bilateral creditor. In 2011, Tajikistan ratified an agreement ceding an area larger than Singapore to China. While the precise terms were never publicly disclosed, this has been characterized as an exchange for debt relief.

While historically Central Asia has pursued multi-vector foreign policies, BRI investments across sectors are challenging this tenet. Even Kazakhstan, which may be the best-positioned of the Central Asian countries to keep a multi-vector foreign policy alive, is risking sectoral lock-in in its energy and critical minerals sectors. The example of Kazakhstan illustrates how dependencies can develop even with policies in place to prevent them and how, by the time the leverage is exercised, the options for disentanglement may be significantly constrained.

Differences and Similarities between China’s and Russia’s Infrastructure Investment

Infrastructure support is uniquely difficult to reverse because of the combination of significant capital investments, natural monopolies, and lengthy contracts, which can lock in relationships with a supplier even after the geopolitical landscape shifts. While the PRC’s infrastructure investments in some ways mirror Russia’s, the PRC seems to have learned from where Moscow’s strategies failed.

Russia has a long history of using energy as a coercive tool across post-Soviet states. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has had a documented pattern of subsidizing dependency, which at least provides a surface-level cover for coercive actions, such as contract disagreements. This allows Moscow to both present the situation as the other party’s fault while leveraging geopolitical coercion. Moscow’s energy supply manipulations, such as the 1990 cutoff to Lithuania and the 2004 cutoff to Belarus, generally drove targeted countries further from its orbit because the coercion was overt and lacked deeper social or economic integration.

Beijing appears to be learning from Moscow’s failures by adopting alternative approaches in its policies. The PRC is attempting to integrate Chinese firms and workers into local economies more deeply. BRI projects often employ a majority Chinese workforce, meaning skill transfers to locals can be limited. Additionally, in 2018, CSIS’s Reconnecting Asia project documented that 89 percent of contractors on Chinese-funded projects are Chinese firms, which has the effect of embedding Chinese companies, technology, and export relationships into the host country in ways that create domestic constituencies for maintaining those ties. Kazakhstan is an example of this model, where investments create facilities whose financing, technology, and export relationships are all grounded in the PRC. This generates local stakeholders who have vested interests in preserving the relationship.

The Central Asia-China Gas Pipeline, which has been operational since 2009, brings gas from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan eastward. Beijing has invested heavily in this, while westward alternatives, such as the Trans-Caspian Pipeline, remain stalled. This may leave the countries involved dependent on a single importer for their gas exports. This structure appears to mirror the dependency structure with Russia that preceded it, which enabled Moscow to purchase Central Asian gas at deeply discounted prices and resell it westward at a significant markup.

Digital infrastructure investments may also be difficult to reverse, leading to potential long-term vulnerability and therefore leverage. The Digital Silk Road is a component of the BRI that finances, builds, and exports infrastructure like fiber-optic cables, 5G networks, data centers, cloud computing, e-commerce platforms, surveillance systems, and other high-tech capabilities to partner countries. While allegedly done to enhance global connectivity, it also promulgates Chinese tech standards and companies, advancing Beijing’s economic, geopolitical, and normative influence in cyberspace. It is worth noting that China’s national security laws require Chinese firms to cooperate with state intelligence services upon request, meaning that even private sector technology use creates surveillance risk. The combination of infrastructure built to specific standards, managed with country-specific operational protocols and often run on compatible software creates a system that state actors understand well, and both the PRC and Russia have a documented history of employing dual-use technologies.

Of course, both BRI recipients and post-Soviet states have renegotiated or walked away from infrastructure deals before. For example, in Kyrgyzstan in 2020 after protests, a logistics center was canceled. It is possible, but it is also expensive and politically difficult. China’s embedded integration model is likely to be more resilient than the Russian model because the dependency and the local benefit are harder to separate. Countering it requires competitive infrastructure investment that arrives before countries are locked in, not after, when breaking these long-term concessions becomes more costly and complicated. These differences and similarities, as well as the importance of the timeline to market lock-in, should inform U.S. policy.

