Christopher P. Atwood
Indiana University

As Michael Schoenhals has noted, ideological debates in the People's Republic of China often boil down to attempts to create the correct "formulation" (tifa) on a given question, a brief aphoristic statement of the Party's current wisdom on the topic.⁽¹⁾

Nationality policy is no different in its dependence on such formulations. Perhaps the most common and authoritative formulation on the nationality question found in present-day China is that "Our country is a unified, multinational country." This formulation serves as the first chapter heading for Zhang Zhiyi's 1956 work, A Discussion of the National Question in the Chinese Revolution and of Actual Nationalities Policy (Draft).⁽²⁾ With the addition of the word "socialist" to the description of China as a united, multinational country, it also appears in the preface to all the volumes in the "Fivefold Series on the Nationality Question," the standard reference source on the nationalities of China and the autonomous areas established for them.

The force of the formulation lies in its radical dissociation of the idea of nationality (minzu) from that of country (guojia). This dissociation also appears in the classic Maoist statement "Countries [guojia] want independence, nations [or nationalities, minzu] want liberation, and the people [renmin] want revolution--this has become an irresistible historical trend."⁽³⁾ Liberation, then, but not independence is the proper goal for a minority within a country, and from the 1920s on the Communist Party held forth liberation as the true aim of the Mongols and other minorities in China. To confuse the appropriate demands of one type of unit with those of another, for example by saying that countries want liberation and nationalities want independence, would appear to be the most elementary error of political thinking.

These formulations present themselves as timeless descriptions of fact in their dissociation of country and nationality. Yet they, like all such tifa, need to be understood as normative statements, rooted both in present politics and in the longer history of the defined terms. To say that China is a unified, multinational country means first that claims of secession based on nationality (minzu) are illegitimate (China is unified), and second that claims to exclusive domination over the country (guojia) and its policy by any one nationality are likewise illegitimate (China is multinational). In other words, no one nationality should arrogate to itself either the right to monopolize a territory/country of its own or the right to prescribe its own nationality features as binding on all other nationalities. Finally, acceptance of this formulation implicitly depends upon seeing a country's frontiers as given in a way that transcends historical change. If a country such as China grew, shrunk, split apart, or united in the course of its history, it would be impossible to see it as a constant entity demanding independence while containing nationalities within it.

In fact, Chinese historical experience has violated both these normative principles and the idea of a naturally given country upon which they rest. The most obvious violation lies in the independence of Mongolia.⁽⁴⁾ A large chunk of territory, inhabited by a "nationality," the Mongols, which is considered one of the major minority nationalities of China, has broken away and succeeded in establishing itself as an independent country, one recognized by China since 1946. Similarly, while correct formulation claims the Chinese state is not to be monopolized by one nationality alone, the demographic, economic, political, and cultural domination of the Han nationality in the Chinese state and its policies amounts to a virtual monopoly.

One indication of this ambiguity lies in the dual uses of the term minzu. While it often means nationality (in the sense a people who, while preserving their heritage, are not to seek for a state to express it), it can also mean a nation (a unified body of people on a particular swath of territory endowed with a single civic tradition and a right to independence). The Han and the Mongols are two of the fifty-six nationalities (minzu) of China, yet both are part of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu) which is historically destined to assert its claim to indivisible sovereignty over the territory of China. Despite the normative weight attached to the distinction, no watertight wall divides the notions of ethnicity or nationality on the one hand from that of the nation, country, and state on the other. Still, drawing such a distinction has proved to be one of the most important ways that the Chinese state allows members of minority nationalities to reconcile loyalty to their nationality as an ethnic community with loyalty to China as a state and country.

Formation of the appropriate political vocabulary and usage evidently would be a crucial precondition for such a system of nested loyalties. In order even to translate, let alone find satisfying, the statement "Our country is a unified, multinational country," a language needs to have distinct terms for nationality as an ethnic community and for a country/nation as a unitary civic community living within a particular territory. And if one wants to envision the Han as merely one of China's fifty-six nationalities without any special role, it is necessary to have clearly differing words to refer to the Han (those of Han ethnicity) versus the Chinese (those of Chinese citizenship). It is not only overtly political terms such as socialism that have to be understood in their multiplicity of contested meanings. The Chinese revolution radically reshaped and reinvented virtually all the vocabulary that came into its sphere, including seemingly unremarkable or basic words as well as newly coined political terminology. Thus Michael Schoenhals has shown how the modern Chinese binome renmin (people), one composed of two classical Chinese terms that would seem to have an obvious meaning, has acquired a very different meaning in current discourse in the People's Republic of China.⁽⁵⁾

By not putting the relevant key words in the context of historical change, current discussions of ethnicity and nationality issues in China have often assumed the transparent existence of such distinctions. In particular, the confusion of Han with Chinese (e.g., in referring to conflicts between Mongols and Chinese in Inner Mongolia) is often treated as a sort of clumsy faux pas made solely by foreigners in culpable ignorance of China's true multinational nature.⁽⁶⁾ Yet usage in China today indicates the distinction between Han (Han) and Chinese (Zhongguo) has not been not consistently applied. While the Chinese language is referred to in official or multiethnic contexts as Hanyu, it is still commonly referred to on the mainland as Zhongguohua, Zhongwen, or Huayu, all terms which carry more or less the connotation of being the language of China (the whole country). Growing concern and ties with Han Chinese outside the borders of the PRC, whether as "compatriots from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao" or as "overseas Chinese," only serves to underscore the role of Han ethnic-nationalist sentiment in the articulation of Chinese state policy. This sentiment becomes especially evident when both political leaders and popular dissidents envision these ties with Han Chinese imagery of common descent from either the dragon or the Yellow Emperor.⁽⁷⁾

In Mongolian usage as currently established in Inner Mongolia, language indeed separates the concept of nationality, meaning ethnicity (ündüsüten), from the concept of country or nation (ulus). Likewise, there is one word for the Han nationality (khitad ündüsüten) and another for China (Dumdadu ulus, middle country or realm, a calque translation of Zhongguo). It appears at present transparently meaningful to say in the Mongolian of Inner Mongolia: the Mongols (Monggol) and Han (Khitad) are two of the nationalities/ethnic groups (ündüsüten) in the country of China (Dumdadu ulus). Similarly, in Tibetan, rgya-rigs refers to the Han Chinese and their language, while the recent loan word Krung-go designates China as the country. In Uygur, the terminology for the Han and China is borrowed directly from that of the Chinese language--xänzu(chä) is the Han Chinese (language) and Junggo is China the country.

Yet the history of such terms in particular minority languages in China shows the difficulty in ascribing any self-evident validity to the distinction between ethnicity/nationality and nation/country. In the cases of Tibetan and Uygur, the terms for China as a country are borrowed directly from the Chinese language and seem to have been brought into common usage only after 1949; in Uygur, even the term for Han Chinese is an obvious recent loan word. In the case of Mongolian, where the terms are less obviously recent, a fuller examination of the background of modern terminology demonstrates the extent to which it is intimately linked to current political practice and theory.

In independent Mongolia, for example, where such nested loyalties are neither common nor encouraged, the Mongolians see no clear distinction between the Han as a nationality and China as a country.⁽⁸⁾ Khitad refers to both Mongolia's southern neighbor as a whole (China) and to the dominant ethnic group within it (the Han). Similarly, the concepts of nation and national in standard Mongolian usage are rendered by the word ündüsü(n), one which is related to ündüsüten (ethnic group/nationality) and which carries clear connotations of common (ethnic) ancestry. In other words, to be a full member of the Mongolian nation or civic community (ündüsü) it is virtually mandatory to be also a member of the Mongol nationality or ancestral group (ündüsüten). The Inner Mongolian word for nation (ulus) is there restricted to mean the state, as in, for example, "state property" (ulus-un khörönggö, from Russian gosudarstvennoe imushchestvo). The only ethnic differences officially acknowledged within the population of Mongolia are described as yasutan, a word with clearly felt sub-ethnic or "tribal" connotations. All the yasutan mentioned in official or semi-official literature, with the exception of the traditionally Muslim and Turkic-speaking Kazaks, are considered to fall within the Mongolian cultural, linguistic, religious, and historical sphere.

While in Inner Mongolia currently constructed language leads unreflectively towards conceptions of nested loyalty to both ethnic group and nation, in Mongolia proper language leads rather towards a unitary fusion of ethnicity and nationhood, moderated only by small and unideologized sub-ethnic differences.⁽⁹⁾ Clearly these semantic distinctions accord with the actual differences between the political salience of the ethnic issue in China (and especially its minority regions, such as Inner Mongolia) on the one hand and Mongolia on the other. Yet Inner Mongolia and Mongolia both were once parts of the Qing empire along with China. This fact would indicate that the accord between language and the ethnic-political situation in both Inner Mongolia and Mongolia is not something inherently obvious but rather fashioned in the course of the turbulent years since 1911.

This is indeed the case. Nineteenth-century Mongolian usage for countries, peoples, and other human communities was different from and considerably simpler than that of either present-day Mongolia or Inner Mongolia. An examination of the history of these keywords in the Qing and Republican periods illustrates how new beliefs about the proper forms of social and political organization emerged in the increasingly tumultuous encounter with Chinese ideas and how these newer beliefs then merged with and modified older ones. It also illustrates the sleight of hand by which the concept of China as a country was (partly) detached from that of the Han as a nationality and extended to those who would never before have believed it applicable to them.

Country-Consciousness in the Qing DynastyIn his Muslim Chinese, Dru Gladney has taken his cue from Clifford Geertz and put forward the notion of

country as a more simple and basic concept by which many people understand their nationality. Most people think of themselves as living in a certain locality within natural boundaries rather than as members of "nation-states," "nationalities" or other political entities. Nations rise and fall, but countries usually stay much the same, though the people in them may be under one administration or another.⁽¹⁰⁾

Recent work in the political theory of medieval Europe has underlined the degree to which medieval kingdoms were also secular communities, bound both by common participation of elites in governance and by strong sentiments of common descent and common custom. As Susan Reynolds writes, "Kingdoms were units of government which were perceived as peoples."⁽¹¹⁾ This country-consciousness appears to have been applicable to the Mongols in the Qing empire as well. Although the Mongols had been brought under the Manchu dynasty, along with the Chinese, the Tibetans, and the Muslims of Turkestan, an investigation of Mongolian historical writing of the time generally shows no breakdown of the idea of a separate "Mongolia country." The concepts of a Mongolian nationality nested within a overarching "China country" never appear. Only in eastern Inner Mongolia during the late Qing do certain types of terminology appear which would later form the building blocks of the modern Inner Mongolian nested hierarchy of nationality and country.

