This is going to sound like an absurdly contrarian position, partly because it is, but president-for-life Nazarbayev is on to something here. Not so much in terms of the short-term financial value in rebranding his country with a new name – if he wants to better compete with Mongolia for resource development contracts, he needs to go discover some vast and untapped Kazakh coal resource, or else find a way to move his country closer to China's eastern coast. But there are compelling cases for changing the country's name.
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