In Kazakhstani society during the late Soviet era, Dungans were considered a distinct and tight-knit ethnic community12 of successful
12 The inward-looking nature of the Dungan community, revealed in their conversations with trade entrepreneurs in Almaty, was often linked to their short-lived demands in the early post-Soviet period for political autonomy in the Korday district.
and particularly hard-working agriculturalists (Hong 2005:138). Some of the most productive irrigated vegetable farms in the south of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) were the collective farms located in predominantly Dungan-populated rural settlements such as Dunganovka (on the outskirts of the city of Taraz) and the cluster of villages around Shortobe (in the Korday District of Zhambyl oblast). They acquired in-depth knowledge of, and access to, distribution networks by providing agricultural produce to formal state organizations, and they supplied the surplus goods to informal farmers’ markets in large cities in Soviet Central Asia and Siberia. These relationships were key to their status as one of the central groups in the private trade sector after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the 1990s, state-controlled provision schemes were replaced by private wholesale and retail bazaars, such as the Dordoi bazaar in Bishkek and the Barakholka agglomeration in Almaty. Dungan entrepreneurs from rural places, led by Husey Daurov, actively facilitated this process by strategically extending and rebuilding business relations with China.
Fig. 5.2 Dungan vegetable farming in Shortobe.
Photo © Henryk Alff (2014), CC BY 4.0
The Dungans of Shortobe consider themselves ancestors of a group of refugees that left the Qing Empire in 1877. While some households still retain pieces of cloth, jewelry, and even walking sticks13 from their ancestors’
flight, passing them down from generation to generation, ancestral links to China have gradually deteriorated over the past 140 years. Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer (1978:356) notes that during the Soviet period there was almost no contact between Dungan groups in Soviet Central Asia and Huizu groups in the People’s Republic, a fact she does not connect to the conflict between the leaders of the Soviet Union and the PRC during that time, but rather to almost a century of separation between Dungans and their kin in China. With the Sino-Soviet rapprochement in the late 1980s, communication with and travel to China became less restricted. Husey Daurov, a former history teacher in Shortobe’s secondary school and then the secretary of Shortobe’s collective farm ‘Kommunisticheskiy’ was the first to build up new ties with Huizu and Han political and economic circles, first in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province, and later in other places across China. Daurov thereby became a pioneer and retains great influence over the extensive social networks that currently link Shortobe with China, as one of my interlocutors in Shortobe stated:
‘Husey Shimarovich [Daurov] has done a lot for the Dungans, in particular for those here in Shortobe. In fact, all of the people running business with Chinese partners have received contacts and built their business through him. He is the moral authority of our people’ (2014, Shortobe).
A sense of cross-border solidarity and loyalty, based on ethnic and linguistic affiliation, exists between Dungans and their Han Chinese business partners, which has contributed to the establishment of enduring, trusting, and often exclusive commercial and political alliances. These were stronger than the ties between their Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uyghur competitors and the evolving Chinese business sector (Laruelle and Peyrouse 2012:123). Dungan groups in Kazakhstan are being appropriated by the Chinese state as an ‘overseas Chinese ethnic minority’ (shao shu min zu hua qiao hua ren in Chinese), which gives them particularly favorable access to social benefits offered by the Chinese authorities, e.g., to cultural and educational exchange programmes and university grants (Jiménez Tovar 2013, 2016).
13 Interview with Husey Daurov, 12 May 2014, Almaty.
Fig. 5.3 Translocal connections between Central Asia and China forged by Shortobe’s Dungans. Map © Henryk Alff (2015), CC BY 4.0
The export of scrap metal and Soviet-era industrial installations to China in the 1900s was the first economic activity that arose from these connections between Dungan and Han entrepreneurs. The outflow of labourers from Shortobe and the neighboring villages to Bishkek and Almaty was facilitated by the organization of transport schemes between coastal China, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia and by the highly profitable wholesale import of Chinese-made consumer goods such as textiles, shoes, and household items to Kazakhstan, which flourished in the second half of the decade. Today, in up to eighty percent of Shortobe’s households, one or more members are reported to be self-employed in the urban trade sector,14 especially in wholesale and larger retail trade based at Almaty’s Barakholka bazaar agglomeration, complementing the agricultural economic orientation of the village. Those people running
