Fluid Dynamics: The Politics of Water and Oil in China and Kazakhstan
Nick Houshower
SIS - 795
Professor Shapiro
Spring Semester 2009
Table of Contents
Introduction
1.
Xinjiang: A Brief History
Strategic Diversity
A Disputed History
2.
Two-pronged Response
Neighborhood Watch
Looking West
3.
The Great Development of the West
Twin Pillars
Head Westward
4.
Black Gold
An Energized Foreign Policy
Iron Triangle: Kazakhstan, Xinjiang and China
(In)security
Blowing in the Wind
5.
The River Runs Wild
Kazakhstan
A Tale of Two Rivers
Two Front War
Beggar Thy Neighbor
6.
A Closer Look
Resource Wars?
The Realist View
The Liberal View
7.
An Ecological Conclusion
An Ecological Perspective
Scarcity of Sustainability
Appendix: Works Cited and Consulted
i
Fluid Dynamics: Water and Oil Politics in China and Kazakhstan
“The wars of the future will largely be fought over the possession and control of
vital economic goods – especially resources needed for the functioning of modern
industrial societies” (Klare 213).
Since 1950, global population has more than doubled to over 6 billion people; economic
output soared in tandem to more than US$41 trillion (Klare 2001: 15). This extraordinary
expansion in population and wealth is driving demand for the world’s finite resources ever
higher.
Faced with such precipitous growth in humanity’s economic and ecological footprint, a
body of thought known as “resource theory” has rapidly gained influence among policy makers,
academics and the media. This theory argues that unprecedented increases in consumption of the
world’s finite resources will produce growing scarcities that lead to increasing political,
economic, and military disputes over the distribution of such resources (Gleditsch 1998, HomerDixon 1991, Kaplan 1994; Klare 2002, Sharp 2007, Ullman 1983, Westing 1986).
These scholars draw their inspiration from Malthusian theories of population pressures
and competition over dwindling resources, which the eminent economist Thomas Malthus
argued would eventually lead to conflict and social collapse. This sentiment is still echoed by
today’s proponents of resource theory, who see population and economic growth as the main
dynamics creating conflict, as such dual phenomena will inherently intensify competition over
the world’s finite resources (Ullman 1983).
At the domestic level, population pressures and resource constraints will lead to scarcity,
social disruption and eventually conflict. According to Thomas Homer-Dixon (1991),
environmental pressures will lead to reduced agricultural production, economic decline,
population displacement and the disruption of regular social relations, which will, in turn,
produce scarcity disputes between countries, clashes between ethnic groups, and civil strife and
insurgency. Poor countries are seen to be at the greatest risk of resource and environmental
conflict, as they lack the political, financial or intellectual resources to deal with such
disruptions.
Though much resource theory scholarship focuses on the potential for domestic conflict
in developing countries, resource theory recognizes the international dimensions of scarcity and
conflict. In today’s global economy, any major resource conflict will have ripple effects
throughout the entire world economy (Sharp 2007). Political instability resulting from
environmental issues can lead to regional and international instability (Dinar 2002).
Furthermore, countries endangered by environmental decline or resource scarcities are perceived
to be more aggressive, as domestic stability is at risk and political leaders seek to shift the
environmental burden abroad and secure access to new resources (Gleditsch 1998). Thus, the
environmental problems of countries can quickly become internationalized, as environmental
conflict spills over into other countries and into the global economy. This has led the influential
writer and scholar Robert Kaplan (1994) to conclude that the environment is the preeminent
national security issue of the twenty-first century.
1
The argument is given greater salience for contemporary international politics due to the
fact that industrialized nations are major importers of many natural resources required for
modern economic growth, such as oil. This has led theorists such as Travis Sharp (2007) to
predict that rising resource consumption and population growth will lead to international conflict
as resource-dependent nations become desperate to ensure access to foreign-based commodities
(324). Although some do not go as far as Klare (2002) and conclude that such conflicts are
inevitable, the majority of the theory’s proponents share Arthur Westing’s (1986) sentiment that
natural resources are a major contributing factor in war, even if they are not the primary cause.
In an anarchic international system where states are seen to balance their power against one
another, even if resources do not cause war, they will dictate the direction of conflict, as
resources are an integral component of any state’s war-fighting capability (Gleditsch 1998).
Within the resource theory frame of analysis, two resources further merit particular
attention for their coming scarcity and geopolitical importance: water and oil.
Oil serves as the foundation and lifeblood for modern industrialized societies, fueling
economic growth and supporting militaries. The world’s proven reserves of some 1.3 trillion
barrels of petroleum are forecast to be exhausted in less than four decades, without factoring in
surging global demand (International Energy Agency). With global oil production expected to
peak and then decline in the near future, fierce competition over the world’s dwindling supplies
of petroleum is seen as a foregone conclusion. Given the importance of oil, any major
interruption in the global oil market will be treated as a national security threat by oil-importing
nations, a group which includes China, the U.S., and nearly every major industrialized economy
(Klare 2001:29).
Fresh water, likewise, is an increasingly scarce commodity, but one whose value extends
beyond mere economics: water is essential to human existence. Water is required for
agricultural production, human consumption and sanitation. Water is also a necessary input for
many modern industrial processes. Though 70 percent of the earth is covered with water, fresh
water supplies comprise less than 3 percent of the global hydrological endowment and are
expected to be totally exploited by the midpoint of this century. Expected future population and
economic growth mean that per capita water supplies will come under increasing stress. Thus,
given water’s salience to human health and societal wellbeing, secure supplies of water are
argued to be a matter of national security and their interruption akin to an act of war (Klare
2001:19).
Freshwater resources are prone to international conflict if they cross national boundaries,
as all running water disputes are asymmetrical conflicts in which one state controls the river’s
source or upper flow and places downstream states at a disadvantage (Haftendorn 2000). As a
divided resource, rather than a common resource such as seas and oceans, states have little
incentive to cooperate and will strive maximize their individual benefits. Depending on the
situation, water conflicts can either exacerbate already strained relations between riparian
countries, such as in the case of the long-running dispute between Turkey, Syria and Iraq, or
constitute the primary grievance between states, such as in the case of Egypt and Ethiopia
(Dinar 2002).
2
Available fresh water supplies per capita are set to decline in line with economic
development, population growth and rising living standards, stretching the world’s hydrological
balance ever thinner and raising the likelihood of conflict of fresh water supplies.
Theoretical Considerations
An analysis employing resource theory is particularly appropriate, not only because of its
increasing relevance within academic thought, but also because it is derived from realist political
theory, one of the most influential theories of modern politics. According to realism, states will
seek security in the anarchic international system through military power, which is alternately
dependent on economic growth (Morgenthau 1948). Realism, moreover, recognizes the
importance of oil and energy supplies, noting that they are a precondition for economic growth
and, in turn, a strong military establishment. Water, furthermore, is a requirement for any
society, making it a precondition for modern states and any conceptions of state power.
International stability, moreover, is a required for economic growth and a powerful military.
Thus, while realism does not directly argue that states will go to war over access to such strategic
resources, it implicitly acknowledges this fact when it argues that such increasingly scarce
resources are a vital component of state power and that states inherently seek to maximize their
power. Thus, the combination of resource theory and realism seem to suggest a dire future of
zero-sum water and energy competition between Astana and Beijing.
Contradictorily, other theorists posit that the linkages created between resource exporting
and importing states foster mutual interdependence, which creates disincentives towards the use
of military force and reduces the likelihood of conflict (Keohane and Nye 2001). While referring
primarily to oil, such a theory of international politics seems well suited to address transboundary water issues, as such issues can create similar mutual dependencies. According to
Bencala and Dabelko (2008) transnational water management is particularly suited for
cooperation, as it is generally seen as a non-political issue to be managed by technocrats, who
can build trust and create avenues for further cooperation. Thus, rather than apocalyptic
scenarios of resource wars, some theorists predict that the mutual dependencies created by water
and oil will lend themselves to cooperation and mitigate the prospect of future conflict.
This perspective is strongly informed by neoliberalism, which assumes that as resources
become scarce, prices will increase and reduce demand and prolong total depletion. This will
provide both time and an economic incentive to develop a substitute for the exhausted resource
(Sharp 2007). Thus, global growth is seen as inherently positive as it creates disincentives for
conflict and helps to overcome scarcities before they become serious, thereby preventing
resource conflicts.
Coming from a more radical perspective, some theorists argue that realist and liberalist
political theories are inappropriate, as they erroneously take the ecological foundation of the
earth for granted and fail to realize that economic growth is constrained by the capacity of the
biosphere (Daly 1997, Mathews 1989, Reuveny 2002). It is questionable whether the biosphere
can support the continued economic growth called for by either realism or neoliberalism. What
is necessary is sweeping change in modern economic production systems and theory. These
perspectives are particularly informative when paired with the concept of ecological security,
which argues that security is ultimately contingent upon the ecological balance which supports
human life and that national, energy, and environmental security are irrelevant if ecological
3
collapse contributes to insecurity and instability at the human level (Barnett 2001, Dimitrov
2002, Mathews 1989).
Project Overview
Given the increasing global importance of both oil and water, Sino-Kazakh relations
present a particularly interesting case, with geopolitical implications for both the future of China
and the Caspian region: both states remain developing countries with lingering water disputes,
arid climates and exponential asymmetries in terms of power.
Central to this relationship is Xinjiang, whose status as one of China’s most strategically
valuable but often restive provinces means that ensuring its stability overrides almost any other
consideration. This paper includes an overview of not only Xinjiang’s recent history and the
roots of its instability, but also of the policies enacted to stabilize the region, so as make clear the
connections between Xinjiang’s stability, Kazakhstan and water and oil. Though some raise
questions of cultural and economic imperialism by the Han Chinese in Xinjiang, such
considerations are beyond the scope of this paper, as they do not alter the basic dynamics of
Sino-Kazakh relations.
Located in western China, Xinjiang is one of the country’s most strategically important
provinces. Not only does it sit at the nexus of Central Asia, but Xinjiang is also host to key
military installations and home to some of China’s most substantial mineral and energy deposits.
With a complex ethnic and political history stretching back thousands of years, Xinjiang is also
one China’s most rebellious provinces. In response to social unrest, Beijing has undertaken a
massive campaign to reshape the region’s ethnic makeup and pacify Xinjiang through sustained
economic growth (Shichor 2008, Millward 2007). With close ethnic, historic and geographic
transborder connections between Kazakhs, Uighurs, Tajiks, and Uzbeks, Xinjiang is at the same
time intricately interconnected with Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states, which means that
relations with such states are vital to Chinese national security (Clarke 2008; Swanstrom 2005).
Beijing’s development initiative in Xinjiang and other Western provinces, known as the
Great Development of the West (xibu da kaifa), has focused inordinately on the “twin pillars” of
cotton and oil. Aside from being economically valuable, these two resources help to further
Beijing’s political agenda in the region, by both boosting rural incomes and by strengthening the
Xinjiang Production and Construction Army Corps, a massive militarized socioeconomic entity
controlled by Beijing (Moeller 2002). As a consequence of this development program,
Xinjiang’s water needs are rising precipitously, producing significant environmental degradation
and leading to increasing diversions of the Irtysh and Ili Rivers, which flow from the Tianshan
Mountains through Xinjiang into Kazakhstan (Allouche 2007, Millward 2007). The rivers Irtysh
and Ili are invaluable to the Kazakh economy and environment, directly supporting millions of
people and much of the country’s economy.
Under normal circumstances, potential Sino-Kazakh water disputes would bode ill for
Kazakhstan, as China is clearly the more powerful state in regards to economic, political, and
military influence. However, Sino-Kazakh relations are anything but normal. Kazakhstan’s
proven petroleum reserves of nearly 40 billion barrels make it one of the world’s richest
petrostates and have consequently catapulted the arid Central Asian state to the forefront of
international politics, attracting considerable attention from Washington, Moscow and Beijing
4
(Klare 2001, Kleveman 2003, LeVine 2007). To complicate matters, China has identified
Kazakhstan as a key ally in its campaign against expatriate Uyghur separatists, an ally that
Beijing risks alienating and destabilizing through the diversions of the Irtysh and Ili rivers.
In legal terms, both upstream and downstream littoral states are entitled to the equitable
usage of such international waters, and transnational rivers must be exploited in a manner that
does not harm downstream states, nor degrade their freedom of navigation (Sievers 2002). With
more than 40 percent of its available river resources originating outside of its territory,
Kazakhstan is already a hydrologically vulnerable country and though the central government in
Astana has already expressed concern at China’s river diversions, but there has been little
progress on trans-boundary water cooperation to date (ICG Water, Allouche 2007). Though
China’s behavior is currently outside of customary international legal norms (Sievers 2002), as
its diversions will inherently negatively impact the interests and environment of Kazakhstan, the
legal dynamics will eventually flip in China's favor, as international water law prioritizes
“fundamental human need.” It is only a matter of time before the population and hydrological
needs of Xinjiang eventually reach such a tipping point.
As evidence of human-induced global climate change has mounted, predictions of
impending oil and water wars have found increasing traction among academics, governments
and the public. Yet, two of the dominant theories of international politics disagree as to whether
such scarcities and interdependencies will breed conflict or cooperation, while an alternative
branch of scholarship argues that both metrics are ultimately unsustainable in the long-term.
Thus, there exists a clear need for more analysis on the issue of resource scarcity and
competition to better inform policy makers, especially if one or more of these theoretical trends
rests on an ecologically unsustainable foundation.
The unique nexus of oil, water and great power politics in Sino-Kazakh relations mean
that by every measure the region should be an excellent case study for resource theory. Yet, it is
not. This paper thus seeks to analyze Sino-Kazakh relations through the differing lenses of
resource conflict, realism, liberalism and ecological security to offer an analysis that draws on
the intellectual strengths of all three. The goal of this paper, furthermore, is neither to analyze
nor to critique the ethics and efficacy of the Great Development of the West, but to use SinoKazak relations as a vehicle to explore the prescriptions of resource theory. As such, both
Xinjiang and Kazakhstan are analyzed only in so far as they relate to water and oil, in an effort to
demonstrate that political, economic and environmental dynamics all seem to support the dire
predictions of resource theory.
In the end, it will be shown the predictions of interstate resource conflict are overstated,
at least in the case of China and Kazakhstan. Rather than peaceful interdependencies, though, it
is competing realist-political and historical dynamics that mitigate the likelihood of conflict or
aggressive resource politics between the two countries. By serving as the intellectual basis for
Beijing’s ongoing political and economic platform in Xinjiang, realism and liberalism are
simultaneously serving to perpetuate the status quo and manifestly undermining long-term
ecological and human security within both states. The case of Sino-Kazakh oil and water politics
therefore suggests that resource theory fails as an analytical lens, as its alarmist analyses endorse
and propagate the same shortsighted policies that have created the very scarcities in the first
place.
