Somewhat over a month ago, UB Post published an article by one Siarl Ferdinand on the topic “They are not True Mongols”. Ferdinand says he has heard Mongolians claim many times that “Inner Mongolians (or Buryats, or Kalmyks, or Hazara) are not true Mongolians”, the implication being that, unlike the Khalkha Mongols, they are hybrid peoples.
Ferdinand went to look for the historical roots of this attitude. Despite the great variety of peoples that made up the Mongols under Genghis Khan, Ferdinand found that:
Interestingly, Genghis Khan or Temüjin, a wise King with a Turkic name, not only incorporated all those tribes of different backgrounds and languages to his Empire, but also gave them privileges. He created a new nation with different bloods. To him all his subjects were ‘true Mongols’.
Fast-forwarding to the early twentieth century, negotiations were held with Russia in order to create a new independent Mongolia, which would include Inner Mongolia, Urianhai, Hovd, Holonbuir, and Central Mongolia, all considered to be ‘true Mongolians’.
Ferdinand laments the change that has taken place in attitudes to Mongols outside Mongolia and ends his article rather provocatively with the following paragraph:
Tseremchimid (the Mongolian representative in negotiations with the Russians) urged the nobles and princes of Khalkha to care about the rest of the Mongols, without the artificial distinction between pure and hybrid Mongols, otherwise they should be accused of betraying national interests. The Khalkha have not cared, the Khalkha have betrayed national interests. No excuse and one solution: denying the Mongol heritage to those who are not under Ulaanbaatar.
I would, in the main, have to agree that the thrust of Ferdinand’s article is correct. Unfortunately, one does encounter an appallingly narrow perception of ‘Mongolness’ in Mongolia. I, also, heard comments that “Inner Mongolians are not Mongols” and noted an almost total lack of interest in, indeed almost a disdain for, the Mongol culture and roots of the Inner Mongolians.
Where I disagree with Ferdinand is that he has failed to look more deeply for the reasons behind the narrowness of the modern Mongolian vision. The current situation wasn’t created by Genghis Khan; it is a result of the momentous, traumatic, and destructive events of the past century. Looking back from a relatively placid present, it is easy to forget that Mongolia’s birth took place in a world of violent unrest, with internal convulsions and eventual disintegration in China, the final days of imperial Russia, various kinds of adventurer making their appearance in untamed regions like Mongolia, not to mention Japan’s disastrous entry into continental Asia.
If I may lay down my own primitive understanding, to which I welcome corrections or comments, the main drivers have been:
* The age-old clannishness of the Mongols. The people of the steppes have always been divided into clans, since the time of Genghis Khan and earlier. It often took a central figure (a chanyu, a khan) to weld them together. Antipathies among groups have always existed and it seems to be much easier to divide the Mongols than to unite them.
* Second is the process by which modern Mongolia was born. From the beginning, the Khalkha, rather than the Oirats or the Chahar or the Buryats, appear to have seen themselves as the people to lead Mongolia to independence. The Khalkha have thus for a long time seen themselves as wearing the mantle of leadership among the Mongols. This results in an attitude of superiority and exclusiveness among the Khalkhas towards the rest of the Mongols.
* Modern Mongolia grew out of a struggle to assert its independence from China. Of all the states that struggled to break away from Chinese rule at the end of the Qing dynasty, Mongolia was the only one to succeed, although it was eventually forced to give up all of Inner Mongolia. Gaining and keeping its independence was a long and arduous task. Given the tenacity of Chinese claims to ‘Southern Tibet’, the Aksai Chin, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyutai), it can be imagined with what reluctance they relinquished their claim to Mongolia under pressure from the Russians. The Chinese continued to regularly ask Russia to give Mongolia back right up till the 1950s. Mongolia is thus both a rump state, containing only a part of the original Mongolian lands, and a beleaguered state that was forced to turn to the Russians, at great cost to their own culture — the destruction of the monasteries and much of Mongolian culture, the loss of their ancient script, the demonisation of their founding father — in order to maintain their precarious independence from China.
Incidentally, the obsession of the steppe peoples with China is not new. Historically, many steppe polities in the north of China were eventually culturally and ethnically absorbed by the Chinese. Even the Manchus, who took elaborate precautions against being swallowed up by the Chinese from the very start, were acculturated relatively early. (However, contrary to Chinese claims that the Manchus were ‘assimilated’ to the Han, widespread intermarriage did not actually take place until after the end of the Qing dynasty).
