At 10:10 on 25 September, Kazakhstan Today told its readers that the Kazakhstan-China investment forum opening in Almaty would end with the signing of "more than 40 commercial documents worth several billion dollars". On stage, by the same agency's count, ten agreements were signed: new plants, a wind farm, car assembly. By 18:56 the same agency had the result, 50 commercial documents for $8.2 billion.
The three figures are compatible with one another, and that is the trouble: ten on the stage, 50 in the tally, "more than 40" in the plan, and no way to tell what the 40 that never reached the stage were. Nobody lied. The morning figure was a plan, the stage figure was a ceremony and the evening figure was a tally, and each was true in its own tense.
What the three numbers share is that none of them measures anything a reader can later check. A "commercial document" can be a contract with a price, a memorandum with a hope or a letter of intent that commits its signatories to continue intending. Added up, they produce $8.2 billion, a precise number made of imprecise parts.
Berlin, four days later, ran the same film with the reels in a different order. On 28 September the Ost-Ausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft announced that the German-Kazakh business forum would see "the signing of 37 bilateral projects with a total volume of €1.8 billion". Euronews repeated the figure on the evening of 29 September, attributing it to the Ost-Ausschuss and reporting it in the future tense.
By 23:25 Astana time the Kazakh presidential press service had its result: "more than 30 commercial documents for around $2 billion". Thirty-seven is indeed more than 30, so nothing was contradicted. What happened is that a precise count of projects became a vague count of documents, and the euro became the dollar: at any exchange rate this year €1.8 billion is a little more than $2 billion, so the number in the headline grew by a change of unit, with no new signature behind it.
Projects became documents, euros became dollars, 37 became "more than 30", and the evening was declared a success, which it was.
There is a precedent. In December 2019 the same Ost-Ausschuss summed up Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's first Berlin visit as president as "around 30 contracts for new investments and cooperation".
Seven years apart, two Berlin forums, two different counters, the same round number. One begins to suspect that "around 30" is a property of the room rather than of the economy.
Munich on 30 September offered the control sample. The Kazakh-Bavarian technology forum produced a presidential formula, "produced in Kazakhstan with Bavarian technology and German quality", a list of companies in the room, Siemens, Siemens Energy, Knauf, Horsch, KUKA and Qarmet, and no count at all. Either Bavaria signs nothing or Bavaria keeps no tally, and the second reading is the more flattering one.
One begins to suspect that "around 30" is a property of the room rather than of the economy.
Two weeks earlier in Seoul the count had gone straight to the top line: "commercial agreements for around $19 billion", Tengrinews reported on 16 September, a figure larger than Almaty and Berlin combined.
Gogol knew the genre. Chichikov, in Dead Souls, travels the provinces buying serfs who exist only on paper, because the paper is what the state counts and what the bank will lend against. The dead soul is a document that has outlived its subject and acquired a value of its own.
A memorandum of understanding is a soul that has not yet been born and already has a price. The forum organiser, like Chichikov, has simply understood what the register rewards, the register being the set of numbers a forum's press release is built to produce.
The register rewards two things, and they pull in opposite directions. It rewards a large count, so the unit shrinks until a letter of intent counts as one. It rewards a large sum, so the unit swells until a "portfolio" of 329 projects worth $133 billion, Kazakhstan Today's evening figure, can sit beside an $8.2 billion signing without anyone asking which of the 329 are the 50 on the table.
Kazakhstan Today printed both numbers in the same report, which is the honest version: the reader is given the figures and left to notice that they cannot be measuring the same thing.
A reader can keep all three figures, the plan, the ceremony and the tally, and note the unit at each stage, the currency at each stage, and the verb: planned, signed, concluded, reached. Then wait a year and look at the number the German side, to its credit, keeps publishing in its own trade statistics: in 2025, by the Ost-Ausschuss's count, Germany imported €5.3 billion of goods from Kazakhstan and exported €2.7 billion to it. Those are the figures a forum is supposed to move.
Berlin's joint "portfolio" of 40 projects worth $54 billion, of which 21 are complete by Akorda's count, is the number to carry forward from this week: it is the only one that came with a completion count.
The documents will take care of themselves. They always have.