New Tashkent hosted a large-scale celebration for Uzbekistan’s 35th anniversary of independence, with Uzbek officials, foreign guests and performers gathered days before the country’s official Independence Day on 1 September. The ceremony was staged in a city being built alongside the existing capital on a site of around 20,000 hectares, a reminder that state power likes its anniversaries big, bright and expensive. The programme mixed speeches with 3D projections, lighting effects, robots and a drone show. The message was clear enough without the choreography: the state is not just marking history, it is building a future on its own terms.
A Capital Built for Power
The venue mattered. New Tashkent is ultimately designed for a population of two million, while its first phase, covering 6,000 hectares, is intended to accommodate 600,000 residents. Plans include housing, universities, cultural and scientific institutions, government buildings, business districts and new transport infrastructure. That is not just urban planning. It is the physical expansion of a governing class, laid out in concrete, offices and transport lines, with the city itself turned into a monument to centralised authority.
President Shavkat Mirziyoyev used the anniversary address to look back at Uzbekistan’s development since independence and to set out priorities for the next decade. He framed independence as a restoration of national identity, paying tribute to the Jadids, a reformist movement of Central Asian intellectuals who promoted modern education and social change, and to Uzbekistan’s first president, Islam Karimov. “Independence gave us back our honour and dignity, our mother tongue and our national values,” he said. The language is familiar: the state claims to restore what it says history took away, then presents itself as the only vehicle capable of delivering dignity.
Mirziyoyev pointed to the end of systemic forced and child labour in the cotton harvest, the lifting of restrictions on currency conversion and the easing of restrictions on residence registration. He also cited changes in taxation, customs and investment policy as evidence of economic opening. Annual foreign investment, he said, had increased from around $2 - 3bn (€1.7 - 2.6bn) to $40 - 50bn (€34.5 - 43.2bn). The numbers are meant to speak for themselves. They usually do, especially when the audience is investors.
Investment, Jobs and the Market State
The president said Uzbekistan had initially aimed to raise gross domestic product to $160bn (€138bn) by 2030 but now expected to exceed that level in 2026. He also said poverty had fallen from 35% in 2017 to 4% this year. Those figures sit at the centre of the official story: growth, poverty reduction, foreign capital, modernisation. The state presents the market as proof of progress, while the whole apparatus remains the one deciding who gets access, who gets registered, who gets counted, and who gets left outside the frame.
Mirziyoyev announced seven programmes covering education, healthcare, the economy, the environment, the rule of law, local government and foreign policy. Among the main economic targets is a plan to attract $450bn (€388bn) in foreign investment over the next decade and increase GDP to $300bn (€259bn) by 2030. The government also aims to create two million high-income jobs in industry and make start-ups, venture capital and artificial intelligence priority areas for development. The vocabulary is polished, but the direction is plain: more capital, more industry, more technology, more competition for the people expected to live inside the system.
Education plans include preparatory education for all six-year-olds, international standards across technical colleges, training up to one million young people for higher-income professions and placing at least ten Uzbek universities among the world’s top 1,000. Healthcare spending is planned to rise to 5% of GDP over the next five years, alongside the expansion of preventive medicine and state health insurance. Another programme targets water scarcity and environmental pressures, with the government aiming to introduce water-saving technologies across all cultivated land within five years. The state promises to manage the damage of its own development model with more administration, more targets and more control.
Neighbourhoods, Borders and the State’s Reach
Plans also call for stronger judicial independence and legal protections for citizens and businesses. The mahalla, Uzbekistan’s traditional neighbourhood-based system of local community organisation, is set to play a greater role, with district budgets, investment programmes and infrastructure projects intended to be shaped increasingly by priorities identified at neighbourhood level. Even here, the language of local participation sits inside a framework still set from above. The district budget remains a district budget. The state still decides the boundaries.
The seventh programme focuses on Uzbekistan’s international position. Mirziyoyev said the country would continue what he described as an open, pragmatic foreign policy, prioritising close relations within Central Asia while expanding partnerships with the European Union, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Arab and Muslim world. Uzbekistan is also due to chair the Non-Aligned Movement for the first time from 2027 to 2029. The grouping brings together more than 120 countries. The diplomatic choreography is tidy enough, but it still runs through the same old machinery of states arranging themselves, trading access, and calling it principle.
After the president’s address, the anniversary ceremony moved from speeches to spectacle. As darkness fell over New Tashkent, the programme culminated in a major concert, choreographed light and visual displays and drones forming images above the venue. A state can always find a way to make itself look inevitable.