Protests in Kazakhstan are rare so when a video of people burning a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping in Almaty went viral on the internet, it signalled public disaffection with the country’s giant eastern neighbour.

The trigger for the protests was reportedly the arrest in July, of Kazakh citizen Alimnur Turganbay by Chinese border guards in Xinjiang. He’s not been seen since and the concern is he may have ended up in one of the many detention centres for Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Kazakh authorities promptly detained the flag burners and reports said some had been fined while the others had been given short jail terms of about two weeks. They were charged with committing “unlawful acts”, a phrase often used to silence even mild criticism of China. But public anger is rising and it

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