On July 1 China’s new ‘ethnic unity’ law, an attempt to legislate a “shared” national identity among the country’s 55 recognized ethnic minority groups, went into force. Of note it includes a clause stating that individuals and groups outside the country can be held legally accountable for undermining “ethnic unity and progress or inciting ethnic separatism”. In some cases that can include speech, advocacy, fundraising, cultural activism or symbolic acts.
Long story short, Beijing is formalizing its efforts to combat separatist and militant groups, often backed by the West, which target China proper and its growing web of infrastructure projects across the world. Yet it remains unclear if the law rises to the challenge of what’s likely coming. A few details from reports:
- According to Xinhua, Vice Minister of Justice Hu Weilie said that enforcement beyond the country’s borders will be carried out strictly in accordance with law and in a rule-based manner “without prejudice to normal cross-border people-to-people exchanges, and other academic, trade and investment activities”. In countries with close diplomatic and security ties with China, Beijing is already able to get agreements on extradition or other actions against hostile actors.
- Hung Pu-chao, deputy head of Tunghai University’s Center for Mainland China and Regional Development Research, said that the law could lead to entry bans, sanctions, public naming and shaming, and business pressure. An obvious target here would be Taiwan with its extensive economic ties to mainland China.
While China appears to have largely locked down the home front from destabilization attempts, and Beijing can effectively squeeze Taiwan, its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and growing supply chain infrastructure exposes it evermore to attacks — from southeast Asia to Africa.
Brian Berletic notes that the Chinese ethnic unity law is likely in response to what Beijing sees coming: Washington doubling down on its attempts to use armed groups to attack Chinese interests.
🇺🇸🇨🇳NEW ARTICLE: US Prepares Terrorist Army to Expand its Dirty War on China
(NOTE: Because X continues censoring links previously banned by Twitter in cooperation with the US State Department including NEO, I am providing the entire article below).
The US media has invested in… pic.twitter.com/ZoFLdJ9S2N
— Brian Berletic (@BrianJBerletic) June 24, 2026
As far as I know, it’s difficult to say with certainty that the US is behind attacks on Chinese projects. There are reasons for local backlash against Chinese economic might, and there are other actors who would have an interest in seeing several projects come under fire, but there are also plenty of convenient coincidences, and the pattern fits with Washington’s—and its allies— M.O.
Due to the sprawling nature of China’s BRI, here we’ll limit our focus to Central Asia, which has been in the news a decent amount here recently for another reason.
Central Asia’s Importance
Central Asia has vast deposits of critical raw materials and the attention paid to the region has grown substantially in recent years as the race to secure lithium, rare earth elements, cobalt, uranium, and more has grown.
Russia long dominated the scene in the former USSR states, but a rising China began to change the equation years ago. The West arrived late to the party.
With Russia under siege and preoccupied by Ukraine, it would seem to be an opportune time for the US and friends to move into Central Asia, but it is China that is only increasing its dominance there. Even with money coming in from the Gulf, China dwarfs all other players. Its investment in Central Asia hit $25 billion in the first half of 2025 alone. Even The Telegraph admits this:
Back in 2000, Russian trade with Central Asia outstripped Chinese trade with the region more than five-fold. Since then, Chinese trade with Central Asia has soared, accelerating after the launch of Beijing’s so-called “Belt and Road Initiative” in 2013 before rising even faster over the last three years, since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Chinese trade with the region is now more than twice that of Russia.
With Moscow distracted and America’s Central Asian military bases closed since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Beijing has filled the vacuum – not only securing more resource deals with Central Asian nations but also engaging in a frenzy of infrastructure construction across the region to make sure China, whatever the geopolitical weather, can keep transporting goods to and from Europe and global markets.
Or keep itself supplied in case of any US-led shenanigans. China, seeing how Washington is so fond of disrupting energy supply flows these days and with talk in the air about a toll booth for the Strait of Malacca, is doubling down on its land connections to Central Asia:
Reminder that Central Asia really matters to China & even Tajikistan is import in China’s rail network across Asia to Europe.
See below for the multiple path thru Tajikistan & Kyrgyzstan that reaches Iran, Afghanistan & Pakistan.
China has intensive diplomacy to keep peace in… https://t.co/iFtjR4tz9S pic.twitter.com/CwY23eeL0M
— tphuang (@tphuang) May 13, 2026
China and the Central Asian states continue to pour time and resources into development of these lines. Just to name a few developments:
- China is working on a major railway terminal on the Turkmenistan–Iran border, which is supposed to speed up transport along the China–Iran–Türkiye–EU route.
- Iran and Turkmenistan are laying down new standardized tracks to expedite freight movement and expand border-crossings.