Inner Mongolia as a whole came under the rule of the Manchu Qing dynasty in 1636. After the fall of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), ruled by the Mongols, the ruling family, descended from Chinggis Khan, had continued to dominate the Mongolian plateau. Yet while the last of these Khaans lost his throne in 1636, the Qing emperors ruled Inner Mongolia (and subsequently Outer Mongolia or Mongolia proper) through a nobility composed mostly of Chinggis Khan's descendants. The switch of ultimate sovereignty from a Mongol Khaan to a Manchu emperor thus seems to have had little direct impact on the country-consciousness of the Mongols. Through the Qing period, the Mongols continued to see the Mongolian banners as collectively forming a single realm, one on a level with that of China, Tibet, Korea, and so forth.

In Mongolian chronicles of the seventeenth century, the world described appears divided into realms or countries (ulus), each with its own customs, languages, and traditions of rule. Neither political disunity within a realm nor a realm's incorporation into a larger empire disrupted this sense of a historically continuous domain. A vivid illustration of this country-consciousness lies in the numerical and color schemes which Mongolian historians used to order these realms in space. One common trope in these chronicles was that of the "five colors and four aliens" (tabun öngge dörben khari) which together made up the "nine great realms" (yisün yekhe ulus). These nine great countries were distributed in terms of the four cardinal directions plus the center and each identified with a particular color. Invariably at this time, the "great blue Mongol realm" (yekhe khökhe Monggol ulus) was placed in the center. To the east lay the white Solonggos and Bitüüd realms, meaning roughly Korea and Manchuria. To the south was the red Khitad and Khiliyed realms--Khitad is the name for the realm of China. To the west lay the black realms of Tibet (or Tanggud) and Tajik, while to the north lay the yellow realms of Sartuul (Sarts or Central Asian oasis dwellers) and Tokmak (a city in present-day Kyrgyzstan, but probably indicating the Turkic nomads of Central Asia as a whole).⁽¹²⁾ In their political narrative, of course, the chronicles focus on the Mongols in relation to particular realms. The 1607 biography of Altan Khaan, titled "The Sutra Entitled the Jewel Translucent" (Erdeni tunumal neretü sudur oroshiba), speaks of how Altan Khaan pacified the "great realms of Mongolia and China" (Monggol khitad khoyar yekhe ulus) and "merged the great states of China and Mongolia" (khitad monggol-un yekhe törü-yi neilüülbe).⁽¹³⁾

Each of these realms had their own defined ruling lineages, languages, traditions, and customs, about which the Mongolian chronicle writers were quite self-conscious. In describing how the Mongols conquered Tibet in 1240, Sagang Sechen wrote in 1662 how a Tibetan lama dreamed of a messenger coming from "Köten, incarnation of a Bodhisattva and Khaan of a realm/people called the Mongols [Monggol khemekhü ulus], with hats like a sitting falcon, boots like a pig's snout, houses like a wooden net, and an accent that says echigee after every three or four words."⁽¹⁴⁾ This description--which clearly notes the peculiar Mongol hats, their boots with the distinctive upturned toe, the yurts built of wooden lattice-work, and the typical sounds of Mongolian ceremonial speech as heard by foreigners--demonstrates a vivid awareness of how the Mongols appeared to others. The anonymous Altan Tobci or "Golden Chronicle" (c. 1624-34) also notes the astonishment of the Oirad Mongol ruler Esen Taishi at the way the Chinese soldiers never fled in a losing battle but always stayed at their posts even when it only meant useless sacrifice.⁽¹⁵⁾ Nowhere, however, do we see this image of the Mongol customs, language, and ancestry detached from the idea of the Mongol lands. As Gladney noted, the country is still imagined as a natural unit of geography, ethnography, and traditional governance.

In the eighteenth century greater familiarity with Chinese historical sources and their focus on the dynasty (guo) as the unit of time introduced a new element of complexity in the vocabulary of realms, states, and countries. In 1644, the Qing court sponsored the translation into both Manchu and Mongolian of extracts from the official histories of three preceding foreign dynasties, the Liao, the Jin, and the Mongol Yuan.⁽¹⁶⁾ In these translations, as in other official works, the translators established Mongolian ulus as the proper word to render Chinese guo in all its meanings, including that of "dynasty." This usage in effect expanded the previous sense of ulus, meaning a geographical domain inhabited by people of a given character, into something closer to the modern idea of the "state." By focusing on the notion of a particular swath of territory as controlled by a single state, this expansion of the term ulus opened a door for viewing such traditional realms as being part of a larger state.

In seventeenth-century works, this usage of ulus to mean dynasty had not yet penetrated into the Mongolian historiographical tradition. The usual usage was not to speak of the emperor of the Dai Ming dynasty (ulus), but the Dai Ming emperor of China country (Khitad ulus). Sagang Sechen, for example, in summarizing the history of the various dynasties of China, never uses ulus for the dynasty names, instead always referring to the Jiu khaan (Zhou emperors), the Khan khaan (the Han emperors), and the Tang khaan (the Tang emperors).⁽¹⁷⁾

By the eighteenth century, however, authors within Mongolia's "country" historiographical tradition, well outside the court tradition of Beijing, had come to adopt the use of ulus to mean state or dynasty. In "The Golden Wheel of a Thousand Spokes" (Altan khürdün minggan kheesütü), the Jarud lama Dharma Güüshi in 1739 regularly attached the term ulus to Chinese dynastic titles, thus writing Süng ulus (Song dynasty), Ming ulus (Ming dynasty), Altan ulus (Golden or Jin dynasty), Da Yuwan ulus (Great Yuan dynasty), and, most commonly, Daiching ulus (Great Qing dynasty).⁽¹⁸⁾ The source of such usage was certainly the earlier Mongol translations of Chinese histories; at one point Dharma Güüshi explicitly refers to the Dai Yuwan ulus-un bicig ("Book of the Great Yuan Dynasty") of 1644 as a source.⁽¹⁹⁾ The Baarin nobleman Rashipunsug's "Crystal Rosary of the Great Yuan Dynasty" (Dai Yuwan ulus-un bolor erike), written in 1774-75, included this usage in his very title and referred throughout to Chinese dynasties as ulus.⁽²⁰⁾

The idea of organizing China's long history into dynasties also influenced the Mongols to analyze their own history in this fashion. Thus Dharma Güüshi labelled the period from 1206 to 1368 the "Great Yuan dynasty" (Da yuwan ulus), while that from 1368 to 1636 was "the Yuan dynasty solely in the north" (umara daki gagcha yuwan ulus).⁽²¹⁾ Rashipungsug, in a more explicit confrontation with Chinese concepts of legitimacy, considered that the legitimate succession of the throne passed from the earlier Yuan to the later Yuan (1368 to 1636) and directly to the Qing dynasty, bypassing the Ming usurpers altogether. He therefore considered all the Yuan from 1206 to 1636 to be the Great Yuan and divided it into Former and Latter Yuan (Uridu Yuwan and Khoitu Yuwan).⁽²²⁾

Yet this usage of ulus as a dynasty or state did not eclipse its previous meaning as a natural geo-ethnographic unit. Both Dharma Güüshi and Rashipungsug, for example, continued to speak of China as Khitad ulus or China country, even directly in the context of China's various dynasties (also called ulus).⁽²³⁾ Nor did the use of the term ulus as dynasty for the two Yuan dynasties and the succeeding Qing dynasty which ruled Mongolia eclipse the continuing usage of ulus for Mongolia as realm persisting through all these administrative changes. Rashipunsug wrote in the present tense of the distinctive characteristics of the continuing Mongolian realm:

The people of other realms [ulus] make a living exerting themselves in manual labor such as farming, handicrafts, commerce, and so on. The people of our Mongolian realm [Monggol ulus] make a living herding livestock, living off of the yearly increase and in between using them for riding and transport and selling the excess to buy goods.⁽²⁴⁾

The great Khalkha Mongolian poet Danzanrabjai (1803-56) described the characters and customs (aburi yosu) of the people of the three realms (ulus) of China (Khitad), Tibet (Tanggud), and Mongolia:

The Chinese, since he is of the dragon's ancestry, dines on vegetables, has a bad temper, does not know shame, is always thinking up something, and is greedy for profit. The Tibetan, since he is of the demoness's ancestry, dines on flour, is lustful, quick-witted, and his main thought is envy and jealousy. The Mongol, since he is of the monster's ancestry, dines on meat, is proud, likes to talk, is not reliable in his thinking and understanding, and will be trying to strike back.⁽²⁵⁾

In this sense, Mongols of the eighteenth century saw Mongolia, China, and Tibet as all ulus (natural geographic, civic, and ethnographic realms) under the power of a single Great Qing ulus (dynastic state).

