SEOUL, September 16 — South Korea hosts the first-ever presidential summit with the five Central Asian states on Wednesday, raising to heads-of-state level a dialogue that has existed since 2007 and putting economic cooperation between Seoul and the region on a more permanent footing. The meeting follows bilateral talks in Seoul on Tuesday between South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and the leaders of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Local media have described the gathering as historic.
At its heart, the summit answers a need on both sides. The Central Asian states, increasingly positioning themselves as a bloc known as C5+, are seeking investments, access to technology and a diversification of international partnerships beyond Moscow and Beijing.
South Korea, for its part, needs to diversify its economic and supply-chain dependencies. Sabina Insebayeva, a political scientist at Nazarbayev University, set out the imbalance plainly. “Currently, South Korea has a limited domestic resource base and a significant supply-chain exposure to China, particularly in critical materials, components and other industrial inputs.
Central Asia can offer South Korea critical minerals, energy, alternative production opportunities and greater supply chain diversification. Korea, in return, can provide technology, capital and industrial expertise,” she said.
She explained that the K-Silk Road initiative, South Korea’s strategy for Central Asia launched in 2024, aims to go beyond securing raw materials to develop processing, manufacturing and technology capacity in partnership with local companies.
The test of a workable agenda
Sanat Kushkumbayev, from the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera that the first expectation is political. “The summit will raise a dialogue that has existed since 2007 to the level of heads of state. But the real test is whether it produces a workable agenda in critical minerals, energy, digital technologies and transport,” he said.
He added that for Central Asia the value of the meeting also lies in showing that the region can engage external partners collectively without giving up national priorities, and that he would expect a framework for regular high-level cooperation followed by more detailed bilateral deals. By the end of 2025, the lump-sum volume of South Korea’s direct investment in Central Asia reached about $6.4bn.
Kushkumbayev noted that Kazakhstan already accounts for much of South Korea’s trade and investment presence in the region, so it can reasonably push for larger industrial projects, research facilities and local supplier networks — though, he said, “the difficult part will be moving from assembly and memorandums to genuine localisation and commercial production”.
A social connection reaching back to 1937
Behind the trade agenda sits a longer and harder history. In 1937, at the order of Joseph Stalin, more than 170,000 Soviet Koreans were forcibly relocated from the USSR’s Far East to Soviet Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan under the pretext of preventing Japanese sabotage. Their descendants, collectively called Koryo-saram, have sought to stay connected to their roots.
Roman Zakharov, a half-Korean artist from Kazakhstan, described what his grandparents found on arrival. “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,” he said. His grandparents waited a year for housing and, as deportees, had no permission to leave the collective farms they worked on until Stalin’s death. Zakharov’s art pieces were shown at an exhibition in South Korea in 2023.
“Koryo-saram tried to adapt local products like carrots to make Korean pickled food. But local Korean culture changed through time,” he said.
“My grandmother tried to listen to South Korean programmes on TV, but she couldn’t understand anything. It was a different language than my grandparents spoke.” After the Soviet Union collapsed, South Korea began founding cultural centres across Central Asia where local people, including Koryo-saram, could learn the language and engage with Korean culture. Zakharov’s sister attended traditional Korean dance classes.
The breakthrough for Korean soft power in Central Asia came in the 2010s, when soap operas and K-pop became popular. Aiganym Toleuliyeva, a 28-year-old Kazakh researcher who moved to South Korea to study in 2019, said the South Korean government has been popularising Korean culture in Central Asia and using it as a soft power which is already very strong. In Astana, she noted, there is a Korean kimchi festival and a Korean music festival funded by the Korean embassy.
What to watch next is whether the presidential format yields the framework for regular high-level cooperation Kushkumbayev expects, and whether the bilateral deals that follow move the relationship past memorandums into production on the ground.
