The Chinatown Stalin made a ghost town: Millionka in Vladivostok, home for labourers who built the Russian Far East
Tens of thousands of Chinese – labourers, refugees – called the Chinatown in Russia’s easternmost city home for decades until Stalin ordered it ‘liquidated’
Founded as a military outpost around 1860 and named “Lord of the East”, Vladivostok grew rapidly when it was designated by the Imperial Russian Navy as its main Pacific naval base in 1872. In the 1880s and 1890s, the city was integrated into the Trans-Siberian Railway, running all the way west to Moscow and St Petersburg, and linked up with the Chinese Eastern Railway, with its connections back through Siberia, down to Korea, and as far as the ice-free port of Dalian and the Chinese capital, Beijing.
Russian newspapers noted Chinese peddlers of paper flowers and other cheap goods at every station all the way to St Petersburg and, as with all who sought to exploit the natural wealth and new opportunities in Vladivostok, the Russian Empire’s most easterly city, many Chinese workers decided to settle there, too.
The Vladivostok district most of them would come to call home – an area that would soon become known as Millionka – was next to the busy port. Initially intended for the city’s expanding mercantile middle class, it consisted of well-built, three-storey red-brick buildings, replete with ornate arches and balconies. However, with views of a functioning port – rather than a romantic sea vista – the settlement somehow never attracted its target market.
Emil Avdaliani is a professor of international relations at European University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a scholar of silk roads.
The war in Iran is not just a regional crisis. It is reshaping global energy flows, disrupting shipping routes and forcing governments to reassess the vulnerability of their supply chains. For China, the conflict has exposed an increasingly urgent problem: the risks of heavy reliance on maritime energy imports from the Gulf.
The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the world’s most critical chokepoints, carrying roughly a fifth of global oil and gas under normal conditions. Any sustained disruption – whether through direct conflict or rising insurance and security costs – has immediate consequences for Asian economies, none more so than China.
While Beijing is unlikely to reduce its dependence on Middle Eastern energy in the short term, the current crisis is accelerating a longer-term shift towards more resilient, diversified and overland alternatives. In that recalibration, Central Asia is becoming more important. Within the region, Kazakhstan stands out as the key partner.
The foundation for this shift was already in place before this conflict. Trade between China and the five Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – has expanded rapidly in the past decade, exceeding US$100 billion in 2025.
More tellingly, the structure of that trade is changing. Road transport now accounts for more than half of China’s trade with the region, up from less than 20 per cent just a few years ago, underscoring the growing importance of land-based connectivity.
Kazakhstan sits at the centre of this transformation. Bilateral trade between China and Kazakhstan reached a record US$48.7 billion in 2025. The two countries have also built a dense web of investment ties, with more than 200 joint projects valued at more than US$60 billion.
The war in Iran strengthens the strategic logic behind these trends. Beijing has a greater incentive to reduce concentration risk, ensuring that not all of its energy and trade flows depend on a single, vulnerable region. Central Asia offers one of the few viable ways to do that.
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Kazakhstan in particular provides a combination of scale, geography and resources. It is the largest oil producer in Central Asia, with output of around 1.7 million barrels per day, and it is the world’s leading producer of uranium, accounting for more than 40 per cent of global supply. While these volumes are not sufficient to substitute for Gulf imports, they are valuable as part of a broader diversification strategy.
More importantly, Kazakhstan is a transit state. China has invested heavily in overland connectivity across Eurasia in the past decade. The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the Middle Corridor, has emerged as one of the most important of these pathways. Connecting China to Europe via Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus and Turkey, the route has seen rapid growth in recent years.
Cargo volumes along the corridor have increased fivefold in the past seven years, rising from around 800,000 tonnes to about 4.5 million tonnes annually. Container traffic has also expanded, with around 77,000 20-foot equivalent units transported in 2025, while transit times have been reduced to just over two weeks. These are still modest figures compared with maritime trade, but the trajectory is clear.
The significance of the Middle Corridor lies in its strategic function. It provides an overland route linking China to European markets that bypasses both Russia and the Middle East – two regions increasingly exposed to geopolitical risk.
The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, also known as the East-West Middle Corridor. Photo: https://middlecorridor.com/en
That dual exposure is now shaping Beijing’s calculations. Northern routes through Russia remain politically sensitive in the context of the Ukraine war and Western sanctions. Southern routes through Iran and the Gulf have become more uncertain amid the current conflict. Together, these pressures are elevating the importance of Central Asia as a stabilising intermediary.
This is an acceleration of existing trends. At the China-Central Asia Summit in Astana in 2025, Beijing signalled that it views the region as a priority in its neighbourhood diplomacy. The war in Iran adds urgency to these efforts. As maritime risks increase, the value of overland connectivity rises.
There are also broader economic implications. The conflict has driven volatility in global energy and commodity markets, increasing costs for import-dependent economies. It has also disrupted supply chains linked to Iran, affecting the flow of goods into Central Asia and beyond.
Central Asia – and Kazakhstan in particular – also benefit from a shifting perception of geopolitical risk. The Middle East is once again seen as unstable, while Russia remains constrained by geopolitical tensions. Against this backdrop, Kazakhstan offers a comparatively stable environment for investment, trade and logistics.
This does not mean the region is without risks. The Middle Corridor itself depends on stability in the South Caucasus and the Caspian basin, both of which could be affected if the Iran conflict expands.
Meanwhile, Central Asia should not be seen as a replacement for the Middle East. Even in a worst-case scenario, the region cannot offset the loss of Gulf energy supplies. The more realistic outcome is a gradual rebalancing in which China strengthens alternative routes and partnerships.
The Iran war has not created this dynamic, but it has made it more visible. As risks in the Middle East rise, the strategic value of Central Asia as a corridor of resilience is becoming harder to ignore. For Beijing, connectivity is no longer just about efficiency. It is about security and the ability to adapt to maritime disruption. In that emerging logic, Kazakhstan is moving to the centre of China’s geopolitical thinking.
Emil Avdaliani is a professor of international relations at European University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a scholar of silk roads. He has published a number of books including his latest "China, Russia and the New Eurasian Order".