In both Outer Mongolia (Mongolia proper) and western Inner Mongolia, this ambiguity in the understanding of ulus, either as a natural geo-ethnographic unit or as a dynasty, continued up until the very fall of the Qing dynasty. In his 1905 history of Mongolia, Erdeni-yin tobci ("Bejewelled Chronicle"), the famous Ordos poet and scholar, Kheshigbatu, described how the Qing dynasty (ulus) was composed of several realms, each with its own administrative tradition:

When this emperor [the Shunzhi emperor of the Great Qing dynasty] of the Manchu received all in the world, without lifting a single weapon, the eighteen provinces of China [khitad] to the south, the great Kökenuur-Tibetan realm [Tanggud Töbed yekhe ulus] in the west, the Korean realm [Gaoli ulus] also called the "white Solonggos," and the great Mongolian realm [yekhe Monggol ulus] to the north, he all ruled with great mercy and harmony. In China [Khitad], the Zongdus and Zongfus were placed to administer the fu and xian, in Kökenuur-Tibet he appointed deliberative ministers [khubi-yin said (sic) for khebei said] and imperial residents [amban jangjun]. Sharing out this great Mongolian realm [yekhe ene Monggol ulus] amongst the noble-born descendants of Taizu Chinggis Khaan and descendants of the eleven sovereign children of Batumöngkhe Dayan Sechen Khaan, he created banners and sumus and placed one ruler over each banner. . . . ⁽²⁶⁾

No clearer picture could be drawn of the "realms within the realm" character of the Qing dynasty. The use of ulus for dynasties within China also did not mean Kheshigbatu had lost the sense that all these dynasties belonged to one realm, China; he refers to the "Tang dynasty of China [Khitad]," the Mongol ruler Esen's capturing "China's [Khitad] Ming Jingdi emperor," and Mongols invading the realm of China (Khitad ulus).⁽²⁷⁾ In the same manner, Kheshigbatu's division of Mongolia's pre-Qing history into the Great Yuan and the Latter Yuan dynasties did not at all weaken his sense of Mongolia as a distinct realm continuing on despite administrative changes and the loss of full independence under the Qing.⁽²⁸⁾

Thus, as Nakami Tatsuo has noted, on the eve of the 1911 revolution the vast majority of Mongols lacked the concept of Dumdadu ulus/Zhongguo (the Middle Country) as a national community centered on the Chinese heartland, yet including the outlying territories of the Qing empire and separate in conception from the Han Chinese.⁽²⁹⁾ Nor did the Mongols find it useful or relevant to distinguish between countries and nationalities. The layering of the idea of dynastic states onto the Mongols' country-consciousness did not mean that the Mongols even saw the possibility of an ulus, in its primary sense as realm, having many different nationalities within it. Ulus as dynasty involved, rather, the idea that one realm might be divided into warring states, or that one dynasty might rule several separate realms at once. In that case, however, the Mongols accepted that the dynastic state would rule each realm as a separate domain with its own peculiar institutions. Throughout the Qing, Mongolian historical and political literature reveals nothing like the Ottoman concept of millet, self-governing religious communities living permanently on common territory yet governed by their own distinct religious leaders and institutions. Rather, the Mongols saw territorial separation of the major peoples of the empire as an unquestioned part of Qing, and indeed any legitimate, statecraft. To be sure, numerous Chinese traders, artisans, and settlers lived in Mongolia but, according to both Qing law and Mongolian political thought, they were not permanent residents in the Mongol realm but guests residing temporarily outside their proper place in the Chinese realm.

The result was that ulus, in its primary, non-dynastic usage, continued to carry the undifferentiated signification of "country" (a place with particular geographic features), "nation" (a civic community with a particular ruling class and traditions of governance), and "nationality" (a people with particular customs, religion, dress, script, and language), all rolled up in one. The idea propounded by Sun Yat-sen in 1905 and enshrined in the constitution after 1911, that China, or the Middle Realm, was a single, indivisible country held in common by five nationalities, had simply no place in Mongolian political theory of the time.

Nineteenth-Century Trends in Eastern Inner MongoliaNakami Tatsuo, however, has gone too far in his assertion that the Mongolian calque translation of Zhongguo, Dumdadu ulus or Middle Country, was totally unknown in the Mongolian language before 1911. The term was known in eastern Inner Mongolia, the Mongol area most profoundly influenced by Chinese literary culture. Before the 1911 revolution, however, it was rarely if ever used in the post-1911 sense of a unitary supra-ethnic national community including both the ethnic Chinese lands and Inner Asia. Yet the very existence of the term and the history of its growth shows a drift in the nineteenth century from the view of Mongolia as a realm of its own to that of the Mongol lands as peripheral areas bordering China. The East Mongols⁽³⁰⁾ advanced to a position of intellectual leadership in Republican Inner Mongolia in part because of their ability to adapt quickly to this Chinese view of the Mongols as a nationality within the territory of the republic, not as a separate realm.

Ironically, in its earliest usage the term Dumdadu ulus actually referred to Mongolia itself. As I noted above, traditional Mongolian geography divided the world familiar to the Mongols into five realms, each with a characteristic color, with the blue Mongols in the middle. In the "Golden Wheel of a Thousand Spokes" of 1739, Dharma Güüshi, an East Mongol of Jarud Banner, incidentally referred to Mongolia as the "middle center realm" (dumdadu gool ulus) around which the other four were ranged.⁽³¹⁾ In 1775, Rashipungsug, from the neighboring Baarin Banner, also mentioned Mongolia as the "great middle realm" (dumdadu yekhe ulus) bearing the color blue and surrounded by the other four major countries.⁽³²⁾

About a century after Rashipungsug, the historian Injannashi, from Josotu League on the southernmost frontier of Inner Mongolia,⁽³³⁾ revolutionized the Mongols' understanding of their own past in his "Blue Chronicle of the Rise of the Great Yuan Dynasty" (Yekhe yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-un khökhe sudur). One aspect of this transformation was the implicit removal of Mongolia from a central position in the world to a northern one. Turning the traditional trope of the "five colors and four aliens" into "the four colors and the five aliens," he placed the blue Mongols to the north, the white Koreans to the south, the red Chinese to the south, and the black Tibetans to the west. He then reinterpreted the five aliens, not as smaller peoples included with the other realms, but as a general term for the racially alien peoples even further west, along with the Dog-Head Country, the Girl Country and other legendary realms. He also refers at least once to his own people as "those called the Mongols who are outside the Great Wall" (Chagan kherem-ün gadana bükhüi Monggol khemegchi), clearly adopting a China-centered viewpoint. Even more directly, he wrote that China (Dumdadu ulus) is generally contemptuous towards the outer tribes (gadaadu aimag), including the Mongols, just as the upper class oppresses the lower class.⁽³⁴⁾ While Injannashi's explicit purpose was to accuse Chinese historians of petty bias, he implicitly accepted the Sino-centric world-view that generated this bias.

This displacement of Mongolia to the north meant that dumdadu ulus was no longer an appropriate term for the Mongolian realm. Instead, as seen in the last quotation, Injannashi was apparently the first Mongolian to use Dumdadu ulus in writing as a term for China. Speaking of the situation at the rise of the Mongols, Injannashi describes how China, or the Middle Realm (Dumdadu ulus) was divided into numerous dynasties, such as the Song dynasty (Süng ulus), the Jin dynasty (Altan ulus), and so forth.⁽³⁵⁾ Injannashi also uses the loan word Zhongyuan (Central Plains; transcribed in Mongolian as Jüng yuwan) to refer to China proper, a usage which reflected that of traditional Chinese histories. He thus speaks of his own Josotu League as being "practically right within the jüng yuwan."⁽³⁶⁾ That Zhongyuan means roughly the same as Dumdadu ulus becomes clear when Injannashi speaks of how the divisions of Dumdadu ulus into differing dynasties in the time of Chinggis Khaan brought the lands of Jüng yuwan into chaos.⁽³⁷⁾

The use of either Jüng yuwan or Dumdadu ulus resulted for the first time in the Mongolian language in a terminological separation of two notions of China: that of a territorial entity and that of the ethnic Chinese as a nationality. For the latter meaning, Injannashi used either the traditional khitad or two relatively new terms, irgen or nanggiyad. The former meant "subject" and was the standard term in Mongolian-language Qing legal literature to distinguish Chinese subjects in the provinces from the privileged bannermen, either in China proper or in the Mongolian territorial banners. By the late nineteenth century, irgen had come to mean the Chinese as an ethnic group among most of the Mongols.⁽³⁸⁾ The third term, derived from Chinese nanjia (southern families), perhaps reflected the growing role of family migration in the Chinese influx into Inner Mongolia. Whatever terms for ethnic Chinese were adopted, their dissociation from those terms for China as a country or geographical unit opened important new possibilities in the Mongolian lexicon.

How big was Injannashi's Jüng yuwan or Dumdadu ulus? One area which it did not include was Mongolia--the fact that he referred to Josotu as being on its borders would indicate that. At one point he also notes how the dynasties of China before the Yuan were all confined to the area between the Great Wall in the north, Tibet in the west, Yunnan and Guizhou to the south, and the ocean to the southwest.⁽³⁹⁾ Here Injannashi works with an implicit understanding of traditional Chinese territory similar to the Western idea of China proper. He tends toward the same point when he speaks of the Mongols fighting for two thousand years against Dumdadu ulus and not submitting.⁽⁴⁰⁾ At one point this identification becomes explicit as Injannashi pulls together all his various terms for the Chinese. Discussing the four colors, he refers to the red Chinese in the south as "the Khitad, the Nanggiyad of the land of the Middle Realm, the Zhongyuan" (Dumdadu ulus Jüng yuwan-u gajar-un Khitad Nanggiyad).⁽⁴¹⁾

Elsewhere, however, Injannashi seems to adopt a more expansive view of China, including Korea, the Xiyu or Western Regions (modern Xinjiang), the Huihu (that is, Uygurs), the western Qiang, and even India within the Zhongyuan. Similarly, Injannashi often referred to "northern lands" (khoitu gajar or aru gajar) as Mongolia, extending from the Jurchin in Manchuria in the east to the Karluk and other Turkic peoples of modern Kazakstan in the west. Around these two, the Zhongyuan and the northern lands, lay various "different and strange foreign [or outer] countries" (sonin öbere gadaadu ulus), such as Tibet, Nepal, India, Uyguria, Russia, and Kazakstan.⁽⁴²⁾ Injannashi clearly had no great interest in the precise delineation of these differing areas; he lists both India and the Uygurs twice, first among the warring states of the Middle Realm and then among the far-off foreign countries. At the same time, however, we see a vague sense of Dumdadu ulus or the Middle Realm as being something larger than just the area inhabited by the ethnic Chinese. The Mongols in their "northern land" are in some sense closer and not so foreign to this Middle Realm as are those "different and strange foreign countries." Elsewhere he refers to these distant countries as the "completely equal foreign nations" (gadaadu teng sachuu ulus), implying that those realms within the larger Middle Realm and the Northern Lands are somehow not fully independent of each other.⁽⁴³⁾ Perhaps appropriately, it is only in discussing "our" (i.e., Chinese) contempt for foreign countries (gadaadu ulus; evidently Western countries) that Injannashi speaks of "our Middle celestial realm" (man-u Dumdadu tngri-yin ulus).⁽⁴⁴⁾ Even there, by referring to Confucian philosophy and the (Han) Chinese institutions of counties and prefectures, Injannashi makes it hard to tell if he is including the Mongols as a whole within China so much as taking on a (Han) Chinese persona himself. Such implications, however, remain in the background; Injannashi's foreground attention is on the various dynasties and tribes as they contended for power in the arena of East Asian politics.

