ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses attitudes towards China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Kazakh media and among Kazakh elites such as state officials, academics, and journalists. The analysis follows Kavalski (2013) in depicting China’s efforts to create an ideational space in which its foreign policy may be accepted by citizens of other states as an attempt to generate normative power, especially among influential elites of target countries. Data were obtained through two forms of primary research. The first took the form of discourse analysis of media outputs published between January 2013 and June 2019 in the Russian and Kazakh languages. The findings were that around three-quarters of Kazakh media coverage by both state and private outlets presented the BRI as largely successful. While state media were clearly reluctant to cover controversial issues such as the internment of Kazakhs in Chinese reeducation camps, due to the need not to undermine the Kazakh government’s policy of economic engagement with China, private media were also found to be surprisingly compliant in portraying the BRI positively on the whole. The second part of the research consisted of semi-open interviews conducted in Astana and Almaty in Kazakhstan, as well as in Moscow. These revealed, despite some criticism voiced by the interviewees, that China’s normative power drive has had a surprisingly high degree of success in shaping and “socializing” Kazakh elite acceptance and even promotion of the BRI.
