Informal Economies Across the Kyrgyz-Chinese Border

I set out this summer to engage in exploratory fieldwork in preparation for extended doctoral research with the initial question: how are informal economies, particularly market engagements and trade networks across the Kyrgyz-Chinese border reshaping urban sociality? I spent the bulk of my time in Osh, Kyrgyzstan where I observed and participated in daily business at Kara-suu bazaar, the large transnational bazaar in the country’s south. I worked with a family-run curtain business owned by an Uzbek-Uighur couple. In addition, I interviewed other businessmen and women who travel to China and sometimes Turkey to import clothing, electronics, and household goods.  

From my conversations and interactions with both businesspeople and non-businesspeople in Osh, a central sentiment that emerged was the notion that trade and the market had become the prevailing socio-economic institution in the last few decades. While struggles with transition after the fall of the USSR were often narrated, successful businesses were guided by adaptive strategies that drew on both Soviet legacies, new international routes, and which utilized or forged kinship ties. Of particular interest to me was how many Uighur businessmen (and these are mostly men), a politically oppressed minority in China, came to establish profitable ventures in Kyrgyzstan, often in partnership with minority Uzbek merchants who have long dominated business in the country’s south. These relationships form networks that usually involve close family ties that span resale, transport, and production from Osh to Urumqi to Beijing or Guangzhou. In this process, kinship and gender roles are often repositioned, and broader visions of religious, political, and economic futures are debated and interpreted.

The business at the bazaar that I shadowed was a profitable curtain business run by a husband-wife team. While the wife was a local Uzbek woman, the husband was an ethnic Uighur from China. In contrast to the businesses of other more Sovietized and Russified Uzbek families, this business family was religiously observant and often evoked Islamic principles as a moral view of how to properly conduct business. Shared religion was what facilitated contact for this transnational marriage. However, his marriage in Kyrgyzstan is the Uyghur merchant’s second one. His first family in China manages the “other half” of this family business—visiting factories and sites of production in major Chinese ciites to select and buy materials wholesale before trucking them to Osh through Urumqi and Kashgar. In the future, I’d like to follow-up on this half of the family, if political conditions in China will allow for research. I’m interested in further exploring how these two Muslim minorities have come to dominate the entrepreneurial scene, and how “doing business”—in the face of religious restrictions and pressures—has reshaped the presentation of ethnic and individual identities. In the longer term, I hope this inquiry will also raise critical questions about processes of “globalization” and illuminate the complex social actors and communities facilitating transnational flows.