But in the modern-day Great Game battle for influence in the strategic region of Central Asia, it is China who is stealing a march on the two Cold War-era superpowers with its vast chequebook, analysts say.

China has been using the twin distractions of the Afghan war and Russia's financial woes to secure its own position in Central Asia, Alexander Cooley, a political scientist at Columbia University, told AFP.

In 2009, for the first time, China's net trade with Central Asia exceeded that of Russia and the trend is likely to persist in the future, he said.

"Russia was traditionally the dominant power in the region, but the financial crisis has undermined its economic power and influence while it has precipitated a wave of new China-Central Asia business deals," he said.

Ex-Soviet Central Asia, a vast resource-rich region bordering Russia, China, Iran and Afghanistan, has long found itself at the centre of power struggles between the world's leading powers.

In the 19th Century, then-Tsarist Russia and the British Empire held an epic century-long struggle for influence here known as The Great Game, their troops and spies facing off along the dusty plains of the legendary Silk Road.

But if the Great Game was defined by two roughly-equal opponents fighting over an established idea -- the Russian Empire's thrust towards British India -- the new contest is more complicated.

The United States is interested in one thing only in Central Asia, said Paul Quinn-Judge, a Bishkek-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. "One word: Afghanistan," he said.

"As a result they are throwing their lot in with some of the most corrupt and authoritarian regimes in the world today, doing incalculable damage to their own long-term standing," he said.

As it prepared to invade Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks the United States established military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Now almost a decade on and with only the Manas Transit Centre in Kyrgyzstan left -- Uzbekistan evicted the US in 2005 over rights criticisms -- the US presence continues to attract negative attention and to anger Moscow.

Rights advocates say that by choosing to keep Manas despite serious human rights and democratic concerns in Kyrgyzstan, Washington has weakened its hand with ordinary people.

Russia's perception that the US military presence in Central Asia is part of a plan to encircle it has become the key factor driving Moscow's ad-hoc policy here, Quinn-Judge said.

"Russia is essentially floundering -- winging a policy here. Its main lever of foreign policy in recent years, money, is in markedly shorter supply these days," he said.

"And the Moscow policy is that of a small part of the leading elite --- notably those around (Russian Prime Minister Vladimir) Putin, as seen from a near obsessive concern about the US in the region."

Into that mix steps China, which has gone on a vast spending spree, lending billions of dollars to local governments and snapping up key energy rights in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

In December a consortium led by the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) won the rights to develop Turkmenistan's South Yolotan field, one of the world's most prized gas fields.

China is also active in uranium and oil projects in Kazakhstan, the region's largest economy, and has been building modern roads that will transport Chinese goods to impoverished Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and beyond.

But while China's moves into Central Asia are certainly good business, Beijing has a greater concern, one that is often touted by the region's governments as justification for their often-draconian rule: Islamic extremism.

Three of Central Asia's states -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- border China's most restive region, Xinjiang, ancestral home to Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs, a group Beijing has often portrayed as radical.

China sees a stable, if authoritarian, Central Asia as key towards protecting its western regions from the kind of Islamist violence that has devastated Afghanistan.

"Beijing views the Central Asian states as a critical buffer region for stabilizing and developing its bordering Western province of Xinjiang," Cooley said.

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