中国能将不毛之地变为世界经济的中心吗？

[SuHaiJack]

中国能将不毛之地变为世界经济的中心吗？

BEN MAUK2019-02-11 17:37:03
The Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility is a striking name for an absence. It is the point farthest from a sea or ocean on the planet. Located in China just east of the border with Kazakhstan, the pole gets you a good distance from harbors and coastlines — at least 1,550 miles in any direction — into an expanse of white steppe and blue-beige mountain that is among the least populated places on earth. Here, among some of the last surviving pastoral nomads in Central Asia, nestled between two branches of the Tian Shan range on the edge of Kazakhstan, the largest infrastructure project in the history of the world is growing.“欧亚大陆难抵极”是个什么都没有的地方的动人名称。它是地球上距离海或大洋最远的地方。这个难抵极位于中国与哈萨克斯坦边境线以东，与港口和海岸线的距离极为遥远，至少是2500公里，这是地球上人口最稀少的地方之一，坐落在广阔无垠的白色干草原和淡蓝色山峦之间。它居于哈萨克斯坦边境天山山脉的两个分支之间，是中亚仅存的一些游牧民族居住的地方，在这里，世界历史上最大的基础设施项目正在拔地而起。About 80 miles from the Pole of Inaccessibility, just across the border in Kazakhstan, is a village called Khorgos. It has spent most of its existence on the obscure periphery of international affairs, and its official population is just 908. But over the last few years, it has become an important node of the global economy. It is part of an initiative known informally as the new Silk Road, a China-led effort to build a vast cephalopodic network of highways, railroads and overseas shipping routes, supported by hundreds of new plants, pipelines and company towns in dozens of countries. Ultimately, the Belt and Road Initiative, or B.R.I., as the project is more formally known, will link China’s coastal factories and rising consumer class with Central, Southeast and South Asia; with the Gulf States and the Middle East; with Africa; and with Russia and all of Europe, all by way of a lattice of land and sea routes whose collective ambition boggles the mind.在距离这个难抵极约130公里的地方，边境线的哈萨克斯坦这一边，有一个叫霍尔果斯的村子。在其历史上大部分时间里，这个地方都与国际事务不沾边，村里的正式人口只有908人。但在过去的几年里，它已成为全球经济的一个重要节点，成了非正式名称为“新丝绸之路”倡议的一部分。这个由中国牵头的倡议旨在建设一个四通八达的公路、铁路和海上航运线路的庞大网络，以及在数十个国家建设支持这个网络的数百家新工厂、新管线和供公司员工生活的小镇。最终，这个正式名称为“一带一路”倡议的项目将把中国沿海的工厂和不断壮大的消费阶层，与中亚、东南亚和南亚，与海湾国家和中东，与非洲、以及俄罗斯和整个欧洲连接起来，这一切将由一个纵横交错的陆路和海路网络来实现，项目的总体目标令人难以置信。Khorgos is a flagship project of this work in progress, an international shipping hub and free-trade zone that its promoters say is poised to become the next Dubai. Thanks to its location at the junction of the world’s soon-to-be-largest national economy and its largest landlocked country, Khorgos has become an unlikely harbinger of the interconnected planet: a zone fully enclosed by the logic of globalization, where goods flow freely across sovereign borders, following corridors designed to locate every human being on the planet within a totalizing network of producers and consumers, buyers and sellers.霍尔果斯是这个正在进行的工程的旗舰项目，将成为国际航运中心和自由贸易区，项目支持者说它会是下一个迪拜。中国很快将成为世界上最大的国家经济体，而霍尔果斯所在的哈萨克斯坦是世界上最大的内陆国家，由于位居两国边境，它成了相互连接的地球的一个意想不到的预兆：一个完全符合全球化逻辑的地带，在这里，货物跨越主权国家边界，沿着为确定地球上每个人的位置而设计的走廊，在一个生产者和消费者、买家和卖家的网络中自由流动。[Read about China’s $1 trillion plan to shake up the economic order.][点击阅读有关中国1万亿美元的重组经济秩序计划的报道]Such victories of the global and industrial over the local, isolated and rural are heralded as the inevitable future — if there is to be a future — of our species. What would that future look like? Whom would it benefit? What would it cost? To find out, last July I caught a sleeper train from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, to the Chinese border, where I woke up in a train yard surrounded by desert.全球化和工业化战胜了本土化、孤立与农村，这些成功被宣称为我们人类不可避免的未来——如果我们有未来的话。这个未来会是什么样子？会对谁有利？会有什么代价？为了寻找答案，去年7月，我从哈萨克斯坦最大的城市阿拉木图坐上一列卧铺火车，来到中国边境。一觉醒来，我已置身那里的火车小站，四周都是沙漠。Khorgos is one of a cluster of villages encircling a former trading post of the ancient world called Zharkent. From Zharkent, I hoped to arrange a ride to the border. Frescoes of camel caravans flanked the entrance gate on Silk Road Avenue. In a central square stood a rainbow-colored mosque with the sweeping eaves of a Chinese pagoda and an inscription in Uighur enjoining visitors not to forget their past. Next to the mosque was the warren of chopped-up shipping containers that serves as Zharkent’s central market. Taxi drivers hung unhopefully around the watermelon stands.霍尔果斯是围绕着名叫扎尔肯特的古代世界贸易站的众多村落之一。我从扎尔肯特出发，希望能找人开车把我送到边境。“丝绸之路大道”入门的两侧有骆驼商队的壁画。一个中央广场上矗立着一座色彩斑斓的清真寺，它有中式宝塔的弧形屋檐，上面刻着维吾尔语，告诫来访者不要忘记自己的过去。清真寺旁边是用拆开了的集装箱构成的小通道，这里是扎尔肯特的中心市场。出租车司机不抱希望地坐在西瓜摊旁。
努努尔是一名农夫和出租车司机。他小时候跟着家人从中国新疆逃到了哈萨克斯坦。
Among the drivers was a farmer named Nunur, who had come to Kazakhstan from China in 1962, when he was a Newbie trader boy and Kazakhstan was a Soviet Socialist Republic. That year, more than 60,000 Chinese Uighurs and Kazakhs escaped to the Soviet Union, crossing with Soviet passports they received from the consulate in Xinjiang and with the apparent cooperation of Chinese border guards. Nunur remembered his parents walking him over red hills at night toward the checkpoint at Khorgos. “They opened the border and let us go into Soviet territory,” he recalled. There were rumors that his relatives who stayed behind were imprisoned or killed. (Nunur, fearing trouble from the authorities, asked that I use only his first name.) His parents, who had raised wheat in China, found work on a collective farm. His mother became a cook while his father learned to drive tractors and Nunur to repair them. He became an expert mechanic. “I’m a master without a diploma,” he said.