5
This paper will rely primarily on previous existing research on Caspian oil politics, transboundary water issues and several competing definitions of environmental security. The reliance
on previous scholarship is, however, also one of this paper’s greatest limitations, as scholarship
on Sino-Kazakh relations is severely limited. Furthermore, the scholarship that does exist tends
to focus separately on Xinjiang, oil, or water, rather than on the three issues simultaneously.
There is little supporting analysis on how the issues interact and how they are driving politics in
the region. This project hopes to fill this gap at least in part and to suggest valuable future areas
for additional research.
6
Chapter 1: Xinjiang
Strategic Diversity
The populous societies that have formed the civilizational cores of world history lie
around the rim of the continent. Xinjiang lies between them, astride the steppe and
desert bands, and roughly equidistant from the population cores of China, India
and the Mediterranean (Millward 2007:4)
Known officially as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), Xinjiang is
steeped in history and full of full of apparent contradictions and extremes. As China’s
westernmost extremity, the region has long had one foot in the Confucian culture of East Asia
and one foot planted firmly in that of Islamic Central Asia. Owing to the region’s long
association with Silk Road-era trade and migration, Xinjiang is host to a diverse community of
Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Han Chinese, among other ethnicities. Comprising 45
percent of the region’s population in 2000, the Uyghurs remain the region’s dominant ethnic
group, though the Han Chinese are increasingly prevalent, accounting for nearly 41 percent of
the population in 2000 (Ma 2008:4; Millward 2007: 4,5). Yet, at the same time, the region
remains sparsely populated, with its nearly 20 million inhabitants making up less than 2 percent
of the country’s 1.3 billion people.
With such ethnic diversity comes, also, wide disparities in wealth that make Xinjiang at
once both one of China’s richest and its poorest regions. Generally speaking, Han Chinese are
concentrated in northern Xinjiang, in more modern cities such as Urumqi and Karamay, while
the Uyghurs and other ethnic groups dominate the southern Tarim Basin and ancient cities such
as Kashgar. Coincidently, wealth in Xinjiang is also highly polarized along this north-south axis.
Southern Xinjiang, with a 95 percent non-Han Chinese population, has a per capita income half
that of Xinjiang as a whole (Bequelin 2004:372, cited Millward 2007:305).
Such socioeconomic dynamics extend, furthermore, to the rural areas. Though poverty,
generally remains “the rule in [the] rural area,” with 1.3 million farmers subsisting on less than
RMB6 (US$0.80) per day, rural incomes in the north are more than double southern Xinjiang’s
rural income of RMB 1,320, with an average income of RMB 2,666 (Roldao 2005:11; Moeller
2002:16). Such a socioeconomic situation contrasts starkly with the region’s booming urban
centers, where government and professional jobs are concentrated, which help to push the
region’s GDP per capita up to more than RMB14,871 (List ????). Though income statistics
separated on the basis of ethnicity are unavailable, the fact that Han Chinese are overwhelmingly
concentrated in the north and then even more so in urban centers, means that they enjoy a
significantly higher standard of living than non-Han Chinese groups.
Partially responsible for Xinjiang’s growing, albeit stratified, wealth is Xinjiang’s rich
deposits of oil, natural gas, and other valuable minerals hidden beneath the region’s deserts and
fertile grasslands. Though Xinjiang’s shifting sands have long been known to be rich in
petroleum, four significant oil fields and 13 oil-bearing formations were discovered in Xinjiang’s
Tarim Basin between 1991 and 2001 (Roldao 2005:11). Such discoveries have redrawn the
economics of Xinjiang’s far-flung petrochemical industry and catapulted the region to the
forefront of Chinese oil production. In 2007, Xinjiang produced 43.3 million tons of oil
equivalent - enough to surpass the Heilongjiang region for the first time as China’s largest
7
producer of oil and gas (Schicor 2008:71). The bulk of Xinjiang’s production is shipped
eastward to power the country’s energy-hungry urban population centers, with much of that
being shipped via the first West-East Gas Pipeline, which stretches some 4,000 kilometers from
the Tarim Basin to Shanghai.
A warming world and the changing global economics of carbon have also shifted
attention to Xinjiang’s sun-scorched deserts and windswept valleys, veritable goldmines of
untapped solar and wind energy. The region is already home to China’s largest wind farm and
Beijing’s official estimate puts Xinjiang’s potential wind power resources at some 34,000 MW,
an amount which could prove invaluable in ameliorating China’s persistent energy shortages and
insulating the country against future oil crises and price shocks (Roldao 2005:5, 14). Put into
context, “if China develops even one-half of its conservatively estimated wind resources, it could
generate…about one-fifth of the country’s current demand” (Lew 2001, cited in Roldao 2005:15).
Thus, while Xinjiang currently figures prominently in Beijing’s carbon-centric energy
framework, its extreme climate ensures the province will remain central to China’s energy
security in an increasingly carbon-constrained world economy.
In terms of China’s future energy security, which will be discussed in greater detail
below, Xinjiang is crucial. China became a net-importer of oil in 1993 and is quickly on its way
to becoming the world’s largest consumer and importer of oil in the very near future. As just
noted, Xinjiang is China’s biggest domestic source of oil and gas, a fact which will take on
greater importance as the production of established oil and gas centers, such as Daqing, begin to
decline. From a strategic perspective, such domestic sources of oil are invaluable, as they are
insulated from the vicissitudes of international economic and political relations. Xinjiang,
moreover, is also becoming the transit point for rapidly increasing energy imports from
Kazakhstan and Central Asia.
Comprising fully one-sixth of Chinese territory, Xinjiang is likewise of tremendous
military and strategic importance to Beijing. With its extreme isolation, Xinjiang was a natural
choice for China’s nuclear testing and research installations. Known as the Lop Nor Nuclear
Testing Base, the 100,000 square-kilometer base was the site of 45 nuclear tests between 1964
and 1966. It is thought to currently be home to China’s nuclear weapons training center and to
also house a portion of the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile (Lop 1998). When eastern
China’s population density, the tense political situation in Tibet and China’s lack of potential
offshore testing sights are taken into consideration, Xinjiang is one of the few possible locations
for China’s nuclear installations.
Given the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s (XUAR) natural-resource wealth and
Xinjiang’s broad strategic significance, Xinjiang is integral to the future of China as envisioned
by the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP). Xinjiang will not only help to fuel China’s rise
to great power status as both an energy producer and a transit point, but it is also home to some
of China’s most valuable military installations and central to China’s goal to carve out a regional
sphere of influence. As will be discussed below, Xinjiang is also a central concern to Beijing in
terms of domestic stability. Instability is not only a concern due to any economic or social
impacts, but also because it is feared that any serious separatism or move for independence in
Xinjiang will embolden similar movements in Tibet, Taiwan and even potentially Inner
Mongolia (Dwyer 2005:107).
8
The secession of any region, furthermore, not only threatens the existence of modern
China in terms of territorial integrity, but also in terms of national identity, which is explicitly
premised on being a multiethnic state. As a result, any secession would call into question
China’s claims to being anything more than a Han Chinese nation-state and, in turn, undermine
its legitimacy in other historically non-Han Chinese regions. As Chinese policy makers fear a
“domino effect,” where an open move for independence by one region would be followed by
similar moves in the others, stability in Xinjiang is taken as vitally important to national security
and the CCP’s ruling mandate.
A Disputed History
As the above introduction demonstrates, Xinjiang’s diversity makes it one of China’s
strategically essential provinces. The XUAR’s rich geography and geology are home not only to
important Chinese military investments, but also to substantial energy and natural resource
wealth, while the region’s diverse ethnic heritage is integral to modern China’s multiethnic selfimage. These non-Han, largely Muslim cultures, however, make Xinjiang also one of China’s
most restive and unstable regions.
Although the complex relationship between Imperial China and Central Asia dates back
thousands of years, what is important is that in the modern era, Xinjiang’s nationalist Uyghurs
look back to the short-lived East Turkestan Republic (ETR) of the 1930’s and 1940’s as a model
for the creation of their own ethnic nation-state. 1 It was in the more liberal post-Cultural
Revolution political climate of the 1980’s, a period in which Xinjiang Muslims were even
permitted to take part in the Hajj, that nationalist and ethnic tensions first began to erupt to into
increasingly public dissent and separatist activities. Grievances focused not only on greater
political and religious freedoms, but also on concerns about Han Chinese migration, family
planning policies and the effects of nuclear testing in Xinjiang, concerns about the very
“survival of [the] Uyghurs as a nation” (Millward 2007:282). 2
Compounding Beijing’s uneasiness at such burgeoning dissension was the realization that
several hundred Uyghurs had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and the possibility that
they would bring the fight home to Xinjiang and stir up a destabilizing Islamic revival in the
region (Kleveman 2003:109). Consequently, the more accommodating CCP stance towards
religion that had prevailed briefly in Xinjiang during the 1980’s had all but disappeared by
1990’s. Yet, violent outbursts such as the failed Baren rebellion of April 1990, where a group
calling itself the East Turkestan Islamic Party staged violent attacks against the local police and
government, continued to become more common.
1 As
the Qing dynasty collapsed in the early 20th century and China devolved into civil war, Xinjiang enjoyed a
renewed sense of autonomy that gave birth to two short-lived East Turkestan Republics (ETR; 1933-1934, 19441949) and sowed the seeds of modern Uyghur nationalism. Xinjiang was then later absorbed into the People’s
Republic of China in 1949, the same year in which leaders of the nascent republic and national movement died in a
mysterious plane crash on their way to Beijing to negotiate the ETR’s future (Millward 2007).
2
Though more recent, the expansion of Xinjiang’s energy industry and the reality that much of the region’s energy
wealth is shipped eastward to the predominately Han Chinese coastal regions, combined with existing
socioeconomic disparities, has likewise contributed to the sentiment that region’s historically dominant ethnic
communities are not benefiting from the exploitation of its natural wealth (Gifford 2007).
9
Several years later, on February 5, 1997, authorities in Xinjiang were rocked by the
Ghulja riots, in which street protests against the outlawing of mäshräp, a local Islamic-inspired
organization designed to combat alcoholism amongst unemployed Uyghur youth, coincided with
a separate protest over the recent arrest of two Uyghur Islamic students. Though reports vary,
the protesters appear to have clashed with police in several places, leading to looting, attacks
against Han Chinese and destroyed vehicles. Then, On February 25, 1997, less than three weeks
after what was one of Xinjiang’s largest public demonstrations, three bombs exploded on buses
in the provincial capital Urumqi, killing nine and injuring twenty-eight others – another two
bombs failed to explode (Millward 2007: 327, 332-333).
This brief outline inherently simplifies the issue of Uyghur and ethnic unrest in Xinjiang.
Though a more thorough analysis of the roots and details of ethnic relations and politics in
modern Xinjiang does raise important concerns about ethnic equality and religious tolerance, the
key issue is that such unrest has emerged and has and will continue to inform Beijing’s political
agenda in the region. In essence, the rising tide of social unrest and increasingly brazen violence
in Xinjiang helped to convince Beijing that the XUAR’s simmering ethnic dissent represented
one of the biggest threats to internal stability and, thereby, the CCP’s ruling mandate.
10
Chapter 2: Peace through Prosperity
Neighborhood Watch
With the mainstreaming of the human rights movement in the U.S. and Europe in the
post-Cold War era, the Uyghur cause and China’s crackdown against Uyghur separatism quickly
became internationalized. International human rights institutions such as Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report all began to take
an interest in developments in Xinjiang, helping to fuel Beijing’s suspicions of external support
for the Uyghur cause. Such protestations against foreign meddling were reinforced by genuine
evidence of a growing security threat in China’s Central Asian neighbors, areas that lay outside
the reach of China’s police apparatus. Central Asia is home to an estimated one million Uyghur
émigrés, with the many of those concentrated near China’s borders in Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan. As Ma Guan (2008) highlights, the exiled Uyghur population has not only proffered
material support to the national movement in Xinjiang, but also sought to take advantage of their
comparative political freedom to give an international voice to the Uyghur cause (6).
The Uyghur issue is compounded further by the sense of solidarity shared by the recently
independent ethnic groups of Central Asia, such as the Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz, whose
ethnicities are simultaneously represented as not insignificant minority populations in Xinjiang
(Swanstroem 2005: 574). With their own experiences as minority groups under the Soviet Union,
the majority of Central Asians are generally supportive of the Uyghur cause (Ma 2008:7). Given
such ethnic nuances, Nikolas Swanstroem argues that Beijing’s concern that Central Asian-style
“ethno-religious” nationalism might seep across the region’s porous borders and give rise to a
similar militant Islamic-Uyghur nationalist movement in Xinjiang is quite real (Swanstroem
2005: 574). Such concerns were given further weight when it came to light that 50 Uyghurs had
received military training in then Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, before then being transferred
on to China via several Central Asian states (Cornell and Swanstroem 23 Oct 2001, cited in
Swanstroem 2005:575). As opposed to Beijing’s previous concerns about radicalized Uyghyrs
independently returning from the insurgency in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, this case
demonstrated the degree of active support for and coordination by expatriate Uyghyrs in
neighboring Central Asia.
Beijing thus quickly realized that that the issue of Uyghur separatism transcended
political borders, demanding an internationalized response. The ascent of the human rights
movement in the West threatened to tarnish China’s image and potentially create diplomatic or
trade impediments for Beijing. At the same time, the existence of a significant and vocal
expatriate Uyghur community in the newly-independent states on its western border meant that
China was not able to fully address the issue on its own and therefore needed to engage its
neighbors, or risk that not only would such expatriates use their comparative freedom to fuel a
Uyghur human rights campaign abroad, but also that they would use their political protection as
a staging-ground for Uyghur activism within China.
A Two-pronged Approach
To address the domestic and international dimensions of instability in Xinjiang, China
formulated a two-pronged approach. Xinjiang was to be more tightly integrated with Beijing
through enhanced economic development, while strengthened political, military, and economic
11
cooperation with neighboring Central Asian states would simultaneously help Beijing to address
the international dimensions (Clarke 2008, Ma 2008, Millward 2007, Schicor 2008, Swanstroem
2005).
As Yitzhak Schicor (2008) notes, though, engaging Central Asia economically and
politically posed a fundamental problem for China, in that opening the borders to facilitate
economic interaction served to undermine Beijing’s control of the flow of people, information
and goods into Xinjiang (58). Beijing needed not only the tacit support of Central Asia’s
governments for its campaign against Uyghur separatism, but also their explicit cooperation.
