China’s Eurasian hedge runs through Turkmenistan

WITHIN a single month, three moves put Turkmenistan at the centre of a much larger Chinese strategy.

On Mar 18, Chinese President Xi Jinping met Chairman of the People’s Council of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov in Beijing. On Mar 24, Ashgabat authorised a contract with China National Petroleum Corp Amu Darya for Phase IV of the Galkynysh gas field.

On Apr 15-17, China’s Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang travelled to Turkmenistan as Xi’s special representative for the gas field’s groundbreaking ceremony and co-chaired the seventh meeting of the bilateral cooperation committee.

Taken together, those steps were more than routine diplomacy around another gas project. Turkmenistan is clearly on the rise in China’s Eurasia geostrategy.

The deeper story is about hedging. China is not searching for one perfect corridor to Europe or one decisive substitute for vulnerable sea lanes. It is building a portfolio of routes, suppliers and interfaces that make its external position harder to squeeze.

Turkmenistan has become valuable because it sits where three Chinese priorities now overlap: overland energy security, land access towards Iran and the Gulf, and a southern branch of trans-Eurasian connectivity that gains importance when war, sanctions and chokepoints disrupt established routes. 

Timing matters. Even as global liquefied natural gas supply is expected to grow faster in 2026, the International Energy Agency has warned that geopolitical tensions and weather shocks can still drive volatility. That warning already looks conservative.

Asian buyers are living through another lesson in what maritime dependence means when the Gulf is unstable. In that environment, an additional overland energy option has value well beyond its headline volume.

The second force pushing Turkmenistan upwards is the post-Ukraine remapping of Eurasia. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, routes that reduce exposure to Russian territory or diversify away from a single continental axis have gained strategic weight.

Last year, the long-discussed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway gained new importance because shippers wanted overland options that bypass Russia. The broader China-Central Asia push now reflects the same logic. Beijing is deepening transport, customs and infrastructure links with the region because resilience increasingly depends on optionality. 

This is where Turkmenistan comes in.

First, it remains a hard energy asset. Phase IV of Galkynysh is set to include facilities capable of processing 10 billion cubic metres of marketable gas annually, along with the related wells and field infrastructure.

A piece of energy architecture

On its own, that does not transform China’s gas balance. Its importance lies elsewhere: It adds secure overland supply to China’s import mix, deepens a relationship that Chinese officials openly describe as the foundation of bilateral ties, and gives Beijing another piece of energy architecture that does not depend on tanker traffic through congested and contested waters, nor any single supplier including Russia.

Second, Turkmenistan offers China something rarer than another gas field: a discreet land access to Iran.

Turkmenistan joined the International North-South Transport Corridor in 2023 and, since July 2024, has served as a transit corridor for shipments between Iran and China. That matters because Turkmenistan also borders Iran and maintains a foreign-policy profile shaped by permanent neutrality, a status China explicitly supports.

For Beijing, this makes Turkmenistan useful not as a flamboyant geopolitical broker but as a quiet connector – a state through which logistics, contingency planning and low-profile regional access can be organised with less noise than elsewhere. 

Third, Turkmenistan matters because it does not belong to just one corridor. It is located along the southern branch of the Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor linking Europe and China, and remains an essential part of that route.

The same country also sits on the north-south axis reaching towards Iran and the Gulf. That gives Beijing something geopolitically precious: overlap.

A state that can connect westbound and southbound options is more useful than one that serves only a single line on the map. Turkmenistan helps China move away from corridor thinking in the singular and towards network thinking in the plural. 

Commercial geography of Eurasia

This has implications well beyond China.

For traders, shippers, insurers and energy buyers across Asia, the rise of routes through states such as Turkmenistan does not mean sea trade is being dethroned. It means the commercial geography of Eurasia is becoming layered.

Risk will increasingly be priced not only around whether cargo can move, but around how many politically workable routes exist when one region is hit by war, sanctions or chokepoint disruption.

For a hub such as Singapore, that is not a maritime obituary. It is a reminder that the strategic map of Asian commerce is expanding inland. 

None of this makes Turkmenistan China’s only gateway west, and it would be a mistake to oversell it.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s own work points to the usual obstacles: transit costs, border procedures, infrastructure bottlenecks and the uneven competitiveness of different branches of the trans-Caspian route.

Turkmenistan is not a magic corridor nor an exclusive one. Its value lies in redundancy, resilience and room for manoeuvre. In a fragmented Eurasia, that is enough to matter a great deal. China’s hedge runs through Turkmenistan because Turkmenistan helps turn connectivity from a route into an insurance policy. 

The writer is a research fellow with the Charhar Institute. He previously served at East Asian intergovernmental organisations including the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat in Seoul and the Asean-China Centre in Beijing.