Belt-Road Stories in Almaty
*Caroline Knowles
In Almaty’s Baraholka Market, Stallholder tells me his ancestors are descended from silk road romance. Many generations ago, his family travelled between China and the Gulf trading silk. He says he is Dungan — which he says means that on his father’s side the family traces its origins to the marriage of a Chinese woman and a man he describes as ‘Arab’. Walking in the steps of his ancestors, trading air conditioners and other electrical goods instead of silk, Stallholder plies the Belt-Road. His little shop in this vast market is a reclaimed shipping container. These can be rented or bought from the Baraholka market authorities. Spare containers result from Kazakhstan’s asymmetric trade with China in which Kazakhstan imports far more than it exports and so containers pile up. Baraholka is Almaty’s biggest market, ranging in its ramshackle ever-expanding inelegance across the city’s northern ring road. It sells everything imaginable from women’s hair decorations, to clothes, to lawn mowers and car parts: it supplies the infrastructures of everyday life. Baraholka is popular and cheap, but not as cheap as Khorgos. It reminds me of Yiwu except that it is mainly retail, scruffier and more informal.
Stallholder who wears jeans and a T shirt tells me he has been a trader in this market for 2 years. The stuff he sells is not properly safety certificated, he says. This means it is technically illegal — but cheap and low-income city dwellers with few options are prepared to take this kind of risk. He tells me he travels to Guangzhou to buy his electrical goods. This is easy for him because he is fluent in Chinese. He studied translation in Guangzhou for five years and then found a job in a bathroom factory for another two. He knows from the inside how to deal with Chinese factories. Once he has travelled to a new factory, established connections and trust and felt the merchandise, he works virtually from Almaty by WeChat.
I suspect that he knows how the Khorgas to Khorgos crossing from China into Kazakhstan works in practice. I can hardly believe his answer. If he has a whole container and it comes by train, it takes at least three weeks, he says. This is a long way off the high-speed intermodal seamless Belt-Road service of official announcements. Why so long? Things get held up in customs on the Kazakh side in Khorgos. He says ‘there is no fast delivery from China’ apart from airfreight. Later, I check this with an importer of parts used to repair heavy Chinese trucks and bulldozers used in construction. This man — let’s call him Uncle — orders parts through a logistics company and quotes an even longer train transit time of six to eight weeks, even though the parts he buys are made in Urumqi just over the border in Xingjian. He says he’s been doing this for ten years and it has always been like this. I ask what he thinks about it. He says, ‘it doesn’t matter if I like it or not I have to earn money’. He adds that he doesn’t mind doing business with China but dislikes the idea of Chinese people moving to Kazakhstan. Being overwhelmed is a Kazakhstan story it seems. In Khorgos, Belt-Road trucks and trains navigate a series of choke points, especially customs clearance, and this slows everything down.
Next in my plan to probe Belt-Road reverberations in Almaty is a visit to Kazakhstan’s National University Confucius Centre and the department dealing with international students to ask about cross border activity in students. There are a number of Confucius Centres promoting Chinese language and culture in the UK, and I am keen to see how they operate in Almaty. From the International Department I just want some basic information about numbers of Kazakh exchange students studying in Chinese universities and Chinese students studying at Kazakhstan National University. Nothing contentious, or so I thought. I didn’t get the information I wanted, but in the process of not getting it I hear some softly spoken Belt-Road stories about how local people think about China.
With Z’s help I begin at the Confucius Centre. It’s founding director looks uneasy as I walk into his elaborate office even though his PA says he is expecting me. Am I a journalist? No. I’m wring a book about the Belt-Road. I say, can I ask you for some basic information about the centre? He agrees. I check if it’s alright to record his answers on my phone. He looks panic stricken and refuses. I put my phone away and take out my notebook. Director, a man in his late fifties, still looks uneasy. Unfortunately, Z chooses this moment to look him up on Google, she says so that she can address him properly and respectfully. He falls into a rage and accuses her of secretly recording and storms out of his own office. After a moment we follow and I apologise. Z confesses to the lesser crime of not having done her homework and a fragile peace is restored as Director backs down cautiously and takes us on a walkabout. He tells us almost nothing, but the visual displays around the centre tell their own story. There are photos of the Centre Director with visiting officials from China and officials from the Chinese Consulate in Almaty. He tells us that the Centre teaches Mandarin and does Chinese cultural displays within and beyond the university, much like Confucius Centres in the UK. The centre has three hundred students and employs five Mandarin teachers. That is all the information he offers.
As I try to understand what happened, Z explains that men of his generation grew up in the Soviet system: people’s thinking and social relationships were organised by fear and suspicion. China, she explains is a sensitive, even a ‘scary’ topic in Kazakhstan. And Kazakhstan is an authoritarian regime too where it is not safe, especially for people in key administrative positions like Director, to discuss sensitive matters to a foreigner who might indeed be a journalist. Kazakhstan maintains what Z (a politics student) describes as ‘multi-vector foreign policy’. The neighbours are scary. China is important in securing Kazakhstan’s economic well-being and promises the kinds of expansion that could lift living standards. The other neighbour, Russia, is even scarier as its military and propaganda tactics in Ukraine reveal. Many Kazakhs are fearful that they could be next on Putin’s land-grab list.
As we walk to the International Student Office I wonder if fear is a city-making infrastructure of some kind. It certainly creates atmospheres of suspicion that shape social relationships and inhibit willingness to speak critically about sensitive topics. This might in turn inflect how cities are built and lived. I am nervous about visiting the international office. I needn’t have been. We found out absolutely nothing about cross border students movements. Instead, I was told off by a series of administrators, each more important than the last delivering the same admonition: ‘get the top boss at your university to write in through official channels on the 12th floor and wait to see if we agree to speak with you’. I am pretty sure Sir Colin has absolutely no idea who I am and I am leaving Almaty the next day anyway, so this isn’t going to work.
It’s time to move on and test Belt-Road trains through Kazakhstan. I need to get to Aktau on the Caspian Sea, navigating this Middle Passage that avoids Russia. In my fantasy of this journey, I hop on and off trains travelling for no longer than twelve hours at a stretch, taking in the Belt-Road stations at close quarters while enjoying the scenery. The reality is that there is just one train a day to Aktau. This translates into ‘all of the tickets are sold out for the next month’ and with this I learn a bit more about how Kazakhstan actually works. Z’s mum, who works at the university and was indispensible in smoothing our path through her contacts, told me: ‘we have a contact at the station who will look out for returned tickets for you’. She didn’t add, ‘for a small fee’ but this is how it works. The next day I had a ticket in an open carriage for the fifty-four-hour journey over three nights from Almaty to Aktau. My relief at being able to continue my journey outweighed any consideration of what it might be like to spend this long on a train. I didn’t dare to break the journey anywhere for fear of getting stranded. Meandering reflectively is out. I am heading straight to Aktau.
*Caroline Knowles is an urban sociologist and the author of Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, published by Penguin (2022) https://seriousmoneybook.com and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.
