Chinese handling of Kazakhs a bump in Belt and Road

Astana’s economic ties with Beijing leave it with a headache in dealing with public anger over the internment of its nationals in Xinjiang’s ‘re-education centres’

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Police patrol the streets of Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:00pm, 4 Aug 2018Updated: 8:38pm, 11 Jan 2019

Kazakhstan’s government is facing growing popular resentment against China, one of its major economic partners, as accounts emerge of Chinese-Kazakhs and Kazakh nationals being sent to “political re-education camps” in China’s Xinjiang region.

In a widely followed case, a Kazakh court on Wednesday allowed an illegal Chinese immigrant to stay in the country after she gave details about an indoctrination centre in Xinjiang where she had been employed. “In China, they call it a political camp. Officially, this is a training centre where people study Chinese ideology. But in reality, it’s a prison in the mountains,” Sayragul Sauytbay, a Chinese of Kazakh ethnicity, told a court hearing in July, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.

Sayragul Sauytbay, 41, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national and former employee of the Chinese state, was accused of illegally crossing the border between the countries to join her family in Kazakhstan. Photo: AFP

Sauytbay said she worked in one of several such camps for Chinese-Kazakh people that held 2,500 detainees. Accounts of the trial and images of groups of supporters outside the court have been shared hundreds of times on social media in the last few days.

Kazakhstan, a key partner in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, has been accused of deporting Uygur asylum seekers back to China, but activists believe popular support received by Sauytbay prior to the ruling helped her to receive a more lenient ruling. “Public opinion was very influential,” said the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a local NGO that has been campaigning to prevent Sauytbay’s deportation.