Chinese President Xi Jinping’s September 2013 unveiling of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Astana, Kazakhstan, marked a significant milestone in China’s engagement with Central Asian states (Xinhua, 2023). Selecting Nazarbayev University as the venue for the announcement of China’s flagship infrastructure-building project was not arbitrary, coinciding with 30,000 scholarship offers to entice Kazakh students to attend Chinese universities (Zhang, 2022). This event demonstrated China’s renewed foreign policy approaches in Central Asia, engaging in education diplomacy to dismantle historic prejudices against China and build long-term, sustainable alignment with the Central Asian republics (CARs). While China’s economic magnanimity and active participation in regional affairs are rehabilitating China’s image among CAR elites, its perceived deficiency in cultural, linguistic, and historical affinity curtails China’s bona fide potential in establishing a viable soft power regime. Perceptions of China among CAR populations are steeped in fear and distrust (Peyrouse, 2021, p. 85). Aware of its soft power crisis, China has pressed on its Silk Road heritage with the BRI as a diplomatic vessel (Diener & Artman, 2021, pp. 40-41) to provide a compelling narrative in a region where historical ties and shared cultural elements shape alignment.

Russia’s status as a former colonizer and superpower informs its current approach of patronizing, “big brother” diplomacy toward other states, especially in the Russosphere and Russia’s extended neighborhood (Ivanov, 2023). The inherent visibility bias for Russian media, language, and culture—thanks to the enduring legacies of civic institutions erected and maintained during Soviet rule—has been a reliable source of soft power for Russia in its former colonies (Nourzhanov, 2021, pp. 71-72). Russia’s monopoly on soft power in the region has been tested in recent years, however, as invasions of Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022 galvanized some post-Soviet states to reconsider the proximity of their engagements with Russia in the interest of defending their sovereignty (Marat & Engvall, 2022). As Russia’s relevance continues to wane in the region (Imamova, 2023), China finds itself in a prime position to deepen ties with CARs who have begun to look beyond their former colonizer for strategic partnerships.

This paper intends to review the origins of and the rationale behind Chinese foreign policy in the context of evolving dynamics of alignment between China and CARs. This paper also seeks to investigate the impact of hard power metrics, such as Chinese FDI metrics, on soft power leverage. This study will closely evaluate the success of Chinese soft power through the lens of education diplomacy by using quantifiable measures—such as the number of students enrolled in Chinese tertiary education institutions from each of the five CARs—to do so. Lastly, this paper argues that the success of China’s new soft power strategy in Central Asia carries substantial implications for the long-term success of the BRI and, subsequently, the state’s geopolitical ambitions toward greater global influence.

Alliances, Alignment, and Dimensions of Power

The study of international relations (IR) examines the dynamics of conflict and cooperation between states. Analyzing historical profiles and material realities of states enables IR scholars to understand the impetuses underpinning foreign policy strategies and identify sources of alignment to forecast political trajectories on a global scale. Thus, the principal question in the scholarship remains: “What causes alignment?”

Alignment is an informal, broad, and malleable concept, denoting convergence of interests among parties without formalizing relations and institutionalizing commitments as inherent to alliances. While in alignment, the relationship between states remains fluid via a substantial agency to accept, adjust, or reject the conditions of joint engagement based on evolving circumstances without sustaining significant curtailments to national sovereignty as may be true for alliances (Erkomaishvili, 2019). Hence, viewing alignment as a spectrum of inter-state relations may prove most useful: with membership in an alliance on one end of the spectrum and the absence of alignment on the other.

Hard and soft power are inextricably linked to the discussion of alignment, made useful in explaining macropolitical processes of attaining influence and setting the parameters for alignment.

Hard power is the application of visible and coercive measures to achieve foreign policy goals, including military force, economic sanctions, and other exertions. Alliances are the most direct manifestation of hard power alignment, referring to a formal association between two or more sovereign states bound by mutual commitments, obligations, and, oftentimes, a collective security mechanism. As institutionalized partnerships, alliances reinforce existing nodes of alignment within diplomatic, economic, political, and military realms (Snyder, 1990).

According to Snyder (1990), the epistemic foundation for alliances is grounded in realist conceptions of an anarchic, self-help system of IR. Thereby, alliances are rooted in definition as security pacts among states against shared adversaries, used extensively as sources of mutual aggrandizement between European powers during the nineteenth century (Hussain, 1979).

Hussain remarks World War I as a turning point in foreign policy, wherein advancements in military technology and the wide-scale destruction following the mass adoption of indiscriminate weaponry inspired an emphatic shift toward the preservation of peace. Furthermore, “collective security” emerged as a popular concept in diplomatic engagements post-WWII, asserting that each state bears responsibility for safeguarding against the aggression of other states. The conventional principle of “balance of power”—a philosophy that presupposes states’ attraction to “hard” power indicators as determinants of alliances—thus evolved to include a “balance of threat” dimension, wherein states participate in “bandwagoning” behavior to respond to a perceived threat from other states. Whereas pre-WWI alliances favored bilateral arrangements with individual states, alliances assumed a multilateral character to promote deterrence strategies and alternative mechanisms for conflict resolution via interventions of intergovernmental organizations.

Soft power, on the other hand, is an application of non-coercive measures and persuasion (Nye, 1990) to coordinate alignment and/or influence the objectives of other states, derived from shared norms, confluence of interests, and diplomatic cooperation (Sar, 2023). In his seminal 1990 work, “Soft Power,” Nye forecasted the declining relevance of conventional hierarchies among states traditionally rooted in population size, military strength, or resource abundance. Nye asserts that the gradual erosion of tangible power sources as sole guarantors of political leverage in IR has led to a diffusion of power on a global scale as networks of multilateral interdependence among nation-states enable entanglements and, with them, contemporary approaches to gaining influence. This is particularly relevant in the context of China-CAR relations, as “the factors of technology, education, and economic growth are becoming more significant in international power, while geography, population, and raw materials are becoming somewhat less important” (Nye, 1990, p. 154).

Economic strength is a curious case in foreign policy approaches, as it can be applied in a hard and/or soft power context. Economic strength may be viewed as a source of “hard” power vis-à-vis relations between states. Tariffs, sanctions, and embargoes are levied by states wagering the size and scope of their economies to apply unilateral pressure on sanctioned parties. The intent behind economic sanctioning lies in compelling designated targets into compliance or deterring them from engaging in behaviour deemed offensive by denying access to trade channels and key commercial markets, thereby undermining the economic sovereignty of a nation-state (Kessler, 2022).

Therefore, wielding economic policy as a “hard” power instrument involves the exercise of coercion and intimidation, commonly deployed to induce political change by ostracization of the delinquent party from participation in the global economic system and by threats of escalation. Kessler (1990) provides the United States’ austere and enduring embargo on Cuba following the 1959 nationalization........

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