Mongolia: A Political History of the Land and its People

233 Pages·2019·2.787 MB·English

by  Michael Dillon

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Mongolia
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Mongolia

A Political History of the Land
and Its People
Michael Dillon
iv v
I.B. TAURIS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of
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First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © Michael Dillon, 2020
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v v
Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Mongolia and the Mongols: Land, people and traditions 9
2 Revolutionary Mongolia in the early twentieth century 43
3 Establishing the Mongolian People’s Republic: Sükhbaatar
and Choibalsan (1921–4) 57
4 Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party in power: The
Choibalsan years (1924–52) 73
5 Post-War Mongolia: The Tsedenbal (1952–84) and Batmönkh
(1984–90) years 103
6 Democratic Revolution: Mongolia after the collapse of Soviet
power (1991–2019) 121
7 Collapse and recovery of the Mongolian economy 139
8 Mongolia and the new East Asian order 151
9 The Mongols and China: Inner Mongolia and Ulaanbaatar’s
relations with Beijing 161
10 Looking back to the future: Mongolia’s search for identity
and the contemporary cult of Chinggis Khan 175
Notes 195
Bibliography 209
Index 215
vi v vii ii
Preface and Acknowledgements
In the course of just over a hundred years Mongolia has experienced the
revolutions of 1911 and 1921; seventy years as a dependent state of the
Soviet Union; and almost thirty years as a fully independent country.
Despite the colossal changes that have taken place domestically and in the
international context, one constant factor has been the need of its leadership
to balance geopolitical pressures that have remained fundamentally
unchanged. As far as I am aware no other book has attempted to cover this
extended period.
Mongolia’s experience is important as a case study of social and political
revolution in an underdeveloped Asian society and, moreover, a society in
which the predominant means of subsistence has been pastoral nomadism
rather than settled agriculture. It was the prototype ‘satellite’ of the infant
Soviet Union and, as a small nation sandwiched between the Russian bear
and the Chinese dragon, the history of its struggle for nationhood and
independence as it negotiated with its two powerful neighbours illustrates
many of the pressures and compromises imposed by geopolitics.
I owe my original interest in Mongolia to lectures on Chinese history
given by Owen Lattimore (1900–89) to undergraduates who followed the
course in Chinese Studies that he established at the University of Leeds in
1963. Lattimore had moved to the United Kingdom after his contract at
Johns Hopkins University was revoked as a result of the McCarthy hearings,
one of the darkest periods in modern American history. As the pre-eminent
Western Mongolist of his generation and the author of the seminal Inner
Asian Frontiers of China, he naturally developed the study of Mongolia and
the Mongol language in Leeds, and the relationship between China and
Mongolia featured prominently in his teaching on China. Owen Lattimore’s
writings on Mongolia are classic texts, combining a profound knowledge
of the country and its language and culture with sympathy for its people.
He rejected the simplistic anti-Communism of the times but maintained
a sceptical approach to the politics of Mongolia, and the Soviet Union to
which it was so closely bound. While research and greater access to Mongolia
since his death require some revision of his analysis, his approach remains of

