Anna Hakobyan, the wife of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, set social media aflame in Armenia earlier in January, posting videos of her speaking Chinese that drew over 2 million views in two days.
The videos highlight China's sustained efforts to foster understanding and appreciation of the Chinese language and culture across the Caucasus and Central Asia.Even so, language-speaking ability, such as that demonstrated by Hakobyan, is an anomaly among regional elites.
While many young people in the regions, especially in major urban centers, have a solid command of English, few can muster even a sentence in Chinese.Thousands of students from across the Caucasus and Central Asia now study in China, and it seems Beijing is expanding such educational programs every month.
In addition, China projects cultural influence through soft-power entities such as Confucius Institutes and Luban Workshops attached to higher education institutions in Central Asia.Despite such expansive initiatives, the number of proficient Chinese speakers among citizens of the Caucasus and Central Asia is low, limiting Beijing’s ability to shape regional attitudes towards China and project its influence.
Regional engagement with China is largely mediated through Russian, English, and interpreters.Unlike Turkish or Korean, Chinese has not benefited from widely circulating popular cultural exports, such as TV series or pop music, that might motivate informal learning, particularly among younger generations.
Even in Hakobyan’s case, she demonstrated only a rudimentary command of Chinese.That is understandable, given that she enrolled in a master’s program at BeijingNormal University only in June 2025.
She started posting photos of her academic activities in September, mostly images of classroom attendance and university-related materials.Notably, in the background of her social media photo postings, she consistently displayed a narrow, recurring range of books, most prominently works by Chinese Communist leaders, including multiple volumes of Xi Jinping’s writing, as well as English-language editions of works of ancient Chinese philosophers.
In her viral videos posted on January 12, her speech is consistent with memorized recitation rather than spontaneous elocution.Her delivery also consistently features incorrect pause placements that disrupt word segmentation.
Because many Mandarin words are formed from multisyllabic units, pauses that split or fuse these syllables incorrectly can significantly affect comprehension.More broadly, numerous political figures across the Caucasus and post-Soviet Central Asia have lived, studied, or worked in China, but only a few can be considered proficient in Chinese.
In Kyrgyzstan, two Chinese-born ethnic Kyrgyz politicians, Adyl Junus uulu and Orgalcha Toktobubu, served in the Jogorku Kengesh (parliament) during the past decade, while another MP, Tabyldy Muratbekov, pursued graduate studies at a Chinese university.
Perhaps the leading political figure most conversant in Chinese is Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.Trained in diplomacy and the Chinese language at the then-Soviet Union’s top foreign service institute, MGIMO, Tokayev spent much of his early career in Soviet diplomatic postings related to China and has continued to use Chinese professionally since Kazakhstan’s independence, even though he has not resided in China since then.
Public footage shows him speaking Chinese, both on- and off-script, in a wide range of settings, including interviews, formal remarks, diplomatic exchanges, and interactions with university students.His Mandarin is accented but consistently intelligible.
While his vocabulary remains practical and sentence structures relatively simple, his Chinese functions as a working language rather than a symbolic display, deployed selectively and pragmatically in China-facing contexts.
The complexity of the Chinese language means that for speakers of Turkic, Kartvelian, and Indo-European languages, Chinese poses a genuine learning challenge that demands sustained commitment and high-quality resources.
The language issue, then, creates a substantial barrier for China’s efforts to spread its cultural and economic influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia.Because Chinese has yet to crystallize as a prestige language, its public use by Eurasian political figures remains rare, uneven, and frequently performative.