The 1911 Revolution and the Sudden Birth of Nationality Discourse

The 1911 Revolution marked a radical change in the political environment of Mongolian intellectual life. The most important fact was the division, eventually proving to be permanent, between Mongolia proper, which declared its independence from China in November 1911, and Inner Mongolia, which was unable to resist the imposition of control by the new Republic of China. These political facts also dramatically transformed the Mongolian political lexicon. In the new independent Mongolia, the old use of ulus as a combined geographic-national-ethnic unit continued, as did the tendency to designate China and the Chinese as both a country and an ethnic group by a single term, Khitad. In Inner Mongolia, however, the approved term for the Republic of China--Dumdadu irgen ulus, "Middle Commoners' Realm," a direct translation of Zhonghua Minguo--and the simplified Dumdadu ulus or "Middle Realm" gained common currency as terms for the country of China in which the Inner Mongols were now included. Still, the old term Khitad by no means went out of use even as an unofficial term for China as a whole. The most rapid and complete change lay in the Inner Mongols' designation of their own situation. From 1911 to the present, the Mongols of Inner Mongolia have referred to themselves overwhelmingly as a nationality, tribe, or ethnic group, never as realm or ulus. From this point on, a virtually unbridgeable gap opened between the self-understanding of the Mongols of Mongolia and those of Inner Mongolia. While the former have continued to think of the idea of Mongol as a country, nation, and nationality all rolled into one, the Inner Mongols from the 1911 Revolution on have understood Mongol to refer to a nationality only, without its own land or civic expression. The Inner Mongols in a few short years had gone from being a part of the Mongol realm to being a mere minority.

The shift was so rapid that there was great confusion even about how to render the very concept of nationality (a stateless and country-less ethnic group), confusion that lasted until the 1940s. The earliest attempt in Mongolian I know of to render the idea of nationality as an ethnic group came from Bayanbiligtü, a Kharachin Mongol of Josotu League, and foreshadowed the confusion. Writing of the Mongols' need for modern cultural education, he spoke of the necessity to strengthen "the one tribe-race-nation of the Mongols" (Monggol-un aimag ugsaa ündüsü). While the phrase is clumsier in English than it is in the original Mongolian, where binomes and even trinomes are a standard device for forming abstract concepts, the particular binomes for this concept remained variable for decades. Even in this particular source, the author tended to speak more of the Mongolian lands (Monggol gajar or Monggol gajar orun, contrasted to foreign lands, gadanakhi gajar orun) than of a Mongolian nationality.⁽⁴⁵⁾

The three terms used by Bayanbiligtü in 1908, aimag (tribe), ugsaa (race or stock), and ündüsü (nation), all later became building blocks of the vocabulary of nationality. Aimag referred to named regional groups within the Mongols, such as the Kharachins, Ordos, or Khalkha, with separate dialects, costumes, and customs; it can be translated in English as "tribe" as long as it is understood in the sense in which the Bavarians or Saxons of Germany, for example, are often called tribes.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Ugsaa derived ultimately from the word ug (stump, base, origin, or beginning and, as an adjective, original, basic, or initial). It was primarily used in the Qing period to mean a lineage, as in khaan-u ugsaa (royal lineage). Ündüsü had a similar primary meaning (root, beginning, origin, base, or, as an adjective, original, basic, fundamental, or principal). It was often used as a term to describe the legitimate ancestry of the Mongolian nobility, as in phrases such as khad-un ündüsü, "the origin/lineage of the sovereigns." Along with ijagur, another term primarily meaning "root" and latter applied to royal lineages in particular, these three terms, combining and recombining in a variety of binomes, formed the main lexical resource out of which the post-1911 terminology of nationalities (as distinct from countries) would be formed.

The initial efforts to render the proclamations of the 1911 revolutionaries into Mongolian showed, in their very clumsiness, the novelty for most of the Mongols of separating nationality or ethnicity from the country-cum-nation-cum-nationality complex represented by the word ulus. Adopting Sun Yat-sen's idea of a quinque-racial republic (wuzu gongheguo) and quinque-racial harmony (wuzu gonghe), the new Republican government under Yuan Shikai aimed to put across the idea that the Han and the Mongols were just two of the races or nationalities (zu) in the supra-ethnic country-nation of China (Zhongguo). The Republican government also claimed that this supra-ethnic Zhongguo had been in existence, as a supra-ethnic entity, from time immemorial.

Not surprisingly, the translation of these terms borrowed from the East Mongolian usage developed since Injannashi's time in designating the Han nationality as Khitad and the country-nation, China, as Dumdadu ulus. The area which the Mongols had referred to as China (Khitad ulus or occasionally Dumdadu ulus), the new documents consistently rendered as dotoodu gajar, a calque translation of neidi, "interior land."⁽⁴⁷⁾ This rendering made the distinction between ethnicity and country-nation at least formally possible. Still, most Mongols outside of East Mongolia had probably never heard of the term Dumdadu ulus (China) before 1911, and even those in East Mongolia learned for the first time that they were not on the northern border of Dumdadu ulus, as Injannashi thought, but had actually been deep within it for hundreds of years.

Even stranger was the term officially used to render the crucial idea of zu (race or nationality). The Chinese government's Mongolian language translators ignored Bayanbiligtü's essay in rendering this concept and translated zu as törül, a term connoting "kind" or "sort" and one nowhere else used to designate nationality.⁽⁴⁸⁾ For the official name of the Republic of China (Zhonghua minguo), Mongols in Beijing chose to translate the word "republic" (minguo, literally commoner-realm) as irgen ulus, literally again meaning "commoner [or subject] realm." The problem was that, by the second half of the nineteenth century, irgen (subject or commoner) had also come to mean "ethnic Chinese" throughout much of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. As a result, the so-called "republic" or irgen ulus came across to many if not most Mongols as "the Han [or ethnic Chinese] realm." Probably no translation could have overcome the fundamental differences in understanding between the existing Chinese and Mongol conceptions of the nature and extent of China as a nation, but such hasty mistranslations made the gap of misunderstanding all the larger.

The new vocabulary and rhetoric of multi-ethnic nations (or multi-national countries) had no real impact on Mongolia proper, which was able to escape from the control of the Republic of China. In this new state, essentially equivalent in territory to the old Outer Mongolia of the Qing dynasty and the future Mongolian People's Republic, the old unity of the country-cum-nation-cum-nationality still applied and was even unified with the idea of a centralized state embedded in the secondary meaning of ulus as "dynasty." The new realm's name was Monggol ulus, meaning "Mongolia realm" or "Mongolian dynasty." As a result of this overlapping of geographic, civic, ethnographic, and political categories, the idea of a nationality as opposed to a country or state remained virtually invisible in the early years of independent Mongolia, even among intellectuals acquainted with some aspects of Western political theory.

Tsyben Zhamtsarano, a Buriat Mongolian scholar, intellectual, and publicist writing in theocratic Mongolia, could discuss the development of humanity, the Mongolian declaration of independence, and the systems of government in the world without ever drawing explicit attention to the idea of the nation (as apart from the country). As he described it in the first journal to be published in Mongolia, new states (ulus törü) are formed by those people having similar language (khele), ancestry (ijagur), religion (shashin), customs (yosu), and teachings (surtal) who all live in one region (orun).⁽⁴⁹⁾ While the explicitness of the criteria for statehood may well derive from Zhamtsarano's familiarity with nationalist debates in Russia, the very confidence with which he joins them into an indivisible complex shows the power of the Mongolians' undivided country-consciousness.

The attention to ancestry (ijagur), a term often used for aristocratic lineages, heralded a summoning up into a more conscious political existence of the traditional notion of Mongolian ancestry. Pronouncements of the Mongolian government in the telegram war of 1912 defined the purpose of the new state as "defending the lineage [ündüsü], guarding our faith [shashin], and preserving the integrity of our territory [gajar orun]." A later statement repeats this formula but changes the term for lineage to speak of "defending our ancestral lineage" (ijagur-aca ündüsü)--a concept not far from "defending the nation" as a historical community of origin.⁽⁵⁰⁾ In his publicistic endeavors, Zhamtsarano touched once upon the same point, basing Mongolia's need for independence on China's desire to suppress "our Mongolian nation [ijagur ündüsü] and its traditional teachings [yosu surtal]," and change its privileges (erkhe), language (khele), religion (shashin), and ways and manners (jang jirum).⁽⁵¹⁾

When Mongolian writers of the time wished to emphasize one or another aspect of the notions subsumed under the modern word "nation," they would use quite separate words. Speaking of the mass of citizenry, these documents tend to use "all the realm" (bükhü ulus); as a race with common origin, either ündüsü or ijagur or some combination; while for the Mongols as a people among other people, they occasionally borrow Chinese usage and use törül or "stock."⁽⁵²⁾ In the vast majority of cases, where no such special emphasis was needed, however, the Mongols of Mongolia proper continued to use ulus to cover the concepts of country (geographic unit), nation (civic community), and people (ethnographic unit).