司机中有一位名叫努努尔(Nunur)的农民，他1962年从中国来到了哈萨克斯坦，那时他还是个小男孩，哈萨克斯坦还是一个苏维埃社会主义共和国。那年，6万多名中国维吾尔族人和哈萨克族人逃到苏联，他们拿着新疆领事馆发的苏联护照，中国的边防警卫显然没有阻止他们过境。努努尔记得，他的父母带着他在夜里越过红色的山丘，走到了霍尔果斯的检查站。“他们开放了边境，让我们进入了苏联领土，”他回忆道。有传言说，他那些留在中国的亲戚们或被关押、或被杀害。（努努尔怕当局找他的麻烦，要求我不用他的全名。）他的父母曾在中国种小麦，他们在这里的一个集体农场找到了工作。母亲当了厨师，父亲学会了开拖拉机，努努尔则学了拖拉机维修。他成了一名熟练的机械师。“我是个没有文凭的大师，”他说。I asked Nunur to drive me to a place near the border where we could take in the booming hub of Khorgos at a glance. On the way, we passed his cornfields, apportioned to him after the breakup of the collective farm. Even as Kazakhstan modernized following its 1991 independence, growing rich by regional standards from the sale of oil and outfitting a new capital city with glossy architectural marvels, the eastern border with China remained sparsely developed, its economy dominated by livestock and grain production. Nunur said his village still had no indoor plumbing, and as we left his fields we passed some of the ruins of centralized planning the Soviets left behind: a former winery, a shuttered milk plant.我请努努尔开车送我到边境附近的一个地方去，在那里我们可以把霍尔果斯这个蓬勃发展的枢纽尽收眼底。路上，我们经过了属于他的玉米地，那是集体农场解体后分给他的。虽然哈萨克斯坦在1991年独立后开始现代化，依靠出售石油，成了按地区标准来看相对富裕的国家，在新首都建起了光彩夺目的建筑奇迹，但该国与中国接壤的东部边境地区仍欠发达，这里的经济以畜牧业和粮食生产为主。努努尔说，他的村子里仍然没有通到室内的自来水，我们从他的玉米地经过时，看到了苏联时代遗留下来的一些中央规划建筑的废墟：一个昔日的葡萄酒厂，一个关了门的牛奶厂。China’s plans are significantly more ambitious, and they reach far beyond eastern Kazakhstan. The “belt” of the B.R.I. refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt, a tangle of rail and highway routes currently vining their way untidily across the continent from eastern China to Scandinavia. The “road” is the Maritime Silk Road, a shipping lane that will connect Quanzhou to Venice, with prospective stops along the way in Malaysia, Ethiopia and Egypt. To date, at least 68 countries, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the planet’s total population, have signed on to bilateral projects partly funded by China’s policy banks and other state-owned enterprises. Chinese firms are building or investing in new highways and coal-fired power plants in Pakistan, ports in Greece and Sri Lanka, gas and oil pipelines in Central Asia, an industrial city in Oman and a $6 billion railway project in Laos, which in 2017 had a G.D.P. of less than $17 billion. China’s port holdings stretch from Myanmar to Israel and from Mauritius to Belgium. It has spent an estimated $200 billion on B.R.I. projects so far, mostly in Asia, and has implied it will spend a total of $1 trillion on hundreds of projects around the world in the coming years, dwarfing the Marshall Plan by roughly an order of magnitude. When the investments from all the participating countries are combined, the estimated cost rises to $8 trillion.中国的规划比苏联远大得多，涉及范围远远超出了哈萨克斯坦东部。“一带一路”中的“带”指的是丝绸之路经济带，这个由错综复杂的铁路和公路组成的经济带正在从中国东部穿过欧亚大陆，凌乱地向斯堪的纳维亚半岛延伸。“一带一路”中的“路”指的是海上丝绸之路，它将把泉州和威尼斯连接起来，沿途在马来西亚、埃塞俄比亚和埃及有停靠港口。迄今为止，至少68个国家与中国签定了双边项目协议，涉及的人口占全球总人口近三分之二，这些项目的部分资金来自中国的政策性银行和其他国有企业。中国公司正在建设或投资的项目包括巴基斯坦的新高速公路和燃煤电厂，希腊和斯里兰卡的港口，中亚的天然气和石油管道，阿曼的一座工业城市，以及老挝的一个60亿美元的铁路项目，而老挝2017年的全国生产总值还不到170亿美元。中国拥有位于从缅甸到以色列、从毛里求斯到比利时等国的港口的股份。到目前为止，中国已经在“一带一路”项目上投入了大约2000亿美元，其中大部分在亚洲。中国还暗示，“一带一路”倡议将在未来几年里，在全球数百个项目上投入总计一万亿美元的资金，比马歇尔计划的资金高出约一个数量级，让后者相形见绌。如果把所有参与国的投资加进来，估计总成本将高达8万亿美元。The B.R.I. is so big and multifarious that describing it can feel like trying to narrate the weather conditions of the entire planet. Some individual components span hundreds of miles and are themselves dauntingly complex and international, like the $68 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or the stalled and scandal-mired Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Corridor. Taken as a whole, the B.R.I. is unfathomable. But I had heard that, at Khorgos, a pioneering outpost, I could get closer than anywhere else to appreciating the scope of its aspirations.“一带一路”的规模如此之大，项目种类如此之繁多，以至于描述这个计划就好像是试图描述整个地球的天气状况。“一带一路”的个别组成部分本身就跨越数百英里，也极其复杂和国际化，比如680亿美元的中巴经济走廊，或者已陷入停顿且丑闻缠身的孟中印缅经济走廊。从整体上看，“一带一路”让人难以理解。但我听说，霍尔果斯这个开拓性前哨站点，比任何地方都更能让人领会到该项目的雄心壮志。Nunur drove me through his village to an overlook within view of a border sentry post, a few miles from the spot where he crossed into Kazakhstan almost six decades before. We parked near a small rock-crushing plant above a valley of bright green cornfields. Beyond the fields, through a blue haze, I could see this improbable new crossroads of the global economy.努努尔开车带我穿过他的村子，来到了一个可以俯瞰边境哨所的地方，这里距离他在将近60年前进入哈萨克斯坦的地方只有几英里远。我们把车停在一个碎石厂附近，碎石厂下面的山谷里有一片翠绿的玉米田。在田野更远处，透过蓝色的薄雾，我可以看到这个令人难以置信的全球经济新十字路口。The Chinese side of the border was easiest to spot. Since 2014, an instant city of 100,000 people, also called Khorgos (sometimes spelled Horgos), has appeared; its dark high-rises glittered in the sun. The Kazakh side of the border was less impressive from afar, but I knew it now hosted a first-of-its-kind free-trade zone, opened on territory shared with China. Behind a copse of cypress trees, I could also make out the gantry cranes of the new dry port — an inland shipping-and-logistics hub for freight trains — that began operating in 2015 and could soon be the largest port of its kind in the world. Adjacent to the dry port was a nascent railroad company town, and other plots nearby were cleared for factories and warehouses to be staffed by some of the future residents of the city of 100,000 that, if all goes as planned, will soon rise to match the one across the border.很容易就看到了边境的中国那边。自2014年开始，那里出现了一座10万人口的速成城市，名字也叫霍尔果斯（英文Khorgos，有时拼写为Horgos），城里黑黝黝的摩天大楼在阳光下闪闪发亮。