Mongolia

A Political History of the Land and its People

Michael Dillon

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788316965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Asia

Mongolia remains a beautiful barren land of spectacularly clothed horse-riders, nomadic romance and windswept landscape. But modern Mongolia is now caught between two giants: China and Russia; and known to be home to enormous mineral resources they are keen to exploit. China is expanding economically into the region, buying up mining interests and strengthening its control over Inner Mongolia. Michael Dillon, one of the foremost experts on the region, seeks to tell the modern history of this fascinating country. He investigates its history of repression, the slaughter of the country's Buddhists, its painful experiences under Soviet rule and dictatorship, and its history of corruption. But there is hope for its future, and it now has a functioning parliamentary democracy which is broadly representative of Mongolia's ethnic mix. How long that can last is another question. Short, sharp and authoritative, Mongolia will become the standard text on the region as it becomes begins to shape world affairs.

1

Mongolia and the Mongols: Land, people and traditions

Mongolia and the Mongolian people

What is Mongolia and who are the Mongols? The answers to these questions are not as simple or as obvious as it might seem. Many different communities identify themselves as Mongol; most are in or close to present-day Mongolia, but some are long settled in lands far beyond the present-day borders of Mongolia, primarily in Russia and China.

Mongolia today (Mongol Uls in modern Mongolian) is the successor to the former Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR, Bügd Nairamdag Mongol Ard Uls), which lasted from 1924 to 1992. Before the revolution of 1921 it was a semi-autonomous region of China, known as Outer Mongolia on account of its great distance from Beijing. Most of the remaining Mongol territories are in Inner Mongolia, which is much closer to Beijing and is today part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC); the greater part of traditional Inner Mongolia is officially known as the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, other parts having been hived off into neighbouring provinces. This region is home to a considerable population of Mongols, 4.2 million at the time of the Chinese 2010 census. This is greater than the population of independent Mongolia, which did not reach the figure of 3 million until 2015. Although Inner Mongolia is therefore home to far more Mongolians than Mongolia, they are in a minority as they constitute less than 20 per cent of the total population which is dominated by 20 million Han Chinese. By contrast the 3 million inhabitants of Mongolia consider themselves to be overwhelmingly Mongolian, although many families are the result of mixed marriages with Buryat Mongols, Russians or Chinese.

There are also substantial communities of ethnic Mongols living in other parts of China, in the north of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the province of Qinghai, and there is a smaller population in Gansu and in north-eastern China, the region formerly known as Manchuria.

Buryatia is a republic within the Russian Federation and lies to the north of Mongolia. Although the great majority of the population of that republic is Russian, Buryat Mongols constitute about 30 per cent and both the present-day Russian Federation and its predecessor in the USSR, the Buryat Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, were named after them. Although the language of the Buryats belongs to the Mongolian language family, and some of its dialects are close to the Khalkh Mongol of Mongolia, they are often treated as a distinct group and not always accepted as ‘pure’ Mongol.¹ These distinctions are significant as Buryats played a crucial and controversial role in links with Russia during the Mongolian revolution in the 1920s and in the development of the MPR.

In the 1960s Owen Lattimore commented on the strained relations between Buryat Mongols and the Mongols of Mongolia who mainly belong to the Khalkh sub-group. He concluded that the migration of Buryats into Siberia and their closer relations with Russians had made them, as far as the Mongols of Mongolia were concerned, ‘less Mongol’. The original name Buryat Mongol Republic was replaced by Buryat Republic for this reason:

When Buryats use the term ‘Mongol’, it means for them ‘the larger family of which we are an offshoot’; but the Mongols of Mongolia, if they grant the name ‘Mongol’ to the Buryats at all, do so a little doubtfully, and this has been true for some centuries. For them the name ‘Buryat’ means very definitely ‘people who are different from us Mongols’.²

Mongolians, Mongols and Mongolia

Even the names ‘Mongolian’ and ‘Mongol’ are problematic. Mongolians refer to themselves as Mongol and their language as Mongol xel in the standard Khalkh Mongolian of Mongolia, but that term is complicated by the fact that in the West, for at least a century, ‘Mongol’ and ‘Mongolism’ were used as descriptions of the genetic anomaly that is now almost universally known as Down’s or Down syndrome. That usage originated in the middle of the nineteenth century and reflected not only an insensitive approach to those people with the syndrome, but also the crude classification of ethnic groups that was in vogue at that time. Most of the population of eastern Asia were aggregated under the undifferentiated category of ‘Mongolian’ or ‘Mongoloid’. It was thought in the West that people with Down’s syndrome had a facial resemblance to eastern Asians so the name was applied to them.

