Return to China's Northern Frontier

Abstract

This lecture will be an unavoidably inadequate attempt to report, in one hour, on a visit to Chi a that took two full months?September and October, 1972?and covered an enormous sweep of territory. The initiative came from the Chinese side, and so when the discussion of plans reached the question of where I would like to go, I asked for the whole strip of frontier territory between China and the Soviet Union (at the western and eastern ends) and the People's Republic of Mongolia (in the centre). As a good ten years of my life had been devoted to travel and study in these territories, the Chinese cordially assented. I do not want to claim to have broken entirely new ground; although these territories have been closed to foreign visitors for some years, there were several visitors in 1972?though none, I think, who had known them well before. Nor shall I have anything to say that is sensational. We were not taken up to any frontiers strung with barbed wire, to look at sentries staring eyeball to eyeball at their opposite numbers on the Soviet or Mongolian side. What we saw was the general condition of China's northern frontier, after the Great Cultural Revolution. My previous visit to China had been a very short one?the last week of 1945 and the first week of 1946, 26 years ago. After this long interval I got the full shock of contrast and, as I had expected, this was very revealing, but it was not totally illuminating, because I quickly realized that there were many things I would have understood better if I had also seen the intervening stages. We were a small party. I had with me my Japanese research associate, Mrs. Fujiko Isono, and my 20-year old grandson, Michael, who made a documentary film as we went along. Mrs. Isono is primarily a Mongolist, but she is also competent in Chinese. There were several touching incidents when a woman, after a little conversation, would suddenly say to her, 'My husband [or my father, or my brother] was killed by the Japanese, but I know the difference between the Japanese people and Japanese militarism, and I hold nothing against you.' The Chinese were also especi? ally kind to my grandson. In spite of revolution and changes in the family system, some old ideas linger, and when told that he was the fourth generation of my family to visit China, they responded warmly. In the days when I was travelling in the frontier regions, in the 1920s and 1930s, relations between the Chinese and the minority peoples could hardly have been worse. A particularly ruthless form of exploitation was the seizure of land by Chinese provincial warlords, in order to plant Chinese farming colonies, and the driving out of Mongol herdsmen as, in North America, the white man drove out the Indian. Today, the changes can be called truly revolutionary. In Sinkiang, only uninhabited land that can be brought under cultivation by irrigation is taken ^ Professor Owen Lattimore, Gold Medalist of the Society, founded the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds in 1963 and introduced Mongolian Studies there in 1968. He is Honorary Life President of the Anglo-Mongolian Society. This paper was delivered as a lecture at an evening meeting ofthe Society on 5 February 1973.