China potentially could supplant Russia as the main energy broker in central Asian countries that don’t have their own significant fossil fuel resources, suggested 10 graduate fellows from the region at Johns Hopkins University’s School for Advanced International Studies. But the relationship would be more commercial than geopolitical, the Fall 2013 Rumsfeld Fellows in the Silk Road Studies Program at SAIS’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute added. Several countries in the region are aggressively pursuing waste energy and other biogas alternatives as well as hydropower, they said. “So the question becomes what the development of local firms pursuing green technology means alongside China’s presence,” said S. Frederick Starr, the institute’s chairman who moderated the discussion. “The people in this region are more resourceful than some outsiders believe. What’s happening on the smaller scale may mean more and be a bigger response to the fear of Chinese dominance than they expect.” An […]