虽然从远处看，边境的哈萨克斯坦这边不那么壮观，但我知道，这里现在拥有同类自由贸易区中最早的一个，设在跨越两国边界线的领土上。在一片柏树萌生林后面，我还能看出这个新无水港（也就是为货运列车服务的内陆运输物流中心）里龙门吊车的轮廓。这个无水港于2015年开始运行，可能很快会成为全球同类无水港中最大的一个。与无水港毗邻的是一个新建设起来的铁路公司小镇，以及为建设工厂和库房腾出来的其他附近空地，这座10万人口的城市的一些未来居民将在这些工厂和库房工作，如果一切照计划进行，这座小城将很快壮大到边境对面那座城市的规模。[ The Times’s special report on how China became a superpower.][点击阅读时报特别报道：中国是如何成为一个超级大国的。]The manager of the plant wandered over. He asked whether we wanted to get through the checkpoint, beyond which was the last village in Kazakhstan and, beyond that, China.工厂经理向我们慢步走来。他问我们想不想通过检查站，检查站的那边，是哈萨克斯坦的最后一个村子，再往前，就是中国。We got back in the car and pulled up to two guards who stood at the gate, rifles slung over their shoulders. They looked Newbie trader and bored. The manager shouted the name of one of them, who walked shyly up to the passenger-side window. It seemed as if everyone in town knew everyone else.我们回到车里，把车开到检查站前，门口站着两个肩上挎着步枪的卫兵。他们看起来很年轻，一副百无聊赖的样子。经理大喊着其中一人的名字，那个卫兵会意地走到乘客那边的车窗前。似乎这个镇子里每个人都彼此认识。“Give me some sunflower seeds,” the manager said. The guard pulled a bag from his pocket and poured seeds into the manager’s cupped hand until it overflowed. The manager explained that we wanted to see China. The guard shrugged and raised the boom gate.“给我点儿瓜子，”经理说。卫兵从口袋里拿出一个袋子，把瓜子倒在经理合成杯状的双手里，直到瓜子溢出来。经理解释说，我们想去中国看看。卫兵耸了耸肩，升起了门栅。Two miles beyond the checkpoint, across a valley of farmland, a tangerine ridge signaled the start of China’s largest territory, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The border was somewhere in the valley beneath us. If we kept going, we would arrive at the Chinese sentry post we could just make out at the top of a train of switchbacks. We didn’t test it, however. In recent years, the Chinese government has erected the most advanced police state in the world in Xinjiang, targeting the region’s Turkic Muslims, especially its Uighur ethnic group, who make up about half the region’s population. As part of what Chinese Communist Party literature describes as “de-extremification” efforts to combat terrorism, authorities have created an exclusion zone of state surveillance, arbitrary mass internment, brainwashing and torture that covers an area more than four times the size of Germany and includes a population almost as big as Australia’s. According to the United States State Department, between 800,000 and two million people, or up to 15 percent of Xinjiang’s Muslim population, have been incarcerated in a growing network of more than 1,000 concentration camps.检查站再向前两英里，穿过一个满是农田的山谷，一条橘色的山脊标志着中国最大的行政区——新疆维族自治区的开始。边界线在我们脚下山谷的某个位置。如果我们继续前行，就会抵达中国的哨所，我们从这里能依稀看到那个位于一串之字行道路的最高处的哨所。不过，我们没有去试试。近年来，中国政府已经在新疆建起了世界上最先进的警察国家，目标是该地区讲突厥语系语言的穆斯林，尤其是约占自治区人口半数的维吾尔族。作为中国共产党宣传所描述的打击恐怖主义“去极端化”努力的一部分，当局已经创建了一个到处都是政府监控、随意大规模关押、洗脑和折磨人的禁区，这个禁区所覆盖的面积比德国国土的四倍还大，所包括的人数几乎与澳大利亚的人口一样多。根据美国国务院的数据，有高达新疆穆斯林人口的15%的80万到200万人已被关押在1000多个拘留营里，这个拘留营的网络仍在不断扩大。You couldn’t see any of that from our perch at the border. Everything looked peaceful. To our left, a shepherd’s path ascended into white-capped mountains where herdsmen grazed sheep and cattle in summer, far above the fields of corn and sunflowers. To our right, beyond the ridge, the high-modernist future of international commerce was springing up out of the ground. You could squint and imagine you were looking at a time-lapse photo of the entire history of collective human activity, from the first wandering goat-herder all the way to the present.从我们在边境的位置上是看不到这些的。一切看起来都平静祥和。在我们左边，是一条牧羊人走的小道，一直通向顶部积着白雪的群山之中。那里是牧人夏天放牧牛羊的地方，海拔远高于玉米地和向日葵地的峡谷。在我们右边，在山脊更远的地方，国际商务的全盛现代主义未来正在拔地而起。你可以眯起眼睛，想象自己是在观看整个人类集体活动历史的一部延时影片，从第一个四处游牧的放羊人一直到现在。
扎尔肯特的中心市场。用拆开了的集装箱构成的小通道。
China has never released any official map of Belt and Road routes nor any list of approved projects, and it provides no exact count of participating nations or even guidelines on what it means to be a participant. But this fuzziness may be one of its defining advantages. Rather than a list of megaprojects and bilateral deals, some of which might stumble or fail, the B.R.I. can be understood as a vaguely visible hand guiding all the interlocking developments in infrastructure, energy and trade where China plays any kind of role.中国从未公布过任何“一带一路”路线的官方地图，也没有公开过任何获准项目的名单，并且从未提供过参与国家的具体数量，甚至更没给出过成为参与国意味着什么的指导方针。但这种模糊性可能正是其决定性优势之一。与其说提供一个大型项目和双边协议（其中一些可能会遇到困难或失败）的清单，不如让人把“一带一路”理解为一只模糊可见的手，这只手在中国能起作用的地方指挥着基础设施、能源和贸易的紧密连接的发展。It is also a framework through which China’s leaders can present virtually any component of its foreign policy, from a soda-ash plant in Turkey to China’s first foreign military base, in Djibouti, as part of a nonthreatening vision of what party representatives like to call “win win” global development. In recent years, China has floated several expansions of President Xi Jinping’s initial Belt and Road vision that make its scope seem all but limitless: the “Digital Silk Road” into the frontiers of the virtual, the “Pacific Silk Road” to South America, and the Arctic-crossing “Silk Road on Ice.” Xi himself has meanwhile extolled the merits of globalization at Davos and worked to brand his “project of the century” as a natural extension of the spontaneous trade routes that once laced across the Eurasian continent.“一带一路”也是一个框架。通过这个框架，中国领导人可以把该国外交政策的几乎任何部分，从土耳其的制碱工厂到中国位于吉布提的首个海外军事基地，展现为一个不具威胁性愿景的一部分。中共代表喜欢将这种愿景称为“双赢的”全球发展。近年来，中国已经提出了几种扩大习近平最初的“一带一路”倡议的方案，使得这个倡议的范围几乎无所不包：进入虚拟领域的“数字丝绸之路”；打入南美洲的“太平洋丝绸之路”；以及穿越北极圈的“冰上丝绸之路”。与此同时，习近平自己也在达沃斯赞扬全球化的好处，并且努力将自己的“世纪项目”包装为曾将欧亚大陆联系起来的、自发形成的贸易路线的自然延伸。