Beijing thus made the significant decision to “open” Xinjiang and encourage Central Asian
cooperation. There was, though, in the 1990’s no existent regional multilateral platform to
address such multinational security and economic concerns. Beijing’s diplomatic initiative
therefore took the form of initiating an informal grouping of regional actors known originally as
the “Shanghai Five” (SF). Consisting of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan,
the major actors in the expat Uyghur nationalist movement, the SF officially came into being on
April 26, 1996 (Millward 2007:331). 3
What is important is not the organizational development of the grouping or its specific
policies, but the fact that it was initiated largely by Beijing. As Schicor (2008) points out, by the
time the SF and the SCO were formed, domestic terrorism or separatism did not particularly
threaten the governing mandate of Central Asian governments and combating them was marginal
issue for them at best. China itself was by the same token much less concerned about the
destabilizing effects of the “three evils” of separatism, terrorism and extremism on Central Asian
states themselves than it was about activist émigré Uyghur communities and the potential
spillover of terrorism into Xinjiang (59). Cooperation was thus more a means for Beijing to
bolster its regional influence and to pressure to Central Asian governments to crack down on the
Uyghur communities within their own countries. Russian Minister of Defense Anatoly
Serdyukov highlighted this fact when he explained the SCO is an organization created “to
combat terrorism and nothing else” (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, June 27 2007, cited in
Schicor 2008:60).
Given Beijing’s historic opposition to multilateralism, the significance of the SCO cannot
be overstated and should be seen as an indicator of BJ’s analysis of both the importance of
Xinjiang and the gravity of the threat to it. It is also important because by singling out
multinational security and anti-terrorism cooperation, China’s strategy highlights the
international nature of the nationalist Uyghur movement, including the salience of neighboring
states to China’s own stability.
Opening the West
As mentioned previously, China’s response to growing unrest in Xinjiang was a twopronged approach diplomatically to counter Uyghur separatism abroad and to mitigate separatist
sentiment in Xinjiang through development at home. As just described, China’s diplomatic
3
Given its proximity to Afghanistan and other SF member nations, Uzbekistan was granted member status at the
2001 SF summit in Shanghai, briefly transforming the SF framework into the “Shanghai Six,” before the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) officially superseded the grouping on June 15, 2001 (Brief 2008).
12
initiative took the form of an unprecedented experiment in regional collective security that
helped China to pressure its neighbors to crack down on Uyghurs living in their country, while
contributing to the cross-border economic expansion that has further magnified Beijing’s
leverage in the region.
The domestic initiative, conversely, manifest itself in a massive state-led investment and
development project launched initially in 1992 as the “Open the North-West” project, which later
grew to encompass much of China’s underdeveloped western provinces with unveiling of a
similarly-styled “Great Development of the West” (xibu da kaifa) initiative in 2000. 4 From the
outset, Chinese leaders made little effort to conceal the underlying goal of the Great
Development of the West, namely to address the threat of social unrest through increased
prosperity. As early as 1980, Deng Xiaoping and the highest echelons of the Chinese leadership
were expressing that improving the living standards of ethnic minorities was an important means
to curb support for separatism (Millward 2007:279). This policy standpoint was reiterated once
again in 1996, when an influential Chinese official confronted with the upswing in separatist
violence in Xinjiang wrote that “only a strong economy and improved material and cultural
living standards can show the advantages of socialism…and promote the unification of all
peoples” (Economic, cited in Millward 2007: 296).
Beijing’s investment in Xinjiang via the Great Development of the West is substantial, for
that matter, even by international standards. Millward (2007) estimates Xinjiang’s share of the
Great Development of the West at more than RMB 900 billion (USD130 billion), earmarked
mainly for infrastructure projects and telecommunications links designed to integrate the farflung region with China’s booming coastal markets (299). Before proceeding into an analysis of
the project and its relevance to Sino-Kazakh relations, it is worth taking a moment to consider
the size of Beijing’s RMB 900 billion outlay, which is equivalent to more than one-fifth of
Beijing’s recently unveiled USD 586 billion economic stimulus package designed to “buy”
China out of looming economic slowdowns and social unrest. In addition, a good portion of the
USD 586 billion stimulus package were previously earmarked funds and do not represent
additional spending, which makes the Great Development of the West outlay look all the more
impressive. RMB 900 billion is a significant sum for an industrialized economy, let alone a
developing country where hundreds of millions continue to live in poverty.
Beijing’s authority is broadly taken to be contingent on sustained economic expansion and
Xinjiang is seen as the cornerstone of not only China’s greater social stability, but also of the
energy supply created by such national growth. From this perspective, the fact that growth has
been singled out as a panacea for instability in Xinjiang inherently makes it an overriding goal.
As the economic and political manifestation of that goal of stability through growth, ensuring the
success of The Great Development of the West is therefore absolutely paramount. Klare (2002)
argues that resource theory is particularly germane in countries where legitimacy is explicitly
linked to economic growth. By the logic of resource theory, then, Beijing should react strongly
to any resource conflicts or scarcities that stand to hinder the Great Development of the West.
4
While the latter Great Development of the West encompasses not only Xinjiang, but also Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia,
Shaanxi, Tibet, Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou and the urban centre Chongqing, this essay will focus on the Great
Development of the West in so far as it relates to Xinjiang and Sino-Kazakh water and oil relations (Holbig
2004:351, cited in Moeller 2006:13).
13
Twin Pillars
Since the early 1990’s, Beijing’s development strategy has focused on one “white” and one
“black,” in reference to oil and cotton, the twin pillars of Xinjiang’s economy. According to
Robert Moeller (2006) the dual-pillar approach was conceived to boost provincial revenues via
the expansion of the lucrative petrochemical industry, while also raising the living standards of
Xinjiang’s ethnic minorities, who remain engaged primarily in the rural economy (23). With
such explicit backing from the central government, Xinjiang’s acreage under cotton production
doubled between 1990 and 1997 and its annual cotton yields rose from a meager 55,000 metric
tons in 1978 to 1.5 million tons in 1998 (Zhang Jianjiang 2001, cited in Woodward 2007:299).
Given the magnitude of such successes, cotton production once again factored prominently
in the Great Development of the West campaign. As Moeller (2006) explains, cotton’s inclusion
in the Great Development of the West agenda derives not only from its relevance to rural
farmers, though, but also due to its close association with the Xinjiang Production and
Construction Army Corps (XPCC). The XPCC is a vast military-styled hierarchical structure
that was originally designed to promote land reclamation, defense against the former Soviet
Union, and settlement in strategic regions during the Cultural Revolution. Significantly, the
XPCC and several other bingtuan that have persevered into the 21st century answer solely to the
CCP and Beijing (Millward 2007:253).
According to Moeller (2006), given the region’s political and geographic distance from
Beijing and its complex ethnic politics, such direct allegiance is central to Beijing’s Xinjiang
policy and it is primarily through the XPCC that the Great Development of the West project has
become a conduit for Beijing to exert control over Xinjiang (19). The XPCC’s 2.5 million
members represent more than 10 percent of the XUAR’s total population and are nearly 90
percent Han Chinese. The XPCC is also one of the region’s largest landholders, cultivating
some of 16 million mu of land - nearly one-third of the region’s arable land (Becquelin
2004:360,367, cited in Moeller 2007:20-21). According to one news report, the XPCC produces
40 percent of the region’s cotton output, a third of its oilseed production and nearly half of its
sugar beet crop, while also turning out RMB 4 billion in sales as the world’s largest producer of
tomato paste. More importantly, with its strict allegiance to Beijing and broad geographic reach,
it is also the XPCC who guards the growing network of pipelines that shuttle Xinjiang and
Central Asian oil and gas to China’s coast (O’Neill 2008).
With such a large population and broad economic interests, the XPCC is easily one of
Xinjiang’s wealthiest and most influential entities. Moeller captures the political significance of
the XPCC’s de facto autonomy when he writes that:
“…the XPCC, a Han organization, has more autonomy in the Xinjiang Uighur
Autonomous Region than the XUAR’s Uighur residents through the administration
of its own internal affairs, its own public security apparatus, jurisdiction over its
own legal, administrative and business structures, as well as independently
administered educational, health, and judicial systems” (2006:22)
14
The XPCC, thus, is a ready-made platform for Beijing to implement development and
migration policies, exert political control, and expand its influence over the Xinjiang economy
and society. As such, it should come as no surprise that Beijing has seen it politically expedient
to cultivate the XPCC as its political and economic arbiter in the region. One of Beijing’s chief
policy mechanisms to strengthen the XPCC’s relative position has been an unwavering emphasis
on expanding agriculture, especially the XPCC’s staple crop, cotton. Of the 30 Great
Development of the West projects earmarked in the tenth five-year plan (2001-2005), three dealt
specifically with promoting Xinjiang’s emergence as an agricultural base (Moeller 2006:23).
Given such explicit government backing, between 1997 and 2005, Xinjiang’s annual cotton
harvest rose by a further 250,000 metric tons to 1.75 million.
Cotton, therefore, is an invaluable component of Beijing’s plan to both develop and pacify
Xinjiang. The majority of Xinjiang’s non-Han Chinese ethnicities remain rural dwellers and
nomads, and cotton farming has been identified as a key means to directly improve their
livelihood and thereby reduce such groups’ grievances - cotton already accounts for a
disproportionate 40 to 70 percent of rural income depending on the region (Millward 2007:299).
Equally important, Beijing’s most direct policy lever in the region, the XPCC, is closely wedded
to cotton production and any expansion (or contraction) in cotton production stands to
correspondingly affect the bingtuan’s political and economic leverage in the region. In other
words, what is good for cotton is good for Beijing, owing to not only its ostensible benefits for
rural Xinjiang, but also to its significance to the XPCC.
Head Westward
Another subtle, but important, component of Beijing’s Great Development of the West
campaign and its goal to pacify Xinjiang has been the implicit policy to encourage the westward
migration of Han Chinese migrants. Such a policy accomplishes two goals simultaneously,
namely relieving population pressure along the densely-populated coast and altering Xinjiang’s
ethnic makeup. According to Nicolas Bequelin (2000), Chinese leaders had decided by the late
1990’s that development alone was not enough to alleviate ethnic dissent and, therefore, sought
to alter the region’s ethnic balance through mechanisms such as direct land grants to Han
Chinese (cited Millward 2007:308).
The result of such pro-migration policies is an unnaturally-high population growth rate.
Based on China’s 2000 census, Xinjiang’s annual population growth rate was nearly 0.40 percent
higher than its natural growth rate of 1.28 percent, suggesting a marked population inflow
(Toops 2004:247-2008, cited Millward 311). According to the state-run newspaper People’s
Daily, Xinjiang’s population is expected to grow by an additional 3.5 million by 2015, reaching
an estimated 23.47 million, leading even the state-run newspaper to warn of a looming “serious
population situation” (Xinjiang 2000).
Leaving aside ethical considerations, such a policy is also disconcerting from an
environmental perspective. Such pro-migration policies mean that Beijing must ensure that
Xinjiang’s economy continues to expand, providing the economic incentives to attract and
satisfy such migrants. Central authorities have recently sought to shift China’s textile production
base from the coastal regions inland. Moeller’s observation that Han Chinese migrants tend to
15
dominate industrial agriculture and related manufacturing in Xinjiang, both within the XPCC and
without, suggests that a further motivation for shifting such textile industry is to provide a ready
supply of work for would-be inbound Han Chinese migrants (Moeller 2006:29). Given this
added dynamic, cotton production once again takes on an outsized socioeconomic role, as it
thereby becomes necessary for both attracting and retaining Xinjiang-bound migrants.
Cotton and migration have been identified, therefore, as the primary means to encourage
development and stability in Xinjiang. The crux of the issue as it relates to resource theory and
conflict is the simple fact that Beijing has identified these as its chief policy tools. This
essentially means cotton will continue to receive preferential treatment from both central and
provincial governments for the foreseeable future, regardless of any environmental degradation
this might entail.
16
Chapter 3: Black Gold
An “Energized” Foreign Policy
The other stated pillar of Xinjiang’s economy, namely oil, and its role in Xinjiang needs to
be put in the context of China’s overall foreign policy and energy security. Though Xinjiang’s
oil and gas reserves are significant, they are not that large when viewed from a global or costeffectiveness perspective. Moreover, gas and oil in Xinjiang are located far from the population
centers and major energy markets along the eastern coast. Consequently, when viewed
independently, the economic rationale for developing Xinjiang’s domestic energy supplies is
questionable. As Ma (2008) highlights, the addition of significant imports from Kazakhstan are
important in making the marginally efficient oil fields in Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin more
economically viable. The development of Xinjiang’s oil industry is furthermore interrelated with
Beijing’s drive to secure oil and gas concessions from Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states
and, hence, will be analyzed largely in so far is it relates to China’s Central Asian initiatives.
As a major energy importer, securing access to sufficient energy supplies is crucial to
ensuring that the Chinese miracle continues. After decades as an oil-exporting nation, China
became an oil importer in 1993, after which its net imports have grown rapidly. According to
the International Energy Agency (IEA), China’s primary energy demand will double between
2005 and 2030, making it the world’s largest energy consumer soon after 2010. Moreover, as
China’s domestic petroleum production peaks in the near future, China’s net oil imports are
expected to jump from 2006’s 3.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) to more than 13 mb/d by 2030
(International 2008:1). According to the official English-language newspaper China Daily,
China was already importing 47 percent of its oil supply in 2007 (China’s Thirst)
What is more, according to Yamuguchi and Cho (2003), China’s use of natural gas will
rise precipitously in the near future, as the country tries to wean itself of dirty coal. Natural gas’s
share as a percentage of China’s total primary energy consumption is expected to grow from a
mere 2.5 percent in 2000 to 12.5 percent by 2020 (Yamuguchi and Cho 2003:2). As a result,
China’s consumption of natural gas will expand by an estimated 1,000 percent by 2020 (Klare
2002:115). China’s domestic gas reserves and industry will have trouble keeping pace with such
growth in demand, meaning that the country will import ever-larger quantities of natural gas in
the future. According to one report, by 2010 China will be importing at least 20 billion cubic
meters (Bcm) of gas, or nearly 1/5 of its total consumption (Jiang 2006).