The sudden division of their southern neighbor into a supra-ethnic "China" (Dumdadu ulus) on the one hand and the Han or Khitad inhabiting the "heartland" (dotoodu gajar) on the other did not take hold among the Mongols of independent Mongolia. The confusion in usage curiously foreshadowed the terminological difficulties in the West which would greet the change from "Russia" to the "U.S.S.R." after the Russian Revolution. Government documents used the new official designation, while unofficial writers used either the old name with which they were familiar or various shortened or mixed forms of the new and old terminology. Looking at the 1912 telegrams and the articles of Zhamtsarano, the Mongolian officials referred to the new Republic as Dumdadu irgen ulus, but in common usage still as Khitad or Khitad ulus. Simplified and mixed forms included Dumdadu ulus, Khitad irgen ulus, Khitad-un Dumdadu ulus, and simply Irgen ulus.⁽⁵³⁾

The conservative theocratic regime in Mongolia eventually gave way, via Chinese and White Russian occupation, to a revolutionary regime supported by Soviet Russia installing itself in Mongolia. Given the prominence of the national question and national revolutionary movements in the Leninist program for relations with the colonized countries, one would expect that terms for nation would acquire greater prominence in Mongolian political vocabulary. This was indeed the case, but only to a certain degree. Literature from the early formation of the Outer Mongolian People's Party (later simply the Mongolian People's Party, forerunner of the present Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party) shows the terms ündüsü and ijagur, either alone or in combination, taking a distinctly larger role in political discussion. Thus the People's Party's first manifesto denounced "vicious enemies hostile to the nation and the faith [shashin ündüsün]" and proclaims the Party's aim "to guard against the nation's [ündüsü ijagur] being lost."⁽⁵⁴⁾ Early issues of Mongolia's Truth (Monggol-un ünen), a magazine produced by Khalkha and Buriat Mongols under the supervision of the Siberian Party apparatus, also evidence this substantial increase in the use of terms for nation, particularly ijagur ündüsü as opposed to the rather differently conceived term ulus. Thus for the first time I am aware of we come across the use of the adjectival form, "national," when the newspaper pledges to "establish a truly national [uul ündüsün-ü] government." Elsewhere ijagur ündüsü or ündüsü ijagur appears as the most common rendering of the concept of the nation.⁽⁵⁵⁾

Around this time, the concept of nation and nationality as an ethnic collectivity also began to be important enough that new terms were brought into existence to express it. These terms were formed by adding the suffix -tan, which indicates a class of people characterized by the said noun. Ijagurtan, "those with a root or ancestry," appears twice here as a word for the nation.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Ironically, this word would eventually become fixed as a term for the aristocracy. Ugsaatan, however, derived from ugsaa, and ündüsüten, derived from ündüsü, would soon join the lexical soup as possible words, either alone or in combination, to designate the concept particularly of a (minority) nationality. This growth in the currency of terms specifically translating "nation" was only modest, though. Even in these works, the old term ulus, indicating country or nation indiscriminately, prevailed. "Oppressed and exploited minority nations" became literally "oppressed and exploited small countries/nations" (darulagdagsan khikhagdagsan olan baga ulus-ud). Occasionally the anonymous authors linked the idea of "nation" with "country," as when they spoke of "countries [ulus] of one nation [ijagur] oppressing and exploiting countries of another nation."⁽⁵⁷⁾ In the vast majority of cases, though, ulus remained the unmarked term for nation or country through World War Two.

There is no need to go through the rest of the history of the concepts of nation, country, China, and Han Chinese in independent Mongolia. Suffice it to say that through the final replacement of the Mongolian script by Cyrillic in 1945-51, ulus remained the major word for both country and nation. At the same time ündüsü and ündüsüten were established as the more precise words for the concepts of "nation" and "nationality," respectively. Thus the Mongolians translated the important term "National Revolution" as ündüsün-ü khubiskhal. The Mongolian tradition of using binomes to form abstract nouns continued, and ulus was still sometimes joined to ündüsüten to put across the idea of a nation-state. Only after the shift to Cyrillic and a strong influx of Russian lexical influence, however, did the two concepts decisively part ways in common usage, the idea of "country" being taken by orun (originally "region") and that of "nation(al)" by ündüsü(n-ü). When the United Nations was first formed in 1945, for example, it was rendered in Mongolian as the Nigedügsen ulus ündüsüten-ü baigulalga, while it is now translated as Nigedügsen ündüsün-ü baigulalga. Meanwhile, ulus came to have the sole connotation of "state" (something formerly rendered by either törü or the binome ulus törü); ulus, which previously meant the country and nation as a whole, was now applied only to the government apparatus.

Official usage in Mongolia for "China" fluctuated along with Sino-Mongolian relations. When relations went well, as in 1925-27 and in 1945, the Mongolian government scrupulously referred to China as Dumdadu ulus or even more officially Dumdadu irgen ulus, but when they went badly or indifferently, as in all other periods, the Mongolian government referred to China as simply Khitad or Khitad ulus. Only after the period of 1949-51, when Mongolia's bureaucracy finally switched to Cyrillic and China changed from a Republic to a People's Republic, was this ambiguity resolved. Influenced no doubt by Russian Kitai for China, the official translation of the People's Republic of China in Mongolia become Bügüde Nairamdakhu Khitad Arad Ulus, finally eliminating Dumdadu ulus as a usable term in Mongolia proper.⁽⁵⁸⁾

Inner Mongolian Vocabulary of Nationality under the Chinese Republic

In Inner Mongolia, the separation of nation-state from nationality was an unavoidable reality from the first turbulent years of the Republic onward. Confronted by the established fact of a regime or dynasty claiming to rule over a natural historical and political unit it called "the Middle Realm," the Mongols had little choice but to acquiesce and give this regime and unit the title of Dumdadu ulus. The Mongols of Inner Mongolia were definitely no longer in a Monggol ulus or "Mongolia country." Since it was quite inconceivable that the mass of Mongols should suddenly abandon their sense of difference due to cultural traditions and a separate ancestry, the result was a firm separation of the concept of "nationality" from that of "country," leaving the idea of "nation" (legitimate civic traditions) in a contested and ambiguous terrain between them.

The term törül for the Mongol nationality did not, however, catch on. While it was used in a few official documents from the early Republic, it never seems to have entered popular usage.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Instead the Mongols chose from those terms I have already mentioned--aimag, ugsaa, ündüsü, and ijagur. In a poem from Ordos in western Inner Mongolia from around 1915, the author declares that the Chinese (irgen), Manchu, Mongols, Muslims (khotong), and Tibetans are the aimags (tribes) of China (Dumdadu ulus), and the five great races (tabun yekhe ugsaa) of the age.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Even official documents often used these more natural Mongolian translations; one spoke of how "the tribes [aimag] of the five races [tabun ugsaa] living together in harmony in our China [Dumdadu ulus] all loving each other" are reforming customs and spreading culture.⁽⁶¹⁾ In the remotest Shili-yin Gool League, on the border of Mongolia proper, the minstrel Gamala sang of how the Qing dynasty (Ching ulus) was overthrown and replaced by the Zhonghua minguo (Jüng khuwa min güwé). The president (Da dzüngtüng), he went on to chant, was enthroned and unified the five tribes (tabun aimag).⁽⁶²⁾

The retention of the peculiar Mongolian political institutions undoubtedly contributed to a continuing sense of a Mongolian political identity, but the utilization of the nobility by the Republic as an instrument of control discredited these institutions in the eyes of many Mongols. By 1925 a widespread, if disunited, revolutionary sentiment had arisen in Inner Mongolia. Dominated by younger members of the East Mongolian intelligentsia, this new movement was prepared to accept, if not to welcome, the status of the Mongols as a nationality like the Han (Khitad) within China (Dumdadu ulus). Inspired by the revolution in Mongolia, these Inner Mongolian nationalists publicly aimed for a democratic reconstruction of an autonomous Inner Mongolia, although pan-Mongolist ideas were never far from their mind.

Influenced perhaps by Mongolian terminology, where ündüsü had become the most common word for "nation" and "national," the Inner Mongolian nationalists brought this word more prominently into nationalist discourse. Ündüsü for "nation" or "nationality" achieved currency in part by being fixed in certain set phrases, such as "National Revolution" (ündüsün-ü khubiskhal), drawn directly from usage in Mongolia proper.⁽⁶³⁾ Yet this word, with its revolutionary, (Outer) Mongolian, and socialist overtones, did not replace the more traditional Inner Mongolian ugsaa. The manifesto of the 1925 nationalist congress which established the People's Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia spoke first of Mongols reviving their nation (ündüsü ugsaa). Elsewhere the revolutionaries translated the five races (wu zu) of Republican ideology as tabun ugsaa, and advocated the realization of the equality of the five nationalities (tabun ugsaatan). Other official writings of the Inner Mongolian party used aimag ugsaa or ugsaatan to describe the Mongolian nationality.⁽⁶⁴⁾

The people and institutions of China proper--whether they be the common people of the towns, the farmers colonizing Inner Mongolia, the merchants fleecing the Mongols, the county and prefecture system, or the warlords--were all described as Khitad or Han Chinese, while the country itself was the Middle Realm (Dumdadu ulus). To this degree, the authors clearly accepted that the Inner Mongols were a nationality within a country and not a country or realm in their own right. Indeed, the manifesto even accepted the key Republican tenet that Dumdadu ulus had always included the Mongols--"It has been many long years since we Mongols have became citizens [khariyatu] of China [Dumdadu ulus]."⁽⁶⁵⁾ The revolutionaries also changed the official translation for the "Republic of China" from Dumdadu irgen ulus to Dumdadu arad ulus, switching the word irgen (subject, with its longstanding connotation of Han Chinese) to the word arad (people or commoners).⁽⁶⁶⁾

The terminological variation noted earlier continued in the private writings of the revolutionaries in this period. Still, usage tended to converge on the constellation of terms established by the Party in its official manifestos. By 1926, even relatively unpolitical writers, such as the pioneering publisher Temgetü, had adopted new terminology such as arad ulus in place of irgen ulus, and ugsaatan for nationality.⁽⁶⁷⁾ By the beginning of 1929, the new terminology--Dumdadu arad ulus for Republic of China, ugsaatan for nationality considered as a single people (translating the Chinese minzu), and ulus for country or nation considered as a union of equal citizens--had become codified in the approved Mongolian translation of Sun Yat-sen's Three People's Principles.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Once established, this vocabulary--with ugsaa and its two derivatives, aimag ugsaa and ugsaatan, as the words for nationality--continued into the period of Japanese domination of Inner Mongolia. Perhaps the only change in that period was the revival of the term Dumdadu irgen ulus, the better to incite sentiment against the Chinese Republic among the Mongols.⁽⁶⁹⁾

The Chinese Communist Transformation of the Mongolian Lexicon of Nationality

The final drama, both in the history of the Mongols' relations with the Republic of China and in the development of the Inner Mongolian vocabulary of their minority situation, came in the Chinese Civil War which followed the fall of the Japanese empire. Most of Inner Mongolia came under occupation by Soviet and Mongolian troops. After a period of uncertainty, it became clear the occupiers would not unite Inner Mongolia with the Mongolian People's Republic. They did, however, encourage young Mongol nationalists to set up new autonomous regimes on the soil of Inner Mongolia. These regimes soon faced the growing strength of the Chinese Communist Party. In the end, most of the influential Mongol nationalists merged their movements, regimes, and military forces with those of the Communists, expelling and persecuting the minority of Mongols who either supported the Guomindang or advocated neutrality in the Civil War.

