Small Wars Journal

A Chinese Policy for Central Asia?

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 7:31pm

A Chinese Policy for Central Asia?

by Joshua Foust

Registan.net

Still, the effects of Chinese policies in Central Asia are not the same as the policies themselves, and this is what Alexandros (and his common writing partner, Raffaello Pantucci) is arguing. But, despite the big talk about Chinese plans for doing… something influential in the region, there just isn’t data that there is a concerted, long-term plan for establishing decisive Chinese control. And that’s the big problem I have with this formulation: it is a deductive analysis of what China might be doing, but there just aren’t enough data to conclusively say that this is what China intends to do. And more important, there’s no sense of whether it’s a good thing, a bad thing, — and if the U.S. should respond, much less care about it.