Elites in Between Ethnic Mongolians and the Han in China 39 Chelegeer Contents Introduction ...................................................................................... 696 MINZU in China at a Glance ................................................................ 696 Mongolian Elites Before 1949 .................................................................. 699 The Old Nobility ............................................................................. 700 From Old House to New Elite ............................................................... 702 Mongol MINZU from 1949 to 1979 ............................................................ 704 Economic and Cultural Reforming .......................................................... 705 MINZU as Social Transformation ........................................................... 707 Ongoing Generations from the 1980s ........................................................... 709 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 711 References ....................................................................................... 712 Abstract Whether an ethnicity or a nationality is a natural and historical entity with clear self-consciousness, or a constructed identity as one of the consequences of modernity, there are always academic debates in sociology. By concerning Mongolian elites, this chapter argues their essential role in interacting with Han, the dominant population of China, through history and informing their modern concept of MINZU. Indeed, this research is not taking Mongol as a group-in-itself but as a dynamic identity with constant changing. Keywords Mongolian elites · Inner Mongolia · MINZU · China · Ethnic identity Chelegeer (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 695 S. Ratuva (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2898-5_51 696 Chelegeer Introduction The intention of this chapter is to sketch how Mongolian elites had been and are now interacting with the majority Han of China through the history and in the context of today’s Chinese sovereignty. Mongol was once a federal community with conflicting clans, who were widely believed as barbarians and invaders to the Confucian culture. However, the recent elite politics reformed the pan-Mongol society into two major regimes: one republic state while the other one a province in China. Thereafter, the “Mongolians in China” had been constructed as an official notion of the Chinese MINZU category whose ethnic identity was classified and inherited restrict to law, and their history was a part of the history of China for its own sake. Scholars like Bulag (2002) believed the Mongolians in China could be a subject of postcolonial criticism, while this chapter would take a more neutral view to see the changes of Mongolian elites. Indeed, the departure point of this research is not taking Mongo- lians in China as a consistent group-in-itself but as choices made by certain people in the view of Brubaker (2006) and Song (2003), which may touch the debate on nationality being a historical and cultural entity or a modern creation. Dillon (2016) introduces that a popular stereotype in the West is that China is a single monoculture, populated entirely by a homogeneous Chinese population who all speak the same Chinese language and have a more or less uniform Chinese culture. The fact is that the People’s Republic of China today is founded by combining Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, and other ethnic areas together. Indeed, there are 55 national minorities with state-certificated communities of people and distinct languages, customs, economic lives, and psychological makeups in culture, whose autonomous habitats account for 64% of the country’s total land territory (Yi 2008). In other words, China is not and had never been a monoculture society. The various peoples of the MINZU category are believed that have been weaving intricate networks of conflict, interconnection, and influence over the entire Chinese history (Dreyer 1976; Heberer 1989). They are considered important for China, and studies on them could also be enlightening to the more general sociology on ethnic relationships around the world. MINZU in China at a Glance One may feel confused about studies on Chinese Mongolians or other minorities in China for there is even no consensus on what “China” means (Ge 2011;Bo2007). In fact, the Chinese language makes no difference between nation, nationality, minor- ity, ethnicity, and ethnos. A liquid situation of Chinese identity has explained that whoever believes in Confucianism and relative ethics could be considered as belonging to the Chinese cultural community, and this cosmopolitan ideology of “TianXia” has shaped the basic structure of Chinese worldviews throughout the history (Xu 2017). The modern concept of “nationality” was firstly introduced by Liang Qichao into the Chinese literature in 1899 (Huang 1995). Borrowed the term “MINZU” (民族) 39 Elites in Between Ethnic Mongolians and the Han in China 697 from Japanese, he initially called for protecting the Zhonghua MINZU and fighting against colonialism from the western powers. Soon afterward, the term was applied in complicated ways and referred to different entities. Sun Yat-sen considered Zhonghua MINZU a racial concept and expressed his ambition to found a pure nation-state with only the Han population in his Three People’s Principles, by saying “Qu Chu Da Lu” (驱除鞑虏). Here, “Qu Chu” meant “swiping out” and “Da Lu” mainly referred to Manchu and Mongol, who were not only the ruling ethnicities in Qing Dynasty but also the ones considered really different from Han and Zhonghua population. Soon after the successful revolt, he replaced the nationalism principle into “Wu Zu Gong He” (五族共和) which meant ruling a republic China with the cooperation of Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and Muslims for political purpose. Fur- thermore, Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, went opposite to classify minorities to avoid ethnic nationalism. Being backed by scholars like Fu Sinian and Gu Jiegang, he argued a theory of “Jie Yi Lei Shi de Hun Yin” (结以累世的婚姻) which stressed that even Mongolians, Manchu, and Tibetans were offspring of Chinese ancestors and their kinships, so that there should be a consensus of Zhonghua Unity for all of them. On the contrary, the Chinese Communist Party recognized the importance of identifying minorities and committing them with privileges. Chairman Mao stressed a “Political Model of Soviet Ethnicities” as the way to go against colonialism and hegemonism and the way to call for support from marginal areas of Han’s culture in his strategy of “encircling the cities.” The leader of the new sovereignty also tried to stop controversial discussions on the term “MINZU” by politically defining it as a description of various ethnicities of people came into being on a certain territory. In specific, all citizens in the People’s Republic of China were described as belonging to the Zhonghua MINZU Family under a common destiny, while the dominant population was named as “Han-MINZU” or just “Han” for short, and non-Hans were identified as “Shaoshu-MINZU” no matter they could be “minorities” to sociological and historical studies or “races” under the discourse of conflicts. Even “nationalism” in the worldwide had been translated into MINZUism (民族主义). Indeed, the wildly used Chinese term “MINZU” is a concept concealing complicated situations of ethnic groups in both academic and daily practice. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was an uncertain task to count how many MINZUs with how big populations were living in China. The census of 1953 focused on the question of MINZU as a fill-in-the-blank query wherein a registrant dictated survey objects’ MINZU name to the census taker, who then transcribed it into Chinese characters (Huang 1995). The census turned out more than 400 entries, which challenged the government for allocating seats of deputies for the National People’s Congress (Mullaney 2010). Since then, more than 200 historians and anthropologists of the China Academy of Sciences, associated with professors and students from the MINZU University and other institutes, and experts on music, art, and literature all worked together for recognizing and classifying ethnic minor- ities. Led by professors like Xiaotong Fei, Guangxue Huang, and Yaohua Lin, they were trying to convince whether some ethnic minorities could be branches of another one. 698 Chelegeer While Qin (2013) argued the classification process was not a formal mission released by the United Front Work Department, it was also not a simple scientific project for understanding the new state’s population. Quoted by Yaohua Lin, the research “must unite with politics, particularly with the problem of national secu- rity.” For example, in Leyao, local cadre Pan Demao stressed that the mass peasants there had no idea whether they belonged to Han, Zhuang, or others; however, they would be pleased to be identified as Yao for certain privileges, and so they did. Indeed, a willing principal was widely applied. In 1953, Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi confirmed that the government would respect personal rights that the process shall consult individual’s own pleasure whether he or she hoped to be identified as an ethnic or a Han; however, officials and scholars taken charge of the registration should not emphasize this principle