#62: Northwest China
15 October 2002
As my train rolled into Hohhot, I wandered if I have mistakenly gotten onto a train to Beijing or Shanghai. Here in Hehehaote (Chinese name for Hohhot), capital of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia (officially known as “Nei Menggu Autonomous Region” although some can argue as to how much real autonomy it enjoys), one is greeted by a forest of skyscrapers, gigantic shopping malls and zillions of bright shiny neon lights, advertising anything from mobile phones to holidays in Southeast Asia (the latest craze among China’s 150 million-strong middle class is vacations in what they call the “Xin-Ma-Tai” travel route, referring to a standard tour to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand).
I had expected to arrive at a backward, dusty capital of one of China’s poorest provinces. Instead, Timbucktu has turned into Las Vegas in the last decade of China’s mad rush to economic prosperity and development.
Entering China again is most refreshing since my last visit in 1997. Drastic changes have taken place in China in the 15 years from my first visit in 1987. No longer a poor, primitive and suspicious Communist state, but a confident, emerging economic superpower with a huge middle class that aspires and can afford the best things in life – certainly a capitalist and class society that still pretends to be classless and socialist. (There is still a large poor rural population, but there was no real middle class previously.)
The new economic prosperity is self evident – even supposedly poor Inner Mongolia (poor in terms of provincial ranking in China) beats Russia, where I had spent the preceding 2 months, in many ways: Well-dressed people; happy faces; well-stocked supermarkets and department stores with good quality goods at low prices; cheap and good food, plus variety to win your hearts – and the shop attendants who actually smile and want to do business; taxis with meters; policemen who treat tourists with courtesy; and simple, plain law and order. These are things you would expect in any normal country, but they are hardly present even in the most important Russian cities like Moscow or St Petersburg. The Russians love to complain that Chinese merchants sell them low-quality goods, but Chinese traders I have met have argued that the Russians couldn’t afford the better quality stuff one sees in all the department stores across China. This is a pity, as Russia began the 1990s with a better footing than China, and the former is a country with a lot of well-educated people and a sophisticated level of technological development. Maybe Putin can do some good going forward.
Inner Mongolia’s broad grasslands stretch along the southern and eastern edges of independent Mongolia, with a section straddling across an awkward bend of the Yellow River, the “Mother River” of Chinese civilization. This, once known as Chahar and Suiyan, too, was once the grazing ground for Genghis Khan’s ferocious nomadic cavalry. Its fate became separate from that of central Mongolia (i.e., independent Mongolia today) when its princes joined the Manchurians in the latter’s conquest of China in the 17th century.
With the establishment of the Qing (or Manchu) Dynasty in China, the southern Mongolian princes of Chahar and Suiyan joined the new Manchurian Chinese Empire, with promises from the Manchus that their ancestral lands would be inviolable from Han Chinese settlement. They even joined the Manchus in the Manchu conquest of central Mongolia – why not? After all, they were marching against their historical enemies, the Khalka tribes in what is today Mongolia.
However, the Manchus did not keep to their bargain. When the pressure of peasant rebellions became too great in the 19th century, they opened Inner Mongolia to the landless Han farmers in China proper. Millions of farmers flooded across the great plains, in an exodus not too different from America’s move to the West, or the Russian settlement of Siberia, during the same period – the guys I met on the train from Ulaan Baatar to Hohhot were all fifth-generation Han Chinese in Inner Mongolia. In 1911, when central Mongolia (Tibet too did the same thing at the same time) declared independence from China in the wake of the chaos that engulfed China following the Republican Revolution, Inner Mongolia’s demographic landscape has already changed forever.
Tsarist Russia and the new Republican Government of China agreed to allow “temporary autonomy” (which of course became permanent) of central or “Outer Mongolia”, while keeping Inner Mongolia Chinese. After 1949, the Communists accelerated settlement from other parts of China, but this was merely continuing the process that has already taken place well before they came to power. Today, only 3 million out of the 30 million inhabitants of Inner Mongolia are ethnic Mongols.
The cities of Inner Mongolia today are no different from those in other parts of China. There are, however, nominal symbols of its autonomous status, in particular the use of bilingual signboards everywhere, i.e., Chinese and Mongolian, the latter in classical script, which is written vertically. Ironically, independent Mongolia uses the Cyrillic script, which was imposed by Stalin during the period of domination by the USSR, which began at independence (which in reality was only in name) till the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
The only other indication that Inner Mongolia was once linked to the independent Mongolian state are the names of businesses and brand names of local products – names such as Pastures, Genghis Khan, Mongol Khan, Horses and other symbols of the Mongolian plains that fire Chinese popular imagination. Airag, the Mongolian fermented mare’s milk, and arkhi, the Mongolian milky vodka (which are available in Mongolia only from countryfolk selling them from barrels alongside highways), have been beautifully packaged here in China with extravagant images of Mongolian herdsmen and iconology, Chinese style, that is. These fanciful products are aimed at a few free-spending Japanese tourists as well as vast number (and fast-growing) ranks of domestic tourists from among China’s new middle class. They come here to see the pastures and pasture life.
There are few gers (Mongolian tents, known as Menggu Bao in Chinese and gers in Mongolian) in the open plains here in Inner Mongolia, but tourists camps have been set up for these tourists. They are run like theme parks, Chinese style. 11am is Mongolian wrestling time, 1pm Mongolian concert, 2pm archery and 3 pm horse riding. Welcome to Inner Mongolia, China! Chinese commercial acumen has brought Mongolian culture into the world of Wal-Mart and Walt Disney.