By the 1960s it had been realized that the use of these terms was offensive, both to people with Down’s syndrome and to Mongolians, who did not exhibit this syndrome and considered it to be a racial slur. The embarrassment grew with the increasing participation of Asian professionals in international organizations, and correspondents to medical journals proposed that an alternative designation be adopted. Following its admission to the United Nations on 27 October 1961, the MPR became a member of the World Health Organization (WHO): in 1965 its government wrote formally to the director-general of the WHO requesting that such an offensive term should no longer be used. The usage was eliminated from WHO documents forthwith and disappeared from professional communications during the 1970s, although it persisted in common use in the English-speaking world well into the 1980s and has not entirely disappeared in casual usage.³

‘Mongolian’ and ‘Mongol’ can be used interchangeably but it is convenient to restrict the use of ‘Mongolian’ to the citizens of the independent state of Mongolia; ‘Mongol’ can be used to describe more generally those who speak Mongolian (Mongol xel) or one of the related Mongolic languages, or identify themselves as Mongols. The Mongolian plural, Mongolchuud, ‘Mongols’, is also sometimes used in a more general sense to mean ‘the Mongols’, including all those who possess ‘Mongolness’.

Historic Mongol lands

During their long and often turbulent history, and as a consequence of their nomadic lifestyle, proficiency on horseback and their military prowess, different groups of Mongols have been able to inhabit or control various widely separated tracts of territory across the whole of Eurasia from Manchuria to the basin of the Volga River in south-western Russia. This does not mean that they controlled the entire area over which their search for pasture and power took them and indeed in pre-modern times there was really no such thing as a Mongol state. As the eminent British Mongolist, Charles Bawden, pointed out, ‘at the most generous estimate it would be anachronistic to speak of a Mongol state, in the modern sense of the word, as existing before the end of 1911.’⁴

The primary focus of this book is on the contemporary successor of that state which was created in 1911, the present-day territory of Mongolia, which is the former MPR and is often still referred to as Outer Mongolia. As the only state controlled entirely by Mongols it has a strong case to be considered as the centre of Mongolian culture, especially political culture, both historically as the home of the ancient capital Karakorum and in the present day. Mongolia is a small country with a population at the beginning of 2019 estimated to be 3,200,000: this number is growing at a rate of 1.44 per cent per annum. Almost 95 per cent of the population are ethnic Mongols, who are mostly professed Lama Buddhists in the Tibetan tradition. However, shamanism, the complex belief system of the Mongols and other north-east Asian peoples that long preceded the introduction of Buddhism, has played and continues to play a central role in Mongol culture, complementing and often influencing the variety of Tibetan Buddhism practised in Mongolia. Although the overwhelming majority of Mongols are Buddhists by tradition, if not always by practice, there is a small Muslim community in the west of Mongolia, most of whom are ethnic Kazakhs, although some identify as Mongols.

Two other Mongol regions that have also been mentioned will be covered in less detail. Four million Mongols live in neighbouring Inner Mongolia, which since 1947 has been the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of the PRC. There are, as has been noted, more Mongols in Inner Mongolia than in independent Mongolia, although in the autonomous region they only constitute about 20 per cent of a total regional population of nearly 25 million. The vast majority of the population of Inner Mongolia are Han Chinese and the minority status of Mongols in the region formally designated as their homeland has given rise to concerns that Mongol language, culture and their traditional pastoral way of life, are under threat. In Mongolia itself, where the population is almost entirely Mongolian, there is no such threat, especially since the demise of the Soviet Union which had introduced into the MPR many facets of Russian language and culture. The state that is now called simply Mongolia can legitimately present itself as a champion of modern Mongol culture. The other significant Mongol community is settled in the Republic of Buryatia, currently an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation and with its capital at Ulan Ude (Ulaan Üüde, Red Gate). This Buryat republic lies to the north of Mongolia and borders the eastern and northern shores of Lake Baikal: its population today is approximately 30 per cent Mongol and 70 per cent Russian.

