“When my grandparents arrived in southern Kazakhstan, it was autumn, and it was already cold, but they had no houses to live in. That winter they lived with local Kazakh people who supported them and deportees from other countries.” Roman Zakharov, a half-Korean artist from Kazakhstan, was describing 1937, the year Joseph Stalin ordered more than 170,000 Soviet Koreans moved from the USSR’s Far East to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The stated pretext was preventing Japanese sabotage.
Nearly nine decades on, South Korea is receiving the heads of all five Central Asian states in Seoul. Wednesday’s gathering is the first presidential summit between Seoul and the region, and local media have called it historic. President Lee Jae Myung held bilateral meetings beforehand with the leaders of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The summit is meant to deepen economic ties and give them a more permanent footing.
What each side wants
Central Asian states increasingly present themselves as a bloc, C5+, and analysts say they want investment, technology and partners beyond Moscow and Beijing. South Korea has its own reasons. Sabina Insebayeva, a political scientist at Nazarbayev University, said the country has a small domestic resource base and heavy supply-chain exposure to China in critical materials and components. Central Asia can offer minerals, energy and alternative production sites. “Korea, in return, can provide technology, capital and industrial expertise,” she said.
She added that Seoul’s K-Silk Road strategy, launched in 2024, is meant to reach past raw materials into processing, manufacturing and technology capacity built with local companies. By the end of 2025, South Korea’s direct investment in the region had reached about $6.4bn.
Sanat Kushkumbayev of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies told Al Jazeera the first expectation is political: the summit lifts a dialogue running since 2007 to heads of state. The real test, he said, is whether it yields a workable agenda in critical minerals, energy, digital technologies and transport. For Central Asia, he said, it also shows the region can deal with outside partners collectively without surrendering national priorities. He expects a framework for regular high-level cooperation, then detailed bilateral deals. Kazakhstan already accounts for much of Korea’s trade and investment in the region, so it can push for bigger industrial projects and research facilities. “The difficult part will be moving from assembly and memorandums to genuine localisation and commercial production,” he said.
The Koryo-saram
Zakharov’s grandparents waited a year for housing, and as deportees they could not leave the collective farms where they worked until Stalin died. The descendants of the deportees, known as Koryo-saram, have tried to keep a link to their roots, with mixed success. They adapted local carrots into Korean pickles. “My grandmother tried to listen to South Korean programmes on TV, but she couldn’t understand anything,” Zakharov said. “It was a different language than my grandparents spoke.”
After the Soviet Union collapsed, South Korea opened cultural centres across Central Asia where local people, Koryo-saram included, could study the language. Zakharov’s sister took traditional Korean dance classes. The real breakthrough came in the 2010s, when soap operas and K-pop caught on. Aiganym Toleuliyeva, a 28-year-old Kazakh researcher who went to study in South Korea in 2019, said Seoul’s promotion of its culture is already a strong soft power. In Astana, the Korean embassy pays for a kimchi festival and a music festival.
Kushkumbayev expects the Korean approach to stay commercially driven and relatively low-key rather than openly geopolitical, even though Seoul wants a more visible position in a region where China, Russia, the European Union, Turkiye and the Gulf states are already active.
