Unlike the 2025 China–Central Asia Treaty, the 2026 China–Tajikistan Treaty places explicit constraints on Tajikistan’s external alignments, institutionalises crisis consultations and military cooperation, and embeds China’s vision of global governance through binding treaty language.

The international system is currently consumed by wars in Ukraine and West Asia, increasingly shaped by the intensifying great power competition between the US and China and confronted with escalating concerns over Taiwan. Against this backdrop, a seemingly obscure treaty signed between China and Tajikistan in May 2026 received little international attention. Yet the ‘Treaty of Permanent Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Tajikistan’[1] may prove to be one of the most revealing documents of contemporary Chinese statecraft.

The significance of the treaty does not lie in Tajikistan’s size or power, but in what the agreement reveals about China’s evolving approach to its continental neighbourhood in terms of influence, security and regional order. Notably, China signed a similar treaty[2] in June 2025 with all Central Asian countries—the ‘Treaty on Permanent Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the Republic of Uzbekistan’. But there is a major difference in the scope and language of the two documents, even though their objectives are similar. While the 2025 treaty was multilateral, the 2026 China–Tajikistan treaty is bilateral.

The treaty between China and the five Central Asian states (C5) works as a regional framework for cooperation, consultation, dispute resolution and broader intergovernmental coordination. Its most consequential provision is Article 3, which places reciprocal constraints on the parties’ external relations by stipulating that they should not participate in alliances, groups or activities directed against the sovereignty, security or territorial integrity of the other party.

The provision therefore goes beyond a general commitment to good-neighbourliness: it seeks to ensure that none of the signatories permits its territory or political partnerships to be used in ways that could threaten Chinese interests. While China has other regional cooperation models like Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC), it is not a binding treaty between China and the five Southeast Asian States. This treaty with C5 is China’s only multilateral treaty directly binding China to the region, which tells us how important this region is for China and how amenable Central Asian nations are to a China-centred institutional framework.

While the 2026 Treaty is formally reciprocal and framed around sovereignty, non-interference and mutual benefit, Articles 4 and 5 potentially create a deeper form of strategic alignment, and Article 11 accepts China’s alternative governance model, thereby promoting and supporting its normative power. This brief analyses the contents of the treaty and illustrates how China may be institutionalising its influence in Tajikistan through a binding legal instrument. The analysis reveals how Beijing translates the language of partnership and a “community with a shared future for mankind” into a deeper strategic relationship with a small, economically dependent but geopolitically critical neighbour.

Why Tajikistan or Central Asia?

Since the early 2000s, China has expanded strategic partnerships with its Western neighbours—Kazakhstan and Tajikistan—due to the Xinjiang conflict. In 2005, China signed[3] an agreement of Strategic Partnership with Kazakhstan which included opposition to “the three evils”: terrorism, separatism and extremism. But soon, under Xi Jinping in 2013, relations with all five nations were elevated to Strategic Partnership, and the Silk Road Economic Belt (later the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI) was announced in Kazakhstan. This was the first glimpse of China’s diplomatic architecture in Central Asia and its long-term strategy.

Through Central Asia, China sought secure access to Europe, energy supplies, mineral resources, strategic depth against maritime containment and stability in Xinjiang. Therefore, China needed greater influence in the neighbourhood to secure its interests. Subsequently, through BRI, the region saw large investment[4] in major projects and also became heavily reliant and indebted[5] to China, with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan becoming most vulnerable. In successive years, China has embedded itself more deeply in Central Asia and the region has become a vociferous promoter of various Chinese policies.

While economic leverage does result in strategic influence, it’s the normative power—to set standards, define what is legitimate and acceptable in international politics—that defines a superpower. There is little doubt that BRI functioned as an instrument of China’s expansionist foreign policy and geopolitical consolidation. But Beijing recognised that a rising power cannot depend solely on economic statecraft or institutional dominance. To exert and sustain influence over a long period, China must also rewrite the terms of engagement and establish norms, standards and global governance frameworks within which international politics and commerce could operate, an alternative to the America-led........

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