Although they do not get a lot of attention abroad, water issues are truly vital in Central Asia.  Since those states who have water do not have oil and gas and vice versa, a fundamental economic-political asymmetry exists between them.  This has led to many continuing instances of disputes, rivalries, and clashes among them.  However, as the quality of China’s water becomes an issue and given the geography of rivers in Central Asia (including Russia and China), China’s waste policies, which have hitherto been for the most part unilateral ones committed to development and heedless of other parties’ interests, have become an increasingly important issue in interstate relations.  China’s policies also tell us a good deal of what its posture might be like on those and other issues as it ascends the power rankings and becomes an ever more important player there.

BACKGROUND: China’s Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection, Wu Xiaoqing, said that the area water and soil loss in China amounted to 37% of its land area or 3.56 million square kilometers.  Thus it is already reaping the harvest of its environmental policies.  The implication of those policies, and their results, greatly affect Central Asia. Indeed, environmental issues affect the relationships not just of Central Asian states but of these states and Russia with China.

For instance, China’s efforts to leverage its greater power for unilateral benefit also appear in environmental policies with major economic impacts.  China plans to extract water from the Ili and Irtysh Rivers for Urumchi and oil field development in the Xinjiang autonomous Uyghur Region – a source of escalating inter-ethnic conflict between Han and Uyghur communities. While both rivers rise in China, the Ili passes through Kazakhstan before terminating in Lake Balkhash, and the Irtysh River travels through Kazakhstan before joining up with the Russian Ob River and Siberia.  This proposal aims to stimulate Xinjiang’s economy, while eroding support for Uyghur unrest.  But it will probably fail to meet its goals, even as it links environmental degradation and political activism, erosion of regime legitimacy, and instability.

This project will also probably generate outcomes resembling those we see in Central Asia.  Xinjiang is already the most environmentally stressed area in China. This project will also negatively affect Kazakhstan, which is already involved in a host of water disputes with other neighbors in Central Asia, and other environmental concerns relating to oil and gas and Soviet biological and chemical warfare experiments. From Beijing’s standpoint, this is unfortunate.  As of 2005 China had contravened both international law and bilateral agreements by not notifying Kazakstan of its intentions and not providing environmental impact assessments. Thus, as Stuart Horseman concluded, “it is evident that China is unwilling to engage in meaningful cooperation or compromise [in] the pursuit of its water demands.”

Simultaneously, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev has voiced several claims against China due to Kazakhstan’s grave concerns about some water projects being implemented by China.  These concerns are readily understandable, since Kazakhstan is at the bottom of post-Soviet countries’ list of sufficiency in fresh water. China’s project of a canal that will siphon water from the Irtysh River to the Karamay oil province plants and farmlands in Xinjiang is close to completion.  Beijing is also building up an intake of water in the upper reaches of he transborder Ili River that ensures 30% of the influx of water to Lake Balkhash.  The expansion of the intake of the Ili’s waters in China from 3,500 to 5,000 cubic meters will increase the shallowing and salinization of Lake Balkhash.  The Irtysh is also the largest tributary of Russia’s Ob River and yields water to Lake Zaysan in Kazakhstan.

IMPLICATIONS: Thus the consequences of this project are quite clear.  It will slash freshwater inflow to eastern and Central Kazakhstan, putting the cities of Ust-Kamenogorsk, Semipalatinsk, and Pavlodar on the brink of full water deficiency, dry up the Irtysh-Karaganda canal, and lower the water level in the Irtysh around Russia’s city of Omsk by 0.6 meters. But China is doing this because it is short of water as 70% of its water supply is so polluted that it cannot be used even for technical purposes.  Since Beijing conceals the extent of its pollution and of the resulting industrial accidents, its neighbors have no clear assessments and means of undertaking adequate countermeasures.  So until there is a catastrophe that involves the neighbors, little can be done except consequence management which is clearly an inadequate response.

Many fear that such a catastrophe could sooner or later take place due to China’s continuing policies. Leading Kazakh environmentalist and two-time presidential candidate Mels Eleusizov in 2007 charged that China’s efforts to increase diversion of the Ili river will generate an "ecological catastrophe" around Lake Balkhash, especially if combined with the impact of climate change, i.e. melting glaciers. Although it is known that Beijing expects to develop the river and its tributaries for agriculture and electricity generation, the extent of Chinese plans for harnessing the Ili remain unclear.  He also compares this outcome to the visible deterioration of the area of the Aral Sea.  Specifically, Lake Balkhash could divide into several smaller lakes and the spread of desertification throughout the surrounding area.   Then airborne salt, potentially produced by an evaporating Lake Balkhash, could be carried as far as glaciers in the Tien Shan Mountains that provide water for southern Kazakhstan, including Almaty, as well as portions of Xinjiang. He claims that if this outcome materializes, China’s glaciers will die and migrants into Xinjiang as part of the Go West campaign, he said, "will also be left without water."  Igor Malkovsky, Deputy Director of Kazakhstan's Institute of Geography, agreed then with Eleusizov, contending that China’s rising exploitation of the Ili’s water represented the most immediate and dire threat to Balkhash.  However, he gave his opinion that the evidence that salt from Central Asia's disappearing lakes would speed glacial melt was inconclusive.  Rather global warming bore the primary responsibility for glaciers melting at an average annual rate of one percent each year.

As the foregoing suggests, China has hitherto been unwilling or unable to show any consideration for the interests of its Central Asian  neighobrs.  Since they are all looking to China to render them even more support during a time of  global economic crisis, China’s economic power and attraction to them is growing despite its posture. Central Asian economies will naturally confront greater pressure to integrate with China, and  become more dependent upon it.  But their inability to persuade Chna to rethink its policies and defend their interests could have profoundly negative consequences for their ecology, environment, and economics.  Morerover, China’s unilateralism suggests as well that China aims to move these states and their economies into a position of dependence upon China. According to the Chinese scholar S. Zhaungzhi, “SCO members share a common border.  It is unimaginable for Central Asian countries to develop their economies and maintain domestic stability without support from their neighbors.” More recently, even as unrest in Xinjiang was beginning, Chinese newspapers were writing that Central Asians are envious of China’s developmental policies and their success in Xinjinag, notably the production of stability and ongoing economic growth, something they had failed to achieve in their own countries.  

CONCLUSIONS: It need not be added that these are traditonally neo-colonialist and patronizing views of so called backward states and their relationship to the metropole.  Central Asia has in many ways served as a laboratory for China’s broader Asian policies.  This may also be the cse with regard to its water polices insofar as they affect its other neighbors to the South, and Russia.  Indeed, on September 11 Russian President Dmity Medvedev called for a joint Russo-Kazakh project to save the Irtysh, Tobol and Ural rivers that would, if necessary, involve China.  Such involvmeent is clearly necessary, but China’s response may be a significant sign of its future policies in Central Asia.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Professor Stephen Blank, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA. The views expressed here do not represent those of the U.S. Army, Defense Department, or the U.S. Government.