Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Steenberg, Rune
• Rippa, Alessandro
• Saxer, Martin
• Horstmann, Alexander

Titel

Accumulating trust: Uyghur traders in the Sino-Kyrgyz border trade after 1991

Ist Teil von

• Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands, 2018, p.294-303

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This chapter tells the story of Uyghur small-scale traders from Atush in southwest Xinjiang trading into Kyrgyzstan. It traces the border trade's rise and decline from the 1990s until 2016. During this time, frequent shifts in the trade's high-profit, high-risk environment took place, caused by political instability, state deliberations, and economic transformation. These shifts strongly affected the conditions of the traders and the traders' position and possibilities. Uyghurs hold marginal positions both within China and Kyrgyzstan. They often have only limited access to formal infrastructures such as bank credits, government support, good education and - at times - even security and rule of law. Their main asset allowing them to conduct trade in such a volatile, high-risk environment are their social networks. The networks provide necessary infrastructure and security, but they are not only a means to and end to make a profit in trade. Forging and strengthening social networks is an important goal in itself for which trading provides a platform. This became a main motivation for Uyghur traders to continue to trade into Kyrgyzstan even when profits fell to a bare minimum after 2010. Today, many of them have retired from the border trade to venture into new business endeavours drawing on the same social networks and connections. This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part explores the arrival of humanitarian grassroots organizations as important players in the borderlands. It looks at emotions and affects related to border politics and border struggles, shedding new light on capitalist and humanitarian economies. The part takes the example of the Free Burma Rangers, a faith-based humanitarian organization based in Chiang Mai, Thailand that proliferated in the ethnic conflicts of Myanmar's frontier regions. It discusses the work of the Aga Khan Development Network, the Ismaili Imam's global development organization, in Central Asia. The part also discusses the extension of boundaries to the personal and even intimate level of the body. It uses the concepts of boundary making to analyze the local conflict caused by the elopement of a Tibetan Buddhist woman with a Muslim Hui man.