Mongolia: Target or Screen?

Abstract

THE irresistible pressure of historical development is making Mongolia into a new focus of danger to the peace of the world, and the enhanced importance of the country emphasizes the lack of authoritative and easily accessible information about it.1 The peaceful land of the Mongols, the remnant of the empire of the great Chinghis Khan, became relatively stagnant after the short-lived glory of the Mongol rule over China, which ended in the fourteenth century, and from the eighteenth century to the twentieth the Mongols were content with the primitive existence of nomads. Their pastoral life was gradually modified in certain respects, notably because long-range migration had become impossible after the solidification of the Russian Empire and of the Manchu Empire in China, but on the whole they were practically untouched by the high-speed machine civilization which began to spread out from Western Europe and America in the nineteenth century. They were separated from too close a contact with Russia, in the north and west, by the relative emptiness of the vast spaces of Siberia. Outer Mongolia was divided from both Inner Mongolia and China by the uninviting Gobi, and Inner Mongolia, though it adjoined China, was yet separated from it by a climatic boundary, north of which conditions were not suited to Chinese colonization on a large scale until railway communication increased the range and speed of trade. During the nineteenth century, while other countries were developing communications by rail and by sea, Mongolia lost even the contacts which it had once had with