Competition among Chinese companies in Central Asia is not limited to the electric vehicle sector or the renewable energy industry. It is equally intense in the field of digital payments, where tech giants Alipay and WeChat Pay together handle more than ninety percent of mobile transactions in China. With their home market largely saturated, these companies have begun to look outward.
Central Asia has become one of the most promising destinations for this expansion. Uzbekistan stands out in particular. With its fast-growing population and steady transition toward cashless transactions, the country offers long-term upside for a global payment platform willing to invest early.
Between 2023 and 2025, the share of cashless payments in Uzbekistan rose from 38% to 43%, and projections suggest this could nearly double by 2027. As interest in digital payments grows, Uzbekistan offers a rare environment where foreign entrants face little resistance. This creates an opening for Chinese companies to establish themselves early and shape adoption patterns for many years to come.
Recent developments reveal that Chinese firms are not only interested in this market but are already preparing for entry. Recently, Alipay announced a partnership with HUMO, the national payment system of Uzbekistan. This cooperation will enable cross border QR payments that connect Uzbekistan with more than fifty countries. Technical work is also underway to integrate both WeChat Pay and Alipay into the two major payment networks within the country, Uzcard and HUMO.
Uzbekistan’s Digital Dividend
The inclusion of Chinese digital payment platforms in Uzbekistan’s national systems offers concrete advantages for both countries. For Uzbekistan, one of the most immediate benefits comes from tourism. The integration of Chinese e-payment applications allows Chinese visitors to pay with the same platforms they use at home. This removes the need to search for unfamiliar local payment methods and makes travel smoother.
This opportunity is especially relevant for Uzbekistan, where the number of Chinese tourists has risen sharply. While over 42,000 Chinese visitors arrived in 2023, this figure climbed to over 74,000 in 2024. As tourist flows continue to rise, easier digital payments will make the country even more attractive and will support higher levels of visitor spending.
There are broader advantages as well. Linking Chinese digital payment platforms to Uzbekistan’s national system connects the country to a wide global financial network. Alipay, for example, already connects forty different e-wallets, ten national QR payment schemes, more than one 100 million merchants and more than 1.8 billion consumer accounts across the world.
This connectivity creates access to a massive international merchant base through a single integration channel. It greatly reduces the financial and technical burden of creating cross border payment acceptance, especially when compared with the fragmented and often complicated integration processes associated with older global card networks.
The most important benefit is the long-term impact on financial modernization. The presence of large, globally experienced Chinese fintech companies encourages Uzbekistan to upgrade its technical standards and to move toward more advanced financial technologies.
Understanding Beijing’s Goals
The expansion of Chinese digital payment companies also brings significant advantages for China itself. By integrating more countries into the Chinese payment ecosystem, platforms gain millions of new users. At the same time, each new integration provides an opportunity for Chinese firms to promote their own digital standards and technical protocols.
This strengthens China’s influence within the digital landscape of Central Asia and deepens its role in shaping the region’s financial architecture. The data generated from the spending patterns of Chinese visitors in Uzbekistan and Uzbek citizens in China can also help Chinese companies create new business strategies. Over time, these insights will extend beyond tourism and influence the broader financial sector in Uzbekistan.
The growing presence of Chinese digital payment platforms also carries wider regional and international implications. China already maintains a strong digital footprint in Central Asia through projects related to smart cities and various digital security systems. The expansion of e- payment platforms adds another layer of influence and contributes to the long-term growth of the China’s Digital Silk Road across the region.
A further strategic advantage relates to China’s goal of increasing the international use of the renminbi. Even if transactions in Uzbekistan are settled in the local currency, the deeper settlement processes behind the scenes can gradually increase the use of the Chinese yuan. This reduces dependence on the United States dollar in cross border trade over time.
A slow but steady shift toward yuan-based settlements can lessen reliance on Western financial infrastructure, including systems such as SWIFT and major global card networks. As Chinese payment platforms become more closely linked with China’s own state-controlled settlement system, known as the Cross Border Interbank Payment System, China reduces its vulnerability to external pressure and ensures that essential trade and financial flows can continue outside Western control.
Confronting the Vulnerabilities
In parallel to the involvement of Chinese e-payment platforms creating benefits, their presence also carries several risks for Uzbekistan. While Uzbekistan has adopted data privacy laws, the regulatory landscape remains inconsistent with best international practices.
Chinese digital platforms operate within an environment where the extraction of user data, behavioral metrics and metadata is an integral business model, and they often comply with Chinese state requirements for data access. This creates a structural vulnerability for Uzbekistan.
Weak enforcement of privacy rules and limited institutional capacity mean that sensitive financial information collected through large scale e-payment systems could be accessed by foreign actors, used for commercial profiling or potentially integrated into broader Chinese data ecosystems.
Chinese firms frequently bundle hardware, software and data management layers together, making it difficult for recipient states to control where data is stored or how it is processed. This raises concerns for long term digital sovereignty and the protection of Uzbek citizens’ financial information.
Furthermore, the addition of e-payment systems further entrenches Uzbekistan within a vertically integrated Chinese technological sphere. Such dependence can reduce the state’s ability to diversify suppliers and limit its leverage in future regulatory negotiations. It may also expose the financial system to external pressure if geopolitical tensions arise.
The Path to Strategic Balance
In this context, the growing involvement of Chinese companies in Uzbekistan’s e-payment landscape offers clear opportunities, from greater financial inclusion to deeper digital connectivity across Eurasia. Yet these gains will be sustainable only if Uzbekistan approaches this partnership with strategic caution.
Strengthening the country’s regulatory system, ensuring transparent data governance and expanding cooperation with Western partners will allow Tashkent to benefit from Chinese innovation without becoming structurally dependent on it.
The real challenge for Uzbekistan is not choosing between East and West but building a digital ecosystem that draws on both while preserving national autonomy. Achieving this balance will determine whether today’s digital transformation becomes a source of lasting prosperity or a new avenue of external vulnerability.
Yunis Sharifli is CGSP’s Non-Resident Fellow for Central Asia.
