1 China Business Sep 25, 2012 China deepens Central Asia role By Zabikhulla S Saipov Recent Chinese diplomatic maneuvers in Central Asia, both bilateral and multilateral, show that Beijing's strategy treats the region as a corridor for reaching resource bases in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Central Asia is thus part of China's broader blueprint of securing strategic resources and supplies to feed its developing economy. Illustratively, Chinese Vice Premier Hui Liangyu's two-week official tour of Congo, Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan on September 1-13 supports the premise that Central Asia is to have an important role in Beijing's energy strategy. While other global and regional powers contemplated and sketched out on paper their desired projects to slice up the Central Asian hydrocarbon pie, China quietly has found common language with the regional leaders and has been connecting the countries with oil and gas pipelines as well as air and land routes. In particular, Beijing succeeded in rapidly building and launching the Kazakhstan- China oil pipeline and the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan-Kazakhstan-China gas pipeline. In all of these projects, China achieved its goals incrementally by inviting Uzbekistan only after nearing completing of the construction of its Central Asia-China gas pipeline, having built the necessary infrastructure first in Kazakhstan and then in Turkmenistan. Beijing apparently is playing the same shrewd strategy in Africa by visiting Congo and Tanzania - the eastern and western coasts of Central Africa - but not yet revealing its real motives. In the future, the upgraded infrastructure at these two end points probably will be connected with the African countries located in between. By intensifying trade and economic relations with Central Asia, Beijing intends to develop its own periphery - its western provinces including Xinjiang - and extend and tie them to the wider region's economies. In this respect, Chinese media reported that Xinjiang is expected to become China's main logistics and information hub for rendering services to Central Asia.