Above all, Moscow wants to preserve its monopoly on distributing Central Asian gas and its major role in other energy sectors. To this end, President Vladimir Putin proposed at an October regional summit in Tehran that all the Caspian Sea states have a veto on any new pipelines crossing the sea bed — apparently so Moscow can block plans to connect Kazakhstan’s and Turkmenistan’s rich oil and gas fields to the west, bypassing Russia.

But Moscow’s dominance of the region’s energy reserves is eroding. Despite Russian pressure, both Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have welcomed discussion of a trans-Caspian pipeline — and Putin’s proposal was met with silence.

Twice in the past two years, Turkmenistan has signed contracts to ship natural gas west through Russian pipelines — only to turn around a month later and, in effect, promise to ship the same gas east to China.

Beijing is playing a subtler game. It is a customer, not a competitor, for Central Asia’s hydrocarbons and other natural resources. It is playing offense not defense, buying oil companies and expanding its access to Middle Eastern gas and oil through a network of new highways, railroads and pipelines.

During much of the 20th century, Central Asia was a source of raw materials for Soviet factories and a captive market for shoddy Soviet goods. After the Soviet collapse, Russian goods vanished here, replaced first by merchandise from Turkey and now from China.

While Russia is now drenched in oil wealth, its hopes of restoring many of its industries — and weaning itself from reliance on sky-high oil prices — depend on regaining access to markets like those here.

Russia sees Central Asia as an inheritance from its imperial Czarist and Communist past. For China, with its appetite for raw materials and its awakening as a world power, Central Asia is the Wild West: a land of opportunity, a reservoir of resources and a corridor to the Middle East’s oil fields and Europe’s wealthy shopping districts. China has been moving in quietly and steadily since the mid 1990s, when trucks loaded up on scrap iron, steel and copper at derelict Soviet factories and carted the metals back to China for recycling.

In the 1990s, China did relatively little trade with Kazakhstan — Central Asia’s economic motor, an oil- and gas-rich nation of 15.2 million larger than Western Europe. But by 2006, China ranked third behind Germany and Russia in Kazakhstan’s US$35.6 billion export market and second after Russia in the nation’s US$22 billion import market.

The tiny, mountainous nation of Kyrgyzstan imported almost nothing from its giant neighbor to the East. By 2006, 57 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s imports came from China — and only 15 percent from Russia.

In Khorgos, trucks leave China packed and typically return empty. The road to the border bears the scars of this one-way trade. The lane leading away from China is deeply rutted, the one leading back is smoothly paved.

In 2003, Beijing predicted a 30- to 50-fold increase in its trade with Central Asia within a decade.

China’s growing clout makes many Central Asians anxious.

“Sometimes, it feels uneasy to be next to such a mighty neighbor,” said Anastasiya Zhukova, a 24-year-old ethnic Russian and Kazakh citizen who works as a linguist for Chinese companies.

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