Xinjiang’s Growth Involves Few Risks and Many Rewards for Kazakhstan, Two Kazakh Experts Say

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 1 – Many countries are able to develop more easily if they are doing significantly better than their neighbors because their residents focus on their own countries rather than on their neighbors and some of them fear that if a neighbor develops more rapidly, that will entail real risks for such nation building.
    That has been a concern in Kazakhstan which for most of the last 30 years has been far more developed than the neighboring Chinese territory of Xinjiang but is now seeing its neighbor grow far more rapidly and thus becoming of greater interest to Kazakhs (spik.kz/2050-rascvet-sosednego-sinczjana-blago-ili-ugroza-dlja-kazahstana.html).
    But two experts, Vyacheslav Dodonov, a political scientist, and Arman Baiganov, an economic advisor, say that in the current case, Kazakhstan had far more problems with Xinjiang when its economy was doing less well than it does at the present time when Xinjiang’s is doing significantly better.
    There are two reasons for that, the experts say. On the one hand, the economic growth of Xinjiang has overshadowed the ethnic and religious problems that Xinjiang has experienced and that Kazakhs had focused on and this growth has meant that Kazakhstan’s trade with China has expanded as a result.
    And on the other, the two countries have complementary economies with Kazakhstan providing raw materials, services and transit to Xinjiang and China more generally while China’s Xinjiang is providing consumer goods to Kazakhstan. That relationship has only been strengthened by Western sanctions, Dodonov and Baiganov say.