Mapping Global China: a new lens on Beijing’s reach in Central Asia

When Maria Adele Carrai spoke at CAPS Unlock last month, she posed a simple question.

“Have you heard of Global China?”

Most had not. Yet, as she explained in her lecture and in a forthcoming interview with the CAPS Unlock podcast, the term captures the scale of China’s activities abroad, from South America to the Arctic, and especially in Central Asia.

Carrai, an assistant professor at NYU Shanghai, co-leads the Mapping Global China project.

This month it relaunches with an expanded “master map,” datasets and research designed to help track China’s economic, cultural and political presence worldwide.

“The truth is in between,” she said of common portrayals of Beijing as either benign partner or looming threat. “We need data and knowledge to understand what China is really doing beyond the stereotypes.”

Mapping Global China pulls together information on infrastructure, trade, migration, Confucius Institutes and even satellite imagery. Users will be able to zoom into regions, filter by sector, and compare countries across time.

“Maps, charts and story maps can help us have a better sense of what China is doing,” Carrai said.

For Central Asia, where Beijing’s involvement has grown rapidly since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, the tool could help establish a clearer baseline.

The project was born from frustration with BRI maps that focused narrowly on routes to Europe.

“They actually hampered our understanding of what China was doing,” Carrai said.

Central Asia, despite being integral to Beijing’s connectivity plans, was often treated schematically. The new platform aims to allow users to view projects such as oil refineries, logistics hubs or power lines as part of wider networks rather than isolated ventures.

Crucially, Carrai emphasized that Chinese influence in Central Asia is shaped by local choices.

Kazakhstan, for example, integrated BRI into its national development plan voluntarily.

“Recipient countries have agency in shaping how Global China looks,” she said.

State-owned firms, private companies and even students often follow their own logics, producing a picture more fragmented than Beijing’s centralized rhetoric suggests.

Infrastructure remains the most visible dimension. New railways and pipelines bring investment but also concerns about dependency.

Carrai acknowledged these debates, praising Kazakhstan’s policy of balancing between major powers.

“You cannot become a China, but you can take whatever you can from these different powers and balance it,” she said.

Soft power also drew discussion.

Confucius Institutes, once a lightning rod in the West, vary in their effectiveness depending on host universities. Digital platforms such as TikTok raise questions over data and algorithms, but their political impact differs across contexts.

“[To better understand this], you need fieldwork,” Carrai said, highlighting the need to ground data in local realities.

For Central Asian policymakers and analysts, the project’s value may lie in its attempt to navigate patchy and conflicting information. Figures for trade and investment often diverge depending on whether they come from Beijing or host governments.

For example, in Kyrgyzstan the gap is striking. In 2023, Bishkek’s official figures recorded $5.4 billion in imports from China, while Chinese customs data put the number at nearly four times higher, at $19.7 billion.

Much of the discrepancy comes from goods that transit through Kyrgyzstan en route elsewhere but are still logged by Beijing as exports to Kyrgyz markets. Such divergences make it difficult for policymakers, researchers and the public to know the true scale of economic ties, and they highlight why efforts to visualize the data must be transparent about their limits.

Carrai is frank about these gaps but stresses the importance of showing them openly.

She also wants the tool to be accessible.

Students and journalists in Almaty, Bishkek or Dushanbe will be able to generate their own maps, overlaying investment data with migration flows or cultural initiatives, she said.

Some of these can be published as “story maps.”

“We welcome collaborations,” Carrai said.

The relaunch comes at a time when Central Asia is courted not only by China but also Russia, the European Union, the Gulf states and India. The ability to visualize and contextualize Beijing’s role, with its contradictions and limits, is not simply academic. It shapes how the region understands its own choices.

The new website goes live later this month. It will not resolve every question, but it may provide a clearer way to see the complexity of China’s presence in Central Asia.