- Two China-Iran-Türkiye-EU routes are in development; one that travels through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan; and another just through Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
The US and Europe, on the other hand, are making the region central to their critical mineral strategies, and that strategy is picking up steam. From The Times of Central Asia:
The pace of U.S. commercial engagement in Central Asia has quickened in recent weeks, with business delegations, export-finance officials, and sector-specific agreements appearing across the region. In June, a U.S. business delegation discussed investment opportunities in Turkmenistan, while Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director General of the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service David L. Fogel used the Astana Mining and Metallurgy Congress to press for practical cooperation in critical minerals.
That same month, the Tashkent International Investment Forum drew John Jovanovic, president and chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, and Ben Black, chief executive officer of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Kazakhstan and U.S. companies signed artificial intelligence agreements worth $10 billion, Uzbekistan agreed to reduce tariffs on a range of U.S. goods, and Kyrgyzstan’s Civil Aviation Agency held talks with U.S. Ambassador Leslie Viguerie on aviation cooperation.
Taken together, these moves suggest a change in tone. Washington’s regional agenda is increasingly being expressed through commercial missions, project finance, technology partnerships, and trade mechanisms rather than broad diplomatic declarations. The shift from diplomacy to deals is becoming visible in several capitals at once.
The seriousness of the relationship is also visible in the bank accounts of the Trump and Lutnick sons, who are in on a deal for American access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, which is in desperate supply in the US for its depleted “arsenal of democracy.” From the New York Times:
Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.
It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.
Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.
Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.
Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.
Central Asia is ripe for such opportunities where the tragedy of post-USSR neoliberal governments casts a long shadow. It’s kind of amazing that US corruption like what the Trumps and Lutnicks are currently engaged in hasn’t previously arrived in force to the region.
Nevertheless, the kleptocratic governments in Central Asia help ensure local backlash and make the region a prime candidate for other, more violent projects.
The CIA Islam Threat
Here’s Mariya Omelicheva, a a Professor of Strategy at National War College, in an essay from 13 years ago:
…although radical Islam and Central Asian terrorism have been linked to external influences, the emergence of Islamist organizations has been stimulated by events within the region—the primary cause of fundamentalism being the autocratic policies of Central Asian governments. Following the onset of the global “war on terrorism,” all Central Asian regimes have intensified security and suppressed a wide range of religious and political freedoms under the pretense of fighting terrorism. By controlling Islam, Central Asian governments bred resentment among the Muslims and, inadvertently, contributed to the emergence of social forces that embrace violence and terrorism.
Deals like the Trump-Lutnick one feed directly into this dissatisfaction machine. From Nurlan Aliyev at Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst:
Corruption, mismanagement by the government and public dissatisfaction pave the way for radical nationalistic tendencies, while infighting among the political elite adds to the public dissatisfaction. Moreover, political radicalization is increasing especially among the young generation. According to survey data from the Central Asian Analytical Network, feelings of injustice is the most important factor explaining the radicalization of youth (56 percent of the respondents did not consider Kyrgyzstan to be a fair state).
China’s heavy presence in the region makes it a prime target of resentment from the local population, and past protests have targeted Chinese immigrant labor policies, land leases to Chinese companies, expenditure of Chinese grants and loans, and marriages between local women and Chinese men.
Attempts to weaponize the Uyghur issue in western China add fuel to the fire, as does climate change’s effects on Central Asian water scarcity.
At the same time, in an interesting oversight, Islamist groups operating in Central Asia don’t seem too concerned with going after US interests despite Washington carrying out a genocide in Palestine and other widespread violence against Muslims across West Asia. In fact, US officials seem wholly unconcerned with what for years we were told was coming for “our way of life.”
In a recent piece for Foreign Affairs Carter Malkasian, a former civilian adviser to U.S. forces and officials in Afghanistan, argues that the terrorist threat from Afghanistan was simply overblown—for two decades. Oops:
Meanwhile, the Islamic State maintains a few thousand fighters in Afghanistan who have conducted high-profile attacks on the Taliban government in Kabul. But for five years, no known terrorist attack has been mounted from Afghanistan against the United States.
They have, however, been mounted against Chinese interests. For example, work just resumed on a 109-kilometer sector of the Dushanbe-Kulma highway near the Tajikistan border with Afghanistan following attacks in late 2025 that killed five Chinese laborers and injured several others. Tajik officials blamed Islamic militants.
A total number of attacks on Chinese infrastructure projects is hard to come by, but they have come under fire in the Sahel, sub-Sahara Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and across the five Central Asian states.
In case it wasn’t clear, War on the Rocks announced in February, “China Now Finds Itself in al-Qaeda’s Crosshairs”. That was in reference to a statement released at the end of last year by Sheikh Saad bin Atef al Awlaqi, the emir of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In it he labeled the Chinese government as a “pagan, infidel” enemy whose alleged actions against Uyghur Muslims justify future attacks.
