Kazakhstan’s Continued China Challenge

It’s a cliche, but an apt one: When it comes to China, Kazakhstan is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Nur-Sultan is trapped by its own economic interests and China’s overwhelming gravity. Kazakhstan’s leaders have long been preoccupied with staking out the state’s sovereignty in the ashes of the Soviet Union, and with a parallel desire for global prestige. China’s Xinjiang policies is straining both endeavors. Meanwhile, the recent not-quite power transition between Nursultan Nazarbayev and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev made clear to many Kazakhs – some of whom have taken to the streets in several successive protests – that they don’t have much influence over their own government. The democracy they’d long been told they were marching toward still doesn’t exist.

Both Kazakhstan and China, like many states, are fond of fencing off domestic affairs from influence or criticism by outsiders. But the line drawn on the steppe between domestic and foreign affairs is not a clean demarcation; it never really is. Two recent events serve to highlight the conflicting interests and forces at play in the Kazakhstan-China relationship and the murky area between domestic matters and foreign affairs: The arrest of Konstantin Syroyezhkin and the continued persecution of Serikzhan Bilash.

In July, the Wall Street Journal published a story revealing a secret Kazakh counterintelligence operation on February 19, 2019 to detain former Soviet KGB agent and prominent Kazakh China expert Konstantin Syroyezhkin, accusing him of conducting espionage on China’s behalf. The main thrust of the WSJ report is that the Kazakh government, months after Syroyezhkin’s arrest, leaked information to local media. It’s a “rare instance of open push back against Beijing’s growing influence in Central Asia’s largest and richest country,” the report notes.

In a twist of time, about a week after Syroyezhkin’s arrest but before the news began to break, the Carnegie Endowment for International Piece published an article from Philippe Le Corre of the National University of Singapore, which cites Syroyezhkin – whom the author interviewed in November 2017. In the article, titled “Kazakhs Wary of Chinese Embrace as BRI Gathers Steam,” Le Corre writes: “Although China’s political influence is still minimal, says Almaty-based China expert Konstantin Syroyezhkin, it is gaining ground as ties improve…”

News of Syroyezhkin’s arrest began to seep out throughout the spring. Rumors that’d he’d been detained for espionage followed his absence at two conferences he’d been scheduled to attend. In May, Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee released a statement confirming that Syroyezhkin had been arrested on “high treason” charges, but provided no further details.

In another cruel twist, Syroyezhkin was reportedly current President Tokayev’s dissertation adviser. He’d been at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of Kazakhstan, a government-affiliated think tank, since 2006 and served as a senior government advisor on relations with China.

Per the WSJ’s anonymous sources, the investigation “revolves around accusations that [Syroyezhkin] passed secret documents to people associated with Chinese intelligence. Others familiar with the investigation say Mr. Syroyezhkin might also have received cash as payment.”

The WSJ story posits Syroyezhkin’s arrest as a “warning shot” for China, a slight push back.

But arresting one alleged spy should be viewed in context of how little Kazakhstan is pushing back on China in other areas, most prominently when it comes to subject of the detention camps in Xinjiang.

Analysts estimate that more than a million people – mostly Uyghurs but also other Muslim ethnic minorities like Kazakhs and Kyrgyz – have been taken into a massive array of detention centers, dubbed “vocational training centers” by the Chinese authorities once they stopped denying their very existence. As I’ve covered extensively, Kazakhstan and ethnic Kazakhs have provided the most accessible window for journalists and human rights advocates into what’s occurring in Xinjiang.

Serikzhan Bilash, as has been covered in previous reports – especially Nazira Kozhanova’s lead in the May 2019 Issue of The Diplomat Magazine – was the head of a civil society organization in Kazakhstan focused on advocating for the relatives of Kazakh citizens who have disappeared into the camps in Xinjiang. Bilash’s organization, Ata Zhurt, was refused registration by the state a handful of times and then fined for operating as an unregistered organization. Bilash’s group, despite being warned, was nevertheless able to operate from the spring of 2017 until February 2019.

In early March, Bilash was arrested. While he was released to house arrest shortly thereafter, the previously very vocal defender of ethnic Kazakhs detained in China has gone relatively silent.

Kozhanova explained the bind Bilash found himself in:

[Bilash’s] arrest has been framed by the state as the detention of a pro-jihad activist, although his supporters argue that the clip shown at his hearings – in which he argues in favor of “jihad” – was taken out of context. Bilash, they say, was referring to the hard work of spreading information about the situation in Xinjiang, that he was advocating for more information, not for violence. The word “jihad” is Arabic and has many meanings to Muslims – it can be translated as referring to hard work on the way to God, often phrased as “struggle” or “effort” of a spiritual nature. But it has also been used as a call to violence by extremists, which is the meaning that the Kazakh prosecution is using in its case, arguing Bilash was advocating a “war on ethnic Chinese.”

In July, Aiman Umarova – Bilash’s lawyer – told Eurasianet that state prosecutors informed her the investigation had concluded. Bilash’s house arrest had already been extended for a third time by a court in Nur-Sultan. Umarova also served as counsel for Sairagul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh whistleblower on the detention camps in Xinjiang who was unable to obtain asylum in Kazakhstan despite the state declining to deport her back to China. In June, Sauytbay left Kazakhstan to seek asylum in Sweden.

The next step for Bilash, per Umarova, is a preliminary hearing, which she believes won’t occur until at least August.

Bilash’s supporters rallied in Almaty on July 12, urging Tokayev to release him from house arrest and the state to drop the charges of inciting ethnic hatred he nows faces.

The cases of Konstantin Syroyezhkin and Serikzhan Bilash demonstrate both Kazakhstan’s wriggling under Chinese pressure – direct and indirect – and also Nur-Sultan’s unease with confronting the myriad opinions of its 18 million citizens.

It’s perhaps important to note that China didn’t feature much as a topic for discussion among the candidates who contested the presidency in June and, in public remarks at least, Tokayev has lauded the state’s strong relationship with China. Tokayev has pushed back on the prevailing opinion among regional analysts that anti-China sentiment is on the rise.

Here we see the bleed between foreign and domestic affairs. In Kazakhstan, China is very much a domestic issue. How to deal with China is a critical question for many states and Kazakhstan is no exception. But Kazakhstan hamstrings itself by holding to an impossible notion of unity, an unrealistic fencing off of issues to confront, and cracking down on individuals and groups that push beyond the boundaries of accepted state policies. The result is Nur-Sultan caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place and also beset by a frustrated public.