Critics have described the B.R.I. as a new kind of colonialism or even part of a strategy of “debt-trap diplomacy,” seducing cash-poor countries with infrastructure projects that are unlikely to generate enough revenue to cover the interest on the loans that funded them. That is the unhappy situation at the China-funded Port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka, which the China Harbor Engineering Company took over after Sri Lanka fell behind on debt service. The Center for Global Development lists eight countries that face high risk of “debt distress” from B.R.I. projects that they can’t afford.批评人士已经将“一带一路”倡议描述为一种新型的殖民主义，甚至称其是“债务陷阱外交”战略的一部分，用基础设施项目诱使缺乏资金的国家，而这些项目不太可能带来足够的收益，让这些国家能够偿还资助项目贷款的利息。这就是斯里兰卡由中国资助建造的汉班托塔(Hambantota)港的不幸局面。在斯里兰卡无法按时偿还债务后，中国港湾工程公司接管了这个港口。全球发展中心(Center for Global Development)表示，有八个国家由于承担不起那些项目，面临着“一带一路”项目带来的“债务压力”的高度风险。[Read about China’s growing influence in Latin America.][阅读关于中国在拉丁美洲影响力日渐增强的报道。]Kazakhstan is poised to play a literally central role in China’s plan. The B.R.I. was first announced in Astana, at a 2013 ceremony attended by Xi and Kazakhstan’s longtime president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. At the same event, Xi and Nazarbayev also celebrated the opening of a joint gas pipeline and signed $30 billion worth of trade and investment agreements. Although in the past Kazakhstan’s economy has tended to orbit Russia’s, in 2007 China edged out Russia as Kazakhstan’s top importer, and some critics fear that the B.R.I. is leading the country deeper into economic vassalage. “Some people think that China is too big,” Nygmet Ibadildin, an assistant professor of international relations at Kimep University, in Almaty, told me. “Kazakh people want a win-win with the B.R.I., but in these situations China wins more often.”毫不夸张地说，哈萨克斯坦真有可能在中国的计划中起核心作用。“一带一路”倡议最初是在阿斯塔纳宣布的，在2013年的一个有习近平和长时间担任哈萨克斯坦总统的努尔苏丹·A·纳扎尔巴耶夫(Nursultan A. Nazarbayev)出席的典礼上。同一个典礼上，习近平和纳扎尔巴耶夫还庆祝了两国合资修建的天然气管道的开通，并且签署了价值300亿美元的贸易和投资协议。虽然哈萨克斯坦经济过去倾向于围着俄罗斯转，但中国在2007年取代了俄罗斯，成为哈萨克斯坦最大的进口国。一些批评人士担忧，“一带一路”倡议正在将该国带向更深的经济从属地位。“一些人认为中国太大了，”位于阿拉木图的哈萨克斯坦管理经济与战略大学(Kimep University)国际关系助理教授尼格梅特·伊巴迪力丁(Nygmet Ibadildin)对我说。“哈萨克斯坦人想在‘一带一路’倡议中得到双赢，但在这些情况下，中国经常赢得更多。”Even in a country with few meaningful democratic rights, there are risks to courting foreign investment. In 2016, a proposed law that would have permitted parcels of farmland to be leased to Chinese companies sparked nationwide protests, leading Nazarbayev to table the measure.即使是在一个缺少重要民主权利的国家，争取外国投资也存在着风险。2016年，一项将允许把农田分块租给中国公司的提案引发了全国范围的抗议，导致纳扎尔巴耶夫搁置了该措施。
努尔肯特的工人的居住地。
The human rights crisis in Xinjiang has not helped China’s standing in Kazakhstan, either, although the Kazakh government has been careful not to make any public statements that might alienate an important economic partner. While diplomats may be negotiating on behalf of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang behind closed doors — in January, the Kazakh foreign ministry announced that China would allow 2,000 ethnic Kazakhs to give up their citizenship and cross the border into Kazakhstan — the government is not letting the presence of a prison state across the border interfere with its collaboration with China.新疆的人权危机也对中国在哈萨克斯坦的名声没有多大帮助，尽管哈萨克斯坦政府一直小心翼翼，避免作出任何可能会疏远一个重要经济伙伴的公开声明。就在外交官们可能正在秘密地为新疆的哈萨克族人进行谈判时——今年1月，哈萨克斯坦外交部宣布，中国将允许2000名哈萨克族人放弃国籍，越过边境进入哈萨克斯坦——政府并没有让边境对面存在的警察国家干扰该国与中国的合作。That may be largely thanks to the immediate economic concerns of both states, not to mention a shared penchant for autocracy, but it may also owe something to the unprecedented nature of the B.R.I. In many participating countries, the project’s very novelty seems to lend itself to gauzy optimism. In September, the Chinese state-run media group People’s Daily commemorated the fifth anniversary of the B.R.I. with a music video modeled after Coca-Cola’s famous 1971 “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” TV spot. The new video featured altered lyrics like “I’d like to build the world a road/And furnish it with love,” sung by smiling representatives of dozens of participant nations, decked out in ruquns,hijabs and dashikis. Rather than defining the initiative in any concrete way, the video slyly co-opts Coke’s ability to serve as empty cipher, meaning anything to anyone. Whatever it is, the B.R.I. is “what the world needs today/It’s the real thing.”这可能在很大程度上由于两国经济的当务之急，更不用提双方对独裁政体的共同爱好，但这也许也在某种程度上因为“一带一路”倡议史无前例的特点。在许多参与“一带一路”倡议的国家，这个项目的新奇本身似乎给它带上了一层乐观主义的薄纱。去年9月，中国官方媒体《人民日报》用一段音乐视频庆祝了“一带一路”倡议提出五周年，视频模仿了可口可乐1971年做的“我想给这世界买瓶可乐”(I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke)的著名电视广告。这段新音乐视频用的英文歌词有所改动，比如“我想给世界修一条路/用爱铺满它”，演唱者是来自几十个参与国满带笑容的代表，他们用襦裙、盖头和达西基（西非男子穿的花哨而宽松的套衫——译注）等民族服饰盛装打扮。音乐视频没有解释该倡议是什么，而是狡猾地把可口可乐满足需求的能力作为空暗号，让每个人去填自己的意思。不管它是什么东西，“世界需要‘一带一路’／因为它实实在在。”Khorgos Gateway rises out of the flat desert basin, a pale yellow moon base of cranes and storage silos into which, every so often, a freight train slowly rolls. A trio of rail-mounted gantry cranes loomed 50 feet overhead as I arrived on a damp, overcast morning. Khorgos Gateway may be the most advanced port in Central Asia, but it retains some of eastern Kazakhstan’s rustic atmosphere. When I walked into the lobby of the dry port’s main offices, a security guard was handing out apples he had picked in his garden.“霍尔果斯东门”(Khorgos Gateway)从平坦的沙漠盆地里拔地而起，像是个配有起重机和储存筒仓的暗黄色的月球基地，一辆货运列车会时不时地慢慢驶入。我在一个潮湿、阴沉的早晨来到这里时，三个安装在铁轨上的龙门吊车架赫然耸立在头顶上方15米处。虽然霍尔果斯东门无水港也许是中亚最先进的港口，但它仍保留着哈萨克斯坦东部的乡村气氛。当我走入无水港的主要办公楼时，一名保安员正在给来人分发他从自家园子里摘来的苹果。