China and Uzbekistan have upgraded their ties to an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” from the previous plainer “comprehensive strategic partnership”.

The announcement of the move came during the January 23-25 state visit paid to China by Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. Beijing uses defined levels of partnerships to indicate its likely strategic priorities and perception of countries in foreign policy and diplomacy.

In Beijing, Mirziyoyev and China’s President Xi Jinping signed 14 bilateral documents, said by officials to mark a significant advance in Uzbekistan-China relations. The visit follows the first in-person “C5+China” summit held in May last year that brought together Xi and Central Asia’s five national leaders in China. Since then, Beijing has been setting the stage for extended cooperation with the five “Stans” of the region.

On the first day of Mirziyoyev’s visit, the two countries reached agreements on approximately 500 projects. They would be valued at $56.7bn if all successfully rolled out.

Mirziyoyev, in an article in Chinese state media, lauded China’s economic model and the “new historical heights” of Sino-Uzbek relations. He stated: “Every time I visit China, I sincerely admire the scale of the reforms taking place here, the accomplishments, creative strength, diligence, and talent of the Chinese people.”

He said the trip would allow him to “develop a new long-term agenda” for the two countries that would serve for “decades”.

Uzbekistan’s leader took with him to China a substantial delegation, including senior managers, ministers, regional governors and business leaders.

Trade between the two nations amounted to $14bn in 2023. Both sides say they have realistic aspirations to push it to $20bn as the next step in their trade expansion.

The 14 bilateral agreements signed during the visit spanned a diverse range of sectors, including environmental protection, technical and economic cooperation and human resources development.

However, Niva Yau, a fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub, told RFE/RL: “This [visit] is less about concrete outcomes and more about setting a road map for the future.”

“China has committed to investments and projects and this high-level visit is [about] how to achieve them and to search for new areas to cooperate together,” Yau added.

With China positioning itself as the global leader in electric vehicle (EV) production and photovoltaics, Uzbekistan—Central Asia’s most populous country with 35mn people and embarked on economic reforms that, for sought-after results, will require major expansions in foreign trade and investment—is an attractive market to Beijing in these areas.

In December, China’s Henan Suda and the Uzbek energy ministry struck a deal for the former to build 50,000 EV charging stations around Uzbekistan by 2033.

During the Mirziyoyev visit, agreements were made for the construction of renewable energy facilities with a total capacity of 6GW, supporting Uzbekistan’s ambitious target of reaching 27GW of renewable energy by 2030, with a focus on the Syrdarya region for initiating projects.

Also during the visit, a protocol was signed on deepening cooperation on a China-Central Asia-Europe Railway Expressway. This appears to be a reference to the proposed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) rail project that would connect with lines running through to Europe, but recent months have seen prospects for this investment—first suggested more than two decades ago—dim. With China experiencing economic difficulties, officials there have not made arranging financing for the project a priority. Mountainous Kyrgyzstan—a challenging prospect for the engineers who would build the CKU given its mountainous territory that would require scores of extensive bridges and tunnels—insists the project is still moving forward, but is yet to explain how the funding could be secured.

China’s economic struggles also mean that, following a decade of infrastructure investments around the world through its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing is reorientating BRI to more strategic and transparent projects, likely scaling down the rate of lending in the process, while also making it “greener”. Mirziyoyev no doubt made Uzbekistan’s case for being one of the first to benefit from elements of the reshaped programme.