Will New Protests in Central Asia Lead to Triumph of Urban or Rural Values? Scholars Ask

Paul Goble

            September 8 – Across post-Soviet Central Asia, the rapidly growing urban centers are becoming the locus of protests” as population grows from the influx of rural people and all residents struggle with the problems of living in such cities, Gulmira Ileuova of Kazakshtan’s Strategy Center for Social and Political Research says.

            And in this situation, one about which the region’s governments have not yet come to terms, the question is whether these protests will lead to the domination of urban values over rural ones as in China or the triumph of rural ones over urban kinds as in Iran, adds Adil Kaukenov of Kazakhstan’s China Center.

            Their comments came along with others at a roundtable on “The Role of Megalopolises in the Integration Processes in Eurasia” organized by Kazakhstan’s World of Eurasia Foundation and Novosibirsk’s Siberia-Eurasia Experts Club (stanradar.com/news/full/36195-tsentralnoaziatskie-goroda-trendy-i-problemy.html).

            Roundtable participants pointed out that over the last 30 years, the population of the five Central Asian republics has risen by 40 percent but hardly equally. Tajikistan’s has gone up almost 80 percent while Kazakhstan’s has risen only about 10 percent. And the share living in major cities has varied as well but gone up overall from 44 to 50 percent.

            Despite outmigration, economic growth and consumption have all been concentrated in the major cities, with Almaty and its 10 percent of the Kazakhstan population consuming up to 30 percent of GDP and Ashgabat with its 20 percent of Turkmenistan’s population consuming 52 percent of that country’s GDP.

            Those figures help to explain the attractiveness of moving to the cities as does the fact that urban residents in Central Asia live as much as six years longer on average than do residents of villages.  But the influx of so many young people have changed the face of these cities  and added to the potential for protest.

            At present, 60 percent of the population of Astana is under 35, and 55 percent of that of Almaty is as well, a class of people for whom the economy must find jobs and who are far more at loose ends and ready to protest than are members of the older generation. The same situation is true in other cities of Central Asia as well.

            But in addition to this economic requirement and the need for building more infrastructure extremely rapidly, there is also a need for the governments in the region to decide what cities as a whole are.  Many people in the region view them as simply larger villages in which residents will live without fundamental change.

            Others, Rasul Rysmambetov, a Kazakh financial specialist, says, want them to transform people and make them modern. On the outcome of this competition will depend whether these countries will move in the Chinese direction where cities dominate the villages or the Iranian one in which the reverse is the case.