The chief executive of Khorgos Gateway, Zhaslan Khamzin, welcomed me into a tidy office overlooking the freight yard. “The future lies here,” he said proudly. Khorgos was blessed by its position in the middle of Eurasia. “Look at a map, and you’ll see China on one side, Europe on the other, Russia to the north and the Caucasus and Iran to the east. Why am I pointing this out? Precisely because 90 percent of cargo traffic to these countries is currently made by sea.”霍尔果斯东门无水港的首席执行官查士兰·哈姆津(Zhaslan Khamzin)将我迎入一个井然有序的办公室，办公室窗外就是货运场。“未来就在这里，”他自豪地说。霍尔果斯拥有位于欧亚大陆之间的得天独厚的位置。“看看地图，你会看到这里的一边是中国，另一边是欧洲，俄罗斯在北面，高加索和伊朗在东面。我为什么要指出这些？正是因为运往这些国家的90%货物目前走的是海路。”Since the dry port’s inaugural train passed through in 2015, Khamzin said, companies who manufacture goods in China have begun to recognize the advantages of a modernized overland trade route across Asia. The dry port has transferred John Deere combines to Azerbaijan, he claimed, and Hewlett-Packard parts to Western Europe. He added that it may be much cheaper to ship containers by sea, but it can take more than three times as long, and air transit is the most expensive by far. By contrast, a container passing through Khorgos can travel from a Chinese point of origin to Europe in about 14 days, faster than the sea and cheaper than the air. “We’re going to be a central distribution point,” he concluded. If all goes well, according to company forecasts, in a few years Khorgos Gateway will be the largest dry port in the world.自从这个无水港的首趟列车2015年通行以来，哈姆津说，在中国生产商品的各个公司开始认识到一条穿越亚洲的陆上贸易路线的优势。他声称，无水港已把约翰·迪尔(John Deere)公司的联合收割机运到了阿塞拜疆，还把惠普的零部件运到了西欧。他补充说，虽然海运集装箱也许费用低得多，但花费的时间能是陆运的三倍，而空运的费用则远远高于海运和陆运。作为比较，经过霍尔果斯的集装箱可以在14天内从中国的起始点到达欧洲，比海运快，比空运费用低。“我们将成为一个中央分发点，”他总结道。根据霍尔果斯东门无水港公司的预测，如果一切顺利的话，这里将在几年内将成为全世界最大的无水港。
国际边境合作中心的旅游景点。这里是中国和哈萨克边境的一个自由贸易区。
Out in the shipping yard,  Earnings-price ratio dogs sniffed at stacked containers. It started to rain. A train had just pulled into port, and workers in yellow slickers were jogging out to meet it. Friendship between nations notwithstanding, Chinese border authorities are tight-lipped about freight schedules. The port sometimes learns about an impending arrival only an hour before it appears on the horizon, whereupon a swift ballet of machine and human movement begins. A siren blared as a gantry crane began to creep toward me through the mist. The three 41-ton cranes straddled six rail lines — three are the wide-gauge rails that stretch across the post-Soviet world from Helsinki to Ulaanbaatar; three are the standard gauge used in both China and Europe — and from my perspective they appeared to tower impossibly over the mountains around us. From a dangling control booth, a crane operator lowered containers onto their beds with dull-eyed expertise.在外面的货运场上，野狗对排放整齐的集装箱嗅来嗅去。外面开始下雨。一列火车刚刚驶入港口，身穿黄色防雨衣的工人们跑着出来迎接它。虽然两国交情不错，但中国的边境当局对货运时间表守口如瓶。港口有时候只是在一个即将到来的货运列车在视野中出现的一小时前才知道有车要来，随后，一场机器和人员行动的快速芭蕾便开始了。随着一个龙门吊车穿过薄雾向我所在的方向慢慢移动，汽笛鸣响起来。这三个40公吨重的吊车横跨在六条铁道之上——其中三条是从赫尔辛基延伸至乌兰巴托的跨越后苏联世界的宽轨铁道；还有三条是中国和欧洲都使用的标准轨距铁道——从我的视角，它们看上去不可思议地比我们周围的大山还高。从一个悬在空中的控制室里，一名吊车操作员用令人麻木的熟练度把集装箱吊起，然后慢慢放到列车平板上。[What the world’s emptiest international airport says about China.][从市界上最空旷的国际机场看中国的影响。]The national railway company of Kazakhstan owns 51 percent of Khorgos Gateway. The remaining 49 percent is split between two Chinese state-owned companies. Khamzin viewed China’s participation not as economic imperialism but as proof of the port’s likelihood of success. The Chinese, he explained, “are the kind of people that if they saw no commercial opportunity, they wouldn’t invest here.”哈萨克斯坦的国有铁路公司拥有霍尔果斯无水港51%的股份。其余49%的股份由两家中国国企分别持有。哈姆津不把中国的参与看作是经济帝国主义，而是港口成功可能性的证明。他解释说，中国人“是不看到商业机遇，就不会在这里投资的那种人”。Such arrangements are less one-sided in Kazakhstan than in some of the more debt-strapped B.R.I. countries, so it’s very unlikely that what happened in Sri Lanka will happen here. But Chinese investments have in all likelihood muffled Kazakhstan’s response to the crackdown in Xinjiang.这种安排在哈萨克斯坦不那么一边倒，不像在陷入“一带一路”债务更深的国家那样，所以斯里兰卡的情况不太可能会在这里发生。但中国的投资已经十有八九降低了哈萨克斯坦对新疆发生的镇压的回应。Each train that arrives at Khorgos has to pass through the Chinese region, which is home to 24 million people, including more than 12 million Uighurs and about 1.5 million Kazakhs. Although political unrest has troubled the region for decades, including, in recent years, a spate of knife attacks and bombings by Uighur separatists, authorities in Xinjiang have responded with brutal asymmetry, rounding up hundreds of thousands of Uighurs alongside thousands of ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz residents in a sweeping internment drive the scope of which rivals Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Their “offenses” range from open displays of religious belief — wearing a beard, praying in public, owning a Quran or refusing to smoke or eat pork — to simply traveling with or even speaking to relatives abroad. For those not yet detained, Xinjiang has become a dystopian zone of extralegal checkpoints, patrols, GPS tracking and random home inspections.每列抵达霍尔果斯的火车都需要经过中国的这个自治区，有2400万人居住在那里，其中包括超过1200万维吾尔族人及约150万哈萨克族人。尽管政治动荡困扰这个地区已经几十年了，包括近年来发生的一系列维吾尔分裂分子制造的持刀伤人和炸弹袭击事件，但新疆当局所做的回应的残忍程度极不对等，当局将以数十万计的维吾尔族人、还有数千名哈萨克族人和柯尔克孜族居民抓了起来，这项行动把这么多的人关进了集中营，其范围之广堪比毛泽东的文化大革命。这些人的“罪行”无所不包，从公开展示宗教信仰——蓄胡、在公众场合祈祷、拥有《古兰经》或拒绝吸烟或吃猪肉——到仅仅是与居住在国外的亲人一起旅行，就连跟国外亲人通话也是罪行。对那些尚未遭到拘留的人来说，新疆已成为一个到处都是法外检查站、巡逻人员、GPS追踪，以及随意入室检查的反乌托邦地带。