After the completion of the construction of the third Kazakhstan-China gas pipeline, transportation of hydrocarbons by volume will increase to 55 billion cubic meters per year. Last year, the pipeline transported 30 billion cubic meters. Transport and logistics, including gas transportation projects, are given special attention in the program of implementation of the new economic policy of Kazakhstan, Nurly Jol, and today experts talk about a sharp increase of Chinese influence in Central Asia.
The Director of the Analytical Center of the Institute of International Studies (University) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Andrey Kazantsev, said that China has become the main buyer of Central Asian energy: "The great game, which was played in the 1990s around the Central Asian energy resources, is generally over. China has become the main buyer of oil and gas in Central Asia due to the fast laying of two powerful pipelines. And if the biggest share of Kazakh oil is still bought by the EU, then in the gas sector China is playing an exclusive role, because the deliveries to Iran are not significant, and Russia simply cannot afford to buy gas at such prices as the Turkmens want."
China will continue to expand its influence in the region. "Especially for the region President Xi Jinping during his visit to Kazakhstan announced the new project of the zone of the Great Silk Road. Then the Chinese bureaucracy expanded this project. It began to cover a lot of other countries. But this initial focus on the Central Asian policy is clear from the statement of Xi Jinping. All that you now can find out about the Chinese Silk Road project is nothing more than speculation. Because an official document, which could bring together the positions of all the Chinese authorities, has not been produced yet. In principle, there are some notes about it, but the plan has not officially been announced in full measure. The positions of various departments have not been summarized, and in China there are a lot of different agencies, and they have different interests," Kazantsev said.
But it is obvious already that certain political interests in Central Asia were clearly marked as a part of this project. "This raises the additional question for Russia, which is how will our projects, the Russian project of Eurasian integration and the Chinese project of the area of the Silk Road, relate to each other? In principle, the Chinese government and the Russian government have voiced their unequivocal positions in favor of so-called co-adaptation projects or some interaction between them. But conflicting possibilities of cooperation in the future between the two projects have been spoken about by individual Russian and Chinese experts," Kazantsev reminds