What to Learn from Post-Soviet States Diversification Efforts

The experiences of states that have successfully extricated themselves from Russian dependency offer instructive, if imperfect, lessons. The diversification efforts of Moldova, Poland, and Estonia all illustrate that success requires time and support from external partners as well as institutional reform and physical infrastructure diversification, done together.

In 2022, Moldova became fully independent from Russian gas supply, but this took many years of support from external partners, especially the European Union, as well as internal institutional reform, which required domestic political will to take on entrenched interests that profited from Russian energy dependency. Russian gas leverage in Moldova illustrates how deeply commodity arrangements embed themselves through debt, pricing, supply, and structures, including the physical infrastructure and individuals and institutions that profit from the arrangement.

Poland recognized, immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, that continued dependence on Russian gas was a strategic liability, not a commercial convenience. That insight produced three decades of deliberate infrastructure investment. This meant that when Russia cut off gas supply to Poland in 2022, Poland was ready with alternatives.

Estonia provides another example of diversification in the digital and cybersecurity domains. After the historic 2007 cyberattack, NATO built the NATO Cyber Defense Centre in Tallinn, developed a volunteer Cyber Defense League, and created a digital governance architecture designed to function without dependence on any single vendor. This offers a model for Central Asia, while 5G and data infrastructure are still being built. This may be especially important as cyber and telecom infrastructure present a higher potential for coercive leverage than other infrastructure for a variety of reasons, including that intrusions are more difficult to attribute, lockout is easier to achieve, and shutdown may be more devastating.

Applying these lessons learned to Central Asia requires accounting for meaningful differences. Central Asia is geographically positioned between Russia to the north and China to the east. They are navigating China as increasingly the dominant economic and security partner, and a Russia whose security guarantor role is in structural decline. Between themselves, Central Asian countries have no equivalent of the EU Energy Community to anchor reform commitments or coordinated financing, leaving each country to navigate the pressures of negotiations alone.

Central Asian countries’ physical distance from each other makes alternative infrastructure far more costly to build. Moldova’s, Poland’s, and Estonia’s geographic proximity to Western Europe made their energy and digital infrastructure vulnerabilities a direct security concern. This made them a priority for engagement, and that sustained investment supported their diversification. But Central Asian states are not only distant from each other, but they are also far from Western Europe and the United States.

BRI investments have tested the limits of Central Asia’s longstanding multi-vector foreign policy. Gulf States already account for 45 percent of investment in the region over the past decade. The challenge is that none of these alternative partners individually match the scale of Chinese investment. With business environment improvements, the region can still preserve leverage if the U.S. and others engage meaningfully.

Additionally, many of these industries are natural monopolies. This means that Central Asian countries need independent and competent regulatory bodies. Support for the development of these agencies within these countries is another way that partners and allies can help these countries avoid sectoral lock-in.

The Window Is Open: Acting Before the Lock-In

Hosting all five Central Asian heads of state at the White House in November 2025 for the C5+1 Presidential Summit signals U.S. prioritization outside of counterterrorism contexts. The Commerce Department’s $25 billion “Deal Zone” and bipartisan legislation to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment demonstrate momentum.

Collaboration on critical minerals offers an avenue to deepen cooperation. Central Asia has substantial reserves. The C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue supports just such efforts, as does the U.S. support for a tungsten project in Kazakhstan and rare earth initiatives in Uzbekistan. These initiatives support a multi-vector foreign policy, offering competition in the region while advancing both regional multi-vector politics and simultaneously serving American supply chain security.

The Development Finance Corporation can help finance projects in the region, such as the Trans-Caspian Pipeline. There may be an opportunity to partner on this project with the European Union’s Global Gateway initiative, which is Europe’s answer to BRI, and has already committed over €10 billion to infrastructure development in Central Asia. U.S. programs in Moldova, such as the North Carolina National Guard’s cyber exchange, provide replicable, low-cost models for Central Asia.

Washington has an opening to act while the dependencies are still forming in Central Asia. The experiences of former Soviet states and their ultimately successful pivots toward diversification demonstrate that alternatives are possible but only with foresight, sustained external support, and the political will to restructure relationships that powerful interests prefer to leave undisturbed. The question is whether U.S. policy will leverage these lessons before Central Asia is locked into these physical and structural dependencies and suffers from their downstream coercive effects.