Wallets welcome, but beards beware
Except for men with long beards and women wearing veils or jewelry with a crescent moon motif, just about anyone can enter Chinese territory — at least a few miles of it — across a frontier marked only by two thin stripes of paint daubed across the road.
The stripes — one red, one light blue — demarcate the border between China’s restive region of Xinjiang in the far west of the country and Kazakhstan, a Central Asian neighbour.
There are no Chinese visa checks, no officious border guards or customs officials, only a detachment of the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force.
The visa-free border area is the result of an agreement between China and Kazakhstan that in 2012 established a special economic development zone covering 7.7 square kilometres and comprising territory from both countries.
“This is one of a kind,” said Alexey A. Ivanov, the vice-president of the Kazakh side of the zone, which is fenced off from the rest of Kazakhstan and effectively operates as a ministate, governed by managers appointed by Kazakhstan’s state railway corporation.
The unusually relaxed border at what the Chinese call Horgos and the Kazakhs call Khorgos is all the more remarkable because it marks the entrance to a tense Chinese region that has been struggling for decades to contain a low-grade but persistent insurgency by militants from a minority Chinese Muslim ethnic group, the Uighurs.
Posters in Russian, which most Kazakhs understand, make clear the area is not entirely at peace. They offer a “friendly” warning that bushy beards and Islamic clothing are not welcome in China.
The border-straddling zone, known as the International Center for Boundary Cooperation, was meant to become an island of trade-driven prosperity that would showcase Kazakh-Chinese co-operation and enrich both countries’ impoverished border areas.
Instead, it has become a study in the wide economic gulf that has opened up between a booming China, which used to look up to the Soviet Union as its “big brother,” and struggling former Soviet lands.
Compared with most other former Soviet republics, Kazakhstan is faring reasonably well, its economy driven by a highly educated population and large reserves of oil and other natural resources. Ruled by Nursultan A. Nazarbayev for its 26 years of independence, the country has avoided the violent strife that has cursed other former Soviet lands in Central Asia.
Around two million Chinese enter the zone each year, but they mostly stay on the Chinese side. Traffic across the border, at least in winter, flows almost entirely one way. Only a trickle of Chinese pass into Kazakhstan as throngs of Kazakhs pour in the other direction to shop for clothing, toys and electronic goods, many of them counterfeit, in Chinese shops.
“It is not Hong Kong or Shanghai, but it is a great chance for us to see what China is like,” said Aidos Sarym, a Kazakh political analyst who has visited. The experience, he added, will help calm a widespread fear felt by many Kazakhs of China and its people.