Some experts say the camps and other security measures are partly in reaction to the increased freight traffic across Xinjiang, much of which now comes through Khorgos Gateway. “The role of Xinjiang has changed greatly with the B.R.I.,” Adrian Zenz, an academic expert on China’s minority policy, told me. China’s B.R.I. ambitions have transformed Xinjiang from a fringe territory into what party leaders call a “core region” of development. That’s why awareness of the camps among people in places like Kazakhstan was such an issue, Zenz said. “It has significant potential to cast a very negative light on the Belt and Road.”一些专家说，这些拘押营及其他安全措施，部分是针对穿越新疆的货运量越来越多作出的反应，这些货运量中的很大部分都经过霍尔果斯无水港。“新疆所起的作用随着‘一带一路’倡议发生了巨大变化，”研究中国少数民族政策的学者郑国恩(Adrian Zenz)对我说。中国“一带一路”倡议的雄心已经把新疆从一个边缘地区转化成了中共领导人口中的发展“核心区”。这就是为什么在哈萨克斯坦这样的地方，人们知道那些拘留营的存在很重要，郑国恩说。“这种意识有相当大的可能会给‘一带一路’倡议蒙上极为负面的色彩。”
一名哈萨克男子将货物运出ICBC。当地的“运送者”定期帮助购物者规避海关对购买的限制。
After my tour of the dry port, I headed a mile down the road to Nurkent, a newly built town of low bungalows and apartment blocks. For all its symbolic importance, Khorgos Gateway is still a modest operation; if it were a United States seaport, its 2018 throughput would place it somewhere around the 26th-largest in the country, beneath the ports of Mobile, Ala.; Boston; and Gulfport, Miss. There are just 190 employees, which Khamzin said was close to capacity, and most of them live in Nurkent, alongside railroad workers, police officers, border guards, customs officials and other agents of the new frontier. Except for the cawing of crows nesting within an apartment building’s crumbling gables, the town was silent. During a visit to the region in 2016, Nazarbayev predicted the population would grow and merge with Zharkent to form a large city, but this was hard to visualize. The site of a planned expansion was marked by a roundabout with a tiered silver gateway — the “2001” obelisk as imagined by Frank Gehry — through whose arch I could see only an untended field of scrubland.在无水港转了一圈后，我沿路向一英里外的努尔肯特前行，这是一座新建的小城，城里有低矮的平房和公寓楼。尽管霍尔果斯无水港有着重大的象征意义，但其运作规模仍然不大；如果它是一个美国海港的话，其2018年的吞吐量会让它在美国港口排名上名列第26左右，位于阿拉巴马州的莫比尔港、波士顿港和密西西比州格尔夫波特港之后。霍尔果斯无水港只有190名员工，哈姆津说这个人数与港口所需的相近，这些人中大部分都住在努尔肯特，住在那里的还有铁路工人、警察、边境卫兵、海关官员，以及这条新前线上的其他从业人员。除了在一栋公寓楼人字形屋顶下用剥落的砖块筑巢的乌鸦发出的叫声外，这里一片寂静。在2016年对该地区的一次访问中，纳扎尔巴耶夫曾预言，当地人口将出现增长，并将与扎尔肯特合并，形成一座大城市，但这还很难想象。计划用于扩张的地方现在的标志是一个交通环岛，岛上有一个银色的阶梯式门——那是由弗兰克·盖里(Frank Gehry)设想出来的“2001”方尖碑——通过起拱门，我看到的只是一片无人看管的低矮灌木丛林地。As I stood looking at the archway, a car pulled up. A man in straw hat and sandals hoisted himself out of the passenger side. “I guard this place,” he said. He uncoiled a hose on the ground and began watering the grass around the gate. “This is the double door to the future of Nurkent, where the city will rise up.”就在我站在那里看拱门的时候，一辆车在我旁边停下。一名头戴草帽、脚穿凉鞋的男子从乘客那边的车门下来。“这里由我看守，”他说。他拉开盘在地上的软管，开始给环绕拱门的草坪浇水。“这是通往努尔肯特未来的双大门，城市会在那里拔地而起。”Khorgos’s other major landmark is a boomtown of open borders known as the International Center for Boundary Cooperation, or I.C.B.C., which China and Kazakhstan established in 2011 about six miles from the dry port. Here it is not only the goods that move freely back and forth but also the people. In this duty- and visa-free zone, Kazakh citizens willing to brave the hourlong wait at customs control are permitted to enter a walled section of the Chinese side of Khorgos across the border to buy cheap linens and electronics, and Chinese tourists may enter a walled leisure area inside Kazakhstan to buy souvenirs and eat Kazakh delicacies like shashlik and laghman.霍尔果斯另一个重要地标是一座因开放边境而出现的、名为国际边境合作中心(International Center for Boundary Cooperation，简称ICBC)的新城。中国和哈萨克斯坦于2011年在距离无水港约10公里处设立了这个中心。在这里，来去自由的不只有货物，还有人。在这个免税、免签证的区域，愿意在海关排队等待一小时的哈萨克公民可获准进入边境那边中国的霍尔果斯的一个用高墙围起来的区域，他们可以在那里购买便宜的针织品和电器，而中国游客则可以进入哈萨克斯坦这边的一片用高墙围起来的悠闲娱乐区，购买纪念品，享用烤羊肉串和胡萝卜面等哈萨克佳肴。A United Nations human rights panel describes the entirety of Xinjiang as a “massive internment camp,” but that didn’t stop workers I met at the dry port from suggesting I cross into China by way of the I.C.B.C. Khorgos Gateway and the I.C.B.C. are the products of special economic development zones set up in coordination with China: industrial and commercial arenas designed to foster jobs and investments. There are dozens of such zones within China — the first, Shenzhen, is now a megacity of more than 12 million people — but Khorgos is the first to exist partly outside China’s own borders. That will soon change. Chinese officials have announced plans to build 50 more international zones in countries from Algeria to Vietnam.一个联合国人权小组将整个新疆描述为一个“大规模拘留营”，但这并没有阻止我在这里遇到的工人建议我通过霍尔果斯无水港ICBC进入中国。这个ICBC是与中国一起设立的特别经济发展区的产物，也就是为促进就业和投资而设立的工业和商业区。中国国内有几十个这种经济特区——第一个特区深圳如今已是拥有超过1200万人口的大城市——但霍尔果斯是第一个部分存在于中国边境之外的经济特区。中国官员已经宣布了要在从阿尔及利亚到越南等国家设立50多个国际经济特区的计划。At Khorgos, the I.C.B.C. seems intended to complement the dry port’s vision of frictionless trade with an equivalent vision of borderless commerce, even if most Kazakhs understand the project as a wholesale depot for cheaply made Chinese goods. A popular hustle among shopkeepers from Almaty is to hire one of the locals who wait outside the I.C.B.C., and who are euphemistically called “carriers,” to help circumvent the weight limits on imports. By all accounts, customs officials tend to look the other way.在霍尔果斯，ICBC的目的似乎是让无水港畅通无阻的贸易愿景、以及一个相同的无边界商贸愿景变得更完美，即使大多数哈萨克人对这个项目的理解是，它是造价便宜的中国商品批发仓。阿拉木图商店店主中流行的一种做法是，雇一名当地人等在ICBC外边，帮忙规避针对进口商品的重量限制，这些人被委婉地称作“运送者”。据说，海关官员对这种情况会睁一眼闭一眼。
在哈萨克斯坦阿拉木图和东边的终点站阿腾科里站之间行驶的列车。
