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Paper abstract:

In 2004, the Mongolian authorities established two interconnected border trade zones, one at the Russian border and the other at the Chinese one. In the neighboring - Chinese - territory, the Erlianhot border trade zone has been in operation since 1991. On the Russian side, a "Kyahta tourism cross-border cluster" was established in 2011 and conceived as an area complementary to the Mongolian trade zone. Despite almost two decades of the Mongolian zones' operations, economic life in Altanbulag and Zamyn-Ude is barely simmering, and the border zones are rather collapsing. Covid-19 and the restrictions associated with the pandemic certainly played some part in this failure. However, the decay began long before the global crisis. The weakness of border trade zones is typical in many countries in this region, except China. For example, the idea of cross-border trade and economic zones in Russia died essentially unborn. One can find a "monument" to this death in the Prigranichny settlement, Primorsky Krai, in the form of unfinished and now swallowed by nature buildings.

The failure of the border trade zones is particularly evident if we compare them with the bazaars, for instance, located in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Irkutsk, or Krasnoyarsk (Russia). A comparison of border trade zones and bazaars, which I use in my paper, is not artificial because the main characteristic of both is exemptions from the tax, customs, and other national regulations that apply in a particular and restricted area. Exceptions are introduced from above for border zones, while they are expropriated from below in bazaars. It seems, however, that exceptions obtained by people on their own enable bazaars to survive even in severe crises. At the same time, the rules imposed above fail to keep economic life afloat even in hothouse conditions.

In the paper, using the optics of social topology (Mol 2002; Law 1984; Law and Singleton 2005) and drawing on ethnographic data from Russia, Mongolia, and Kyrgyzstan, I will examine how business networks (do not) work and show why and how border trade zones fade away while bazaars seem enduring.