Transforming Inner Mongolia

This groundbreaking book analyzes the dramatic impact of Han Chinese migration into Inner Mongolia during the Qing era. In the first detailed history in English, Yi Wang explores how processes of commercial expansion, land reclamation, and Catholic proselytism transformed the Mongol frontier long before it was officially colonized and incorporated into the Chinese state. Wang reconstructs the socioeconomic, cultural, and administrative history of Inner Mongolia at a time of unprecedented Chinese expansion into its peripheries and China’s integration into the global frameworks of capitalism and the nation-state. Introducing a peripheral and transregional dimension that links the local and regional processes to global ones, Wang places equal emphasis on broad macro-historical analysis and fine-grained micro-studies of particular regions and agents. She argues that border regions such as Inner Mongolia played a central role in China’s transformation from a multiethnic empire to a modern nation-state, serving as fertile ground for economic and administrative experimentation. Drawing on a wide range of Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, and European sources, Wang integrates the two major trends in current Chinese historiography—new Qing frontier history and migration history—in an important contribution to the history of Inner Asia, border studies, and migrations.

This research is based on an array of source materials in Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, and European languages, including official archives, local gazetteers, survey reports, travelogues, stele inscriptions, folk songs, and oral accounts. It attempts to recreate the socio-economic tapestry of Inner Mongolia by weaving together a multitude of actors (Han merchants and farmers, Mongol nobles and nomads, Catholic missionaries and converts, and Manchu and Han officials) who became involved in the processes of long-distance trade, land reclamation, community building, and state making. Many of these threads remain underexplored in earlier historiographies that largely focus on the Qing empire-building or relations between Manchu and Mongols, nomadic and settled. By restoring agency to this spectrum of actors, while at the same time addressing issues central to our understanding of late imperial and modern China, this study contributes to the current scholarship that studies the frontiers not only as regions in their own right, but also emphasizes their formative impact on the main course of Chinese history.

Since the Chinese Communists took control of Inner Mongolia, very little has been written about that region, the vast steppeland of northern China. This book charts the recent history of the pastoral Mongolian minority there. It examines the effects of five decades of social engineering by the Chinese state, and explores the role of economic forms, ritual, symbolism, and ideology in the transformations and continuities of life on the inner Mongolian steppe.

This is an ethnographic study of a community of Mongolian herders who have been undergoing dramatic environmental and social transformations since 1980. It provides a rare window of observation into a fascinating and important, though remote and relatively understudied, region of modern China, and documents some of the unintended harmful consequences of decollectivization and economic development. Initially, the book presents a case study of land degradation and shows how competing social and cultural forces at the local, national, and international level actively shape that process. More broadly, it focuses on local experiences of modernization and the ways that marginalized people creatively appropriate alien technologies to serve their own ethnic identity and cultural renewal. The book aims to deepen our understanding of environmental change as a social process by exploring significant tensions between such symbolic dichotomies as Chinese/Mongol, farmer/herder, private/collective, development/conservation, Western/Asian, and scientific/indigenous. It argues that the reconstruction of local landscape cannot be separated from the social context of economic insecurity and political fear, nor from the cultural context of group identity and environmental symbolism. Ideologically informed perceptions of the land prove to be highly relevant in both shaping and contesting international development agendas, national grassland policies, and the daily practices of local production. In presenting the full range of material and symbolic stakes now in play on the Chinese grasslands, the book demonstrates that human-land interactions involve social dimensions on a global scale of widely underestimated complexity. Throughout, the author draws from his extensive fieldwork to enrich his study with poignant (and sometimes humorous) anecdotes and biographical sketches.

Using Inner Mongolian cases, this book explains the attenuation of inter-ethnic solidarity in the critical period of Chinese imperial transformation (1900-1930). It engages the key issues related to imperial organization, elite politics, and ethnic relationship. The book will attract a large audience in comparative sociology, empire and ethnic studies.

This book is about Han Chinese who dared to cross over the Great Wall of China, to make a life for themselves on the northern frontier. It compares family lives, the economy, and gender relations among Chinese herders and farmers of Inner Mongolia.

My dissertation examines the emergence of three types of Mongol-Han confrontation in Inner Mongolia in the period of Chinese imperial transition (1890s-1930s). Three local exigencies, namely, private land cultivation, jurisdictional vacuum and Russian territorial expansion, which vividly embodied the general imperial crisis in the Mongolian frontier, prompted the late Qing government to readjust its frontier tactics and consequently induced restructuring of local governing relationships in three ecological zones. The multifarious Mongol-Han confrontations largely came out of these local processes of political restructuring. I use a wide range of sources, including the archives of the Department of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs, the archives of Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, the imperial officials' memorials, local gazetteers, printed legal archives, foreigners' travelogues and so on, to development my arguments. While the current sociology of empire offers many insights into the distinction between empire and nation-state, particularly by assessing the merits and demerits of the two, my study questions such a distinction. It affirms that the Mongol-Han confrontations occurred at the critical conjuncture when the Qing empire gave way to a nascent Chinese republic. Yet, the weak and inchoate Republic of China continuously relied on the remnant imperial elites to run frontier politics, and, due to its internal fragmentation, was not able to propagate any strong national ideology. Henceforth, the institutional incentives for state elites to systematically homogenize their subjects, as is frequently seen in other post-imperial states (like Turkey and Russia), are rather limited in the China case. My study therefore questions the macro institutional explanations provided by the center-periphery model to the causes and timing of minority ethnic mobilizations in empires. Moreover, because the specific exigencies that catalyzed the political reshuffling varied in these three contexts, also did the local governing relationships, the actual meanings of Mongol-Han confrontation were different in these three zones. My study thus dissolves the imagined uniformity of the Mongols, and emphasizes that not all of the Mongol-Han interactions were fraught with the longstanding antagonism derived from the "natural hostility" between nomads and sedentary people.