The bridge that divides: local perceptions of the connected state in the Kyrgyzstan–Tajikistan–China borderlands

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought profound changes to the borderlands of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Xinjiang. In eastern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan region, present-day weaknesses in territorial control of the post-Soviet state’s edges are directly wedded to borderlanders’ memories of Soviet-era practices of bordering, perceived locally as both systemically stronger and cognitively more beneficial to local lifeworlds than contemporary ‘Chinese penetration’. Across the border in Xinjiang, a formerly distant state has been brought into borderlanders’ locales and inscribed into everyday lifeworlds through novel manifestations of the state, which significantly affect cross-border interaction. By comparing how borderlanders on both sides of this frontier themselves choose to characterize border processes between ‘their’ states in the initial two decades of connections to Xinjiang, I explore how and why Kyrgyz and Tajik/Pamiri borderlanders voice strong opinions about what it is they feel has changed in these administrative-territorial homelands. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork on both sides of this frontier, I argue that the gradual bridging of this formerly sealed border has led to neither the development of a new trans-frontier identity nor locally established trans-frontier networks but, instead, reconfirmed borders between China and Central Asia.