Crossroads Asia | Diplomacy | Central Asia

China’s Unity Through Erasure Should Worry Central Asia 

The SCO may serve legitimate Central Asian interests, but it should not become the vehicle through which Beijing’s definitions of security, political loyalty, and ethnic identity become normalized across the Turkic world. 

China’s growing efforts to increase control over the Turkic states of Central Asia was the dominant, if little discussed, outcome of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on September 1. 

Beijing wants its relationship with the Central Asian states to be one of vassals thankful for China’s “protection” and economic integration. The recent summit produced the 25th anniversary Bishkek Declaration and 27 other documents, which claimed they would strengthen mechanisms for security, countering terrorism and organized crime, and promised new transport lines and logistics. On its face, the Central Asian states are promised infrastructure, technology and diplomatic engagement. But beneath those promises is guaranteed deeper dependence on Chinese capital, standards, and security concepts.

China successfully got Muslim-majority states (including Iran, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) to sign onto documents clearly aimed at China’s own Turkic Muslim populations. The SCO endorsement of combatting “terrorism, separatism, and extremism” was China-sponsored and indisputably about Uyghurs. Under this pretext, the institutional capacity that enables surveillance, intelligence exchange, and political labeling of Uyghurs is being expanded.

Sadly, China’s economic leverage and coercion means the public support that these Muslim-majority states provide to Muslim communities globally is absent when it comes to China. 

The Central Asian states should ponder carefully when Beijing uses the security vocabulary noted in the Bishkek Declaration. China’s decade-long ethnic cleansing campaign in Xinjiang, also referred to as East Turkestan, demonstrates what happens when cultural difference is reclassified as a security problem. Religious behavior can be labelled extremism. Cultural autonomy can be called separatism. Overseas relationships of Uyghurs with Turkic states have tended to attract suspicion. Language, memory, and identity become objects of political management.

ASPI’s Xinjiang Data Project has documented mass detention, surveillance, forced labor and political re-education. ASPI’s Cultural Erasure research estimated that around 16,000 of Xinjiang’s 24,000 mosques had been damaged or destroyed, alongside extensive damage to Islamic shrines and other sacred sites central to regional Turkic history. Arguments that Beijing is only concerned about its “ internal affairs” are blind to China’s foreign policy.

Beijing’s formula of combating the “three evils” – terrorism, separatism, and extremism – was incorporated into the SCO establishment document signed in June 2001, and that vocabulary has been institutionalized across Eurasia.

That should matter in the Muslim-majority Turkic states of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkiye. 

During Xi’s visit to Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek explicitly reaffirmed support for China on Xinjiang-related issues while agreeing to deepen law-enforcement, counterterrorism, and information-security cooperation. China and Uzbekistan have made similar commitments.

Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and other Turkic identities do not end at borders. Families, languages, religious traditions, and diaspora communities extend across the region. When governments repeat Beijing’s anti-separatist language without qualification, they risk allowing legitimate concern for fellow Turkic communities to be recast as interference or subversion.

China’s July 2026 Law on the Promotion of Ethnic Unity and Progress contains a provision on extraterritoriality (Article........

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