Prison without Wall: Dilemma of Dual Identities for China-Born Kazakh Residents

• In Event: Poster Session: LGBTQI+ Power and Politics & Human Rights
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Human Rights

Abstract

Examinations of transnational diaspora politics have tended to focus on how emigrants can influence the politics of their sending countries from the more liberal spaces of their receiving countries, and, increasingly, how new techniques of information control and dissident monitoring are allowing the governments of sending countries to contest that space. However, far less attention has been paid to those emigrants who perceive little difference in the receiving and sending countries, and who pose no outward threat to the latter. The case of China-born Kazakhs is an apt one to fill this knowledge gap; it illustrates how something so seemingly innocuous as citizenship choice can be enough to incur harsh repression from a sending country. This paper examines personal testimonies from camp survivors and their family members and interviews with two Kazakhstan-born human rights workers who have been instrumental in collecting these testimonies and bringing the issue of the detention of China-born Kazakhs to light, along with primary government sources and academic literature on the Chinese side to unearth the factors underpinning the mass detention of China-born Kazakhs in Xinjiang. It argues that it is the mutable identities of the China-born Kazakhs themselves, who simultaneously belong to the “Chinese nation” yet are considered subjects of the Kazakhstani title nation, which has resulted in their being perceived as a threat and consequently suppressed by the Chinese government.

Author

• Yu-Chen Chen, York University