China’s skyrocketing demands for energy, in particular oil and gas, and the country’s
comparatively limited domestic resources, therefore, mean that China’s economic growth is
increasingly dependent on foreign sources of energy. That dependence, similarly, has raised
concerns in Beijing about China’s energy security, or lack thereof. According to Philip
Andrews-Speed et al. (2005), China’s chief domestic policy is stability, which requires economic
growth and therefore is dependent on energy. China’s dearth of domestic energy supplies, thus,
inherently makes energy security a central concern for the Chinese leadership.
Importantly, in its quest to secure such stable supplies, China has tended to favor a
“strategic” approach to energy security, preferring state-led investment in energy interests abroad
17
and closer political connections with exporting nations, as opposed to a “market” approach,
where the emphasis is on ensuring liberalized and efficient international energy markets (Philip
Andrews-Speed et al., 2002). From the ICG’s (2008) perspective, it remains difficult for the
Chinese leadership to entrust such a crucial component of security to an “amorphous
international system…dominated by Western importing countries, global oil companies and
often unstable exporting nations” (China’s Thirst 8). China’s drive for “equity oil,” or oil that
results from commercial concessions in physical oil supplies, is thus rooted in the belief that
national oil companies can be “pressed into service” should the world market prove unable or
unwilling to meet the country’s energy needs (China’s Thirst, 2008:8).
Given China’s preference for a strategic approach to energy security, it is natural that
energy security is emerging as a core tenet of China’s 21st century foreign policy. In this sense,
energy policy and foreign policy are often indivisible. Beijing routinely offers various political
and economic incentives at a foreign policy level, while using its control over state-owned
companies such as China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and China Petroleum &
Chemical Corporation (SINOPEC) to offer lucrative investments or cooperation.
Like much of the rest of industrialized world, the Middle East is China’s largest supplier
of oil, with more than 40 percent of imports arriving from the Middle East in 2007 (China’s Oil
2008). The post-9/11 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq deeply unsettled Beijing, though,
raising concerns both about U.S. influence over the country’s energy security, as well as about
the overall stability of the region itself. The political standoff between Washington and Tehran,
China’s second largest oil supplier, further contributes to Beijing’s unease. Moreover, all imports
from the region must pass through areas controlled by the U.S. Navy, especially the geographic
bottlenecks at the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca, respectively located in the Persian
Gulf and between the Pacific and Indian Oceans. In the event of confrontation over Taiwan or
any other future dispute, Beijing is concerned that the U.S. could move to restrict the country’s
energy imports from the region by means of its overwhelming naval power (Lee 2005:270).
Thus, in recent years, China has invested significantly in diversifying its network of
energy suppliers. Beijing has strengthened relations with Sudan, Nigeria and other African
nations, as well as with Iran. Such suppliers, however, present the same problems as more
traditional energy-exporters in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, in that oil exports from
Africa likewise must traverse U.S.-controlled seas. Though there has long been talk about a
Pakistan-Xinjiang pipeline, which would largely mitigate the strategic danger imposed by the
Strait of Malacca, there have been no concrete agreements to date. The increasingly volatile
political situation in Pakistan makes the likelihood of such a pipeline even more remote (Kazi
2002). In addition, although there are ground-routes leading out of Iran, they must currently pass
northward through Russian-controlled pipelines. While Russia is seen as a more stable source of
supply than the Middle East, Russia has repeatedly demonstrated that it is not afraid to use its
energy resources to further its national interests, having previously restricted Kazakh exports on
several occasions and also halted or severely reduced gas supplies to Europe in 2007 and 2008.
Beijing was further stung by its 2004 loss of a heated diplomatic battle between Japan,
China and Russia over the course of the Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean Pipeline (ESPO), which
will eventually deliver 1.6 mb/d of Siberian oil to the Pacific coast (Russia 2008). China had
18
lobbied vigorously for a direct line to its oil production center at Daqing, but was forced to settle
for a spur-line to be built south to China at a later date. China’s failure in the high-stakes
pipeline negotiations has raised concerns in Beijing that Moscow is seeking to curtail its
influence and rise to great power status (Lee 2005). Beijing, therefore, is loath to rely too
heavily on oil supplies that must transit through Russian-controlled pipelines.
Consequently, Kazakhstan is the only major energy-exporter whence direct imports
nominally free of both U.S. and Russian influence are possible, as it directly borders Xinjiang.
Iron Triangle: Kazakhstan, Xinjiang and China
“The discovery of the Kashagan field…has shaken up the geopolitical balance in
the Caspian region, ushering in a new and dangerous round in the great world
power scramble for raw materials and pipelines. Kazakhstan, only a few years
ago a backward Soviet republic, is now poised to become one of the world’s
largest oil exporters” (Kleveman 2003:75).
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan emerged as owner of one of the
world’s largest reserves of oil and natural gas. While estimates of the country’s total energy
reserves vary widely, the country’s reserves are without a doubt considerable. In terms of oil,
according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Information Administration,
Kazakhstan sits on anywhere between 9 and 40 billion barrels of proven reserves, putting it on
par with Libya in terms of reserves (Kazakhstan 2008). As investment in the Kazakh oil sector
increases, it is likely that its recoverable reserves will prove substantially higher. A separate
DOE estimate even put the country’s potential oil reserves at some 235 billion barrels (Klare
2002:85). Such optimistic predictions are fueled by the recent discovery of some of the world’s
largest oil fields, buried deep beneath the Caspian Sea off Kazakhstan’s coast. The Kashagan
field, for example, holds proven reserves of some 13 billion barrels of oil alone, with potential
reserves of up to 38 billion barrels, making it the largest oilfield outside of the Middle East,
while the country’s Tengiz field boasts recoverable reserves of up to 9 billion barrels
(Kazakhstan 2008).
What is important, however, is not the country’s final proven reserves, but the fact that its
production and exports are set to rise significantly (Klare 2002). In 2007, Kazakhstan produced
1.45 mb/d, while only consuming 250,00 barrels per day (bbl/d). As Kazakhstan’s own energy
consumption is not expected to grow exponentially, the country will have ever more excess
production for export as existing fields reach peak-capacity and new fields are discovered. The
Tengiz oil field, for example, is estimated to produce 700,000 bbl/d by the end of the decade,
compared with its current production of 280,000 bbl/d, while the output of the Kashagan oilfield
may eventually reach 1.3 million bbl/d after commencing production sometime after 2011
(Kazakhstan 2008). The country is also home to several other multi-billion barrel oil fields that
are just being developed, such as Karachaganak and Kurmangazy, which ensure that the
country’s future production will be substantially higher than it is today. Even if Lutz Kleveman’s
(2003) assertion that by 2020 Kazakhstan may be exporting 10 million bbl/d to the world market
proves overly optimistic, the country represents one of the world’s few significant latent sources
of supply and will exert a profound effect on world energy markets and global politics.
19
Having joined the international scramble for petroleum relatively late, with much of the
world’s resources already sown up by Western MNCs and long-term supply contracts,
Kazakhstan represents one of the few remaining options for China to gain access to equity oil
and diversify its oil supply. Unsurprisingly, policy makers in Beijing realized early the strategic
and geographic importance of Kazakhstan’s petroleum reserves and have invested considerable
economic and political resources in securing oil supplies in the country. The country is also set
to become a major transit point for China-bound gas from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which
will be examined below.
China’s investments in Kazakhstan’s petroleum industry began in 1997, when CNPC
acquired a 60 percent share in what was then Kazakhstan’s 3rd largest oil field, Aktubinsk, for
USD 4.3 billion. From Kleveman’s (2003) perspective, USD 4.3 billion was far above market
price, a feature that he argues has come to define Beijing’s oil diplomacy, as the state-owned oil
giants do not operate on the same profit motive as other actors (90). China’s initial foray into
Kazakhstan was quickly followed up with a controlling interest in Uzen, one of Kazakhstan’s
largest fields at the time. In 2002, CNPC then bought out its Kazakh partner in the Aktubinsk
field for an additional USD 150 million, while in 2003 the company purchased Saudi Arabia’s
Nimir Petroleum and ChevronTexaco’s respective stakes in the Texaco North Buzachi field, with
estimated reserves upwards of 1.5 billion barrels (Lee 2005:271-272). 5
China increased its Kazakhstan holdings once again in 2005, when it purchased Canada’s
Petrokazakhstan for USD 4.2 billion, which owns the rights to several hundred million barrels of
proven reserves in Kazakhstan (CNPC 2005). China also gained access to one of the country’s
largest fields when CNOOC and CNPCC signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in
2005 with Kazakstan’s state-owned oil company KazMunaiGas to jointly develop the Darkhan
oil field, which has estimated reserves of 11 billion barrels. In 2007, the state-owned CITIC
Group also received Kazakh and Canadian approval to purchase Canada's Nations Energy's
Karazhambas field, which has reserves of more than 400 million barrels, for USD 1.9 billion
(Christopher 2007, Kazakhstan: Major 2008). Even without factoring in a number of smaller
concessions purchased by China’s various state oil actors, China’s oil interests in Kazakhstan are
already extensive, having directly invested more than USD 10 billion for the rights to several
billion barrels of oil, not to mention the billions being invested in developing those concessions.
Such considerable outlays have made China the most prominent foreign player in
Kazakhstan’s energy sector. According to Schicor (2008), in 2006, Chinese assets in Kazakhstan
produced more that one-fourth of Kazakhstan’s total crude oil output, producing roughly 135
million barrels of crude oil, of which China’s aggregate share was approximately 72 percent.
The bulk of China’s Kazakhstan-based assets’ production, however, is not yet exported to China.
In 2007, China imported only 85,000 bbl/d from Kazakhstan, which represents less than onequarter of China’s Kazakhstan-based assets’ daily average production of 370,000 bbl/d (Schicor
2008:69-70).
5
Though it initially purchased 100 percent of all shares of the North Buzachi field, CNPC later sold 50 percent of its
shares, which are currently owned by Russia’s Lukoil (CNPC).
20
China’s oil imports from Kazakhstan are set to rise significantly with the impending
completion of the Kazakhstan-China Oil Pipeline (KCOP) in 2009. Constructed in three separate
stages, ground was broken on the first-phase of the pipeline in 2002, which runs from the major
oil-hub Atyrau on the Caspian coast to the Aktobe region in Kazakhstan. The second stage of
the KCOP running from Atasu in central Kazakhstan to Alashankou in Xinjiang, which also
connects to an existing spur to XUAR’s Dushanzi refinery, was completed in late 2005 and
began to deliver crude oil to China on July 29, 2006. The KCOP’s final leg will connect the two
existing sections, allowing for the export to China of both off-shore Caspian oil, as well as the
country’s substantial on-shore reserves (Kazakhstan 2008).
Figure 1: Source Energy Information Administration (www.eia.doe.gov)
When finally completed, the 3000 kilometer long KCOP will have the capacity to pump
400,000 bbl/d to China, though one analysis by Stratfor, a respected U.S.-based private
intelligence service, estimates that upgrades to the pipeline will eventually see the export of more
than 1 mb/d (China, Kazakhstan 2007). As the first direct oil imports into China, the KCOP
finally gives Beijing an outlet for the substantial oil being produced by Chinese-owned interests
in Kazakhstan and, if Stratfor’s analysis is correct, a substantial and comparatively secure source
of future energy imports.
21
China’s peaking domestic oil production and ongoing boom in domestic consumption
paints an ominous and dependent energy future. With striking polarities forecast for domestic
consumption and production, China will become ever more dependent on imported oil supplies
to sustain its economic growth. Moreover, given the strategic reasons enumerated above, energy
supplies from Kazakhstan are exceptionally important to Beijing, which means that China will be
sensitive to any disruption or interruption in the flow of oil form Kazakhstan. When one factors
in the added dependency entailed by Beijing’s burgeoning gas cooperation with Kazakhstan and
Central Asia, the asymmetries in power between China and its energy partners seem to lend
themselves to the sort of conflict predicted by resource theory.
Natural Gas
Natural gas is set to factor ever more prominently in China’s energy structure, as the
country simultaneously sees its energy demands rise and tries to reduce consumption of dirtier
coal. Cleaner-burning natural gas is particularly important as Beijing attempts to role back the
choking pollution that has enveloped much of China and which is beginning to fuel protests by
both urban and rural residents suffering the economic and health effects of such air pollution.
With its own limited domestic gas resources, China, too, will have to look outside its borders if it
is to be successful in its goal to phase out coal. Inevitability, China is looking to Kazakhstan and
Central Asia to help it meet its future gas needs.
With the development of Kazakhstan’s oil industry, the country’s estimated natural gas
reserves have concurrently risen. A 2007 estimate by the authoritative industry publication, Oil
and Gas Journal, put Kazakhstan’s reserves at 2.83 trillion cubic meters (Tcm), or roughly 11th
in the world. Kazakhstan, however, is not the only Central Asian nation with significant gas
reserves. Oil and Gas Journal estimates neighboring Turkmenistan’s reserves at an identical 2.3
Tcm, while Uzbekistan’s reserves are estimated at 1.84 Tcm (2007, cited Central 2007:12).
These reserves may actually prove substantially higher as future investment and new discoveries
increase the amount of recoverable reserves. In 2008, for example, a British oil and gas
company verified Turkmenistan’s claims that the recently discovered Yolotan-Osman field holds
at least 4 Tcm of natural gas, and may potentially hold up to 14 Tcm, making it one of the largest
fields in the world (Pannier 2008).
As in the case of Kazakhstan’s oil production, gas production in Central Asia is set to far
outpace domestic consumption in the near future. By 2010, Kazakhstan will be exporting an
estimated 34.5 Bcm of gas, while Turkmenistan has stated that by 2015 it intends to export 125
Bcm annually (Central 2007:17; Pannier and Magauin 2008). Due to Uzbekistan’s more closed
political climate, accurate forecasts for the country’s future gas production and exports are more
difficult, but the country currently exports upwards of 30 Bcm annually, mostly to Russia
(Uzbekistan 2009).
The Central Asian states, therefore, represent a key global source of future natural gas
supply and China has, accordingly, moved to deepen its cooperation with Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in the natural gas sector. Though its investments are not as
extensive as in petroleum, China has signed production-sharing-agreements (PSAs) to jointly
22
explore and develop several fields in Uzbekistan. In neighboring Turkmenistan, CNPC,
moreover, signed a 2007 agreement to import 30 Bcm of gas annually, a deal which also grants
China the right to develop several gas fields in the country, as well as construct a pipeline to
deliver the aforementioned gas to China (Central Asian 2008). During a summit between
Turkmenistan leader Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov and Hu Jintao in August 2008, the two
leaders signed an agreement to boost China’s annual gas imports to 40 Bcm per year (Bcm/y),
rather than the previously agreed upon 30 Bcm/y (Rewriting 2007).
