ABSTRACT
3 November 2018. It’s early morning in Boulder, Colorado, as I received a message from Ali. “Hi, how are you friend?” he asked, via Facebook Messenger. “Hi, I’m good,” I quickly replied, then continued. “I recently moved to the USA, I’m not sure if I told you already. How are you?” I expected him to be in Pakistan, possibly in Gilgit. Since we last met, in 2013, we have remained in touch, sending each other regular messages via either Facebook Messenger, Skype, or WeChat. In 2015, he told me, he had given up trading and started a small business in Gilgit. Chinese import tariffs for Afghan dry fruit had become too high to make his business profitable. I found it ironic that his decision to stop trading coincided with the opening of the tunnels around the KKH, and with the rhetoric surrounding CPEC and the BRI reaching its climax. His was not the only story of this kind I was hearing at around that time. Other small-scale Pakistani traders – in dry fruit as well as other items – had stopped travelling to Kashgar, frustrated either by growing tariffs, the treatment of border guards, and the securitisation of the region. I checked in with him the following year, in November 2016, as I was reading about the first official CPEC convoy to Gwadar: when, amidst much fanfare, over 100 containers carrying Chinese goods were escorted by armed police all the way from Sost to the Indian Ocean (Zafar 2016). Ali, he told me then, did not yet see a reason to restore his old business – “the conditions,” he simply put it, “are not good.” In November 2018, as I was working on some much-needed morning coffee, I was thus very surprised to see Ali’s reply to my question. “I am in Kashi [Kashgar]” – he wrote, then asked: “So you are not in China?” I was not, but I was interested in hearing about what he was doing there. Apparently, while Chinese import tariffs were still very high, in 2018 Chinese dry fruit was cheaper than in Pakistan, and Pakistani import tariffs were low. Ali’s business had changed direction: he was now buying in China, and selling in Pakistan. Almonds were still too expensive (20 RMB/kg), but walnuts were cheap. At 11.8 RMB/kg, they made for a sure deal in Rawalpindi. Ali, who was going back to Pakistan the following day, was planning on selling the whole cargo within a week, and then perhaps make another trip to Kashgar before the seasonal closure of the Khunjerab Pass in December. “Money is good,” he told me. Yet, as we chatted about his business, I could not help but thinking about the ongoing situation in Xinjiang, trying to picture him busily travelling from one market to the other while dealing with endless checkpoints. Reports on Xinjiang’s prison camps were by then featured almost daily on major newspapers outside of China. Reports on the missing wives of Pakistani traders had recently appeared in Pakistani newspapers. Only a few days after our conversation, a new UN panel would examine evidences of China’s human rights abuses in the region. When I asked how Kashgar was, his reply was the following:
