As the World Turns: China pushes "new great game"

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While the U.S. plays its "great game" to preserve some kind of hegemony, China pushes ahead cementing energy supplies with Turkmenistan.

By inaugurating a pipeline with the central Asian state of Turkmenistan which will transfer natural gas to China without passing through Russian territory.

It is a pioneering stage in China's "New Great Game."

Chinese, Turkmen leaders celebrate
(watch the video)

China wins a race with both Europe and the U.S. -- which sought their own pipelines from Turkmenistan.

The new pipeline does not pass through Russian territory.

It shatters a bit Russian efforts to control energy resources passing from former republics of the Soviet Union.

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Monday, December 14, 2009 8:26 AM

Mark MacKinnon, The Toronto Globe and Mail's Beijing bureau chief, blogs on life and happenings in China and East Asia:

Beijing – A few hours ago, in a place called Samadepe on the rarely visited border between the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the global balance of power tilted ever so slightly.

Flanked by the leaders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Chinese President Hu Jintao today turned a symbolic wheel as oil started flowing into a new 1,833-kilometre pipeline that snakes east from Turkmenistan and across Central Asia to Xinjiang in the far west of China, where it will connect with China’s own pipeline network.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has insisted that Russia is not bothered by the opening of the pipeline, but that’s difficult to believe. Mr. Putin’s nine years in power (the first eight as president) have been spent trying to reestablish Russia as a global force. Key to that effort has been its role as one of the world’s biggest producers of natural gas, a position that was strengthened by its effective monopoly over the pipelines coming out of the former Soviet states of Central Asia.

That monopoly has now been broken. The Turkmenistan-Xinjiang pipeline is the first that will transport gas from Turkmenistan, the world’s fourth-largest producer, to market without going through Russian territory. When it reaches full capacity in another three years, it will pump up to 40 billion cubic metres annually, feeding China’s rapidly-growing and energy-starved economy, meeting half of the country’s current demand.

In building the new pipeline, China can also claim victory in a race with both the United States and Europe. Both have sought for years to establish a route to bring Turkmen gas west without going through Russia, efforts that were repeatedly thwarted by interference from Moscow as well as Iran, which blocked efforts to build a pipeline underneath the Caspian Sea.