Is China Trying to Take Over in Central Asia?  By Joshua Foust
No matter China's plans, or its economic influence, the politics
of Kyrgyzstan still tilt overwhelmingly toward Russia foust
nov14 p.jpg  Chinese and Kazakh officials take part in a
groundbreaking ceremony for a tax-free cross-border trade zone /
AP  There is a general assumption in most pop-studies of Central
Asia that the region rarely has any agency of its own and is
only to be understood as a pawn of the powerful countries on its
periphery. The purest distillation of this trend is Peter
Hopkirk's The Great Game, which more or less reduced the region
to a battleground for the British and Russian Empires (a less
readable, but more historical tome of a similar bent is Shareen
Blair Brysac's Tournament of Shadows).  This assumption that
Central Asia is understood only as a playground for outside
powers is underneath almost all Western writing about the region
-- and is probably the best reason so many modern books adopt
the language of the Great G