Border Business
Caroline Knowles*
A lot happens on borders. This blog describes just some of it. Swerving the vast, beautiful and troubled province of Xingjian on my Belt-Road train trip through China lands me in Khorgos: a city in three parts — in itself an interesting urban form — straddling the border between northwest China and southeastern Kazakhstan. One part of Khorgos is in Kazakhstan. Another, Khorgas, is in China. And the third is the ‘International Center for Cross Border Co-operation’ that lies in between China and Kazakhstan. The International Center is officially conceived as a zone of ‘relaxed regulation’ between nation states. Chinese and Kazakhs can mingle here. As I discover later, this mingling consists in small acts of consumption. The ‘relaxed regulation’ in question is detailed in a fifty-page document of rules and regulations as Kazakhstan braces itself commercially against its powerful neighbour.
I cross into the International Center for Cooperation with a young Kazakh couple in order to try to see things through their eyes. Getting through the turnstiles and razor wire from the Kazakh side with just tickets and ID cards (them) and a passport (me) we take the bus that connects the border with the tiny central part of the International Center. This is the only part of this 5.3 square kilometre Center that is developed and even this is ringed by construction, some of which clearly stalled some time ago. The bus ride reveals large tracks of empty land — waiting. Big Chinese holes!
On this sunny Saturday afternoon, the atmosphere in the central area is festive. Screens show video sequences celebrating the Silk Road with camels. On-street music blares from loudspeakers. Large billboards proclaim the importance of co-operation with bordering nations, and red (Chinese) and blue (Kazakh) stripes on the road deliver the same message in asphalt. Loudspeaker announcements urge shoppers to visit nearby duty-free shops stocked with luxuries from France and Italy that have bucked the east-west trend of movement along the Belt-Road. Chinese and some wealthier Kazakh shoppers browse standard airport fare — perfume, alcohol, designer bags, cigarettes, chocolate and jewellery. There is an eye-catching Cultural Centre built in the brightest red blocks. Flashing lights draw attention to the (few) buildings. There is a big white metal wheel on the China side for those who want an arial view of international co-operation. Despite these gestures to leisure and tourism, buying stuff made in China is the main form of international cooperation envisaged here.
The Kazakh couple — Z and Boyfriend — see the duty-free area as sightseeing. Their shopping list is more practical — household items, shelving, clothes and shoes. And so we move to where things are less glitzy and, as the couple compare with prices in Kazakhstan, unbelievably cheap. Z tries on an elegant white fake fur coat costing $31; they buy high spec bedding for just a few dollars; Z buys high heeled shoes for a friend’s wedding; twenty-five kilos worth, which is what the regulations allow. Every conceivable product serving daily life is available at rock-bottom prices. We speak to shop assistants. Everything is made in China. One factory owner has an entire floor of eight large units selling bedding in the King Kong Mall. This has many units still to let and few customers. This bit of border business is another partially realised (almost zombie) shop front for Chinese factories, a portal into China for Kazakhs looking for a bargain.
One of the bus queue guards, a former soldier who polices the bus line and weighs the shopping tells us that most shoppers are local Kazakhs who use the border to service everyday household needs. The former soldier estimates that six thousand locals, rising to eight thousand at weekends, circulate in and out of the International Center. The number of visits Kazakhs can make in a month is restricted, but informally there is flexibility and workarounds. Kazakhstan protects its own retail markets — although these goods come from Chinese factories too. The International Center provides cheap goods for traders whose orders are too small to go directly through Chinese factories. The Center also turns consumers into entrepreneurs sometimes. Buying ‘rings for our mums’, Boyfriend quickly calculates that if they bought a tray of a hundred rings instead of two, they could sell them on weekend markets in Almaty and Astana for 10 times what they paid for them.
This particular version of international cross border co-operation in which China plays a leading part shapes the urban landscape of the border. These kinds of commerce in turn shape people’s lives, potentially turning consumers into traders and upscaling petty traders into bigger merchants. The built landscape of the International Center is gaudy, ugly and largely unfinished. It wears its instrumentalism on the surface. Efforts are underway to develop the border as a tourist destination, but so far there are few hotels and restaurants. In our hotel we mingle with a party of Central Asian tourists staying overnight. But this is unusual. At night after the last bus to the Kazak and the Chinese border has left, the streets are empty. We cruise the dimly lit King Kong Mall looking for signs of commercial life. Any life. And dinner. With no restaurants we eat in the mall food court. Despite official gestures towards cross border co-operation, there are areas of razor wire and watch towers even in the central commercial area that wouldn’t look out of place in Berlin in the 1980s marking the areas that belong to each nation. One of the border’s many stories is that everything leads to Chinese factories and Chinese developers. This is also a story of Kazakh subordination that shapes this functional partially built landscape and the lives that can be lived around this border.