great value.1 Another of my teachers of Chinese at Leeds was his colleague,
Urgunge Onon, a Mongol from Manchuria, who had served as bodyguard
to Prince Demchukdongrob and later became an eminent writer on Mongol
matters and a translator of the Secret History of the Mongols.
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Preface and Acknowledgements vii
As primarily a China specialist, my research interests and fieldwork have
focused on the non-Han people of northern and north-western China,
primarily the Hui Muslims of Ningxia and Gansu and the Uyghurs of
Xinjiang, but also the Mongols of Inner Mongolia.
I first visited Mongolia in October 1990, as the authority of the
Communist parties in the Soviet Union and its client states in Eastern
Europe was collapsing, and Mongolia’s drive to build a modern democracy
and a developed economy was just beginning. During that visit I was
privileged to attend the inaugural meeting of the Mongolian Association of
Sinologists and to stay in the State Guest House across the Tuul River to the
south of Ulaanbaatar. After academic exchanges and meetings with political
leaders and government officials, the conference delegates, most of them
from China, toured the grasslands. For the invitation and organization of
this visit, hospitality at the Ikh Tengger State Guest House and discussions
on relations between Mongolia and China, I am grateful to H. Ayurzana
and his colleagues in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Mongolian
Association of Sinologists. From the government, there was support from
the then First Deputy Prime Minister Ganbold who attended the conference
and Deputy Prime Minister Purevdorj. There were no other Western
participants at the conference and I was adopted as an honorary member
of the Chinese delegation. This gave me an unusual opportunity to observe
Chinese attitudes towards Mongolia and relations between Chinese and
Mongols.
My most recent visit to Mongolia in September 2016 enabled me
to familiarize myself with current developments and to collect recent
publications on the history of Mongolia. In Ulaanbaatar, I am grateful to the
staff of the Choijin Lama Museum, the Winter Palace of the Bogd Khan and
the National Museum of Mongolia for their assistance.
During the 1990s I  also carried out research among the Mongol
population in neighbouring China, both in Inner Mongolia which is home to
far more Mongols than live in Mongolia and in the Ili region of the Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region – Xinjiang has a designated Mongol prefecture,
although the proportion of ethnic Mongols has been drastically reduced by
Chinese migration. I am grateful to Ma Ping of the Ningxia Academy of Social
Sciences in Yinchuan for assistance with my research in Inner Mongolia and
for facilitating an expedition to the Alxa (Alashan) region.
I have previously written about Mongolia and its relations with China in
China: A Modern History and on the Mongols of Inner Mongolia in Religious
Minorities in China; ‘Unrest in Inner Mongolia May 2011’, a briefing paper
for the European External Action Service; and Lesser Dragons, a book on the
minorities of China.
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viii Preface and Acknowledgements
I am fortunate to have been able to draw on papers on contemporary and
historical Mongolian culture presented by Mongolian scholars at a conference
arranged by the Niedersächsiche Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
in 2015, organized by the librarian Dr Johannes Reckel, himself a considerable
scholar of matters Mongolian. I have drawn on the work of many Mongolian
Studies specialists; in addition to the books by Owen Lattimore that have
been referred to, the writings of Fujiko Isono, Tom Ewing, Charles Bawden,
Morris Rossabi and Alan Sanders have been particularly valuable.
At I.B. Tauris I am very grateful for the support and assistance of Tomasz
Hoskins and Nayiri Kendir. I have also benefited greatly from the detailed
and constructive comments of anonymous readers, whose observations and
suggestions I have incorporated where possible.
Sherwood Forest
August 2019
1 1
Introduction

Contemporary Mongolia rarely features in the Western media, or even in
the consciousness of most Westerners, although there is a persistent folk
memory in Europe of the threat posed by what are invariably referred to as
Mongol ‘hordes’ to mediaeval Christendom. The name of Chinggis Khan is
often invoked – even if normally in his Persian or Turkic guise as Genghis – as
the epitome of a violent and reactionary ruler. In many works on the history
and culture of Asia written in the last few decades, the Mongols appear as
an exotic and ancient people, with little indication that they might be in any
way connected with the population of present-day Mongolia. For example,
The Mongols, written by the classicist E. D. Phillips and a useful summary of
the period under Chinggis Khan and his successors, was published in 1969.
It was included in a series under the rubric Ancient Peoples and Places and
even the epilogue, which endeavours to bring the story up to date, does not
hint at anything beyond the fall of the Chinese Empire after the collapse of
the Qing dynasty in 1911. Even David Morgan’s otherwise excellent book,
The Mongols, published in 1986 and rightly admired for the use of Persian
chronicles, devotes only a chapter of only eight pages on ‘What Became of the

Mongols?’: only the last page and a half covers the twentieth century.1
Outside Mongolia, the authentic history of the Mongols is no more familiar
than the present-day reality, but that history, and the changing way in which it
is remembered, has had a profound effect on contemporary social, economic
and political developments in Mongolia and on the way in which Mongolia
is perceived by the outside world. J. Boldbaatar of Ulaanbaatar University has
reflected on the changes in the approach of Mongolians to their history in a
short essay for the International Institute for Asian Studies in 2015. He argues
that before 1990 Mongolian historians had been constrained by a version of
the crude Marxist periodization that was the approved academic standard in
the USSR. In recent years, after the collapse of Soviet power, they were able
to adopt a more judicious approach and began to move towards a schema
similar to that used in the West. In this newer representation, the immense
span of time from the earliest known human settlement through to the twelfth
century CE is characterized as the ancient and early mediaeval period. The
subsequent mediaeval and post-mediaeval period includes the emergence of