Deep trade, shallow institutions: China and its Eurasian neighbours’ extensive relations over 2014-2025
Deep trade, shallow institutions: China and its Eurasian neighbours’ extensive relations over 2014-2025

Summary/Abstract: Introduction: China’s goods trade with its six Eurasian neighbours - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Mongolia - reached USD 123.9 billion in 2025, and the five Central Asian states together crossed the USD 100 billion mark for the first time, five years ahead of the target voiced at the Xi’an summit of 2023. In this paper we rise a question that the volume figures do not answer: whether the institutional architecture of these relationships has thickened at anything like the same pace. Methods: The study builds a twelve-year panel (2014-2025) of Chinese customs data for six neighbours, deliberately paired against the partner countries’ own customs reporting rather than substituted for it. Three constructed measures organise the comparison: a directional balance ratio, a Mirror Divergence Ratio quantifying the gap between the two national accounts of the same trade, and an institutional depth score built from four verifiable binary facts - an effective currency swap, a designated renminbi clearing bank, direct participation in the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, and a mutual visa-waiver covering ordinary passports. Commodity structure is decomposed at HS two- and four-digit level from UN Comtrade in both reporting mirrors. Results: Trade grew 2.37-fold across the six neighbours over the period, but the growth is neither uniform nor of one kind. Three structural types emerge. Turkmenistan and Mongolia are resource suppliers running large surpluses with China (balance ratios of -68.1% and -54.1% in 2025). Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are absorption markets where Chinese exports overwhelm the reverse flow (+61.6%, +74.0%, +76.8%). Kazakhstan alone approaches balance (+22.0%). Mirror divergence is severe and systematic: for Kyrgyzstan in 2025 the two customs services differ by USD 22.2 billion, a divergence ratio of 138%; for Kazakhstan in 2024 the gap is USD 13.8 billion, and 72% of it sits in five consumer-goods categories. Kazakhstan’s export basket to China restructured abruptly, crude petroleum falling from 25.6% of the total in 2023 to 7.9% in 2024 as ores and refined metals displaced fuels. Against this commercial deepening, the institutional layer is thin: the Kazakh, Uzbek and Tajik currency swap lines have all lapsed and appear on none of the People’s Bank of China’s effective registers, Kyrgyzstan never signed one, and only two of the six neighbours hold a mutual visa waiver for ordinary passports. Discussion: The two dimensions come apart in a specific, measurable way. Institutional depth tracks the scale of a trading relationship (Spearman’s ρ = 0.93 against 2025 trade volume) but much less its rate of deepening (ρ = 0.59 against 2014-2025 growth), and the fastest-growing corridors are the least institutionalised. Kazakhstan illustrates the pattern in miniature: the People’s Bank of China reports a renminbi settlement ratio near 30% in bilateral goods trade while simultaneously recording the renminbi at 0.1-1.5% of Kazakhstan’s own foreign-exchange markets. Currency internationalisation here happens on Chinese books, not in the neighbour’s financial system. Mobility data supply the counterpoint and the policy lever: where a mutual visa waiver was actually concluded, Chinese arrivals rose from 18,000 to 655,000 in Kazakhstan across the two years spanning its entry into force, and quadrupled in Uzbekistan in the year of its own. The instruments work; they have simply not been built in four of the six relationships. Scientific Novelty: The study is the first to treat the Chinese-partner mirror gap as a measured variable rather than a nuisance to be averaged away, and to set it alongside a coded institutional-depth score across the whole Eurasian neighbourhood. Its central claim - that commercial and institutional integration have decoupled, and that the decoupling is widest exactly where trade is growing fastest - reframes a literature that has generally inferred institutional consequences from trade volumes. A second contribution follows from the first: what is shallow is specifically the bilateral layer, since the institutions China can build without a partner’s continuing consent, notably the seven Luban vocational workshops opened across these six states between 2022 and 2026, have thickened rapidly over the same period. Practical Implications: The findings argue for harmonised bilateral customs reconciliation as a precondition for credible policy analysis; for renewal of the lapsed swap lines if renminbi settlement is to acquire domestic depth in partner economies; for extending mutual visa waivers beyond the two states that currently hold them; and for treating the statistical opacity of the Kyrgyz and Tajik corridors as a governance problem with fiscal consequences rather than a reporting artefact.

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