Elsewhere, the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) also claimed responsibility for the 2024 Crocus City Hall music venue outside Moscow that killed 151 civilians and injured hundreds more. IS-K also appears to have had assistance from Kiev, continuing a trend of NATO-backed Ukraine’s cooperation with Islamic militant groups in Africa, West Asia, and Central Asia.
The view from Moscow and Beijing is an obvious one: that it’s unlikely to be a coincidence that these militants focus on China and Russia. From Indian Punchline a few years back:
Moscow estimated that Taliban rule has stabilised the Afghan situation significantly and it is in Russian interests to help the Kabul administration to effectively counter the extremist elements in the country (especially the Islamic State, which is known to be a legacy of the US occupation of Afghanistan.) Russia leveraged its influence with the Central Asian states to ensure that western-backed anti-Taliban ‘resistance’ forces did not get sanctuaries.
Of course, the strategic objective is that the western intelligence will not be able to manipulate free-wheeling Afghan elements to destabilise the Central Asian region or the Caucasus all over again.
Chinese officials, too, have accused Türkiye of running training grounds for anti-China militants, many of whom are now battle-hardened after stints in Syria.
Recent developments likely have Beijing and Moscow concerned. Late last year at the 12th Summit of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan agreed to deepen cooperation across a range of areas, including trade and logistics—which would sideline Russia and increase cooperation with the EU—and defense cooperation, including joint military exercises.
On the heels of that meeting, Azerbaijan hosted a NATO delegation as it transitions to alliance standards and deepens cooperation with the Turkish military. In April, Kazakhstan and Türkiye deepened their military cooperation with an agreement to allow the transit of military cargo and personnel through each other’s airspace. The Caspian Post highlights the significance of the growing partnership:
Kazakhstan has become one of Türkiye’s closest regional partners within this framework. Previous agreements between the two countries already covered military intelligence cooperation, defense industry projects, drone production, and joint military exercises…For Türkiye, meanwhile, the agreement reinforces Ankara’s ambition to become a leading security and logistical actor across the Turkic world. Turkish defense diplomacy in Central Asia has intensified over recent years through military training, drone exports, defense industry cooperation, and intelligence-sharing agreements.
Ankara’s eastward moves dovetail with the goals of Türkiye’s sometimes NATO allies. As Ali Nassar writes at The Cradle:
It reveals a layered geopolitical project anchored in Pan-Turanist nationalism, Muslim Brotherhood-aligned, political Islam, and strategic deployment of military and development tools – crafted to serve Ankara’s national interests while converging with NATO’s broader regional goals.
…Pan-Turanism, an early 20th-century ideology premised on the unification of Turkic-speaking peoples from Anatolia to western China, has been resurrected in Ankara as a vehicle for geopolitical consolidation. Today, Turkiye deploys this vision to deepen its grip on Central Asia – particularly in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan.
This ideological push is operationalized through the Organization of Turkic states, which functions as a joint political, economic, and security bloc linking Ankara with these post-Soviet republics.
And another growing player in Central Asia are the Gulf states. From 2020-2024, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar invested a combined $16.2 billion. Along with infrastructure and energy projects, Turkish influence and Gulf monarchy money can also lead to other “projects”—namely what Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi calls “CIA Islam.” Some of that money might not be too keen on seeing an Iran-China Railway pick up more momentum.
We’ll see what form China’s ethnic unity law takes when it comes to Central Asia but any hand in further crackdowns by local governments could end up being counterproductive and produce even more fertile recruiting ground for those out to harm Chinese interests.
In similar fashion, more Chinese development in Central Asia could actually facilitate militant attacks. From Global Risk Insights:
Particularly significant to Chinese security interests is the presence of Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) fighters in the region. The TIP is a largely Uyghur jihadi movement. Uyghur militants advocate the independence of the Chinese province of Xinjiang, and are treated as a serious threat by the Chinese authorities. The August 2016 attack on the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek by TIP fighters demonstrated that Chinese assets and personnel in Central Asia are potential targets of politically motivated attacks.
Given Uyghur aspirations for greater political autonomy, China’s westward opening-up might foster attacks on SREB’s routes and infrastructures. Between 2010 and 2014, 468people were killed in terrorist attacks in Xinjiang. Some of these incidents – such as the 1 March 2014 Kunming railway station attack or the 30 April 2014 suicide bombing attack to a railway station in Urumqi by Uighur separatists – demonstrate that rail transportation facilities present potentially inviting targets for Uighur militants. The significance of its geographical position, which links Xinjiang with Central Asian states, makes the China-Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor more at risk of being targeted. Ironically, the construction of a new rail system might increase terrorist attacks. SREB infrastructures will in fact expose formerly isolated provinces and provide extremist groups with access to areas, which were previously too remote to reach.
