Ebook The Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia
The Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR), sandwiched between the Mongolian People’s Republic and the PRC, was to be one of the worst affected areas of China during the CR. While the impact of the CR came slightly late to the area, and extended mainly over the period 1967 to 1969, it was to result in over 22,000 deaths, and 300,000 injuries, according to official statistics. Demographic studies have shown that, based on the almost zero growth rate of the population from 1965 to 1975, the real level of casualties may have reached up to 100,000 deaths. Almost every person of Mongolian ethnicity in the region was affected in some way by the events of the CR. These have a claim to being acts of genocide, and are a wound that lingers to this day. To understand these events, however, one needs to look back a little further in history, to the setting up under Soviet patronage of the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) in 1921.
The Inner Mongolian area had already been heavily populated by Han settlers since the middle Qing period, and was considered part of the territory of both Qing (1644–1911) and Republican China (1911–1949). From the 1920s until the 1940s there was, indeed, a political movement in Inner Mongolia gitating for unification with the MPR and the creation of a pan-Mongolian state. But the main political leadership in the region gave their allegiance to Mao and the Communists after securing an agreement from him that they would be able to self-determine when the war against the Japanese was finally won. This was contained most famously in a declaration Mao made in 1935 in which he stated that “only by fighting with us can the Inner Mongolian nation preserve the glory of the epoch of Genghis Khan, avoid the extinction of their nation, embark on the path of national revival and obtain independence and freedom like that enjoyed by the nations of Turkey, Poland, the Ukraine and the Caucasus.” This statement was to be removed from Mao’s works after 1949, a sign of its evident sensitivity.
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