My state-assigned guide picked me up at my hotel in Zharkent in a sleek Mercedes sedan that he drove as if we had just robbed a bank. “Are you nervous?” he asked, laughing, as we careered around a watermelon truck. His name was Marat Abaiuly. If the I.C.B.C. was the most important of China’s outposts in Kazakhstan, Abaiuly was its ambassador, the handsome liaison to opinion makers and potential investors. He made his power known by blowing through checkpoints with a friendly honk or, if necessary, by leaping out of the car to grip the soldier on duty by the forearm.我那个由国家指派的导游到我住的扎尔肯特酒店来接我，他开着一辆时髦的梅萨德斯轿车，开车的方式就好像我们刚抢了一家银行似的。就在我们猛地绕开一辆运送西瓜的卡车时，他大笑着问我，“你紧张吗？”他叫马拉特·阿拜尤里(Marat Abaiuly)。如果说ICBC是中国在哈萨克斯坦最重要的贸易前哨，阿拜尤里就是驻这里的大使，是舆论制造者和潜在投资者的英俊联络人。他用在一路上通过检查站时友善地按喇叭，或者如果有必要的话，跳出车门抓住当值士兵的前臂，来让人知道他所拥有的这种权力。It was 10 in the morning, and a line of wholesalers and hopeful carriers had formed beyond a fence topped with concertina wire. Bus drivers reclined inside their open cargo holds, chain-smoking and preparing to nap through the day. Inside the customs-control building, a construction worker was destroying the tile floor with a jackhammer. Improvised lines formed around the rubble.当时是上午10点，批发商和满怀希望的运送者们在上边带有铁丝网的栅栏外排起了长队。大巴司机们躺在他们敞开着的货舱里面，不停地抽烟，为打盹度过这一天做准备。在海关大楼内，一个建筑工人正在用手提钻捣毁地瓷砖。破碎瓷砖的周围有临时画出的线。China is said to be spending billions of dollars building up its side of Khorgos. By contrast, Kazakhstan’s share of the I.C.B.C. is mostly a dream of the future. Projects like a constellation of luxury hotels, a sports complex and a Disneyland-style theme park called Happy Land Khorgos have languished for lack of funding. Fields of rubble and stalled construction projects are scattered among the few small retail buildings and the yurt-shaped gift shops that are the Kazakh side’s most distinctive feature.中国据说正在投资数十亿美元把自己这边的霍尔果斯建设起来。相比之下，哈萨克斯坦这边的ICBC大部分还只是未来的一个梦想。一批奢华酒店、综合体育场，以及一个名为“霍尔果斯快乐天地”(Happy Land Khorgos)的迪士尼式主题公园等项目，由于资金不足处于停工状态。散布在为数不多的小型零售大楼之间的是成片的瓦砾和停工的在建项目，再就是是哈萨克斯坦这边最有特色的东西，外形向蒙古包帐篷的礼品店了。In recent years, the name Khorgos has instead become synonymous among Kazakhs with smuggling rings and high-profile corruption cases. In 2011, authorities arrested the head of customs at Khorgos as part of a larger takedown of a $130 billion smuggling ring. In 2016, the former head of the I.C.B.C. was caught on tape accepting a $1 million bribe for a construction bid. Locals do not tend to figure in these public scandals, but based on the crowds I saw in front of the border checkpoint, informal gray-market carrying at Khorgos seems to have replaced animal husbandry as the region’s main line of work. “Most locals work at the I.C.B.C. carrying cargo,” the chief executive of an Almaty-based truck transport company later told me, describing the work as a kind of pseudolegal smuggling. “That’s how they make money.”近年来，霍尔果斯这个名字已经在哈萨克人那里成为了走私团伙和广受关注的腐败案的代名词。2011年，当局逮捕了霍尔果斯海关负责人，那是抓获一个更大、涉及1300亿美元的走私集团行动的一部分。2016年，ICBC前负责人因一个建筑投标受贿100万美元的过程被人录了音。这些公众丑闻中的主角一般不是当地人，但从我在边境检查站前看到的那群人来看，在霍尔果斯从事非正式的灰色运送工作，似乎已经取代了畜牧，成为当地的主要工种。“大多数当地人都在ICBC干运送的活儿，”一名总部位于阿拉木图的卡车运输公司首席执行官后来告诉我，他把这种工作描述为某种伪合法的走私。“那是他们赚钱的方式。”Abaiuly arranged for an I.C.B.C. van to drive us across the open border into China, where the main attractions for visiting Kazakhs are four large, windowless malls. The malls are honeycombed with shops where women of all ages and a few older men sell underwear, electronics and an array of other inexpensive products under fluorescent lights. One mall was dedicated entirely to fur coats, a gift of ritual significance in Kazakhstan, particularly between in-laws at weddings. It was early, and there were no customers anywhere. Floor after floor of identical shops stood empty, their racks of odorless pelts doubled and tripled by wall-length mirrors.阿拜尤里安排了一辆ICBC厢式货车把我们送过与中国接壤的开放边境，那里对来访的哈萨克斯坦人有主要吸引力的是四个没有窗户的大型购物中心。这些购物中心里满是店铺，各个年龄段的女性和少数上了年纪的男性在日光灯下售卖内衣、电器和一系列其他平价商品。一个购物中心只卖皮毛大衣，这是在哈萨克斯坦具有礼节性意义的东西，尤其是在婚礼上的姻亲之间。当时天色还早，却已经看不到顾客了。各层楼上一模一样的店铺空无一人，货架上摆着没有气味的动物皮，和墙一样高的镜子让货物看起来比实际的多两到三倍。
霍尔果斯山上的哈萨克斯坦人准备打中亚叼羊。这是他们的国家运动，运动员们骑在马上，对一头无头羊尸争夺不休。
Some workers I met were Chinese citizens from Xinjiang. I had heard that, in some towns, even talking to a journalist is considered grounds for detention, so I didn’t say much, and I was relieved to come across an outspoken furrier from Kazakhstan, Zhannur Erkenkyzy, who had worked at the border for six months. She got the job because she could speak Chinese, Russian, Uighur and Kazakh. She was also the store’s model, she said, and she showed me her Instagram page, on which she appeared nestled inside the furs of minks, foxes and beavers, although at the moment she was wearing no fur at all, just a black Keynesian economics and Techincal Analyzertail dress that reflected no light.我在那里遇到的一些员工是来自新疆的中国公民。我听说过，在一些城镇，仅仅是和记者讲话都会被作为拘留的理由，所以我没怎么说话，当我遇到一名坦率的哈萨克斯坦毛皮商占木尔·埃尔肯兹(Zhannur Erkenkyzy)时，我感到如释重负。她已经在边境工作了六个月。她之所以能获得了这份工作，是因为会说汉语、俄罗斯语、维吾尔语和哈萨克语。她也是这家店的模特，她说，还给我看了她的Instagram页面，上面有她依偎着貂皮、狐狸皮和海狸皮的照片，不过，此时此刻她一点也没穿皮毛制品，只穿着一件黑色的鸡尾酒礼服套裙，一点光都不反。Erkenkyzy said she worked seven days a week unless she happened to ask for a day off. The time involved in crossing the unpredictable border meant that the job occupied most of her waking life, of which one highlight was catching thieves. “When we see a shoplifter, we put on red armbands and beat them with sticks,” she said excitedly. Abaiuly interrupted, whispering in low, snappy Russian: “Why are you saying such nasty stuff about us to the reporter?”埃尔肯兹说她一周工作七天，除非她提出要休息一天的话。