n-China border said apples were the cargo he brought to Almaty, Kazakhstan's booming commercial center. For Kazakhs, there's a tart irony in the shipment.
Almaty's region is where the first apple trees were found and the first apple orchards planted. The city was a center of the Soviet Union's s fruit industry. Its very name means "Father of Apples."
In the past few years, Chinese fruit, vegetables, TV sets, T-shirts and tires have flooded markets along the old Silk Road in former Soviet Central Asia. Each day, all along the Chinese border, hundreds of tractor-trailers rattle west.
These goods are the most visible sign of Beijing's growing power here as China, Russia, the United States and others compete for financial and strategic advantage on the borders of some of the world's most turbulent countries -- Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It's a struggle in which China seems to be gaining the upper hand.
At stake are oil, hydropower sources, strategic metals, pipelines, transit routes and access to markets. The chief prize is energy supplies: China needs them, Russia wants to control their distribution, and Western powers want to ensure they are not monopolized by Moscow or Beijing.
China today is reaching deep into Central Asia to tap oil and gas reserves, using pipelines and investments to challenge Russia's monopoly on gas shipments and to thwart Moscow's hopes of controlling a bigger share of the region's oil.
In recent years, China and Russia have forged a strategic alliance, as part of a group called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to squeeze the United States out of Central Asia, after the U.S. established military bases here. They have largely succeeded.
However, friction is developing between the two neighboring giants. And given China's 1.3 billion people and its economic strength, it seems certain that Russia, with its dwindling population and economy based narrowly on energy, will increasingly be on the defensive.
Of course, Russia's two-century presence in region gives it potent advantages in trying to preserve its influence.
But Niklas Swanstrom of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies argues China is succeeding in using "soft power" -- judiciously apportioned aid, aggressive diplomacy and massive investment -- to shove Russia aside.
"China will be the dominant player over time," he predicts.
Nowhere, perhaps, is China's presence more starkly evident than at Khorgos, straddling the Kazakh-China border.
On the Kazakh side sits a sleepy village, a mosque and arid steppes where shepherds ride horseback. On the Chinese side sprawls a city, its skyline punctuated by two construction cranes, the skeletons of several large buildings and a massive white arch topped by two scarlet Chinese flags.
Talipzhan Suleimanov, a captain in the Kazakh border service in Khorgos, stood outside his ramshackle post and pointed at the gleaming Chinese city across a dry riverbed.
"This looks like the U.S.-Mexican border," he said. "We are the Mexicans, because the Chinese are so much more advanced."
Central Asia -- which includes Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan -- was long regarded as the middle of nowhere, caught between Russia, China, Siberia and Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains.
The region emerged from isolation about 200 years ago as Russian imperial troops and British spies competed for influence in a rivalry that Rudyard Kipling called "The Great Game."