It was the Communists who brought the final wave of changes to the vocabulary of nationalities and nations in Inner Mongolia. The Mongol nationalists who founded the short-lived autonomous regimes of 1945-46 generally continued to use the terminology which had been set since 1929. The word for nationality was ugsaa, ugsaatan, or sometimes, in literal translation of Chinese minzu (people-lineage), arad ugsaatan. Örlüge, a crudely printed organ of a nationalist Mongol youth league, carried the slogan "All the Mongol nationality [ugsaatan], unite!" on its masthead. The only change, albeit a major one, was a tendency among the more purely nationalist politicians to follow the ordinary usage in Mongolia proper and render China as Khitad ulus. By identifying China as a country with the Han nationality (Khitad ugsaatan), the Mongol nationalists were implicitly rejecting the very possibility of a genuinely multi-ethnic China; it would always be in fact, if not in name, "Han country."⁽⁷⁰⁾

At the same time, Chinese Communist usage came to stand out by its consistent and exclusive adoption of ündüsüten for nationality. The small group of ethnic Mongol interpreters for the Chinese Communists almost certainly borrowed this term from usage of the Mongolian People's Republic.⁽⁷¹⁾ During the brief period of propaganda for unification in 1945, the press of Mongolia proper usually spoke of the whole Mongol nationality as an ündüsüten. Ironically, it was not the ardent pan-Mongolian Inner Mongols but the Chinese Communists who adopted this language, and into 1946 its use served as a marker of Communist discourse on nationalism, as opposed to that of the Guomindang or the Mongol nationalists. By mid-December 1945, the use of ündüsüten had become fixed in the Communist terminology.⁽⁷²⁾ There is also very clear evidence as to when this usage began to dominate the language of the younger East Mongol nationalists. On 5 March 1946, as the radical Mongol nationalist movement merged with the Communists, the above-mentioned newspaper Örlüge changed its masthead slogan. It still meant "All the Mongol nationality, unite!" but now the word for "nationality" was changed from ugsaatan to ündüsüten. Two issues and ten days later the organ was closed, as not only the terms of the masthead but the sentiment itself became obsolete.

Along with the merger of the greater part of the Mongol nationalist movement with the Communist Party came an end to any idea that China was not a multi-ethnic Dumdadu ulus. By 1945, this term and the idea it embodied had penetrated deeply into Inner Mongolian usage; Khitad ulus faded quickly. The one problem was that the name of the Communist Party, intended to be the main nucleus of inter-ethnic harmony in the New China, had carried in Mongolian up until 1945 or so the unquestionably ethnic title of Khitad-un eb khamtu-yin nam, or the "The Han Chinese Communist Party." The origin of this translation seems to be found in the process of translation from Russian; the Russian word for China and Chinese, kitai(skii), is so clearly similar to Mongolian khitad that the latter was used as a rule to translate the former. Even when left-wing Mongol nationalists were turning from the Guomindang to the Chinese Communists, they would still refer to the former as the Dumdadu ulus-un Gomingdan nam (The Guomindang Party of the Middle Realm), and the latter as the Khitad-un eb khamtu-yin nam (The Common Property Party of the Han).⁽⁷³⁾ While such usage did not necessarily denote hostility to the Communist Party, it did encourage an understanding of the Party's mission that the Party itself would find unduly restricting, especially during the Civil War and after.

Just as the Party translators rapidly replaced ugsaatan with ündüsüten as their favored term for "nationality," they also replaced Khitad-un eb khamtu-yin nam with Dumdadu ulus-un eb khamtu-yin nam. This change, again like that from ugsaatan to ündüsüten, seems to have taken place rapidly in the fall months of 1945. In Mongolian-language translations of the speeches of the leading Inner-Mongolian Communist Yun Ze dating from 15 December 1945, the translators used both Khitad-un eb khamtu-yin nam and Dumdadu ulus-un eb khamtu-yin nam indifferently.⁽⁷⁴⁾ Such ambiguity rapidly disappeared, and by 1947 the Communist Party had, in its name at least, finally been dissociated from its ethnic origins and reequipped in Mongolian for its new role as the leader of a multi-ethnic Middle Realm.⁽⁷⁵⁾ A stable Communist vocabulary in Inner Mongolia both reflected and furthered the ability of the Party to co-opt Mongol nationalist sentiment and project a convincing image of Inner Mongolia's place in a multi-ethnic China.

Conclusion

The evolution of the Mongolian words that would eventually be used to describe the Mongols' own minority situation demonstrates that the idea of a multi-ethnic state in general and China as the home of five or fifty-six nationalities in particular is not natural or self-evident. This perception of nationality (defined by customs, language, and ancestry) as something different from citizenship in a country (defined by residence in a particular area with one sovereign government) did not exist among the Mongols in any explicit form before 1911, although its intimation can be seen in eastern Inner Mongolia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Such an emphasis on the historical contingency of ethnic and national identity broadly speaking is not new. Much previous work, typified by Benedict Anderson's influential Imagined Communities, has rightly focused on historicizing the national/ethnic categories which often had been treated as primordial substances detached from any historical expression. The foregoing narrative has pointed up the degree to which such analyses of the historical creation of nations and ethnic groups have, by their silence on the historical creation of the state as a government entity, implicitly privileged the strong, modern state as an entity more basic and potent than the civic community. The tendency of these authors to exaggerate the dichotomy between an international clerisy and a purely parochial peasantry has unfortunately obscured the degree to which country-consciousness was widespread long before the influx of modernity. As Prasenjit Duara has pointed out, this approach replaces a one-sided fixation with the nation as the collective subject of history with a similarly one-sided attention to modernity as an all-powerful force for change.⁽⁷⁶⁾ Moreover, medievalists such as Susan Reynolds have shown how even in medieval Europe, used by Anderson as the type-case of a purely ecumenical civilization, "ideas about kingdoms and peoples were very like modern ideas about nations."⁽⁷⁷⁾

The unseemly eagerness with which some historians have jumped to the conclusion that Mongolian national-ethnic identity is wholly a creation of the nationality policies of the People's Republic of China suggests that the denial of pre-modern ethnic identity reflects an implicit loyalty to the modern state as the only institution able to create ethnic order out of a tribal chaos.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Similarly, Dru Gladney, in studying the Hui and Uygurs of modern China, has taken (individual) self-definition and state-definition as the two interactive elements in his dialogical approach to ethnogenesis. This approach in practice completely omits the role of political concepts and corporate institutions in mediating between the ultimate sovereign power and the individual.⁽⁷⁹⁾ The virtual abolition of such corporate units in the PRC makes such an approach more plausible than it would be in other regimes, but that very abolition is a historically abnormal and, most likely, transient phenomenon.

Among the Mongols the formation of an ideology of a modern multi-ethnic state involved not the creation of Mongol and (Han) Chinese as categories--these existed from the sixteenth century at least--but their reorientation from country-nations to nationalities within a (predominantly Han) Middle Realm or China. Analyses that see national identities as solely the product of modernity are not convincing. The perception of their place in the Qing dynasty relied upon the Mongols' concept of the ulus (country-cum-nation-cum-nationality), which positively and self-consciously valorized the idea of separate Mongolian customs, religion, dress, language, and script. At the same time, the integral association of these ethnographic features with a particular set of institutions--in particular the Mongolian banner system, the Borjigin nobility, and the established Buddhist church--gave these ethnographic features a "thick," mediated link to the political idea of sovereignty, one absent in abstract modern theories of nationality based solely on ethnography, as in the cultunit approach.⁽⁸⁰⁾

The 1911 Revolution's redefinition of the Mongols, Tibetans, Muslims, Manchus, and Han of China as merely zu, "lineages" or törül, "kinds," represented a dramatic delegitimation of all of these national institutions found under the Qing dynasty. This ideology implicitly changed these peoples from historically formed civic communities endowed with prescriptive rights into a sort of ethnic modelling clay found in various colors but capable of being fitted or molded into any centrally determined political structure. The subsequent history of the vocabulary of minority status in Inner Mongolia shows the rapidity with which this naked and de-institutionalized vision of ethnicity succeeded in reworking the Inner Mongolian self-concept, especially that of the emerging intelligentsia. The delegitimation of national institutions and their replacement by the abstract principles of revolution and national utility as the standards of political life led not only to the chronic instability of post-1911 Chinese politics but also to the similarly chronic inability of the Republic or the People's Republic to fabricate a stable basis of power-sharing in the borderlands. It has proved virtually impossible to derive any idea of limited sovereignty from the dominant Chinese political notions of integral nationalism, "revolution to the end," or the total transformation of the country through economic development. In turn, the Mongol intelligentsia has responded to these Chinese notions not with a defense of their prescriptive rights and historic institutions but with their own equally abstract and uncompromising ideologies of legitimation, such as national self-determination, national revolution, and anti-imperialism.

The study of (Han) China's relations with present-day minorities or border peoples cannot assume unhistorically the peripheral situation or the sociological minority status of the non-(Han) Chinese nationalities. For the Mongols such a status grew only from the peculiar political conditions of the 1911 Revolution and the 1915 settlement of the Mongolian question by division between Inner Mongolia and Mongolia proper. One of the keys to bringing this issue of peripheral or minority status into history lies in the exploration of "native" perspectives through the reading of native sources.

The results of this study emphasize again how the most key word in the rhetoric of the Chinese revolution may not be "revolution" but "China." The current distinction between Han and Chinese is as profoundly ideological as would be an unthinking conflation of the two. As suggested by the frequent use of "(Han) Chinese," I find the question of connection and continuity between these two terms highly involved and certainly not susceptible to the cut-and-dried division commonly advanced. As Prasenjit Duara has suggested and as I have tried to show in this working paper, both Han and Chinese (Zhongguoren) have themselves been defined through a complex history of contestation and change, one which is only beginning to be fully explored. Since the convergence or divergence of these two terms takes place particularly in the realms of (Han) China's relations with the (now) peripheral peoples, it cannot be separated from how the peripheral peoples themselves have or have not made such a distinction.

1. Research for this working paper was supported in part by a grant from the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Information Agency, and the U.S. Department of State, which administers the Russian, Eurasian, and East European Research Program (Title VIII). The transcription of Mongolian-language proper names and terms is somewhat simplified. I have replaced the intervocalic -g- by the appropriate long vowels, rendered spirant consonants as in English, and omitted the currently unpronounced -y- in diphthongs. Bibliographic references have been given according to the Library of Congress system, with the sole exception of the replacement of "s" with "sh."

