Ethnonationalism and the changing pattern of ethnic Kazakhs’ emigration from China to Kazakhstan

Amid the post-Cold War global revival of ethnonationalism, Kazakhstan – a newly independent state born out of the collapse of the Soviet Union – launched its ‘ethnic repatriation programme’, encouraging ethnic Kazakhs from outside Kazakhstan to ‘return home’. China has a large ethnic Kazakh population and shares a border of more than 1500 km with Kazakhstan in Xinjiang. Since the 1990s, over 150,000 ethnic Kazakhs originally from China have chosen to emigrate to Kazakhstan. Sketching China’s and Kazakhstan’s state policies toward ethnic Kazakh migration since the 1990s, this article addresses how different factors and rationales have shaped individuals’ decisions to emigrate to Kazakhstan or to stay in China. The article relies upon available, multilingual data and over 30 in-depth interviews with respondents in both Kazakhstan and China. We argue that, for ethnic Kazakhs emigrating from China to Kazakhstan, socio-economically and environmentally based rationales, including perceptions of developmental prospects, social welfare benefits and social ties were most salient during the 2000s. However, since the late 2000s, politico-culturally based rationales, such as ethno-nationalism, Kazakh linguistic and cultural concerns, educational opportunities, and other factors have become increasingly salient especially during the 2010s.