Fleeing Kazakhs and Puff Pieces

On January 9, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry confirmed that China was allowing about 2,000 ethnic Kazakhs to give up their Chinese citizenship and leave Xinjiang for Kazakhstan. The Associated Press, which first published the news, noted that the ministry “did not say who could leave or why.”

According to Chinese authorities in 2016, at the time there were approximately 1.46 million ethnic Kazakhs in China, the vast majority in Xinjiang.

On the one hand, the announcement is a testament to Kazakhstan’s diplomatic lobbying efforts on behalf of ethnic Kazakhs in China; on the other, it lays bare the strict limits of not only Kazakhstan’s empathy for non-Kazakh Muslims trapped in Xinjiang, especially Uyghurs, but the limits of Astana’s ability to budge Beijing.

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The next day – January 10 – Kazakhstan’s state-owned news agency, Kazinform, ran an exclusive report from Xinjiang. The agency’s reporter had been among a group of journalists invited by Chinese authorities to, as Kazinform described it, “get familiar with the exemplary vocational centers (“political re-education camps”) of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).”

The ensuing article is little more than a regurgitation of Chinese propaganda. All the interviews were conducted under the supervision of Chinese authorities and every character speaks with words seemingly directly from Beijing’s talking points.

“I violated the laws of China – I was indoctrinated with ideas of religious extremism, I watched myself and distributed religious extremist videos to my friends. Here I study sewing,” a 25-year-old Uyghur woman told Kazinform, under the watchful eye of the journalists’ escorts.

Reports about increasing surveillance and detention of Muslims in Xinjiang – primarily Uyghurs, but also Kazakhs, Kyrgyzs, and other minority groups  – had been leaking out of the region at an increasing pace since the August 2016 arrival of Chen Quanguo as Communist Party secretary. Unmentioned in the article is that it was only in October 2018 that Chinese authorities publicly admitted the existence of the camps – branding them as “vocational centers” to counter the mounting global labeling of the camps as “re-education centers” or “internment camps.”

The journalists, Kazinform writes, “were given insight into the exemplary educational process: lessons of Chinese language, Chinese law, physical education, and art – singing and dancing.”

In Hotan, “The stories of several pupils of the center… are similar to the stories of other guys interviewed by journalists earlier. All in unison repeat that they were ‘infected with the ideology of extremism’ and intend to return to their families after having a command of the Chinese language, studying the legislation and mastering a blue-color profession to earn money.”

Toward the end of the article, Kazinform’s report asks to visit a vocational center in Xinjiang’s Ili-Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture and is promised a future press tour. Kazinform continues:

We hope that we will be provided with such an opportunity. The public of Kazakhstan is interested in the fate of the ethnic Kazakhs in China, who are the bridge of cooperation between our countries. Constructive dialogue is presently being conducted between the foreign affairs ministries of both countries. As a result of this work, over 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were able to leave China for Kazakhstan in the first 9 months of 2018.

According to the Associated Press, Kazakh Foreign Ministry officials said in November that China had detained 29 Kazakh citizens, and 15 had since been released and allowed to return to Kazakhstan.

In its final paragraph, Kazinform notes that in late December Chinese authorities organized a similar tour for diplomats from a dozen countries, including Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

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“The public of Kazakhstan is interested in the fate of the ethnic Kazakhs in China,” Kazinform wrote. And because the Kazakh public is interested, Astana has to appear to being doing something.

Many ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang have family in Kazakhstan. After independence in 1991, Kazakhstan launched a program – the Oralman, or returnee, program – to invite ethnic Kazakhs elsewhere in the region to move to Kazakhstan. According to a 2015 Radio Free Asia (RFA) report, about 200,000 ethnic Kazakhs from China had become Kazakh citizens since 1991. Given the estimated 1.46 million ethnic Kazakhs living in China, that means thousands of families are stretched across the border.

Serikzhan Bilash, of Atazhurt Zhastary (“Youth of the Homeland”), a group formed in early 2017 to defend the rights of Oralman, has collected testimonies from family members of detainees in Xinjiang. A returnee himself, Bilash has been behind the publicization of the plight of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang, most notably the case of Sayragul Sauytbay.

Bilash was asked by the Kazakh authorities multiple times last summer to stop his activities but recently told the Associated Press that the warnings have stopped. This could be growing tolerance, or a frank assessment that putting a tight lid on a boiling pot will only lead to an explosion.

Some Kazakhs care deeply about the plight of Oralman relatives in Xinjiang, but as an article by Andrey Girshin and Inga Imanbai in openDemocracy last May noted, many Kazakhs have “ambiguous attitudes to repatriates.” In 2010, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who initiated the Oralman program, said “repatriates haven’t worked hard enough for the good of the country.”

That ambiguity may have faded somewhat as report after report emerged over the past year highlighting the dire situation across the border. Whatever growing empathy Kazakhs may have for their ethnic compatriots in China, the state’s empathy hasn’t extended beyond ethnic Kazakhs.

The news in January that 2,000 ethnic Kazakhs would be allowed to leave China was quickly met with questions from regional observers: who would be allowed to leave and what about the thousands believed to be still detained? The Associated Press reported the story as “China allowing” the 2,000 to leave. Regional watchers on social media asked whether it should have been stated as “2,000 to flee China.”

Later in January, the Financial Times reported that hundreds of Kazakhs “freed” from the camps were under house arrest-like conditions. Families in Kazakhstan told the Financial Times that their relatives had been released from the camps but were under surveillance and unable to leave.

When read alongside contemporaneous propaganda puff pieces in Kazakh media about the camps, news of “releases” come across as a deliberate attempt to soften the image of the camps in Xinjiang and the Kazakh state’s complicity.