Old stereotypes and new openness: discourses and practices of trans-border re- and disconnection in south-eastern Kazakhstan’s agricultural sector

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the Soviet breakup, rural communities in the Kazakhstan–China borderlands have faced cataclysmic social, economic, and ecological transformations. Collective and state farms have been replaced by precarious smallholder agriculture suffering from a decline in financial inputs and the deterioration of infrastructure. At the same time, dynamic transformations of border permeability (and trans-border reconnections) between Kazakhstan and China have challenged the until relatively recent widespread Soviet rhetoric on Western China (or rather Xinjiang) as an underdeveloped space across the border. This article is based on several months of fieldwork between 2019 and 2021 in Panfilov District, located at major cross-border road and railway intersections and hosting important infrastructural objects, such as a dry port, a major railway transhipment hub, and a trans-border special economic zone. The article explores how the border situation (and the border’s changing permeability for people, commodities, and ideas since the early 1990s) as well as the implementation of new trans-border infrastructures eventually shaped local discourses and practices in the socio-economic development of south-east Kazakhstan’s agricultural sector. It is scrutinized herein how various forms of trans-border socio-economic interactions (although heavily regulated) and China’s (agri-) economic policy in Xinjiang started to affect farmers’ ambitions and practices across the border.