Figure 2: Source Energy Information Administration Website (www.eia.doe.gov)
As mentioned above, the foundation for this developing Sino-Central Asian natural gas
cooperation is the Central Asian Gas Pipeline (CAGP), which, when finished in 2010, will
deliver Turkmen, Uzbekistani and Kazakh gas all the way to Xinjiang. Stretching from the Amu
Dar’ya gas fields in Turkmenistan, which China is helping to develop, the 2,582 kilometer
pipeline is being financed solely by CNPC at an estimated cost of USD 14 billion (Central Asian
2008). As the pipeline’s stated capacity is 30 Bcm/y, it is not clear how China’s additional gas
commitments will be transited to the country. China has also been in negotiations with
Kazakhstan about a parallel gas pipeline from Atasu to Alashankou in Xinjiang, as suggested by
proposed routes on the map above, which would ostensibly transport the 5 Bcm/y that China has
contracted to purchase from Kazakhstan, as well as re-routing any excess Uzbekistani or
Turkmen exports. One might also note that the CAGP terminates very close to Iran, one of
China’s strongest Middle Eastern allies and energy suppliers, as well as owner of the world’s
second largest proven reserves of natural gas. This thus leaves open the possibility that China
may try to extend the pipeline southward in the future, finally allowing Iranian energy to
circumvent Russian and U.S. influence.
23
When finished, the CAGP will tie into China’s second West-East Pipeline similarly
slated for completion in 2010, which will deliver 30 Bcm/y of natural gas to the metropolis of
Guangzhou, some 6,500 kilometers away. Excluding domestic spur-lines, the core pipeline is
expected to cost USD 10.2 billion, which brings the combined total of the CAGP and the WestEast pipeline to more than USD 24 billion (Feng 2007).
(In)security
China, therefore, is constructing an extensive and increasingly diversified network of
Central Asian energy suppliers. Beijing and its state-owned energy companies have invested
tens of billions of USD in Central Asian energy concessions and tens of billions of dollars more
in the infrastructure necessary to bring those supplies to China’s energy-hungry coast. In the not
so distant future, China may be receiving upwards of 1 mb/d of petroleum from Central Asia,
primarily from Kazakhstan, which would represent nearly one-third of its 2006 imports and just
under 10 percent of its expected 2030 imports. In addition to this, Beijing can expect to see an
annual inflow of potentially more than 40 Bcm/y in natural gas from the region, an amount
equivalent to more than half of its total 2007 consumption of natural gas (China 2009).
On one hand, while such energy imports will not single-handedly secure China’s energy
future, they will help to enhance its energy security in a strategic sense. The aforementioned
imports arrive not from the volatile Middle East, nor do they transit either U.S.-controlled oceans
or Russian-owned pipelines. On the other hand, while the relationship reduces China’s
dependency on other energy suppliers, it simultaneously creates dependencies vis-à-vis
Kazakhstan (and to a lesser extent vis-à-vis Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). While oil-tankers
and oil-cars can be re-routed, pipelines are immobile and difficult and expensive to replace. Not
only do Kazakhstan’s own energy exports to China transit the pipelines on its territory, but so too
do the substantial natural gas exports of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
Kazakhstan could thus cause acute and immediate economic and political disruptions in
both Xinjiang and China by restricting or stopping the flow of energy resources across the
border. Though the probability of such a scenario might be low, any interruption in imports from
Central Asia would send shockwaves through the Xinjiang oil industry. As mentioned
previously, the economic argument for the expansion of Xinjiang’s petrochemical industry rests
largely on the availability of sufficient imports from Central Asia and, therefore, any interruption
in planned exports would undermine the efficiency of Xinjiang’s petrochemical industry. As this
would have parallel adverse effects on Xinjiang’s economy, which Beijing has singled out as an
overriding goal, the mutual dependencies created between Kazakhstan and China by oil seems to
ironically both mitigate the potential for conflict, but also to raise the likelihood that Beijing
would respond strongly to any stoppage by Kazakhstan.
Given the importance of Xinjiang and the potential for conflict as discussed above, it is
therefore alarming that the very same development Beijing has been pushing as an answer for
stability in XJ is undermining the ecological foundation for such stability. This furthermore
stands to exacerbate the sort of water scarcities that Helga Haftendorn (2000) argues give rise to
resource conflict. As these scarcities are not confined solely to Xinjiang, but will also affect
neighboring Kazakhstan to an arguably even larger degree, they seem to work against the
24
mitigating dependencies created by oil and conversely raise the possibility for conflict over both
water and oil.
Blowing In the Wind
“…the crux of Xinjiang’s human and natural ecology…turns on the relationship
between numbers of people and supplies of water…” (Millward 2007:311)
Beijing’s carefully planned development and political agenda in Xinjiang contrasts starkly
with the realities of the region’s arid climate. On a fundamental level the region is ill-suited for
industrial agriculture or cotton production and the urban populations required to support them.
While the fertile desert soil is capable of record harvests of cotton and other agriculture products,
it does so only through Herculean inputs of irrigation water. According to the World Wildlife
Fund (WWF), cotton is one of the world’s thirstiest crops, requiring 550 to 950 liters of water
per square meter of area planted, which is to say that 7,000 to 29,000 liters of water are required
for each kilogram of cotton produced (Soth 1999, cited at www.panda.org). Such hydrological
resources are a significant amount for even comparatively wet regions, let alone parched
Xinjiang.
Similarly, Beijing’s ambitious plans to develop Xinjiang’s petroleum reserves and build the
XUAR into a regional petrochemical center with the planned inflow of oil and gas from
Kazakhstan and Central Asia likewise entails greater demands on the region’s already burdened
resources. Oil extraction and refinement are water intensive industries by nature and the
expansion of Xinjiang’s petrochemical industry will be require a steady supply of water,
especially when future growth in Central Asian oil imports are factored in. Outside of direct
inputs of water during refinement, developing the recently discovered Tarim and Turpan oil
fields and the petrochemical industry will also bring yet another wave of migration, urbanization,
economic growth and, in turn, intensification of water usage (Hagt 2003).
Millward’s (2006) analysis that Xinjiang receives very little precipitation annually and thus
relies almost exclusively on channeling the glacier-fed runoff of Xinjiang’s many mountain
rivers is therefore foreboding (313). As the region’s population and economy have boomed,
Xinjiang has simply diverted more and more water to meet its growing hydrological needs. Such
a hydrological solution is limited by the region’s finite runoff, which is simultaneously set to
decrease as China and Xinjiang’s glaciers recede due to global warming and desertification.
According to one recent report, Xinjiang’s river run-off is currently at historic highs, due to the
fact that melting glaciers are discharging more water than in cooler generations past. Assuming
global warming continues, at some point in the future, Xinjiang’s glaciers will shrink to the point
that runoff begins to decline in absolute terms (Watts 2009). It is particularly alarming then, that
even with river discharge at comparatively high levels, Xinjiang is already encountering
shortages.
A thorough analysis of Xinjiang’s ecological situation will follow, but what is important at
this juncture is that Xinjiang rests on a fragile and limited hydrological system at odds with the
planned development. With little precipitation, the region relies chiefly on rivers such as the
Tarim, which, unsurprisingly, are already failing to meet the region’s skyrocketing demands.
25
China’s longest inland waterway, the Tarim River, winds its way through the Taklamakan desert
on the way past nearly 8 million people. Due to over-usage, the lower reaches of the river have
all but dried up. Though Beijing recently announced the discovery of a massive underground
aquifer in Xinjiang, such finite geologic water resources will not fundamentally alter the region’s
hydrological balance in the long-run, but rather merely help to delay and moderate the worst
water shortages in the short-term (Millward 2007).
Despite these apparent hydrologic conflicts, given the precedence placed on encouraging
cotton growth and migration in Xinjiang, Beijing has had little alternative but to increase
diversions of the XUAR’s other rivers to make up for the region’s growing hydrological deficit –
including the rivers Irtsyh and Ili. As alluded to above, the contradiction is that such diversions
will allow Beijing to continue such development in the short-term, even when it is already clear
that Xinjiang’s water supplies will decline due to global warming and decreased glacial melt in
the long-term. All of this suggests that region will almost inevitably confront serious water
shortages in the future, which, bodes ill for Kazakhstan and seems to raise the probability of
conflict over Kazakhstan and China’s shared river systems.
26
Chapter 4: The River Runs Wild
Kazakhstan
As demonstrated in the preceding sections, Kazakhstan’s is one of the world’s most wellendowed petrostates, with significant reserves of both oil and gas. While such mineral wealth
has pushed Kazakhstan to the front of the world stage and raised its per capita income in terms of
purchasing power parity to more than USD 10,000, on par with similar middle income countries
like South Africa and Turkey, Kazakhstan still remains an underdeveloped, autocratic and
largely agricultural population (Kazakhstan Country 2008:27).
Since Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991, the country has been ruled by former Chairmen
of the Kazakhstan Communist Party, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Though Kazakhstan has fared
better economically under President Nazarbayev than some other post-Soviet states, especially in
Central Asia, progress towards political liberalization remains limited. A 2007 constitutional
amendment eliminated term limits for presidents and though Nazarbayev tried to blunt criticism
by pointing out that the amendment also delegated more power to the country’s elected
assembly, Nazarbayev’s party won every seat in the August 27 election - making it Kazakhstan’s
first one-party parliament since independence. Thus, Nazarbayev seems set to remain president
for the foreseeable future. Given such a political situation, the country is deemed “authoritarian”
by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), ranking 127th out of 161 countries on the EIU’s
democracy list (Kazakhstan Country 2008:7).
Despite its mineral wealth and the flourishing metropolis of Astana and Almaty,
Kazakhstan continues to retain a substantial rural population. According to a 2008 estimate by
the government of Kazakhstan, approximately 47% of the country is classified rural, a proportion
which has actually increased in the post-Soviet years as urban industry collapsed (Population
2008). Consequently, though agriculture contributes only 10 percent of Kazakhstan’s GDP, it
employs nearly one-quarter of the economically active population, which means that agriculture
actually supports a much larger proportion of the total population (McKinney 2003:16).
Furthermore, as Kazakh journalist Marat Yermukanov, highlights, agriculture is often the last
resort for much of the rural population:
“…the shocking reality is that 80% of the rural population get income less than
the minimal existence sum. For many families left without employment after the
privatization of agricultural state enterprises, the only source of income is a tiny
plot of land and some livestock.” (2002).
Agriculture, therefore, is particularly important to the basic livelihoods of a significant
proportion of Kazakhstan’s population. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), Kazakhstan’s arid climate and limited precipitation necessitate irrigation
throughout much of the country. Given the significance of agriculture to rural Kazakhstan,
ensuring a steady supply of water, in turn, takes on an added sense of urgency.
Complicating the issue of agriculture and irrigation, though, is Kazakhstan’s already
tenuous hydrological balance. Of Kazakhstan’s annual average river water resources of 100.5
27
cubic meters, only 56.5 meters originate within the country’s borders, meaning that Kazakhstan
relies on transnational river flows for more than 40 percent of its river resources. Of those
transnational river flows, a remarkable 18.9 cubic meters, or nearly 20 percent of Kazakhstan’s
total resources, originate in China. When one factors in the fact that Kazakhstan’s river
resources have declined from 126 cubic meters per year in 1984, with three-fifths of the decline
coming from transnational flows, transnational river management quickly becomes a paramount
economic and political issue (United 2004:20).
Klare (2002) argues that only those resources essential to national security will provoke the
use of military force when jeopardized (29). With such a large and economically vulnerable
rural population dependent on agriculture, together with the country’s limited water resources,
transnational water supplies inherently qualify as a matter of national security. This is
particularly the case if one factors in the fact that environmental issues, especially regarding the
Irtysh River, are historically associated with opposition to President Nazarbayev, as Nazarbayev
is almost certain to react strongly to any issue that might undermine his power (Sievers 2002:5).
Consequently, it should come as no surprise that Astana has been alarmed by evidence of
increases in both current and future diversions on the Irtysh and Ili rivers, which will be explored
below.
A Tale of Two Rivers
“China’s goals for [Xinjiang] and the assertive water policies they require may not
only affect the stability of the province, but could also jeopardize relations with its
Central Asian neighbors, especially Kazakhstan” (Hagt 2003).
At more than 5,000 kilometers in length, the Irtysh is one of the world’s mightiest rivers.
Known as the Black Irtysh in China, the river finds its headwaters high in the Altai Mountains
that straddle Xinjiang and Mongolia. After crossing into Kazakhstan, the Irtysh later turns
northward to meet up with Russia’s Ob River, before finally emptying into the Artic Ocean.
Drawing in remote parts of Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan and Russia, the Irtysh’s drainage basin
is the world’s fifth largest, collecting the life-giving waters from a swath of territory roughly the
size of India (Sievers 2002: 2).
28
Figure 3: Irtysh and Ili Rivers, cited (Streams 2008).
After traversing the 700 kilometers from its origin to the Kazakh border, the Irtysh empties
into Lake Zaisan, one of the world’s thirty largest lakes (Sievers 2002:2). Flowing northward
out of Lake Zaisan, the Irtysh then passes the cities of Oskemen, Semey and Pavlodar, serving as
an important transportation hub and the chief source of drinking water for what are three of
Kazakhstan’s ten largest cities (Kazakhstan: Provinces 2009). The river also provides drinking
water to the capital city Astana and the important industrial city Karaganda, while the Soviet-era
Irtysh-Karaganda canal diverts the Irtysh’s waters to facilitate agriculture across the country’s
arid interior (Blua 2004).
The Irtysh’s hard-charging waters are also an important source of energy in Kazakhstan,
with numerous hydropower stations scattered along the river’s length. The large Irtysh Cascade
installation itself includes the Buktarmin (675 MWt), Ust-kamengorsk (331 MWt) and Shulbinsk
(702 MWt) hydroelectric stations, representing a significant portion of the country’s power
generating capacity (Giese et al 2004:41). According to Sebastian Peyrouse (2007), the Irtysh
Cascade accounts for at least 10 percent of the country’s electricity needs (136).
While less well-known and smaller than its sister river, the Ili River is no less important
ecologically or economically. Like the Irtysh, the Ili is also a glacial fed river, finding its origin
in the high-alpine Tianshan Mountains that are sandwiched between Xinjiang, Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan. After flowing into Kazakhstan, the Ili terminates 1400 kilometers later at Lake
Balkash, the world’s second largest fresh water lake.