等待通过难以预测的边境要花的时间意味着，这份工作占据了她大部分醒着的时间，工作中的一个亮点是抓贼。“当我们看到店里有小偷时，会戴上红袖标，用棍子打他们，”她兴奋地说。这时，阿拜尤里插了进来，没好气地小声用俄语说，“你为什么要对记者讲关于我们的这么糟糕的事情？”Back on the Kazakh side, we wandered the yurts, which were staffed by Chinese clerks who spoke no Russian or Kazakh. Tourists were milling about inside one of them, browsing rows of instant coffee, jade eggs and taxidermic hawks and antelopes. Outside, a row of golf carts and one stretch limousine waited to take the tourists back. I watched a group of women in ankle-length skirts cross a moonscape of rocks, heading toward China and dragging wheeled luggage behind them. When I asked Abaiuly about the prevalence of the carriers, he smiled. “On that subject I cannot speak,” he said.回到哈萨克斯坦这边，我们在蒙古包外形的店里逛了逛。店里的员工都是中国人，既不会俄语，也不会哈萨克语。游客们在其中一个店里漫无目的的闲逛，浏览着成排的速溶咖啡、翡翠蛋，以及老鹰、羚羊等动物标本。店外面是一排高尔夫球车和一台加长豪华礼车，等待着将游客们送回去。我看着一群穿着及踝长裙的女子，穿过像是月球表面的石头地带，向中国方向走去，身后还拖着轮子拉杆箱。当我向阿拜尤里问起那些无处不在的运送者时，他笑了。“我对这个话题不能发言，”他说。At an outdoor restaurant, I met a shashlik cook who lived inside one of the yurts where Chinese tourists ate. He left and re-entered the I.C.B.C. once a week to stay out of legal trouble, and said it was cheaper than living anywhere else.在一个户外餐馆，我遇到了一个烤羊肉串的大师傅，他就住在中国游客用餐的一个蒙古包里面。他每周离开、再重新进入ICBC一次，以避免法律上的麻烦，他说住在这里比住在其他地方都要便宜。One way to read the history of Central Asia is as a record of interactions between the mounted nomads who were long the primary occupants of the Eurasian Steppe and the sedentary populations who lived among them. As late as the 1930s, the dominant activity on the steppe was pastoral: herding sheep, goats and other livestock. Herders roamed in large, shifting clans on either side of the Tian Shan and Altai ranges, traveling on horseback and occasionally fragmenting or forming political alliances. These nomadic hordes proved unconquerable until the late 18th century, when they began to fall to Chinese conquest and, in what is now Kazakhstan, to Russian — later Soviet — rule.对中亚历史的一种阅读，是将其视为骑马的游牧民族与在他们之中定居的人口的互动记录。长期以来，骑马的游牧民族一直是这个欧亚大草原上的主要居住者。直至1930年代，大草原上的活动仍以畜牧为主：放棉羊、山羊和其他牲畜。在天山和阿尔泰山两侧，大群的牧人骑着马四处游荡，结成不断变化的部族，有时分裂，有时形成政治联盟。事实证明，这些游牧部落坚不可摧，直到18世纪晚期，他们在那时开始被中国人征服，在如今的哈萨克斯坦，他们被俄罗斯、后来是苏联统治。
哈萨克斯坦毛皮商和模特占木尔·埃尔肯兹在中国侧的ICBC工作。
In 1929, the leaders of the Soviet Union determined that Kazakhstan’s pastoral work force would go to work on farms. This forced collectivization was framed as a civilizing mission to modernize a population whom many Russians had long viewed as primitive barbarians. Land formerly devoted to grazing was irrigated and turned over to wheat production, with the immediate result that around 90 percent of the country’s livestock died. The subsequent famine caused the deaths of one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan and anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of all ethnic Kazakhs, a human-made catastrophe that ended nomadism as it had been practiced in the region for thousands of years. Kazakhs became a minority in the nation the Soviets had founded in their name.1929年，苏联领导人作出决定，让哈萨克斯坦的畜牧业劳动力去农场工作。这种强行的集体化做法被套在了教化使命的框架之中，为的是让被许多俄国人长期视为原始野蛮的人口现代化。原来用于放牧的土地经过灌溉，改为生产小麦，这样做的直接后果是该国约90%的牲畜死掉了。随之而来的大饥荒导致哈萨克斯坦人口的四分之一、以及哈萨克族全部人口的四分之一到二分之一死亡，这个人造的灾难结束了该地区传承了数千年的游牧生活。哈萨克人成了苏联以他们的名义成立的共和国的少数民族。Nomadic pastoralism remains central to Kazakh mythology — Nazarbayev describes himself as “the son, grandson and great-grandson of herders” — but as a practice it has retreated to the periphery of the country’s economy. Most of the surviving herders in this part of Kazakhstan practice a form of seminomadism known as transhumance, alternating between winters in a low-altitude village and summers in a pasture, or zhailau, in the mountains. I wondered how those in the mountains above Khorgos were reacting to the economic foment that had emerged around their winter homes. One morning I visited a village of herders in the Zhongar Alatau, a northern stretch of the Tian Shan named for the last nomadic khanate to rule over the steppes of western China.游牧的畜牧生活在哈萨克神话中仍占有中心地位——纳扎尔巴耶夫将自己描述为“牧人的儿子、牧人的孙子，以及牧人的曾孙”，但作为一种生活方式，游牧已经退到了该国经济的边缘。在哈萨克斯坦这个地区，大多数遗留下来的牧人以一种半游牧的方式生活，所谓的“季节性迁移放牧”，他们在冬季住在低海拔的村庄里，夏季到山里的牧场去放牧。我想知道那些在俯瞰霍尔果斯的山里放牧的人们，对他们冬季家园附近出现的经济热潮有什么反应？一个早晨，我探访了中噶尔山里的一个牧人小村，这是天山向北边延伸的一段，是以最后一名统治中国西部草原的游牧可汗的名字命名的。It was Friday, and most of the men were at the village mosque. I asked the local damkeeper’s son, who said his name was Turar, to take me farther into the mountains where families graze their herds throughout the summer. I got into Turar’s old Lada four-wheel drive, and we rattled and bounced up the edge of a steep bank that commanded a wide prospect of sand dunes and crumpled foothills. Hawks gyred overhead. I thought to myself that the beauty of Kazakhstan defied description, but Turar, who had lived here all his life, managed to capture its pristine emptiness. “It’s like a screen,” he said cryptically. Then, to clarify: “Like a computer. Like the Windows screen.”那天是周五。村子里的大多数男性都去了清真寺。我让当地水坝看守者的儿子带我进到更深的山里，那里是这些家庭整个夏天放牧的地方。水坝看守者的儿子说他叫图拉尔(Turar)。我坐进了图拉尔老旧的四轮驱动拉达汽车，然后一路嘎吱作响、上下颠簸地沿着陡峭的河岸往山里开，从河岸可以看到沙丘和连绵起伏的丘陵。雄鹰在我们头顶上盘旋。我暗自想着哈萨克斯坦的美景无法用言语来形容，但在这里生活了一辈子的图拉尔却能捕捉到这里尚未开发的空无一切之感。“就像是一个屏幕，”他隐晦地说。然后，为了进一步说明：“就像是一台计算机。像Windows系统的屏幕一样。”To reach the zhailau, we left Turar’s car at the dam where his family controls the flow of snowmelt and mountain spring through a Soviet-era irrigation canal. Before long, we arrived at an emerald slope where a single yurt sat embosomed in alpine lushness. Turar said this area was called the Black Gorge.为了??