Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 4 – Most “Chinese”
immigrants to Kazakhstan are in fact members of non-Han ethnic groups from
Xinjiang, including not a few ethnic Kazakhs known as “Oralmany,” and the
largest share of Kazakhs going to China are students attending Chinese
universities and colleges.
These are just some of the unexpected
trends reported by Elena Sadovskaya, a specialist on international migration at
the Moscow Institute for Economic Forecasting, in an interview she gave to
Zhanar Kanafina which is published in the current issue of Kazakhstan’s “Karavan”
weekly (caravan.kz/article/93343).
Not only is “Chinese migration to
Kazakhstan not especially ‘Chinese,’” Sadovskaya says, it includes “not only
ethnic Chinese (Hans) but also Kazakhs, Uyghurs, Dungans, Uzbeks, Koreans and
even [ethnic] Russians.” But what is
especially interesting is that different ethnic groups dominate different parts
of the flow.
Hans predominate among those seeking
work, but those interested in business include both Hans and Dungans, Uyghurs,
and Kazakhs. And those seeking permanent residence status are “primarily ethnic
Kazakhs,” known as “Oralmany,” who have been living in China for some time but
now are returning to their historical homeland.
The number of Chinese workers coming
into Kazakhstan in fact peaked six years ago, when 10,140 did so, Sadovskaya
continues. Now, their number has fallen to about 6,000 to 7,000 a year. More
important, the Chinese form only about a quarter of all the gastarbeiters
coming into Kazakhstan, despite widespread beliefs that they are a far larger
group.
At the same time, she says, “the
migration of [Kazakhstan] students to China is much larger than that in the
opposite direction.” In the current academic year, “about 10,000” Kazakhstani
students are studying in China, “eight to ten times” the number of young people
from China studying in Kazakhstan – and most of those are ethnic Kazakhs.
One disturbing pattern, Sadovskaya
says, connected with migration from China is that “according to the 2009
[Kazakhstan] census, 39,000 Oralmans have not become citizens of Kazakhstan.”
Indeed, only about half of those ethnic Kazakhs returning from abroad in
general and China in particular have done so.
There are several reasons for this,
she suggests. On the one hand, many of these people do not want to give up the
special benefits Oralmans can receive from the government. But on the other, they have real language problems:
Their Kazakh is different, and they are used to the Arabic script rather than
the Cyrillic one used in Kazakhstan.
Despite the
relatively small number of immigrants from China and the fact that many of them
are Kazakhs rather than Han, polls show that Kazakhstan residents are
increasingly hostile to immigrants as such, Sadovskaya says. Between 2007 and
2012, the share of Kazakhstan residents expressing hostility toward Chinese
immigrants increased from 18 to 33 percent.
Sadovskaya sums up the situation in
the following way: “It is possible to call Chinese migration a mirror image of
the problems which exist in Kazakhstan.” Were Kazakh officials not corrupt,
there wouldn’t be many illegal immigrants, and were the quality of higher education
in Kazakhstan higher, there would not be as many Kazakhs going to study in
China.
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