Mongols and their languages

The people who live in Mongolia and the other Mongol regions and are referred to simply as Mongols or Mongolians belong in reality to a multitude of different tribal confederations: the principal ones are the Khalkh, Oirats, Buryats and Kalmyks, Barga, and the Chahar (together with other southern Mongols). The Khalkh (or Khalkha) Mongols are the majority in Mongolia and their language, Khalkh Mongolian, has been adopted as the national standard in that country. Other varieties of Mongolian are treated as dialects although some, like Buryat, Oirat and Kalmuk, claim the status of separate languages. In Inner Mongolia, which is part of China, the official standard language is known as Southern Mongolian. This is based on a group of Southern Mongolian dialects that include Chahar, Ordos, Baarin, Khorchin, Kharchin and Alasha. There is, as might be expected, a continuum of comprehensibility between these different spoken forms of Mongolian and the Inner Mongolian standard pronunciation is based on a southern dialect that, conveniently, is not too different from the speech of Ulaanbaatar.

The differences between the languages of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia are accentuated by the different scripts that are used, neither of which has any connection or any similarity to the Chinese script. The Mongols of Inner Mongolia, who live in a predominantly Chinese language environment and for practical purposes need to be bilingual, retain the traditional vertical script which dates back to the thirteenth century and slightly resembles Arabic turned through ninety degrees. This offers a clue to its distant origins in the ancient Syriac script that was used in the Middle East to write one of the Semitic languages, Aramaic. Mongolia on the other hand uses the Cyrillic alphabet that was introduced by the Russians during the country’s long association with the Soviet Union. Since 1991 there has been a formal commitment to restore the traditional script in Mongolia but, although it has been reintroduced to the school curriculum, it is rarely used other than as ornamentation.⁵

From world conquerors to marginalized nomadic tribes

All Mongols are acutely aware of, and most are proud to recognize, the continuing influence of the legacy of Chinggis Khan, the ‘world-conqueror’ who is better known in the West by the Persian or Turkish version of his name – Genghis. He began the expansion of the Mongol world in the thirteenth century, when he succeeded in unifying the disparate and warring Mongol tribes and laid the foundations for the creation of an empire that stretched westwards as far as Europe. While the brutality and slaughter that resulted from this enterprise are acknowledged in Mongolia today, there is a sense that, behind the state’s modernizing and developmental projects, it is necessary to recover at least some of the former greatness of the Chinggis Khan era.

Mongol pride in the military and diplomatic achievements of Chinggis Khan and his successors was not necessarily shared by those who were the objects of the conquering armies. The Mongol Empire was extended under his heirs, notably his successor as Great Khan, Ögödei Khan; Tolui Khan who controlled the original native territory of the Mongols; Chagatai Khan who ruled Central Asia and parts of what is now Iran and whose name lives on in the Turkic Chagatai language that was the lingua franca of the steppes until the nineteenth century; and the khans Batu and Orda whose territory brought the Mongol Empire to its furthest western extent on the frontiers of Europe. Relatively small numbers of Mongols took part in the military conquest of these regions so the victors were obliged to administer their new territories by recruiting officials from the local elites. As a result, the Mongolian language was never as important in those far-flung parts as the local languages of their subordinate administrators. Persian was the language not only of the territory that we know today as Persia or Iran but of much of Central Asia and was also used in the north of India and Afghanistan where a local version of Persian survives as Dari. It was the single most important of the written languages of the region and Persian-language sources afford invaluable insights into the rule of the Mongols; there are few comparable extant documents in the Mongolian language. As their name suggests, the Mughal emperors of the Indian subcontinent were of Mongol origin; they were the descendants of the Mongol emperor, Timur.⁶

Almost all Asia was affected to a greater or lesser degree by the Mongols. Their conquest of the continent was brutal and pitiless and the loss of life colossal. Traditional ways of life, especially those of cultured urban societies, were devastated, or in some cases eradicated. The best known example of the devastation wrought by the conquering Mongols was the sacking by the armies of Hulegu in 1258, and again by Timur in 1401, of the city of Baghdad. Being the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, it was also the symbolic...