Kazakhstan sees protests over Chinese influence and Xinjiang atrocities
People in cities across Kazakhstan took to the streets last week to protest their government’s decision to allow China to open dozens of new factories in their country.
Protesters say the move by Kazakhstan’s government will deepen their country’s dependence on China and will only create jobs for imported Chinese workers rather than for native Kazakhstanis.
These demonstrations are a repeat of another wave of protests in 2016, when Kazakhstan’s government gave Chinese firms the right to purchase local real estate.
Resentment towards Chinese influence has only increased since 2016, when Kazakhs protested the country’s new Land Code that enabled the government to sell or lease agricultural land to Chinese investors for up to 25 years. The protestors at that time feared that the Chinese would use their land ownership in Kazakhstan to gain further influence over local Kazakh government.
This time, however, the protestors are additionally motivated by news of China’s ethnic cleansing against minorities in the province of Xinjiang.
Much like anti-Chinese protests elsewhere in the region, the current wave of protests is directed at Kazakhstan’s own government just as much as at China itself.
Kazakhstan’s government has been hesitant to condemn the abuses committed by its powerful neighbor. The country’s long-term stability and friendliness to China has led to it being called the belt buckle of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road” initiative.
But activists now say that Kazakhstan’s reluctance to upset China could be changing, based on the information coming out of China’s Xinjiang province, which is home to some 1.5 million Kazakhs and is recently the site of Chinese ethnic cleansing programs.
Members of ethnic minorities who were formerly detained by the Chinese government are now living in villages on the Kazakh side of the border and are increasingly outspoken about their experiences, even when they have relatives still trapped in China.
Today, more than 400,000 Uyghurs live in Kazakhstan as exiles, while nearly two million Kazakhs, 200,000 Kyrgyz and many Uzbeks are living in Xinjiang.
The people living in these Central Asian countries have strong cultural, economic and political ties with the indigenous people of Xinjiang, with cities in thr region being key centers of commerce along the Silk Road since ancient times.
The pressure on the Kazakh government is mounting as many Kazakhs have returned to their homeland following the repatriation program of the government, which gave citizenship in Kazakhstan to the scattered Kazakh ethnic groups across Central Asia and China.
This repatriation program left families divided between Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, separated by dual citizenship and residence status. Additionally, the CCP has threatened all those Kazakhs who live in Xinjiang and visit their families in their home country with imprisonment.
As more and more Kazakhs are being released from the re-education camps in Xinjiang through the Kazakh government’s lobbying in Beijing, more stories of torture and forced assimilation have come out.
Now, with major Chinese investments in the pipeline, the Kazakh government has started to face increasing pressure from its own people to denounce China’s plans, as Beijing has not respected the ethnic and cultural identity of the Kazakhs and Uyghurs living in Xinjiang.
