Amid the post-Cold War global revival of ethnonationalism, Kazakhstan – a newly independent state born out of the collapse of the Soviet Union – launched its ‘ethnic repatriation programme’, encouraging ethnic Kazakhs from outside Kazakhstan to ‘return home’. China has a large ethnic Kazakh population and shares a border of more than 1500 km with Kazakhstan in Xinjiang. Since the 1990s, over 150,000 ethnic Kazakhs originally from China have chosen to emigrate to Kazakhstan. Sketching China’s and Kazakhstan’s state policies toward ethnic Kazakh migration since the 1990s, this article addresses how different factors and rationales have shaped individuals’ decisions to emigrate to Kazakhstan or to stay in China. The article relies upon available, multilingual data and over 30 in-depth interviews with respondents in both Kazakhstan and China. We argue that, for ethnic Kazakhs emigrating from China to Kazakhstan, socio-economically and environmentally based rationales, including perceptions of developmental prospects, social welfare benefits and social ties were most salient during the 2000s. However, since the late 2000s, politico-culturally based rationales, such as ethno-nationalism, Kazakh linguistic and cultural concerns, educational opportunities, and other factors have become increasingly salient especially during the 2010s.

This article proposes an analytical framework to address why implemented autonomy outcomes may differ across ethnic republics in the Russian Federation. Composed of a long-range factor, inter-ethnic boundary making, and a short-term factor, titular elites’ representation in the ethno-regional state, the framework is applied to a synchronic comparison of three republics of Russia with differing autonomy outcomes for the 2010s, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Yakutia, reliant upon state-generated data and fieldwork. Titular elites’ representation in the ethnoregional state is used as a proxy for titular elites’ bargaining capacity with the central state. It is argued that an “integration–distinction balance,” or rather, higher inter-ethnic integration combined with robust consciousness of inter-ethnic distinction, can contribute to titular elites’ bargaining capacity with the center, which can lead to greater autonomy outcome for the ethnic republic.

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