AP Photo

When the leaders of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and China gathered in the desert of eastern Turkmenistan in December to inaugurate a new 1,800-kilometre natural gas pipeline running from Central Asia to China, it marked China's dramatic entrance into a battle previously dominated by Russia and the West over access to the region's natural resources. It also was a measure of Beijing's increasingly confident foreign policy, and its growing ties to--and interest in--its neighbours of the former Soviet Union.

‘This project has not only commercial or economic value. It is also political,’ Turkmenistan's president, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, said at the time. ‘China, through its wise and farsighted policy, has become one of the key guarantors of global...