29
According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the 600 kilometerlong Lake Balkhash has a surface area of over 16,000 square-kilometers and a more than
400,000 square-kilometer drainage basin, which is home to some 3.2 million people and
Kazakhstan’s former capital Almaty. The UNEP likewise notes that the Ili River supplies more
than 80 percent of Balkash’s water, a body of water that, in turn, “plays a significant role in
maintaining the natural and climatic balance in the region.” (Le Sourd and Rissolio 2004).
With at least 1/3 of Kazakhstan’s population and much of its economic output dependent
on the Irtysh and Ili rivers, the two river systems are without a doubt invaluable to Kazakhstan.
The two rivers, however, take on an added significance due to the chronic upstream-downstream
disputes over one of Kazakhstan’s other major river systems, namely the Syr Darya.
Two Front War
As in the case of the Irtysh and the Ili rivers, Kazakhstan is once again a downstream
riparian on the Syr Darya, lying downstream of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
According to the ICG, a respected international advisory NGO, during the Soviet era water
policies were coordinated in Moscow, with little consideration given to domestic political
boundaries (Central 2002). More specifically, preference was given to the more developed
Uzbek and Kazakh republics, where industry and agriculture were concentrated. As such, when
the Soviet Union collapsed, the newly-independent Central Asian states inherited not only the
Soviet-era hydrological infrastructure, but also the Soviet-era system of water distributions. In
essence, reservoirs on the Syr Damur were concentrated upstream in Kyrgyzstan, while water
quotas were skewed towards the downstream economies in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
During the Soviet-era, energy rich Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would provide upstream
Kyrgyzstan with energy supplies to meet its winter needs, while Kyrgyzstan would in turn fill the
Syr Damur’s upstream reservoirs to discharge during the summer for downstream irrigation. In
the post-Soviet era, however, downstream states have resisted paying upstream Kyrgyzstan for
what they deem a common resource. Complicating matters, Kazakhstan has largely privatized
its energy economy, while Uzbek’s gas industry is in dire need of repair and investment, thereby
making efforts at energy-for-water deals with Kyrgyzstan difficult. Consequently, Kyrgyzstan
has frequently released water during the wintertime to generate much-needed electricity, leading
to both flooding and summertime irrigation shortages in downstream countries.
The importance of this brief analysis of the Syr Damur water conflict lies in the political
and environmental pressure it inherently entails for Astana. Cotton is the cornerstone of the
upstream states’ economies and an important source of hard currency and government social and
political control (Central 2008). The final recipient of Syr Damur waters, Kazakhstan can thus
likely expect to receive an ever-decreasing amount of water annually from the Syr Damur, as
irrigated agriculture and economic activity along the river are forecast to expand in the coming
years. This dynamic stands to further stretch Kazakhstan’s already delicate hydrological balance
and thereby elevate the significance of both the rivers Irtysh and Ili.
30
Beggar Thy Neighbor
As mentioned, given the importance of the rivers Irtysh and Ili and Kazakhstan’s tenuous
hydrological situation, Astana has been alarmed at China’s growing diversions of both rivers.
Despite the importance of the Ili and Irtysh rivers and the threat of an environmental and
economic disaster, though, there has been little progress in bilateral Sino-Kazakh negotiations
concerning the rivers, not to mention the other numerous trans-border rivers the countries share.
China and Kazakhstan have been holding bilateral “consultations” about transboundary water
issues since 1999, including the signing of a 2001 agreement to facilitate cooperation on
transboundary water management, but the two parties have yet to conclude any agreements on
concrete water allocations of their shared river systems. More recently, Beijing also spurned an
Astana initiative to provide China with free or heavily subsidized foodstuffs for a decade if
Beijing promised to allow the Ili’s unimpeded flow into Lake Balkhash (Kazakhstan, cited
Allouche 2007:52).
Sievers (2007) suggests that Beijing is quietly avoiding signing any binding agreements
until the legal dynamic of such diversions switch in its favor. More specifically, Sievers (2007)
sees China to be currently outside of customary international law, which holds that
transboundary rivers must be exploited in such a manner that does not directly harm downstream
riparians and that does not impinge on states’ rights to the freedom of navigation, meaning that
water levels cannot drop to the point where they become un-navigable. Beijing’s diversions, as
demonstrated below, stand to harm downstream Kazakhstan’s economy and environment, while
also presumably reducing the navigability of the Irtysh. Beijing has further violated customary
international law by failing to notify Kazakhstan of its planned diversions.
At the same time, however, customary international law preferences “vital human needs.”
Thus, in Sievers’ (2007) analysis, when the population of Xinjiang reaches a certain level, the
population dependency of the XUAR will “trump any other factor,” at which point international
law will favor China’s claims to the rivers’ waters (26). If Sievers’ analysis of the situation is
correct, it would suggest that Beijing has little interest in equitably and sustainably exploiting the
rivers Irtysh and Ili. Conversely, one might expect Beijing to intentionally increase its diversions
of these rivers, so as to ensure that it can establish Xinjiang’s dependency and the legal basis for
a “vital human need.”
The extent of China’s existing diversions and the lack of transparency about its future
intentions seems to support Sievers (2002) assertions that it is only a matter of time before legal
dynamics reverse in Beijing’s favor. One of the largest diversions of either river to date, for
instance, is a series of canals on the Irtysh that were announced in the early 1990’s and
completed by 1999. According to the Russian newspaper Ekonomischeskii Soyuz, the project is
a 300-kilometer long and 22 meter wide canal diverting 485 million cubic meters of the river’s 9
billion annual cubic meter flow, with the capacity to eventually divert 1 billion cubic meters of
the Irtysh’s effluence (cited Pannier and Magauin 1999).
Sebastian Peyrouse (2007) points out that the canal notably fits the contours of Xinjiang’s
“one white, one black” development agenda, irrigating 140,000 new hectares of agricultural land,
while also transporting water to the Karamai oil fields located 400 kilometers outside of Urumqi.
31
Chinese Ambassador to Kazakhstan, Pei Shouxiao, alarmed Kazakhstan when he affirmed that
his country was intending to use as much as 40 percent of the Irtysh’s annual flow, implying that
the canal will not be China’s last diversion of Irtysh, as the current canal’s maximum capacity
only represents roughly 1/9 of the river’s total flow (Eurasia Daily Monitor, June 30, 2005, cited
Peyrouse 2007:1).
Such diversions of the Irtysh River will undoubtedly have sizeable long-term consequences
for Kazakhstan’s environment and economy. According to Yermukanov, the diversions have
already significantly lowered water levels on the Irtysh River, threatening to drastically reduce
crop production in downstream Kazakhstan, which relies on the Irtysh for irrigation (2006).
Additionally, reductions in the rate of flow of the Irtysh degrade the river’s ability to flush
pollutants and thus will raise the concentration of pollutants and heavy metals in Lake Zaisan
and other downstream areas, threatening public, environmental and agricultural health. The
European Rivers Network further cautions that reduced Irtysh flows are set to decrease
downstream soil wetness, lowering agricultural productivity and exacerbating the desertification
of northwestern Kazakhstan (Schafarenko 1999).
Outside of such threats to Kazakhstan’s environment, diversions will concomitantly harm
Kazakhstan’s industrial sector, which is concentrated in areas along the Irtysh River. Sievers
(2002) warns that the important Irtysh Cascade hydroelectric stations are likewise at risk of
failure if the water levels on the Irtysh drop further (4). China’s upstream diversion of the Irtysh
River, furthermore, stands to negatively affect the navigability of the Irtysh River, which is the
main commercial thoroughfare between Kazakhstan’s industrial heartland and the Russian port
of Omsk (Peyrouse 2007:2).
At present, China’s diversion of the Irtysh River already represents a serious threat to
Kazakhstan’s economic livelihood and a looming environmental disaster. Needless to say, if the
Chinese Ambassador’s prediction for future diversions by his country materializes, the Irtysh
River will be irreparably damaged. Adding to the sense of urgency downstream in Kazakhstan,
the degradation of the Irtysh River system, moreover, comes along with rising fears that the
exploitation of the Ili River upstream in China is pushing Lake Balkash to the verge of becoming
another Aral Sea. 6 As in the Aral Sea disaster, the collapse of Lake Balkash would pose longterm consequences for the region’s environment, climate and economy.
Kazakhstan’s concerns are not unfounded. In the 1970’s, China diverted nearly 1/3 of the
Ili’s cross-border flow, reducing the amount of water flowing into Kazakhstan from 17.8 cubic
meters to 12.7 cubic meters (Tursonov, cited Siever 2002:4). More recently, Chinese authorities
failed to inform Kazakhstan of the 2005 inauguration of a hydropower plant that consumes 15
percent of the Ili’s water resources. Beijing also failed to divulge the construction of the
6 Under
the Soviet Union, the Aral Sea Basin’s principle rivers, namely the Syr Damur and the Amur Darya, were
diverted to facilitate the development of a massive agricultural complex in Central Asia. As a result of over-usage,
the Aral Sea’s level has decreased by more than 20 meters since 1950, causing the once mighty sea to split into the
Southern and Northern Aral Seas. The sea’s collapse has had disastrous effects on the region’s environment and
public health, as saline levels have risen exponentially and devastated the fishing industry and receding waters have
contributed to dangerous salt and pollutant-laden sandstorms (McKinney 2003).
32
Kapshagay Reservoir, which has the capacity to store an enormous 380 million cubic meters of
water (Yermukanov 2006:1). In addition, China is reported to have plans for a further 13
reservoirs on the Ili rivers in the near future (Novoye pokolenie, February 10, cited Yermukanov
2006:1).
Even without factoring in China’s plans for the Ili River, Lake Balkash is already
ecologically stressed, originating with the construction of Kazakhstan’s own Kapchagai
Reservoir in the late 1960’s. Since 1972, Lake Balkash’s surface area has decreased by roughly
150 square kilometers, according to the UNEP’s Division for Early Warning and Assessment.
Moreover, as Mels Eleusizov, the head of the Tabigat environmental movement and a former
presidential candidate, grimly notes, the lake’s water level has already dropped by 2.3 meters
(cited in Kozlova 2006). As in the case of the Aral Sea, the sand and pollutants uncovered by
Balkash’s receding coastlines are being picked up by the wind and spread across Central Asia,
with correspondingly detrimental effects on public health and desertification. Further diversions
by China, therefore, may well lead to the permanent degradation and collapse of Lake Balkash’s
ecosystem in much the same manner that over-exploitation humbled the once mighty Aral Sea.
Water is, therefore, one of, if not the single biggest, source of insecurity and dependency in
Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan not only depends on neighboring states for more than 40 percent of its
annual river water resources, but also due to such a degree of dependency, the country’s
environment and economy are extremely susceptible to any fluctuations in water resources. A
significant portion of the country, furthermore, depends on agriculture for their livelihood, with
much of that agriculture requiring irrigation. In addition, as environmental issues such as the
Irtysh dispute tend to bolster the opposition vis-à-vis President Nazarbayev, any degradation in
Kazakhstan’s hydrological situation stands to undermine the long-serving President’s grip on
power, not to mention the fact that water shortages would directly impact the living standards of
rural Kazakhstanis and the country’s economic productivity.
With a seemingly intractable dispute with fellow Syr Damur riparian states already
complicating the country’s hydrology, the prospect of substantial decreases in transnational
water flows from China as Xinjiang’s needs rise foreshadow an increasingly water-tight future.
Moreover, the economic and political dynamics of neighboring regions, Xinjiang in the case of
the Ili and Irtysh and Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan in the case of the Syr Damur,
give Kazakhstan little room to maneuver or bargain. The combination of this vulnerability and
seeming inevitability has led even the neutral UNEP to label China’s diversions of the Irtysh and
Il as “risk factor in respect to [Kazakhstan’s] national security” (United 2004:24).
Thus, the centrality of water to Kazakhstan and the apparent lack of any channels for
mediation would seem to strengthen the assertion that scarcities of key resources will lead to
conflict, as it appears to be only a matter of time before water scarcities and related disputes
become a paramount issue for Kazakhstan.
33
Chapter 6: A Closer Look
Resource Wars
Klare (2002) argues that oil and energy supplies are a necessity for industrialized states
and that water is an absolute for every state. Moreover, it is further stated that energy supplies
are even more precious in those states whose legitimacy implicitly or explicitly rests on
economic growth, as their absence would ipso facto threaten growth and thereby security of the
state. Given the importance of these two resources, Klare argues that growing scarcity of oil and
water will prompt states to go to war over of the distribution of ever-decreasing supplies.
By the logic of resource theory, then, Sino-Kazakh relations should represent a tragedy in
the making: two semi-autocratic states each heavily dependent on the other, all the while with
huge asymmetries in economic, political, and military power. Furthermore, not only Beijing’s
legitimacy in Xinjiang, but China as a whole, depends on its ability to ensure continued
economic expansion. Astana’s mandate, while less explicitly pegged to high-rates of economic
growth, would surely be questioned in the face of water shortages, economic stagnation and
falling living standards. This would seem to suggest that serious diplomatic and military disputes
over water and oil between China and Kazakhstan are imminent.
However, a closer analysis suggests that an outbreak of conflict is neither imminent nor
likely. For Kazakhstan to strategically secure the Irtysh, Ili and other transnational rivers that
originate in Xinjiang, it would essentially have to militarily invade China, as that would be the
only way to truly control upstream diversions. Kazakhstan is estimated to have less than 50,000
troops in uniform, a number that pales in comparison to China’s more than 2.3 million soldiers
(Army 2005, People’s 2005) Furthermore, the few troops Kazakhstan does control have little if
any combat or other practical experience. Kazakhstan’s decision to voluntarily return its
inherited nuclear arsenal creates a further strategic disadvantage vis-à-vis nuclear-armed China.
Any attempt to militarily secure access to water supplies across the border, thus, could be
expected to be unsuccessful. Moreover, any military incursion on the part of Kazakhstan would
provide China with the justification to, in turn, militarily protect its energy assets in Kazakhstan.
It is also equally unlikely that Astana would consider seriously disrupting its own energy
exports to China, or those of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. For one, as Andrews-Speed et al
(2002) highlight, the likelihood of prolonged stoppages of energy exports by an exporting
country is minimal, as the exporting country stands to suffer significant financial losses due to
decreased exports. Pipelines take considerable time and money to construct, meaning that
exporting countries cannot easily reroute their energy supplies elsewhere.
In the case of Kazakhstan, furthermore, the Sino-Kazakh oil pipeline is of particular
importance, as it is the country’s first export pipeline to completely circumvent Russian control.
