The “political game” and “state-building”: outer Mongolia during the 1911 Revolution

Abstract

Editors’ introduction. Frontier studies have long been a sensitive area for historical research in the PRC, largely because of the demands for increasing autonomy in Tibet and Xinjiang-movements that are regarded as “separatist” by the authorities. This sensitivity makes the study of the 1911 Revolution on the frontier particularly difficult, because it was precisely in 1911 that independence movements manifested themselves in Tibet and Mongolia. Both of these regions had been incorporated into the Qing empire, whose emperors acted as patrons of the Tibetan Buddhism revered by Tibetans andMongols alike. InMongolia, the Qing court confirmed the status of Mongols nobles, and intermarried with the families of Mongol princes. But the 1911 Revolution created a secular republic, which made these religious and feudal ties difficult to maintain. More importantly, the revolution was launched with an overtly Han nationalist agenda to “expel the northern barbarians, restore China” that left little political space for the political aspirations of other nationalities. As a result, both Tibet and Outer Mongolia declared independence after the Wuchang Uprising. In this chapter, Feng Jianyong explores the impact of the 1911 Revolution onMongolia. He uses the same three-cornered chess-match (boyi) metaphor that we saw in Chapter 3 to analyze the competition for influence in the region among the Chinese central government, Outer Mongolia, and the Russian empire. Feng’s analysis is notable for the attention it gives to the national aspirations of Mongol elites, rejecting prior research that has regarded the Mongols as little more than unwitting tools of meddling Russian imperialists. While it is true that, after the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union became a sponsor of Mongolia’s independence, Feng notes that, in the period after 1911, Czarist Russia only supported Mongolian autonomy under a loose and illdefined Chinese suzerainty. By taking seriously the political goals of Mongol princes and lamas, he is able to explore the links between the state-building process in the early Republic of China and in Outer Mongolia.