In Bishkek, profit and personal risk

Businessmen rethink commitments in Central Asia as crimes against Chinese rise and Beijing avoids engagement with local communitiesChen Junhuang faces the same dilemma whenever he returns to the mainland from Kyrgyzstan, where he has run a trading company since 1997.mini storageChen treasures the opportunity to work in the capital Bishkek where low operating costs allow him to earn more than 300,000 yuan (HK$380,000) a year. But constant crime targeting Chinese expats has pushed push him to consider whether the time has come to return to his hometown in Jiangsu province."Leaving Kyrgyzstan is difficult," said Chen, who is back home for the Lunar New Year holiday. "All of my business ties are there and it's not practical to leave everything behind."With Beijing establishing a stronger presence in Central Asia, Chinese businessmen have started tapping into the region's five nations – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. State-controlled newspaper the Global Times estimates there about 80,000 Chinese living in Kyrgyzstan.While investments from trade and infrastructure to energy projects may have raised the geopolitical status of Beijing, many Chinese people see their safety at risk. At least 20 Chinese citizens were robbed in Bishkek in November. Chen recalled seeing armed criminals when he went to help one victim."I was driving a car and my wife was with me. Then we noticed some criminals were waiting for us at the door of my friend's home," he said. "We just continued driving to a police station and the suspects were [later] gone." Such attacks were making Chinese businessmen nervous, Chen said.China's ambition to get access to the region's vast resources was underscored when President Xi Jinping completed a week-long tour of Central Asia in September. The Kyrgyz parliament ratified a deal in December for China National Petroleum Corporation to build a pipeline to distribute gas to the mainland.But observers said Beijing's strategy in Central Asia, which consisted largely of aid and investment, needed to be rethought, particularly because of wider conc儲存rns about security in the region in the wake of the United States' troop withdrawal from Afghanistan."We need to examine how to protect the cross-border pipeline after assessing the security risk in Xinjiang and Central Asia," said Xing Guangcheng , a specialist in Central Asian affairs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.Questions over security were further complicated by resentment against Chinese people in the region, analysts said.Nationalist groups in Kyrgyzstan have complained Chinese workers are taking jobs from locals. Chinese companies have also been accused of restricting their interests to developing ties with top power brokers and shunning links with the wider society.Dr Alexandros Petersen, author of The World Island: Eurasian Geopolitics and the Fate of the West and co-editor of Chinaincentralasia.com, said Chinese officials and businesses did not seriously engage with local communities or take social responsibility in Central Asian countries, which fuelled resentment."Chinese officials have sometimes missed this opportunity [to engage with the local community] because they are too cautious," he said. "They believe China should operate in the background."He pointed to the lack of action by the China-led Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) when ethnic clashes, in which about 420 people died, broke out in Kyrgyzstan in 2010.The SCO, a grouping of China, Russia and Central Asian nations founded in 1996, only called for a diplomatic approach to resolve the crisis, Petersen said."The SCO could develop into a more substantial actor when it comes to providing stability and security and also political integration," he said.Li Xing , a professor of Russian studies at Beijing Normal University, agreed resentment towards China could be lessened by strengthening ties and engaging more with local people.As for Chen, the trader in Kyrgyzstan, he said the priority was for Chinese embassies and consulates to step up protection of its citizens. "The embassy is more concerned with big Chinese enterprises, and small ones are not taken care of sometimes," he said.迷你倉