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China's fuel promise to Mongolia gets a number: 17,000 tonnes for September, and a 20-year frame around it
CNPC will ship Mongolia 10,000 tonnes of petrol, 4,000 tonnes of jet fuel and 3,000 tonnes of diesel this month, the industry ministry said on Thursday, 9 days after Montsame reported Xi Jinping's promise of fuel with no tonnage attached. The petrol covers about a sixth of the month's book; the diesel about 2%. The larger object in the readout is a memorandum the two sides now intend to sign: 20 years of crude, refinery feedstock and coal chemicals, with a price formula and a rail chain still to be written.
Serbia's president says Uzbekistan's second nuclear plant is being built with China, and Tashkent has named no partner
Aleksandar Vučić told the Uzbek-Serbian business forum in Belgrade on Tuesday that Shavkat Mirziyoyev had told him that morning, one to one, that one nuclear plant is being built with the Russians and another with the Chinese, and that this is not enough for him. Uzbekistan's own record holds one plant, at Jizzakh with Rosatom, and a promise made on 17 August to prepare a second, partner unnamed. If the host heard right, Tashkent is copying the formula Astana chose last year: Rosatom for the first plant, CNNC for the second, and the price as the lever between them.
KazMunayGas settles its yuan bond today at less than half the coupon of the dollars it is buying back
Wednesday is the day the two money tracks touch: 3.5 billion yuan of new bonds settle at 2.3% and 2.8%, and the early deadline for tendering the company's 5.375% dollar notes closes at 17:00 New York time. The gap between the two coupons is the price Kazakhstan's oil company now puts on borrowing in Beijing's currency.
Uzbekistan's new fighters are Chinese, and the footage is the announcement
State television's independence-anniversary film showed at least 6 J-10CE jets in Uzbek insignia at the Karshi-Khanabad air base. That makes Uzbekistan the second foreign operator of the type after Pakistan and the first Central Asian operator of a modern Chinese fighter; neither government has published a contract.
Xi's Bishkek package holds a treaty, a bridge and no fuel line
Xi Jinping and Sadyr Japarov signed a treaty of perpetual good-neighbourliness, friendship and cooperation on 31 August, with a joint declaration and, by economist.kg's count, 28 sectoral documents behind it. The lists published by evening carry a bridge, a rail memorandum and a berry protocol, and nothing on fuel, the one commodity Kyrgyzstan now prices by decree.
Mongolia's Chinese fuel target runs through the miners already burning it
The industry ministry has set a target of covering 30% of Mongolia's domestic fuel consumption from China and named the channel: about 30 Chinese-invested mining companies that already burn some 1.2 million tons of diesel a year. August deliveries in the ministry's count total 11,000 tons.
Kazakhstan asks to host the founding of China's AI order
In Shanghai on 16 July, 29 states signed the agreement establishing the World AI Cooperation Organization. On the 17th, speaking at the WAIC opening, President Tokayev offered Astana for the body’s inaugural meeting and asked for its Central Asia office. Three weeks after joining the US-led Pax Silica bloc, Kazakhstan holds founding papers in both AI systems.
Shanghai hands Kazakhstan a $15 billion signing day
Tokayev’s administration says his working visit to China has produced more than 70 commercial agreements worth over $15 billion, signed in the course of a visit built around Thursday’s talks with Xi Jinping and a round table with the heads of Chinese companies. On Friday the president moves to the World AI Conference. The week now reads as a single Chinese arc: a legal convention on Monday, an order book on Thursday, algorithm governance to close.
The railway the premier called weak signs $400 million with China
A day after Bektenov’s "remains weak" landed on the cabinet record, Kazakhstan Temir Zholy announced a package of agreements signed with Chinese partners in Shanghai, worth about $400 million, part of it denominated in yuan. In the same days, Tokayev flew to Shanghai to meet Xi Jinping.
China gives Central Asia eyes in the sky for its disasters. The data lands in Xinjiang
China and three Central Asian states agreed last week to build a shared constellation of satellites to watch for earthquakes, landslides and the floods that come off melting glaciers. The region needs the warning. The satellites’ data will be processed at a computing centre in Xinjiang.
As SCO chair, Kyrgyzstan is building the bloc’s money machine in Bishkek
Kyrgyzstan opened an SCO project-support centre in Bishkek on 24 June, one more piece of the financial architecture it is assembling during its turn chairing the bloc. The summit in August is the deadline. A development bank is the prize.
Mongolia’s two-neighbor squeeze, and the third neighbor that cannot reach it
China’s foreign minister spent three days in Ulaanbaatar this week promising railways and a shared future. The warmth is real, and so are its limits: nearly everything that should give Mongolia bargaining power, from gas transit to rare earths, is worth only what Beijing or Moscow agrees to pay for it.
The scramble for the Caucasus, from Washington’s bill to a Chinese-built port
In one week Washington moved against Chinese and Russian sway in Georgia, the foreign ministers of Turkiye, Azerbaijan and Georgia signed a declaration in Istanbul, and a Chinese consortium kept its grip on Georgia’s flagship port. The Caucasus is being contested in real time.