With Russia’s ongoing effort to block the construction of any undersea Trans-Caspian pipeline
between Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, which would include a spur to the massive offshore
Kazakh Tengiz field, any voluntary move by Kazakhstan to restrict exports to China would once
again make it almost entirely dependent on Russian pipelines for its energy exports. It is likewise
hard to foresee a scenario in which Astana would disrupt the gas exports of its neighbors
34
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to China. For one, Kazakhstan derives significant transit fees from
such exports. In addition, as discussed previously, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan also control the
fate of the Syr Damur River. Thus, while it would not be surprising for Kazakhstan to threaten
such energy export stoppages, the probability of any prolonged interruption is quite low.
Similarly, in the event of any disruption in energy flows from Kazakhstan, it is difficult
to imagine a scenario in which China would look militarily to guarantee the resumption of such
supplies. Though China clearly has a strong military advantage, any military incursion into
Kazakhstan would almost certainly draw in other regional players, most significantly Russia.
Russia and Kazakhstan are members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), an
outgrowth of the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which commits
member states to the mutual defense of one another. Russia would also be obligated to come to
Kazakhstan’s defense under the SCO. Though, as both China and Kazakhstan are members of
the SCO, it is not clear what each party’s legal obligations would be. Regardless, the aggressor
would be violating its SCO commitment to territorial integrity, non-interference and the non-use
of force.
Russia has been concerned by its loss of influence in post-Soviet Central Asia and has
continuously sought to re-exert its authority in the region by leveraging its control of export
pipelines out of the Caspian region, severely restricting or cutting off Kazakhstan’s energy
exports on several occasions (Levine 2007). Russia has accordingly been strongly opposed to
Chinese involvement in the Kazakhstan energy sector, in particular, as such involvement is
perceived to weaken its grip on Caspian energy supplies (Blank 2005). Kazakhstan, for that
matter, is host to a substantial ethnic Russian community, includes Russian as an official
language and is home to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, formerly the center of the Soviet space
industry and currently on a long-term lease to Russia.
In contrast to the relatively untested Chinese military, the Russian military establishment
is also highly experienced, with a steady string of engagements stretching from Afghanistan to
Chechnya to Georgia. Russia has likewise shown that it will not hesitate to use its military to
further its foreign policy goals, evidenced most recently by Russian’s 2008 intervention in
Georgia. Despite its post-Soviet decline, the Russian military remains one of the world’s largest
and most formidable nuclear-armed forces, with more than one million troops (Russian 2007)
Russian military capacity, therefore, makes a military response at least a viable option for the
Kremlin and, given the overlapping web of cultural, political and legal links discussed previously,
Russia should be expected to react forcefully to any incursion by China into what it considers its
sphere of influence.
The Realist View
The mutual disincentives for conflict discussed above seem to support the perspective of
contemporary structural realists (Mearshimer 2001; Waltz 1979), who posit a more nuanced
security dilemma in which states are perceived to be rationale actors balancing their power
relative to other state actors. If states are held to be rational and self-interested decision makers,
then, Beijing could hardly be expected to take the extreme step to militarily secure its Central
Asian energy assets. As argued above, a Chinese military incursion into Kazakhstan would incur
35
a swift Russian response. In a protracted conflict, Russia could be expected to not only disrupt
Kazakh energy exports to China, but also to strike oil and gas installations in Xinjiang and to
terminate its own sizeable energy exports to the country. Assuming a Russian military victory,
or at least a stalemate, the Russian army would likely maintain a long-term presence along SinoKazakh border region, severely undermining China’s Central Asian energy strategy. Such a
setback would have long-term repercussions for Xinjiang’s economy and China’s goal to build
the XUAR into a major petrochemical center.
Even in the event of a favorable outcome for China, China seems set to lose in other
regards. Russia is a key source of military technology for China, selling Beijing many of its
most advanced weapons systems and cooperating with the country on a range of military
development projects, including China’s first and yet-to-be-launched aircraft carrier (Blank
2009). Though Sino-Russian military sales have slowed in recent years for various reasons,
Russia could be expected to terminate any remaining projects in the event of conflict, slowing
China’s drive to modernize its military, an important source of prestige for policymakers in
Beijing and vital to its goal of projecting its power abroad.
Any conflict in the region would also likely undermine China’s transnational campaign
against Uyghur separatism. Even without considering a long-term Russian military presence in
Kazakhstan, conflict would disrupt the political conditions for SCO security cooperation and also
undermine the political stability and capacity of regional states to restrict any separatist or other
terrorist activities. Additionally, any conflict would almost certainly spill across China’s borders
into Xinjiang, disrupting the economic growth that China sees as the key to XUAR stability.
Faced with a Chinese military threat, furthermore, neighboring states may even directly or
indirectly support such separatist sentiments, while Xinjiang’s previously passive domestic
Kazakh and other Central Asian ethnic minorities may be radicalized by any perceived Chinese
hostility against their ethnic brethren. Niklas Swanstroem (2005) suggested as much when he
wrote that “China’s dependence on the primarily Muslim Middle East and Central Asia puts
stress on the fact that China cannot mishandle the Uyghur (Muslim) question” (578).
Any unprovoked Chinese military action, moreover, would do irreparable damage to the
country’s international standing and likely invite a host of diplomatic and economic sanctions
from former Soviet states and the West. Beijing has worked hard to paint its development as that
of a “peaceful rise,” and any Chinese military antagonism would certainly tarnish this reputation.
An uptick in separatist activity resulting from any confrontation, moreover, would likely invite a
swift Chinese response that would draw unwanted attention to the country’s human rights record.
Such an occurrence would help to justify the West’s antagonistic stance on human rights and
strengthen the position of those who argue for taking a hard line on China.
Similarly, the U.S. should be expected to react alarmingly to any Chinese provocations.
For one, U.S. companies have significant energy interests in Kazakhstan and the Caspian region
and conflict would rile oil markets, upon which the U.S. depends for much of its energy.
Washington has also invested considerable diplomatic resources in the construction of the BakuCeyhan pipeline, which circumvents Russia and delivers Caspian oil through Azerbaijan and
Georgia to the Turkish Mediterranean. The pipeline, furthermore, transits Kazakh oil shipped
across the Caspian via freighter. Both the U.S. and Europe aim to lessen the West’s dependence
36
on Russian oil and, thus, would object to any forceful encroachment on the region’s energy
supplies, as both a Chinese or a Russian military presence would stand to disrupt the region’s
production and once again increase dependence on Russian energy exports.
Thus, from a structural realism perspective, resource-theory’s prediction of looming
interstate conflicts and violence over the distribution of water and energy seems to be overstated,
at least in the case of Kazakhstan and China. Both Kazakhstan and China would incur
significant economic, political and military costs in the event of any conflict. Given such costs,
the outbreak of any water or oil-related conflict between China and Kazakhstan would certainly
weaken both states’ relative power, thus strongly dissuading policy makers from instigating
conflict.
The Liberal View
Neoliberal theorists, conversely, would counter that it is the sort of interdependencies
existing between Kazakhstan and China that raise the opportunity costs of conflict, thus reducing
the efficacy of the military as a foreign policy tool and contributing to a more peaceful
international community (Keohane and Nye 1977). Such mutual dependencies, moreover, are
argued to give rise to multinational institutions such as the SCO, which deepen transnational ties
and provide platforms for what Keohane and Nye (1977) term agenda-setting, the give and take
between interdependent states. From this perspective, Kazakhstan and China’s mutual
dependencies in areas such as river management, energy security and transnational terrorism
mean that the countries stand to benefit more from cooperation than from conflict.
It is this rationale, moreover, that informs the environmental peacemaking literature.
According to Bencala and Dabelko (2008), water rarely, if ever, causes international conflict.
Rather, water issues can aggravate existing and more serious disputes, merely increasing the
likelihood that those existing disputes may erupt into conflict. It is further agued that water can,
actually, mitigate the likelihood of broader conflict, as transnational water disputes create
incentives for cooperation. This closely parallels neoliberalism in that the mutual dependencies
created by transnational water issues increase the mutual gains of cooperation relative to the
consequences of conflict.
In the case of Kazakhstan and China, however, it does not appear that it is such mutual
dependencies that are preventing either current or future conflict between the parties. As
mentioned previously, there has been little evidence of positive or substantial cooperation
between Beijing and Astana concerning the countries’ shared transnational river systems. On the
contrary, Sievers (2002) suggests that Beijing is actually forestalling meaningful dialogue or
cooperation in anticipation that the legal dynamics will sooner or later switch in its favor.
Neither China nor Kazakhstan, moreover, have ratified the 1997 United Nations Convention on
the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses, the paramount international
treaty governing transnational river systems (Sievers 2002:14). Meanwhile, Beijing continues to
exploit such shared river resources to support the rapid development and urbanization of the
XUAR.
According to Haftendorn (2000), though water disputes give rise to international
37
institutions, their effect on ameliorating disputes is relatively small. The region’s preeminent
organization, the SCO, for that matter, does not seem to have the organizational capacity or
political support from member states to address the issues of energy and water conflict either.
As noted before, the SCO was founded with terrorism as its sole mandate and, while energy
security was added to the agenda in 2006, there have not been any meaningful energy security
initiatives to date. Water, for that matter, has not factored in the SCO agenda. Furthermore,
though the CSTO appears to mitigate the likelihood of conflict, by legally-obligating Russia to
come to the aid of Kazakhstan in the event of a conflict, the reality is probably more one of
realpolitik than of neoliberalism, as Russia would be unwilling to accept such a Chinese
intrusion into its historic sphere of influence regardless of the existence of the CSTO. There
exists, therefore, a tentative “balance” (as conceived by structural realists) between the clear
power asymmetries between Kazakhstan and China and the complex power politics in Central
Asia that see Russia protecting its perceived sphere of influence.
It is furthermore worth nothing that, according to structural realism, such balancing can
pursued either internally by increasing one’s domestic sources of power, such as growing one’s
economy and military, or externally, by developing alliances with other states to balance against
a common threat (Mearshimer 2001; Waltz 1979). As shown previously, China has for the most
part favored the internal route to increasing its power. Stability has been explicitly linked to high
rates of economic growth in both Xinjiang and greater China, which is further necessary to fund
the rapid modernization of China’s military. Concurrently, China has largely abstained from
developing or joining multilateral institutions or alliances, though this is slowly changing in
recent years, as evidenced by the SCO.
The irony of the situation, then, is that China’s very emphasis on internal strengthening
has led to increased dependence on foreign oil and put it on a collision course with Kazakhstan.
These same actions are also leading to the environmental degradation that ultimately may
undermine both Beijing’s internal and external power.
38
Chapter 7: An Ecological Perspective
Resource-theory, realism, and neoliberalism are all state-centric analytical lenses,
meaning that they take the state as the security referent - that which is to be secured. Leaving
aside ethical and social considerations, state-centric security theories fail as explanatory
philosophies, in that they fail to recognize the very tool that they prescribe, namely economic
growth, is undermining the ecological systems that constitute the most basic foundation of the
modern nation-state.
This holds true for not only realism, but for liberalist political theories as well, in that
both theories are prefaced on an outmoded and unsustainable conception of economic growth.
According to Carl McDaniel (2005), modern economic science fails in that nature is reduced to a
commodity, ignoring the fact that the economy is fundamentally constrained by the biosphere
and the earth’s natural foundation. According to Jessica Mathews (1989), the main index of
economic growth and the foundation for economic policy, gross national product (GNP),
dangerously misleads policy makers in that it fails to factor in the depletion of natural capital, the
foundation on which all growth rests (173). Thus, policies based on the interrelated economic
tenets that economic growth is unquestionably good and that global economic integration is
unassailable are “reducing the capacity of the earth to support life, thereby literally killing the
world” (Herman Daily 1996, cited in McDaniel 2005:132).
By positing an anarchic world order that demands security through military power and
economic growth, realism is, thereby, undermining the natural capital that supports modern
human society. In addition, the act of war is also deeply degrading to the environment, with
consequences ranging from the physical destruction of the natural environment to the loss of life
to the economic costs of reconstruction. More significant, though, is that when states are not
fighting, they are preparing for the next war, which creates a state of perpetual low-intensity
conflict with cumulative environmental impacts, including the use and degradation of land,
oceans and airspace, the use of energy and material inputs and the generation of toxic wastes
(Renner 1991, cited Barnnett 2002:94).
Similarly, though liberalist theories acknowledge the diminishing efficacy of the military
as a policy tool, it too remains premised on the flawed notion of ever-expanding economic
growth. While economic interdependencies may create disincentives towards military conflict,
global economic interdependence is not necessarily desirable or sustainable. Radoslav Dimitrov
(2002) acknowledges this fact when he writes that international cooperation in the equitable
distribution of water resources merely serves to maximize water consumption and undermine
ecological stability (687). According to Barnett (2002) overconsumption is the primary cause of
resource depletion and the subsequent overloading of planetary sinks and, thus, economic
interdependence is undesirable if it serves to encourage further consumption and make the
depletion of natural capital quicker and cheaper. While potentially minimizing conflict in the
short-term, liberal political theory, as it currently stands, equally weakens the ecological
foundations that make possible such global integration.
While proponents of neoliberal theory would counter that global economic
39
interdependence creates incentives for actors to develop substitutes for exhausted resources,
man’s capacity to substitute all of the earth’s vital minerals is suspect and also ignores the limits
of the earth’s ecological foundation. According to Reuveny (2002), the biosphere is unable to
support the high global standard of living entailed by the sustained global growth necessary to
create such substitutes. Homer-Dixon (1991) furthermore argues that neoliberal faith in the
market is misplaced, as there is no a priori reason that human ingenuity can overcome all
resource problems. Homer-Dixon further states that the world currently faces multiple pressing
scarcities and entrenched consumption and production patterns that make it unlikely sufficient
substitutes will be developed quickly and economically enough to stave off crippling scarcities
(101). In Sharp’s (2007) words, neoliberal political theory is essentially a “prescription for
procrastination,” encouraging policy makers to wait until the situation is critical before pursuing
solutions (325).
Thus, neoliberal theory stands to push the earth’s ecological systems ever closer to their
limits, rather than allowing it to overcome them. Consequently, it too should be seen as
contributing to neither long-term peace nor security.
Both of the prevailing conceptions of national security, then, have clear theoretical
deficiencies and consequently lack the intellectual tools to effectively inform policy makers in
the 21st century. A more illuminating (and alarming) analysis is provided by a human securityinformed conception of environmental security. Such a perspective suggests that the XUAR’s
current development trajectory is ecologically unsustainable and in the long-term may contribute
to environmental insecurity that threatens domestic stability within both China and Kazakhstan.
Generally, human security holds that the object to be secured should be the individual.