* The powers that controlled and often still control the Mongols in modern times have worked hard to divide, indoctrinate, and assimilate them. The adoption of a new Cyrillic script in Mongolia cut the country off from both the Inner Mongolians (who use the old script) and the Buryats (who used a different Cyrillic spelling standard). I understand that under the Russians nationalism was officially discouraged and the Mongolians were not permitted to present Genghis Khan in anything but a negative light. I’m sure the Russians did their best to keep the Mongolians on their side of the divide during the Sino-Soviet split, although I’m not totally sure to what extent they actually massaged Mongolian sentiment.
The Chinese, on their side, worked very hard to extinguish any kind of ‘pan-Mongol’ sentiment. I am on firmer ground here as I have heard stories of ordinary Inner Mongolian citizens being arrested and grilled by Chinese police during the Cultural Revolution for unwittingly saying a passing Сайн байна уу saiŋ bain uu to members of a visiting Mongolian delegation. In another story, the Chinese authorities interpreted the north-facing orientation of the horseman on top of the old museum in Hohhot as indicating subversive thoughts of reuniting with Mongolia, and forced the statue to be changed to face south. The continued influx of Chinese into Inner Mongolia has been deliberately engineered by the Chinese government, creating a society where Chinese has become the language of public life, thus accelerating the assimilation and effacement of the original culture.
The realities of division and war meant that cosy dreams of an ethnically, if not politically united Mongolia did not find an easy soil to grow in. With the Buryats, there were always suspicions among Mongolians that they were working for the Russians (many Buryats in Mongolia apparently had Russian citizenship). Certain groups of Inner Mongolians under the puppet state of Manchukuo fought with the Japanese against the Mongolian and Russian armies at decisive battles of Khalkhyn Gol (Battle of Nomonhan) (although apparently the Inner Mongolians concerned later rose against their Japanese masters). Mongolians are much more keenly aware of the betrayals and suspicions of those treacherous times than a foreigner could ever be.
* Interactions among the Mongols were interrupted for decades due to the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s. While the people of an earlier era may have grown up with a consciousness of being part of a wider Mongol world, a whole generation of Mongolians grew up and came to take for granted life within a narrow state that had little or no interaction with the Mongols of China. The hopelessness of getting Inner Mongolia back and the increasing Sinification of Inner Mongolia appears to have led to an attitude of Өдөр унасан мах авдаггүй ödör unasaŋ makh avdaggüi ‘meat dropped during the day shouldn’t be picked up’. Hostility to the Chinese led to the exclusionary attitudes now prevalent in Mongolia.
* The narrative of ‘blood’. This is one of the most highly charged of issues. Modern Mongolians, feeling under threat from outside encroachments, appear to have adopted the concept of ‘blood’ and ‘racial purity’ as the defining characteristic of Mongolness. I have no idea where this came from. It is possibly something that was always there, although it is just as likely that it was adopted from the nationalist ideologies of the West. While it is, as Ferdinand suggests in his article, totally spurious to analyse ethnic groups in terms of ‘blood’, the laager mentality of modern Mongolia has no doubt done a lot to encourage and entrench such thinking.
* Politics. In the rough-and-tumble of Mongolian politics, it is all to easy for unscrupulous Mongolian politicians to manipulate popular sentiment by playing the now well-established China card and ‘Mongolian blood’ card. For example, an attempt was made to discredit the current president, President Elbegdorj, through accusations that he is part Chinese, and some politicians have gone to the ludicrous extreme of calling for the removal of the statue of Mongolian hero Sukhbaatar from Sukhbaatar square on the grounds that he was “Chinese”. Mongolian journalism is also a murky area. Scurrilous and uninformed articles all too often appear in newspapers whose ownership and connections are unclear.
Despite the gloomy picture, there are signs of change for the better. President Elbegdorj, is an ardent advocate of bringing Mongols together (including the re-adoption of the old script), as can be seen in his speech at the World Conference of Mongolists in 2011. Such moves by the president, and greater recent interaction between Mongolians from both sides of the Mongolian-Chinese border (perhaps less so with Buryatia), may eventually bring about a gradual change in attitudes and a closer relationship among Mongols. But exclusionary attitudes, once implanted, are difficult to uproot, and I expect that Mongolians will continue to have strongly ambivalent attitudes towards their brethren in other countries well into the future.
Post scriptum: For a detailed look at the relationship between China and Mongolia, see Morris Rossabi’s Between the Bear and the Dragon: Mongolia’s Relations with China and Russia. For a look at the way Mongolian culture became entwined with the cosmopolitan culture of Qing China, see Johan Elverskog’s Being Cosmopolitan.