The Mongols at China's Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (review)

Several years ago I attended the taping of the annual New Year’s show at the main TV studio in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. As with all such ritualized productions it was filled with over-the-top ethnic kitsch and paeans to national unity, or minzu tuanjie. The show thus followed Stalin’s nationality policies and presented happy dancing and singing Mongols beaming under the beneficent gaze of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet in the midst of this outrageously mawkish display, a group of local Tibetans took the stage. Rather than don the apparently de rigueur sequined, Liberace-inflected ethnic garb worn by the Mongols, the Tibetans wore their own dirty and tattered “street clothes.” Not only did this clearly go against the highly manipulated production values of the show, but, even more disconcertingly, the Tibetans came out loud and proud. It caused a sensation. In particular, it brought to the fore the problem of the “Mongol malaise” in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—namely, “had we sold out”? This feeling surfaced again a few weeks later when the United States bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Many Mongols wondered wistfully whether Bill Clinton would rain down U.S. air power on China in order to save the Mongols, much as he had done to save the A-la-ba-nian minzu from their Serb oppressors.

In many ways it is questions and contradictions like these that Uradyn E. Bulag tries to elucidate in his most recent work. In particular, through a series of chapter case studies, he investigates the history and ongoing process wherein the Mongols have tried to maintain their “Mongolness,” while at the same time becoming inalienable subjects of the Chinese nation. What gives this book such weight is that Bulag approaches these issues not as another postcolonial “intervention” but rather from the standpoint of a moral imperative. As he notes in the introduction, these issues “haunt” him. In fact, the tensions of writing from exile about his own “diminishing” culture is at times almost too overwhelming. He even ponders abandoning it altogether. Fortunately for us, however, he, like a good young pioneer, presses on and offers us a powerful and theoretically sophisticated study driven by the question, “How can we construct an ethnopolitics in which democracy, civil rights, representation, and equality need not hinge on the moral authority of the ‘Chinese Nation’?” (21).

Bulag does not necessarily answer this question, though in his quest he offers us a detailed rich history of Chinese ethnopolitics embedded within a stunning array of theoretical speculation on issues of identity, ethnicity, nationalism, and political representation. Bulag is indeed a master of the theoretical bon mots, even though at times one can wonder whether the proverbial theoretical cart is driving the lowly horse of facts. This is especially the case when he goes off the postmodern deep end, or into the realm of Madhyamika epistemology (take your pick), and readily asserts “truth is always relational.” Nevertheless, one of Bulag’s best chapters, the fourth, is when he actually uses the case of Inner Mongolia in order to critique postcolonial theory, especially its claims for the subaltern. Paralleling Dorothy Figuera’s observation that the only Brahmans left are those stalking the halls of Western academia, Bulag notes that representing the subaltern is often a self-empowering discourse, and this is a problem that relates to the enormous contradictions between class and ethnicity in Inner Mongolia, where the Chinese majority have become the subaltern, disenfranchised by the “landowning” Mongol minority.

Yet beyond this theoretical intervention the bulk of Bulag’s work revolves around the historiography of Sino-Mongol relations and the attendant ritualizations of the state fostering the Mongols’ incorporation within the Chinese geobody. Within five chapters Bulag provides us with a great wealth of new and fascinating material. In chapter 2, for example, he explores the gendered discourse framing the relations between the Chinese...