1. Michael Schoenhals, "Unofficial and Official Histories of the Cultural Revolution--A Review Article," Journal of Asian Studies 48.3 (1989): 569-71.

2. . Edited and translated by George Moseley as The Party and the National Question in China (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1966).

3. . Beijing waiguoyu xueyuan Yingyu xi "Han-Ying cidian" bianxie zu, The Pinyin Chinese-English Dictionary/Han-Ying cidian (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1978), under yao, "important, essential," etc.

4. . In place of the obsolete usage that treats Mongolia as a single area divided between "Inner" and "Outer" parts, I propose here to restrict the application of the term "Mongolia," in the twentieth century at least, to independent Mongolia. Thus "Mongolia" tout court does not include Inner Mongolia, just as "Mexico" is understood not to include New Mexico and "Ireland" not to include Northern Ireland. Where necessary for complete clarity, I will refer to independent Mongolia as "Mongolia proper." "Mongolian" as a noun refers to a citizen of independent Mongolia regardless of ethnicity, while "Mongol" as an noun refers to an ethnic Mongol regardless of citizenship.

5. . Michael Schoenhals, "'Non-People' in the People's Republic of China: A Chronicle of Terminological Ambiguity," Indiana East Asian Working Papers Series on Language and Politics in Modern China 4 (1994): 1-27.

6. . This assumption that the distinction between Han and Chinese need only be stated to be obvious can be seen in Dru C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1991), 21. June Teufel Dreyer, China's Forty Millions: Minority Nationalities and National Integration in the People's Republic of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 3-4, simply treats the distinction of Han and Chinese as self-evident and not worthy of comment.

7. . Frank Dikötter, "Racial Identities in China: Context and Meaning," China Quarterly 138 (1994): 404-12. In 1987, Deng Xiaoping declared that reunification of Taiwan with the mainland was something that deeply concerned all the children of the Yellow Emperor. A Mongol friend of mine expressed with sarcasm his great relief in hearing this: if the mainland should ever invade Taiwan, he would undoubtedly not be sent to fight, since as a Mongol he had nothing to do with the Yellow Emperor.

8. . In order to reduce confusion, I will transcribe all Mongolian-language terms according to the Mongolian script forms currently used in Inner Mongolia, rather than according to the Cyrillic-script forms current in independent Mongolia.

9. . On the ideologization of ethnic differences, see Crawford Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 44-47, 520-23, and references.

10. . Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 94. Gladney refers to unpublished work by Clifford Geertz. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any work by Geertz since then where this discussion might have taken place.

11. . Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 331.

12. . Liu Jin Süwé [Liu Jinsuo], ed., Arban buyantu nom-un cagan teüke [White history of the dharma of ten virtues] (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolian People's Publishing House, 1981), 86, 99; Dharm-a, Altan kürdün minggan kegesütü [The Golden wheel of a thousand spokes], ed. Coyiji (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolian People's Publishing House, 1987), 77, 340. There is considerable variation between the exact distribution of the colors and the countries, especially those to the north and the west. The Mongols (with or without their closely related rivals, the Oirads) are always in the center, with the Koreans to the east and the Chinese to the south. The color assignments for these are also regular. See the detailed commentary on these geographical notions in Klaus Sagaster, Die Weisse Geschichte: Eine mongolische Quelle zur Lehre von den Beiden Ordnungen Religion und Staat in Tibet und der Mongolei (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), 307-16.

13. . Jürungg-a, ed., Erdeni tunumal neretü sudur orosiba [Sutra entitled the jewel translucent] (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolian People's Publishing House, 1984), 81-82.

14. . Sagang Secen, Erdeni-yin tobciy-a [Bejewelled chronicle], ed. Köke'öndör (Beijing: Nationalities Publishing House, 1987), 132-33.

15. . Charles Bawden, The Mongol Chronicle "Altan Tobci" (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955), 172.

16. . The Mongolian versions of these works were reprinted with modernized spelling as Düdang and Öljeyitü, trans., Dayiliyuu ulus-un teüke [History of the great Liao dynasty] (Beijing: Nationalities Press, 1987), Düdang and Öljeyitü, trans., Altan ulus-un teüke [History of the Gold dynasty] (Beijing: Nationalities Press, 1988), and Düdang and Öljeyitü, Dayiyuwan ulus-un teüke [History of the great Yuan dynasty] (Beijing: Nationalities Press, 1987). The latter was also reprinted in the original unpointed script form as Süng Liyan, Dai Yuwan ulus-un bicig [Book of the great Yuan dynasty], trans. Tüteng and others (Khailar: Inner Mongolia Cultural Publishing House, 1987).

17. . Sagang Secen, Erdeni-yin tobciy-a, 92-100.

18. . See, for example, Dharm-a, Altan kürdün minggan kegesütü, 151, 73, 109, 116, 202, 227, 239, 241.

19. . Dharm-a, Altan kürdün minggan kegesütü, 118.

20. . For example, Rasipunsug, Bolor erike [Crystal rosary], ed. Köke'öndör (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, 1985), 6, 8.

21. . Dharm-a, Altan kürdün minggan kegesütü, 109.

22. . Rasipungsug, Bolor erike, 792-96, 853.

23. . See, for example, Dharm-a, Altan kürdün minggan kegesütü, 73, and Rasipungsug, Bolor erike, 8.

24. . Rasipungsug, Bolor erike, 7.

25. . Noyon Khutagt D. Rawjaa, Zokhiolyn emkhtgel [Collected works], ed. Tsagaan (Ulaanbaatar: State Publishing House, 1962), 360.

26. . Kesigbatu, "Erdeni-yin tobci" [Bejewelled chronicle] in Ordos kümün-ü teüken tulgur bicig-ün emkidkel [Collected historical source writings of Ordos people] (Yeke Juu ayimag-un dangsa ebkimel-un sang, 1984), 1: 97.

27. . For example, Kesigbatu, "Erdeni-yin tobci," in Ordos kümün-ü teüken tulgur bicig-ün emkidkel, 1: 224, 158-59.

28. . Kesigbatu, "Erdeni-yin tobci," in Ordos kümün-ü teüken tulgur bicig-ün emkidkel, 1: 133 and 150 refer to the founding of the Latter Yuan dynasty and its replacement of the Great Yuan. Yet Chinggis Khaan and Khubilai are said to be two great rulers of Mongolia (Monggol ulus), while in referring to Esen's invasion of the Ming in 1449, he refers to Mongolia (Monggol ulus) attacking China (Khitad ulus); see 158-59. For the term "Great Mongolian realm," see the quotation above and also 76.

29. . Nakami Tatsuo, "A Protest Against the Concept of the 'Middle Kingdom': The Mongols and the 1911 Revolution," in Etô Shinkichi and Harold Z. Schiffrin, eds., The 1911 Revolution in China: Interpretive Essays (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1984), 147-49.

30. . This term refers to the Mongols of eastern Inner Mongolia who lived east of the Great Khinggan Range and were strongly influenced by Chinese civilization. In the Qing Dynasty and Republican periods, it included those who belonged to Josotu, Jirim, and Juu Uda Leagues. At present, this means the Jirim and Khinggan aimags and Chifeng Municipality of Inner Mongolia, and the Mongol autonomous counties and nationality townships of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces.

31. . Dharm-a, Altan kürdün minggan kegesütü, 340.

32. . Rasipungsug, Bolor erike, 137.

33. . His home place of Tümed Right Banner occupied present-day Beipiao county in Liaoning and is not to be confused with Tümed Special Banner near Khökhekhota.

34. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur [Blue chronicle of the rise of the great Yuan Dynasty], (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolia People's Press, 1979), 1: 24, 67; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 66, 93. Injannashi elsewhere referred to the "Chinese people" (Khitad khümün) as living in "the interior land of the south" (emünetü jüg-ün dotogadu gajar), a locution which again indicates his sense of being on the periphery. See Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 76-77; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 98.

35. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 31; English translation in Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 70-71.

36. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 10; Hangin, Köke Sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 56.

37. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 31; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 70-71.

38. . See, for example, Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 10, 14, 17. This usage was also widespread among the Khalkha Mongols of Mongolia proper by at least 1891. See, for example, the text in Alice Sárközi, Political Prophecies in Mongolia in the 17-20th Centuries (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 127-28, and English translation, 129-31. For the use of irgen for Chinese in Ordos, see the documents from 1903 on in Henry Serruys, "Documents from Ordos on the 'Revolutionary Circles': Part I," Journal of the American Oriental Society 97.4 (1977): 487, 488-89.

39. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 15-16; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 59.

40. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 69; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 93.

41. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 33; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 72. He also refers to the Chinese (Khitad) of the Middle Country (Dumdadu ulus)--see Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 65; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 91.

42. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, vol. 1: 31-32; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 70-71.

43. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 23; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 65.

44. . Injannasi, Yeke Yuwan ulus-un mandugsan törü-yin köke sudur, 1: 81-82; Hangin, Köke sudur (The Blue Chronicle), 101.

45. . B. Gereltü, Monggol jokiyalcid-un sigümji ögülel, 1721-1945 (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolia Educational Publishing House, 1986), 337.

46. . The term "tribe" is somewhat controversial due to its perceived derogatory or "primitive" connotations. Yet there is also a common belief that nomads (and hence Mongols) naturally organize themselves into the relatively small, acephalous, egalitarian, and kin-based social units traditionally designated in anthropology as tribes. Whatever one thinks of the continued utility of the term "tribe" in general, the Mongols of Inner Mongolia and Mongolia proper from the sixteenth century on certainly did not have a tribal organization in this anthropological sense. The Mongols of the Qing dynasty period would actually be much better envisioned as a kind of nomadic peasantry, that is, a basically demilitarized commoner class formed not of corporate lineages but of nuclear or extended families engaged in subsistence production and ruled by a highly privileged hereditary nobility.

47. . See the Mongolian translations of the telegrams in the 1912 telegram war between Beijing and the Mongolian capital of Neislel Khüriye ("Urga") in L. Dindub, A Brief History of Mongolia in the Autonomous Period (Ulaanbaatar, 1935; reprint Bloomington, IN: Mongolia Society, 1977), 30-32, 33, 34-35, 39, 41-42, 47-49. Translations (at times inaccurate) are in Urgunge Onon and Derrick Pritchatt, Asia's First Modern Revolution: Mongolia Proclaims its Independence (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), 60-66.