14 Fieldnotes based on a conversation with a local Dungan businessman, 18 May 2014, Shortobe.
the trade business travel to China for supplies — either to Urumqi or directly to the manufacturing centres on China’s eastern seaboard — on a regular basis. Yet, many of them return to Shortobe during the weekly day off at Almaty’s Barakholka, from Sunday evening to Tuesday morning. During a taxi ride with Dungan retail traders from Shortobe to Almaty’s Baisat bazaar in October 2012, one of them explained the evolution of his business:
‘I moved from Shortobe to help out my elder brother with his business back in 2002. Bazaar trade became a highly profitable way of making a living, as Kazakhstan recovered from the 1998 financial crisis. I soon could buy a sales container on my own and started to travel to Urumqi almost every two months for supplies of household appliances using the contacts my brother had established. Sales went well, nowadays they have slowed, but still I was able to buy a new house in Shortobe a year ago, although retail prices in Shortobe have reached the level of Almaty.’15
The connections to China fostered the increasing mobility of Dungan trade entrepreneurs and the circulation of goods and capital, but also the exchange of innovative ideas that often accompanies these translocal flows. In the mid-1990s Husey Daurov, then the head of the privatised farm ‘Shaanxi’ in Shortobe, imported agricultural innovations from Xi’an, such as basic greenhouse and mushroom-growing technology, to generate income for the village in the late autumn and early spring months. These technologies later spread to other parts of southern Kazakhstan. Rapid housing construction triggered the constant expansion of Shortobe16 and its neighboring villages, and small-scale brick and paint production facilities were built in the neighboring villages of Bular Batyr and Aukhatty using Chinese technology and expertise17 to satisfy local demand. During a visit to the paint factory in May 2014, a Dungan foreman emphasized that the half-mechanized production is the only industrial facility in the Korday district. The
15 Fieldnotes, 8 October 2012.
16 One of my interlocutors in Shortobe named these extensive new quarters on the fringes of Shortobe ‘micro-districts’ (microrayon in Russian), pointing to their increasingly urbanized character.
17 The small-scale paint factory in Aukhatty is currently run by a Han Chinese manager from Fujian province, employing around thirty workers from surrounding villages.
products are currently sold across Kazakhstan and are always in high demand due to the lack of serious domestic competition.18
Fig. 5.4 Paint production facility in Aukhatty.
Photo © Henryk Alff (2014), CC BY 4.0
As a way to ‘develop’ Shortobe, Daurov proposed a project of
‘community-based tourism as seen in many parts of China nowadays’
to attract larger numbers of Chinese visitors, who seek to experience a highly folklorized version of ‘traditional Hui culture’ that has vanished in China after the Cultural Revolution.19 According to Daurov’s vision, inviting Chinese people to stay in Dungan homes and participate in
‘traditional Dungan wedding ceremonies’, as well as constructing an ethnographic village with ‘ancient Dungan-style houses and Kazakh yurts’, promote Chinese-Dungan dialogue and interaction and provide new modes of income (ibid., see also Laruelle and Peyrouse 2012:121–23).
18 Fieldnotes, 19 May 2014.
19 Interview, 9 October 2012, Almaty.
A Dungan tendency towards history-making and self-mythologization is evident in such ethno-tourism, as they explain their contemporary existence as a Chinese-speaking group in Kazakhstan with reference to a reimagined (folklorized) past (see also Svetlana Jacquesson in Chapter Six). Several of my interlocutors in Shortobe outlined that not only have Chinese tourists arrived in increasing numbers in search of what they imagine as their lost selves, but journalists, film crews, and social anthropologists from mainland China have also visited Shortobe for investigation or field research.
This strategy of historicizing present, everyday reality in Dungan settlements apparently serves to attract attention from China and tap new sources of income for the rural Dungan population. It is part of a project that exploits (and appropriates) images from the past to build a prosperous future.
Social change in Shortobe and other Dungan settlements during the past two decades was entangled with state-led modernisation across China. This is particularly true with respect to agricultural innovation in Shortobe and the simultaneous increase in more urbanized economic activities such as international trade, tourism, and manufacturing, which all contribute to what is perceived as modern society. The influx of ideas for development together with these new entrepreneurial activities is vividly expressed by my Dungan interlocutors’ descriptions of particular elements of China’s modernisation ideology. A member of Shortobe’s local branch of Kazakhstan’s Association of Dungans on one occasion said:
‘In China, the advancement of people and society is given highest priority. The Chinese government supports unity, equity, and dialogue in society though various measures, because this comes as a pledge for societal improvement and wellbeing. As Dungans in Kazakhstan’s society, we also retain a high degree of respect for our compatriots’
(2011, Shortobe).
The importance of dialogue, harmony, and equity in society as a precondition for positive change and, at the same time, a major goal thereof, seems to be influenced by the notion of ‘social harmony’ (hexie shehui in Chinese), which is prominent in the Chinese modernisation discourse (Brox and Bellér-Hann 2014). However, the reference to
‘social harmony’ is not the only aspect of ‘Chinese modernity’ brought
up during conversation by Dungans in Shortobe. The ability to flexibly and pragmatically react to changing socio-economic conditions, e.g., to adapt their supplies to the demand for products or services, or to adjust cross-border trade and transport networks to navigate changing modes of regulation and to trade effectively, are considered quintessential entrepreneurial qualities.
Thus, among my Dungan interlocutors there is a positive sense of symbolic connectedness to the flow of ideas and forces of development in China, on the one hand, and their impact on modernisation in Shortobe, on the other. In fact, Shortobe’s Dungan population has a certain fascination with development in China. As I have stated elsewhere in more detail, it appears that by promoting particular ideas about development across borders, Chinese state elites will eventually be able to use the Dungan population for their own purposes by inspiring translocal developments that are favourable to China and are forged by key actors and communities within the Dungan population (Alff 2014, Jiménez Tovar 2016).
Fig. 5.5 Miniature version of Astana’s Baiterek Tower in a Dungan village. Photo © Henryk Alff (2014), CC BY 4.0