Posts Tagged ‘ Jalal-Abad ’

China’s Slow Surge in Kyrgyzstan: A View from the Ground

November 13, 2011

By Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen

First published in the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief on November 11, 2011.

Chinese Ambassador Wang Kaiwen with the Kyrgyz Premier

Kyrgyzstan’s recent peaceful presidential elections did not feature China as a campaign issue. For the most part, they focused on domestic issues and where foreign policy seeped in, it was mostly in the positive light that most Kyrgyz see Russia and separately its regional customs union, or perennial whipping boy the U.S. “transit hub” at Manas airport, outside Bishkek. Subsequent to the elections, the winner Mr. Atambaev declared: “In 2014 the United States will have to withdraw its military base from the ‘Manas’ international airport” (www.regnum.ru, November 1). China was not mentioned at all, even though a series of conversations and interviews up and down the country in the weeks prior to the election revealed a strange sense of unease about Kyrgyzstan’s growing dependence on China.
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Kyrgyzstan: Between Two Worlds

November 11, 2011

By Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen.

First published in The National Interest on November 4, 2011.

The Chinese government, via China Aid, donated more than 50 public buses manufactured by Yaxing Motor Coach company to Bishkek in 2009 with commitment for more in 2011. Each bus has a China flag and China Aid logo on the side, and the words “Chinese-Kyrgyz Friendship Bus” written in Chinese and Cyrillic. Photo by Sue Anne Tay

In the midst of a relatively calm election season, we have been travelling to Kyrgyzstan’s cities, villages and border posts to track the rise of China in Central Asia. The atmosphere around this election is less tense than in previous years, when governments have been ousted by street revolutions and transfers of power have yielded ethnic violence. But Kyrgyzstan’s new government will not alone decide the country’s fate.

Kyrgyzstan is a place between powers, and not just geographically. This is reflected in Jalal-Abad University, located in the country’s third-largest city, where respective wings of the central administrative buildings are run by the U.S. embassy-sponsored American Center and a Chinese government-funded Confucius Center subsidiary. In between sit Kyrgyz administrators.

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