Central Asia’s ripe demographics form a key geopolitical node
China, Russia and Turkey have strong stakes in youthful region’s development while US and West are wholly absent
A tectonic shift is underway in Western Asia. The region’s leading Muslim powers of the moment, Turkey and Iran, will lose 30% to 40% of their working-age population during the 21st century due to plunging fertility.
Meanwhile, the Central Asian republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan—will dwarf Iran and Turkey in sheer population size.
Another Turkic country, Azerbaijan, is included with the five Central Asian countries in the chart below. Except for the Tajiks, who speak a dialect of Persian, the rest of Central Asia is Turkic.
A great deal has been written about declining birth rates and their consequences for the world economy, but relatively little about the pockets of population growth in investible regions.
Most of the world’s population growth this century will occur in Africa, which has challenges in raising an educated workforce. Pakistan is also growing, but with 50% functional illiteracy and political instability, its economic potential is limited.
That makes Central Asia’s growing population of considerable interest to China, which needs to export capital to countries with younger populations. It also offers a market with long-term growth potential for Europe.
Germany, with its 3 million resident Turks, is looking East for markets. Hungary is the sole European member of the Organization of Turkic States, which held its annual summit meeting this week in Kyrgyzstan.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban was awarded the Supreme Order of the Turkic World, the organization’s highest honor. “We are the westernmost people of the East,” the Hungarian prime minister commented.
The charts show linear projections, to be sure, and are almost certainly exaggerated because the poor Central Asian republics will probably repeat the fertility decline of their neighbors. The slope of the red line in the chart below likely will be flatter.
But the big trends are baked in the cake, so to speak.
Low fertility rates in Turkey and Iran stem from the culture shock of female education and won’t change soon, as I showed in an August 2024 analysis. Pre-modern fertility rates in Central Asia will decline only gradually over time.
Shifting demographics have profound strategic implications that are well understood by China and Russia, but largely ignored in the West.
If Afghanistan, with its fertility rate of nearly five children per female, were reckoned into the Central Asian total, the number would double. With a fertility rate of five children per female, Afghanistan remains locked into pre-modern conditions.
If we include the UN projections for Afghanistan’s working-age population at constant fertility, the result is striking: The five Central Asian republics, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan together will have a population aged 20 to 64 of 280 million, dwarfing the combined total for Turkey and Afghanistan. Afghanistan shares a border with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
Security concerns after America’s disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 add a sense of urgency to China’s and Russia’s focus on Central Asia.
Except for Kazakhstan, a middle-income country with a per capita GDP of about US$15,000, the Central Asian countries are poor. Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan border on China’s Xinjiang province.
In addition to more than 10 million Uyghurs, who speak a Turkic dialect, Xinjiang is home to nearly 2 million Kazakhs and 200,000 Kyrgyz. Any instability in Central Asia thus has echoes in Xinjiang.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative diplomacy in the region has had broad success. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two largest republics, voted against a 2022 resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China’s treatment of its Uyghur population.
“The favor from these two larger Central Asian countries came after Xi visited both countries in September during the SCO summit. Xi, during his first foreign visit after Covid-19, signed a new $4.1 billion railroad deal with Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan,” complained the Observer Research Foundation, referring to China’s president.
The Group of 20 proposed an “India-Middle East-Europe Corridor” at its 2022 summit in New Delhi, with rail lines to the Mediterranean terminating in Israel. The Gaza and Lebanon wars have put that on indefinite hold.
Turkey opposes IMEC as a competitor to its central role in trade between Europe and Asia. But the issue goes far beyond transportation: The future of the Turkic peoples is centered in central Asia rather than Anatolia.
Writing in China’s English-language newspaper Global Times last June, a former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, Djoomart Otorbaev, hailed the new China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway project as “a monumental game-changer.” The railway will be the most challenging engineering project ever of its kind.
“The total length of bridges and tunnels will be 146.49 km or 47 percent of the length of the entire section of Kyrgyzstan. The railway will pass at altitudes above 3,000 meters in some sections, showcasing the ambitious project’s immense scale and intricacy,” Otorbaev noted.
He added, “The new railway lines will intersect in Central Asia with planned and under-construction north-south railway lines from Russia and Central Asia, passing through Afghanistan, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Iran to reach the deep-sea ports of the Indian Ocean. Once fully implemented, the plan could transform Central Asia into a unique transport hub for the entire Eurasian continent.”
With Turkey and the Central Asian republics on its side, China has little to fear from unrest in Xinjiang. By building infrastructure across Central Asia, China has underwritten Turkey’s economic and demographic future.
And by stabilizing what might otherwise be a belt of unrest, China has also mitigated one of the main threats to the Russian Federation. This cements a Chinese-Russian rapprochement in a part of the world where the two powers long contended for influence.
Follow David P Goldman on X at @davidpgoldman