Getting stuck within flows: limited interaction and peripheralization at the Kazakhstan–China border

For more than two decades, the Sino–Soviet border was almost hermetically closed to the exchange of people and goods. In the late 1980s, however, exchanges resumed at a remarkable pace between the immediate border communities of Zharkent, in Kazakhstan, and Chinese Khorgos. But this situation was short-lived. Currently, trade turnover in consumer goods between the two countries is conducted primarily via the hub bazaars of Urumqi, in China, and Almaty, in Kazakhstan, several hundred kilometres inland from the border. While the borderland population’s agency in these trade processes remains limited, top-down modernization efforts to upgrade infrastructure in the borderlands and to ‘centralize the periphery’ are the subject of popular controversy. The article explores local representations of development and exchange in the Kazakhstan–China borderland town of Zharkent and the everyday social practice and discourses they generate. I examine the peripheralization of this borderland community, which remains largely bypassed by commodity flows, at a moment characterized by multi-scalar attempts at modernization. In so doing, I argue that the trajectories of borderland lives perpetuate a subjective positioning in social space that reinforces perceptions of ‘remoteness’ and ‘disconnection’, despite powerful state-advocated visions of modernity.