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Contribution short abstract

This paper employs a "regimes of mobility" framework to examine cross-border im/mobilities at the Sino-Kazakh border.

Contribution long abstract

In 2013, Glick Schiller and Salazar urged us to move beyond the dichotomy between mobility and stasis and to acknowledge that mobilities are unevenly distributed. Building on their concept of "regimes of mobility", I propose the Sino-Kazakh border as a powerful lens to see the mobility inequalities produced by different forms of governance.

Based on 20 months of ethnographic field research conducted in Kazakhstan, this paper explores regimes of mobility pertaining to the Sino-Kazakh border. Focusing on Khorgos, a major global economic hub, I show how people’s mobilities are scaled, layered, and intersectional. While individuals on one side of the border move across it on a near-daily basis with relatively few restrictions, their co-ethnics on the other side cross the border in far less visible and significantly more constrained ways. By examining these spatially and temporally layered mobilities, the paper renders visible processes of political polarization as well as the constraints imposed by global capitalism.

This paper makes two main contributions. First, it applies a “regimes of mobility” framework to revisit the concept of the borderline. Second, empirically, it demonstrates how highly mobile female cross-border traders from Kazakhstan intersect with mobilities of people on the other side of the border.