Border business inevitably extends beyond the border. Crossing back to the Kazakh side we visit the little town of Zharkent which houses border workers: border guards, military personnel, those who make the International Centre run, staff at Khorgos’s Altynkol Train Station and, in time, the Dry Port, which is linked with the Xi’an Dry Port mentioned in an earlier blog. We chat with a local businesswoman who owns a convenience store. She tells us the government offers free housing for local workers running border business and preferential rates for business start-ups. She says that local people expect a massive expansion of Zharkent — might it even become a city? — when the Dry Port opens.
We drive over to the Dry Port to check whether it is actually built or just a figment of an imagined future. It is indeed built. I can see that it stretches into the distance from the entry road with yellow gantries just visible. From the outside it looks finished, but it’s not yet operating. Apparently it is being ‘tested’. Khorgos’s Altynkol Railways Station- intended to serve freight and passenger traffic — is also built but not yet operating. It too is being tested. But for now, it stands gleaming new with no passengers or trains to sully its pristine surfaces. The ghost station runs a ghost service to Almaty, one ancient carriage mostly empty apart from a few railway workers and three urban researchers.
To climb aboard the Almaty train we must walk along the ghost station’s platform to where it ends, navigate the track between containers and haul ourselves, our luggage and our shopping onto the train. With only a single track at most points, the train waits at multi-track points while freight trains pass. Boyfriend says his uncle calls these ‘gentleman trains’ — after you! It takes more than 5 hours to get to Almaty, a journey of three hours on the new four lane east-west highway, built by the Kazakh Government. The Government of Kazakhstan wisely retains a controlling interest in its sections of the Belt-Road corridor, but China is a major partner, user and the reason it exists.
Taking a close look at how things actually work beneath the glossy announcements proclaiming future — never current — benefits of the Belt-Road has provided a few new angles from the ground, from London’s Chinese hole (remember that?). Border business serves consumption and the transport corridors that carry goods from Chinese factories to markets. Its architectural and human forms are shaped by these priorities. In the process, border cities make new cities, new jobs and new lives. Border business reconstructs transportation and logistics and turns the outskirts of towns and cities into Dry Docks and Logistics Hubs.
While travelling across China on luxurious high-speed trains I was prepared to believe in the multi-modal high-speed Belt-Road trains described by Chinese and Kazakh authorities in endless announcements of future intention. But I can see already that this description of the Belt-Road doesn’t hold in Kazakhstan, where things are still in construction and move more slowly. This bit of the Belt-Road at least may not be as advertised. It seems that Khorgos too is dogged by the announcement of great expectation. According to the South China Morning Post, Khorgos will be the ‘new Dubai’. Dubai World, a shipping, port building and logistics company that owns many of the world’s container ports including London, is a partner in its development. Khorgos is certainly not Dubai — not yet anyway and it is hard to imagine it will ever be.
Khorgos looks like a partial, slow and precarious section of the Belt-Road transport corridor, but I don’t yet know how the rest of the corridor works. And, to make matters more complicated, many routes leading from Khorgos are described as part of the Belt-Road. I know that the fastest Belt-Road route heads north from Khorgos and Almaty into Russia, through Moscow to Belarus and to Eastern Europe. German carcompanies still use this Trans-Siberian route despite EU sanctions against Russia. But with Russia at war with Ukraine, some manufacturers, logistics companies and especially insurers are becoming uneasy about a transport corridor that runs through a war zone. In these circumstances, what Chinese authorities refer to as the ‘Middle Corridor’ is gaining traction as an alternative route. This passes through the length of Kazakhstan to Aktau and its western border at the Caspian Sea.
Inevitably, my journey exploring urban form along the Belt-Road from China to Europe is routed by the geopolitics of now. I’m not going to travel through a war zone or deal with Russian authorities at this moment of heightened anti-western feeling. I decide to take the Middle Kingdom’s Middle Corridor. But first I will head to Almaty and dig into some of the reverberations of border business and the Belt-Road which might be shaping this city.
*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.