The security of the state is taken to be irrelevant if its inhabitants are already rendered insecure
by more immediate concerns such as poverty, hunger or environmental degradation. Essentially,
the contradiction is that under customary international relations theory, the state can be secure,
while its citizens suffer from a broad range of insecurities that do not register as salient threats to
national security, and thus, do not trigger a state response. Such a scenario represents a pointed
security failure, as the state, at a basic level, was established by and exists for the benefit of its
inhabitants. Furthermore, though human security literature generally rejects association with
national security, human insecurities suggest fundamental socioeconomic or other problems that
can eventually entail real threats to national security if they contribute to political unrest,
intrastate violence or transnational refugee flows, to list a few examples.
Environmental security, as conceptualized by Jon Barnett (2001), builds upon this
human-centered framework, except that it takes as its starting point the security of the earth’s
environment. The earth is viewed as the basis for all life and, accordingly, as the ultimate arbiter
of security. Environmental issues such as climate change, pollution, over-exploitation of water
supplies and desertification, among others, pose serious threats to the Earth’s ecological health
and, consequently, the individual security and health of humans. In other words, “the danger
arises not from what nature can do to the human, but rather the impact of human activities on
nature and, in turn, the consequent effects on the human” (Mische 1989:392, cited Barnett
2001:109). What is required under an environmental security framework, then, is the active
prevention of environmental degradation, as environmental stress entails concurrent threats to
40
human wellbeing in the long run.
The fundamental issue is that state-centric theories inherently overlook the ecological
foundation of human society, whereas a human-centered conception of security illuminates the
intimate relationship between human security and the natural environment. As Simon Dalby
points out (2004), Klare’s focus on macro-level power relations and conflict ignores the social,
environmental and economic violence on the ground in many localities surrounding the
extraction of resources (244). If the world is taken as an ecological whole, resource conflict in
the developing south is then understood as a result of the disruptions of modern economic
development, not as a matter of a shortage of resources.
Applying such a bottom-up level of analysis to Xinjiang suggests that Beijing’s quest for
a more traditional conception of national security has come at the expense of the environment
and human security. As made clear in the analysis of Xinjiang’s development, the humanenvironmental balance in Xinjiang has always hinged upon water. As China has sought to
ensure its territorial and national security through the economic development of Xinjiang, it has
exponentially increased the burden on Xinjiang’s environment, most notably in terms of the
region’s hydrological carrying capacity.
More than 75 percent of Xinjiang’s pastureland has declined in productivity due to
overgrazing to support Xinjiang’s booming population, while the Tarim drainage basin has seen
an 84 percent reduction in poplar forest coverage and desert scrub in the Taklamakan has
declined by a similar 65 to 90 percent (Millward 2007:316). Resulting deforestation and
desertification are causing the snowlines and glaciers of Xinjiang’s mountains to retreat,
meaning that there is ever less glacial runoff to feed the XUAR’s river systems (Ma 2004:102).
Consequently, 1/5 of the land reclaimed since 1960 has since been abandoned and the
Taklamakan desert grows by 400 square kilometers annually, forcing the abandonment of ever
larger amounts of once-fertile farmland to the desert (Millward 2007:318). A booming urban
population and industrial economy will see underground water tables fall further, having already
declined from 2 meters below the surface in the Tarim basin during the 1960’s to at least 16
meters below the surface today (Ma 2004:98). This will further deprive groundcover, trees and
crops of their water and exacerbate the disastrous cycle of degradation
Such desertification gives birth to violent dust storms that threaten both ecological and
human health. According to Chinese hydrological expert Ma Jun (2004), these salty dust storms
make groundcover whither, decimate cotton plants and cause blackouts by eroding power lines
(95). In one community particularly hard-hit by desertification and associated dust storms, 70
out of 100 villagers had some form of lung disease, while hospitals have reported an increase in
eye infections and skin diseases. Livestock that feeds on the land, moreover, suffers from
diarrhea, making it harder for herders to make a living. As a result, many residents of the
community have taken to “voting with their feet,” abandoning their homes and farms in the face
of such a harsh environment, a dilemma certainly facing an increasing number of rural Xinjiang
residents (Ma 2004:95). With little or no groundcover to prevent soil erosion, farms are quickly
overtaken by the desert once abandoned.
Under an environmental security rubric, allowing such degradation of the XUAR’s
41
ecological and hydrological systems is, in and of itself, a security failure, as their degradation
clearly implies direct threats to the region’s ecology and, subsequently, the ability of this ecology
to support human society. Xinjiang’s environmental decline is already impacting negatively on
the health and economic security of residents and will do so even more as degradation and
desertification continue apace. An environmental security analysis would have made clear that
Beijing’s efforts to expand agriculture, grow the region’s economy and encourage inward
migration were at odds with the region’s ecological capacity and would create insecurities that
may ultimately undermine stability in Xinjiang. Such a bleak picture suggests that Xinjiang’s
development model is not ecologically sustainable.
Heightened vulnerability to environmental pressures, moreover, most directly affects the
poorest segments of society, which, in Xinjiang, tends to overwhelmingly be Uyghur and other
non-Han farmers and herders. Launched ostensibly to benefit Uyghur and other potentially
restive ethnic minorities, it is, paradoxically, those groups that are bearing the brunt of the
ecological cost. Such a conclusion is also troubling for Beijing in that it calls into question
Beijing’s legitimacy in the region, which has been staked on improving living standards in the
XUAR, and threatens to undermine its long-standing social, political and economic policies in
the region.
An environmental security perspective, moreover, poses tough questions about the effects
of the Great Development of the West on downstream Kazakhstan. Whereas realism and
liberalism fail to acknowledge the detrimental impacts on Kazakhstan’s ecology and economy,
an environmental security lens recognizes that environmental issues are indifferent to abstract
political borders. Xinjiang’s development and the exploitation of the XUAR’s transnational
water resources stands to permanently degrade Kazakhstan’s environmental security, with longterm implications for Kazakhstan’s environmental and social wellbeing. Acknowledging China’s
potentially detrimental impact on the environmental security of its downstream neighbor need
not, for that matter, be simple altruism. As environmental and water issues historically bolster
the opposition to long-term President Nazarbaev, a collapse or change in government in
Kazakhstan would potentially affect China’s energy interests in the region, either through
domestic instability or through a changing of the political calculus in Astana in a direction
unfavorable to Beijing. Regardless, a deteriorating environmental security environment may
reduce Astana’s capacity or will to assist China in its campaign against transnational separatism.
As Ullman (1983) notes, as resources are strained, those at the bottom of society tend to
question whether those in charge are distributing the benefits of such resources in ways that
favor some groups at the expense of others (142). As social groups in either country feel
increasingly insecure and desperate, they are far more likely to be swayed by separatist or
extremist sentiments. Any instability in Xinjiang as the result of environmental insecurity, for
that matter, stands to directly influence the region’s ability to serve as an international energy
production and transit center. Not only would domestic instability stand to disrupt domestic
Xinjiang production, but also accordingly disrupt energy imports from neighboring Kazakhstan,
which must transit Xinjiang. Similarly, if downstream Kazakhs perceive their insecurity to be the
product of Xinjiang’s development, moreover, they be more inclined to support such Uyghur
separatism or to look to disrupt energy exports to China within their own country. It might be
worth remembering the “water wars” that took place in California in the early 20th century,
42
where residents of the Owens Valley took to dynamiting the canals that were diverting water to
distant Los Angeles and depriving them of the ability to earn a living.
An environmental security analysis, therefore, implies that Beijing’s foundational
Xinjiang and Central Asian policies are both shortsighted and self-defeating. Beijing’s emphasis
on traditional state-centric security in the short-term has created a long-term environmental
security problem not only in Xinjiang, but also across the border in Kazakhstan. This stands to
threaten one of the key motivations for Beijing’s massive investment in Xinjiang stability,
namely building the region into a major petrochemical transport and production center. Beijing
long ago internalized the international dimensions of Xinjiang’s stability and, thus, its failure to
incorporate an environmental security perspective at an early stage in planning represents a
serious policy failure.
The challenge is, however, that having pursued this policy line for such a long time,
Beijing now finds its options sharply limited by the migration and development it so carefully
encouraged. This fact is reflected in Sievers’ (2002) legal analysis of Sino-Kazakh transnational
water disputes, where it is shown that it is only a matter of time before fundamental human need
ensures China’s legal right to the Irtysh’s (and ostensibly other shared rivers) waters. The key
issue is not any future legal claim to the waters, as Beijing has shown little concern for
international water law to date, but the fact that even legal theory recognizes that Xinjiang will
soon reach a tipping point, after which the wellbeing of a critical mass of people will be
dependent on those shared rivers. After reaching that tipping point, Beijing’s policy options in
terms of water will be severely constrained by the need to provide for the fundamental needs of
that population.
The paradox is that while Beijing has a vested interest in the ecological health of
downstream Kazakhstan and of Xinjiang, it cannot give water back to either Kazakhstan or to the
environment, as that would exacerbate distributional problems in Xinjiang, heighten insecurity
and make domestic conflict in the XUAR more likely (Dimitrov 2002). Any diversion for
human consumption threatens environmental security in both the XUAR and Kazakhstan, while
refraining from further diversions increases the scarcity of water resources in Xinjiang and
threatens its continued development and stability. At the same time, Xinjiang’s glaciers are
receding at a rapid pace due to global warming and glacial runoff is expected to begin declining
in absolute terms in the next 40 to 100 years (Watts 2009).
Yet, despite this, water and environmental security issues are by their very nature longterm and slow-developing, and it is thus unlikely that either ecological or social collapse in either
the XUAR or Kazakhstan is imminent. China’s recent discovery of a giant underground aquifer
in Xinjiang, as mentioned above, affords Beijing a degree of breathing room and may limit
shortages in the near-term. It does not, however, ameliorate the underlying threat of ecological
degradation, but rather exacerbates it, as mining such finite geologic water resources will allow
Beijing to continue its current policy of encouraging migration and development. It is only when
the aquifer begins to run dry in the future, that such environmental contradictions will become
painfully clear, a point at which the population and economy of Xinjiang will inevitably be
significantly larger than it is today.
43
Scarcity or Sustainability?
The contradictions above capture the essence of resource theory’s flaws, that it
recognizes only scarcity, rather than questions of sustainability. By viewing the issue as one of
scarcity and not sustainability, resource theory’s alarmist predictions of water and oil conflict
help to perpetuate the very circumstances that created those scarcities in the first place. Under
Hans Morgenthau’s version of “classical realism,” oil is specifically recognized as an aggregate
component of power, due to its modern military applications, and therefore something that states
must have to survive in the international system (Morgenthau 1948). Though Kaplan (2002) does
not explicitly argue that states inherently seek to maximize their power, he implicitly
acknowledges this fact by arguing that states will go to war over the most economically and
strategically vital resources.
In China, for instance, it is Beijing’s unwavering realist emphasis on internal
strengthening through economic growth that first led to the environmentally-disastrous Great
Development of the West program. Ill-advised cotton production, likewise, has been encouraged
in so far as it enhances Beijing’s political and social control in the region. Similarly, concerns
about domestic stability and energy security led Beijing to strengthen economic and energy
linkages with neighboring Central Asian countries, ties that will accelerate such unsustainable
resource exploitation and economic growth over the long-term. The deteriorating environmental
security situation in Central Asia, then, can be traced back to components of both realism and
neoliberalism.
If water and oil are taken to be absolutely essential for modern states and a key
component of power, resource theory’s prediction of unavoidable scarcity and conflict frames
this competition as a zero-sum game and thereby elevates those resources to a national security
issue requiring a state response. Consequently, resource theory demands that states strengthen
themselves internally, so as to have the military and economic capacity to secure such contested
resources. Resource theory, furthermore, necessitates that states deepen international economic
cooperation, so as to not only help facilitate the economic growth necessary to field a powerful
military, but also to make the procurement of such resources on the international market more
ready and affordable. Such responses are the very same policies that created the very crisis
resource theory purports to warn about.
This irony is reflected in the case of Sino-Kazakh relations. Framing access to oil and
water as an issue of scarcity makes it merely an object to be overcome through political,
economic or military channels, obscuring the fundamental ecological contradictions. As such, a
resource theory analysis highlights the competing resource dependencies and shortages in the
case of Sino-Kazakh relations, but the realist response it has generated is merely deepening of
the status quo. In the face of growing water shortages and desertification in Xinjiang, Beijing is
simply diverting more and more water, rather than alternatively reconsidering the root of such
shortages. By forecasting a world of zero-sum energy competition, moreover, Beijing has seen it
necessary to invest heavily in its military modernization and the intensification of trade and
energy relations with Central Asia. It is not just in Central Asia, though, that the ramifications of
such a realist response to scarcity are being felt, as witnessed by China’s growing naval presence
in the oil-rich South China Sea and its relations with energy-exporters such as Iran and Nigeria.
44
Thus, the contradiction is that rather than demanding a rapid reappraisal of social,
economic and political systems, resource theory seems to set off an urgent scramble for power
and resources that will only exacerbate the problem in the long-run. In contrast, an
environmental security analysis would seem to highlight that it is not simply a matter of scarcity,
but of sustainability and thus demand a whole new tool chest of policies and theories that take
into account the ecological foundations of the earth and human society.
The analysis presented in this paper suggests that even if Beijing is slowly shedding its
predilection for a strongly realist foreign policy and looking to engage the global economy and
international society, the threat of serious future environmental insecurity remains. This paper
also seriously questions the predictions and relevance of resource-theory. Sino-Kazakh relations
would seem to be a perfect example of impending future clashes over resources, most
importantly over oil and water. As has been shown, though, while serious competing
dependencies in oil and water do exist between China and Kazakhstan, the potential for conflict
is tempered by a multitude of other dynamics. In some ways, resource-theory seems to be little
more than a theoretical justification for militarily and politically stronger states to intervene in
the affairs of others under the rubric of resource scarcity. Rather than encouraging long-term
policymaking and forcing states to make environmentally-sound decisions, resource-theory
offers policy makers a dubious intellectual shortcut to perpetuate the status quo under the
argument that a resource-constrained world demands strong states and powerful militaries.
In conclusion, while Sino-Kazakh relations will exercise a profound impact on world
politics in the coming years, it will not be because of apocalyptical resource wars as predicted by
resource theory. Rather, it is more likely that environmental degradation resulting in large part
from Xinjiang’s development will put ever-more pressure on domestic social stability in both
Xinjiang and Kazakhstan in the short-term, with a real possibility that such environmental
insecurity may lead to internal unrest in both countries in the long-term. Unrest in either
Kazakhstan or Xinjiang would, in turn, have attendant effects on international energy markets
and thereby on global economic and political relations.
45
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