48. . Thus Yuan Shikai was translated as claiming the Mongols were Dumdadu ulus-un nigen törül, "One type (or stock) within China (the Middle Realm)." Another early telegram referred to the Han, Manchu, Mongols, Muslims, and Tibetans as the "five great stocks of commoners" or tabun yekhe irgen-ü törül, evidently rendering wu da minzu. See Dindub, A Brief History of Mongolia in the Autonomous Period, 39, 31. The Buriat scholar Tsyben Zhamtsarano, in Mongolia's first newspaper, in 1912 translated "quinque-racial republic" (wuzu gongheguo) as tabun törül-i nigedkhen bügüde nairamdakhu ulus; "Monggolcud tus ulus bayigulugsan ucir dörbe," Sine toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913): 34. (Note how republic or gongheguo was translated literally into Mongolian as bügüde nairamdakhu ulus, showing the fluctuating nature and lack of independence in Mongolian political terminology in this period.)

49. . "Delekei degereki kümün-ü aju törükü-yin ucir-a," Sin-e toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913): 31. Later, Zhamtsarano summarizes these criteria again in speaking of a common law (neite yosu), territory (gajar orun), ancestry and language (ijagur khele), and religious traditions (yosu shashin) as the foundation of a legitimate state (ulus törü); "Oros Monggol-un ger-e togtogagsan-u ucir-a," Sin-e toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913): 34-35.

50. . Dindub, A Brief History of Mongolia in the Autonomous Period, 36, 43. The translations in Onon and Pritchatt, Asia's First Modern Revolution, 61, 63, make no attempt to render the nuances of this evolving political vocabulary.

51. . "Monggolcud tus ulus bayigulugsan ucir dörbe," Sin-e toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913), 40.

52. . For bükhü ulus, see the telegram from the Tibet and Mongolia Unification Assembly in Dindub, A Brief History of Mongolia in the Autonomous Period, 33; "Delekei degerki kümün-ü aju törükü-yin ucir-a," Sin-e toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913), 31; "Oros Monggol-un ger-e togtogagsan-u ucir-a," Sin-e toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913), 33. The final telegram in the telegram war has Bidan-u Monggol törül (our Mongolian stock/nationality) and busu törül (other stocks/nationalities); Dindub, A Brief History of Mongolia in the Autonomous Period, 51; Onon and Pritchatt, Asia's First Modern Revolution, 65.

53. . Dumdadu ulus: Dindub, A Brief History of Mongolia in the Autonomous Period, 37, 44 and "Khitad ulus Monggol ulus-aca salqu-ügei ucir gurba," Sin-e toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913), 37; khitad irgen ulus: Dindub, A Brief History of Mongolia in the Autonomous Period, 38; khitad-un dumdadu ulus: "Delekei degereki olan ulus-un neres inu," Sin-e toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913), 13; irgen ulus: "Oros Monggol-un ger-e togtogagsan-u ucir-a," Sin-e toli kemekü bicig 1 (20 Dec. 1913), 33.

54. . Mongol Ardyn Khuwisgalt Namyn tüükhen kholbogdokh barimt bichgüüd, vol. 1, 1920-1940 (Ulaanbaatar: State Publishing House, 1966), 7.

55. . Mongol Ardyn Khuwisgalt Namyn tüükhend kholbogdokh barimt bichgüüd, 1: 14, 16, 19.

56. . Mongol Ardyn Khuwisgalt Namyn tüükhend kholbogdokh barimt bichgüüd, 1: 14, 15.

57. . Mongol Ardyn Khuwisgalt Namyn tüükhend kholbogdokh barimt bichgüüd, 1: 13, 14.

58. . This elimination has left Mongolian historians and sinologists with the question of how to translate the Chinese idea of "Han," given that Khitad ulus now represents Zhongguo. The Mongolians could simply transcribe the term, but khan', the transcription resulting from the standard rules, is the same as the Mongolian word from "friendly," which hardly describes the Mongolians' sentiments towards the Han. Dropping the soft sign makes the Han Chinese China's Khan nationality, which has imperial and sovereign connotations the Mongolians equally dislike. No ready solution to this problem appears in sight.

59. . For an example of official usage of tabun törül, see Henry Serruys, "A Collective Letter of Protest by the Mongol Princes of Ordos, 1920," Oriens Extremus 23.2 (1976): 214, 219.

60. . Sayinjirgal and Sharaldai, eds., Isidandzanwangjil-un silüg-üd (Beijing: Nationalities Press, 1984), 8, 113.

61. . Henry Serruys, "Documents from Ordos on the 'Revolutionary Circles': Part II," Journal of the American Oriental Society 98.1 (1978): 12, 14. Note in his English translation Serruys has mistaken tabun ugsaa for a translation of Chinese wu fu or the five degrees of kinship.

62. . Daraq-a and Na. Dongrubdamba, eds., Gamala-yin silüg-üd (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolian People's Publishing House, 1987), 23-24. Elsewhere in popular songs of Inner Mongolia, the Chinese name of the Republic of China, Zhonghua minguo, was transcribed in this fashion; see Christopher Atwood, "National Party and Local Politics in Ordos, Inner Mongolia (1926-1935)," Journal of Asian History 26.1 (1992): 15-16.

63. . See, for example, a letter by the Khölön Buir politician Mersé in September 1928 in Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party Central Party Archives, 7-1-19: 25, which discusses strategies of this revolution, and the July 1929 pamphlet Kitad-un üiledbüricin tariyacin-u qubisqal ba. Dotogagdu Monggol-un arad tümen erke cilöge ba temecegsen qubisqal-un tuqai jarlan uqagulqu bicig (Dolonnuur, 1 July 1929), 5-6.

64. . Altan'orgil, Kökeqota-yin teüken monggol surbulji bicig, vol. 3, Anggi-yin qaricag-a (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, 1989), 511-12.

65. . Dotogadu Monggol-un arad-un qubisqaltu nam-un nigedüger yeke qural-aca olan tümen arad neyite-dür tungqaglan jalaqu bicig (Ulaanbaatar: Oros Monggol keblel-ün qoriy-a, Dec. 1925), 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, etc. We also see here the use of ijagurtan as "aristocrat" (3), thus eclipsing it as a term for the Mongol nationality.

66. . See, for example, Altan'orgil, Kökeqota-yin teüken monggol surbulji bicig, vol. 3, Anggi-yin qaricag-a, 528, 531. The same document also uses Dumdadu-yin irgen ulus (524), presumably by force of habit.

67. . See his autobiographical essay in Gereltü, Monggol jokiyalcid-un sigümji ögülel, 1721-1945, 344-46.

68. . Arad-un gurban jorilta-yin tobciy-a ögülel/San min zhuyi qianshuo (Beiping: Monggol bicig-ün qoriy-a/Mengwen shushe, Jan. 1, 1929).

69. . See, for example, the usage in Bökhekheshig's 1940 essay in Rincingawa, Monggol orcigulg-a-yin teüke-yin quriyanggui toyimu (Khökhekhota: Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, 1986), 138-40, and Sayaningbu, Sin-e Monggol (Zhangjiakou: Öbesüben jasaqu Monggol ulus-un aguu medügülel-un balagad, 1943), 10-11.

70. . See, for example, the petitions of November, 1945, in Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party Central Party Archives, 7-1-33, letter no. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. and BNKhAU-yn Öwör Mongolyn öörtöö zasakh oron (Ulaanbaatar, 1981), 45. "Ulus-un arad-un nam kiged eb qamtu-yin nam-un arad ugsagatan-u jasag-un bodolg-a," in Örlüge 2 (11 December 1945) is a discussion of nationality policy which commonly uses arad ugsaatan for "nationality." The same article also regularly uses Dumdadu ulus for China, which probably indicates the influence of the Communist minority policy extolled in these articles.

71. . There was apparently a small number of Mongolian-language books produced by Chinese Communists from Yan'an during World War Two. I have not seen any of them, but one title given in a survey of translations uses the word arad ugsaatan, a calque translation of minzu, in what is clearly a Communist work of this period; Rincingawa, Monggol orcigulg-a-yin teüke-yin quriyanggui toyimu, 141. This suggests that ündüsüten was not in vogue among communists before the end of World War Two.

72. . See the Mongolian language translation of the proceedings of the First Congress of the Federation of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Movement, the Communist front organization in Inner Mongolia, Dotogadu Monggol-un öbesüben jasaqu ködelgegen-ü qolbun neyileldügsen qural-un bayigulugsan yeke qural-un tusqai darumal (n.p., December 15, 1945), 1 and throughout.

73. . As in the fall 1927 manifesto of the Inner Mongolian Party, found in the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party Central Party Archives, 7-1-26: 70.

74. . Dotogadu Monggol-un Öbesüben jasaqu ködelgegen-ü qolbun neyileldügsen qural-un bayigulugsan yeke qural-un tusqai darumal, 1 and throughout.

75. . The lack of Mongolian-speaking Mongols in the Communist Party in 1945 was reflected in the clumsy and literal translations from Chinese. These translations also reflected official usage in the De Wang government in western Inner Mongolia, which differed somewhat from that current in eastern Inner Mongolia. As the Communists acquired more and better translators and shifted their base of operations east, the Party's official usage in Mongolian changed considerably. Thus the official 1945 translation of the Federation of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Movement was originally Dotoodu Monggol-un öbesüben jasakhu khödelgeen-ü kholbon neileldügsen khural. By 1947 and perhaps as early as 1946, this had been changed to Öbör Monggol-un öberteen jasakhu khödelgeen-ü kholbootu khural. This later usage, with Öbör Monggol (Southern Mongolia) for Dotoodu Monggol (Inner Mongolia) and öberteen jasakhu not öbesüben jasakhu for "autonomous," is that followed at present in Inner Mongolia.

76. . Prasenjit Duara, "De-constructing the Chinese Nation," The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 30 (1993): 1-26, especially 10-13.

77. . Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300, 9.

78. . See Pamela Kyle Crossley, "Thinking About Ethnicity in Early Modern China," Late Imperial China 11.1 (1990): 24-25. I have dealt with her arguments in "Revolutionary Nationalist Mobilization in Inner Mongolia, 1925-1929" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1994), 72, and more broadly, 33-90.

79. . Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 76-98, 326-37; Gladney, "The Ethnogenesis of the Uighur," Central Asian Survey 9.1 (1990): 1-28.

80. . See Gladney, Muslim Chinese, 66-74.