Chris Devonshire-ellis' Tale Of Two Mongolias

Recent reports in the press over ethnic tensions in Mongolia demonstrate there is still much to be understood about the region. Apparently, an ethnic Mongolian herder was killed by a Han Chinese lorry driver in an accident that has sparked unrest in the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. Meanwhile, Mongolia itself remains an independent country and is utterly unaffected by the incident in China. Such reports however, tend to demonstrate poor standards of journalism, a lack of appreciation of the dynamics between the two areas, and a disregard for historical fact. That the incident was widely reported in headlines as having taken place in Mongolia blurs distinctions and is indicative of lazy journalism. In this article I aim to describe the differences between the two as well as shed some light on the background to the incident in question.

Many Chinese nationals still in fact regard all of Mongolia including the sovereign nation to the north of Beijing as being historically Chinese. Yet the reverse is true. While Mongolia was subsumed by the Han, it was the Mongols who were long the masters of the Steppes, creating under successive Khans an empire that stretched across Eastern Europe, Russia, most of Central Asia, China, Tibet and parts of India. Indeed, the very Dalai Lama himself is a symbol of Mongolian supremacy the title was created by Altai Khan and bestowed upon the dominant Tibetan King of the day. The name itself is Mongolian, meaning Ocean of Wisdom, and is not Chinese. As Tibet sold religious favors to the Mongolians to legitimize the latters command of the region, so Tibet fostered a type of trade in religious blessings in return for military protection. This system would later be inherited by the Chinese dynasties as the Mongolian empire eventually crumbled, leaving Tibet to bestow favors upon the new regional power. This only came to a halt when Chairman Mao decided he had no need for religion and derided it as poison. Those acts of suzerainty so often quoted by the Chinese as meaning sovereignty, were in fact introduced by the Mongols, not the Chinese. A case for Tibet being part of Mongolia is arguably stronger than the case for the Chinese settlement of the land, military force and might not withstanding.

Indeed, the Chinese shame of having been invaded by the Mongols is such that history itself becomes warped schoolchildren are taught that Genghis Khan was a Chinese Emperor. He wasnt, he was a barbarian invader who conquered all. Beijing is still modeled in terms of the siting of the main Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the main avenues on the ancient Mongolian city plans. No wonder the Chinese have such a strange attitude towards their neighbor, with distinctions between the sovereign state and the Chinese autonomous region still being blurred today.

With the demise of the Genghis Khan-led Mongolian Empire, which effectively lasted for about 400 years under different Khans, China eventually gained the upper hand and subsumed Mongolia towards the end of the 17th Century under the Qing Dynasty. It was the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 that gave the Mongolians the contemporary initiative to declare independence, but this came just as the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution was occurring in Russia. Faced with a choice between going cap in hand back to the Chinese or sticking with the Russians, the Mongolians became under strong Soviet influence until their withdrawal in 1991. Democratic elections were almost immediately held.

Inner Mongolia as a region has historically been the subject of various kingdoms over the centuries before becoming part of the Mongolian Empire under Genghis Khan. However, like Mongolia, it also fell to the Qing Dynasty in the late 1600s, however each various region of Mongolia was subjected to different rules. Inner Mongolians, unlike those elsewhere, were forbidden to travel to other parts of what had been the Mongolian Empire and a gradual assimilation by the Han Chinese began in a manner that did not occur elsewhere. Mass emigration of Han Chinese began in the late Qing period with the balance of ethnicity shifting to Han dominance, a position that remains today. With that has come settlement and the gradual destruction of the nomadic lifestyle.