Inner Mongolian Nationalism in the 1920s: A Survey of Documentary
Information 1
by Christopher P. Atwood
The writing of local history of Republican China has undergone a dramatic efflorescence
in the 1980s and 1990s, an efflorescence assisted in large part by the publication of a wide
variety of local historical materials in the People's Republic of China. The contemporary local
historical material, much of it presented in the form of "raw" oral history, supplies vivid
anecdotes and personal-seeming memoirs that are an immediately attractive database for
historians seeking to supplement the often vague and general accounts existing in previous
Western-language literature. 2 Roxann Prazniak's Of Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural
Rebels against Modernity in Late Imperial China3 for example, has attempted to tell the
history of the New Policies "from below" by relying heavily on the wenshi ziliao [Cultural and
Historical Materials] series published for every administrative unit above the county in China.
The importance of these newly published materials has been particularly great for the study of
China's border regions, such as Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, where documentation of
twentieth-century political history has always been particularly hard to come by. Thus Melvyn
1
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Conference on Mongolian Archival Sources, 24-25 October
1997, in Tokyo. I would like to thank Nakami Tatsuo, Tsedendambyn Batbayar, and Futaki Hiroshi for their helpful
comments on the earlier version of this paper, and Stephen C. Averill, and the anonymous reviewer for Twentieth
Century China, for their valuable suggestions. Research for this paper was supported in part by a grant from the
International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the United States Information Agency, and the U.S. Department of State, which administers the Russian,
Eurasian, and East European Research Program (Title VIII).
2
The best survey of local historiography, with an excellent discussion of the various types of materials on the
Republican period being produced, is Søren Clausen and Stig Thøgersen, The Making of a Chinese City: History
and Historiography in Harbin (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995).
3
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
Goldstein's A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State,4 updating
traditional accounts of Tibetan history previously told from a British perspective, Masami
Hamada's exploration of the transmission of nationalism to Xinjiang,5 and Paul Nietupski 's
notes on the rule of the Alo family in Labrang monastery in Gansu 6 all rely heavily on the
"Cultural and Historical Materials" series and memoirs of party-historical figures.
In the field of Inner Mongolian history from 1900-1949 any additional material would
seem all the more desirable, as the existing Western-language literature has been based on little
or no written Mongolian-language documentation. Until quite recently, virtually all the
published studies in English, such as Owen Lattimore's influential Mongols of Manchuria,7
Robert Rupen's Mongols of the Twentieth Century,8 the numerous studies of Jagchid Sechin
and Paul Hyer,9 or Michael Underdown's study of Demchugdongrub's autonomy movement, 10
have been based on a combination of journalistic accounts, interviews, or contemporary consular
reports, with only a smattering of documents from public conferences. Moreover, the vast
majority of the journalistic or contemporary historical accounts stem from accounts first penned
either by Chinese, or Russian, or Japanese observers and participants in the events. This former
emphasis on non-Mongolian sources in the English-language scholarship reached the point
where the historian Robert B. Valliant, who worked primarily from Japanese sources on Inner
4
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Masami Hamada, "La transmission du movement nationaliste au Turkestan oriental (Xinjiang)" [The Transmission
of the Nationalist Movement to Eastern Turkestan or Xinjiang] Central Asian Survey 9 (1990): 29-48.
6
Paul Kocot Nietupski, Labrang: A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery at the Crossroads of Four Civilizations (Ithaca:
Snow Lion Publications, 1999), 81-101.
7
New York: 1934 (NY reprint, H. Fertig, 1969).
8
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).
9
Sechin Jagchid and Paul Hyer, Mongolia's Culture and Society (Boulder: Westview Press, 1979); Paul Hyer
and Sechin Jagchid, A Mongolian Living Buddha· Biography of the Kanjurwa Khutughtu (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1983); Sechin Jagchid, Essays in Mongolian Studies (Provo, UT: David M.
Kennedy Center for International Studies, 1988), pp. 207-95.
10
"De Wang's Independent Mongolian Republic," Papers on Far Eastern History 40 (1990): 123-32.
5
Mongolia, wrote of this period that "The Mongols themselves left nothing in writing."11 If this
were so, the memoirs of Inner Mongolian political events so assiduously collected in the PRC
would seem to be a most valuable unexploited resource for a richer understanding of Mongolian
history in the late Qing and Republican periods.
Archival documentation is crucial, however, for a detailed examination of the reliability
of the oral historical material published in China. For many areas in Chinese Inner Asia, archival
corroboration is hard to find because of limitations on access to archival materials. For Inner
Mongolia, however, a unique source of archival material became available in the late 1980s,
with the transition of the Mongolian government to a democracy. Those working in Mongolian
archives, including Urgunge Onon and Mei-hua Lan, have already shown the wealth of
Mongolian language documents on the 1911 restoration of Mongolian independence.12 Such a
record continues for the period up to 1930, as Inner Mongolian nationalists looked to
Ulaanbaatar for support, and criss-crossed the frontier seeking to extend the Mongolian
revolution to Inner Mongolia. From 1924 to 1928 also, the Mongolian government sent several
missions to China to open relations with both the Beijing government and the Nationalist Party
(Guomindang) regime in the south. As a result of these contacts, the Central Historical Archives
of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party in Ulaanbaatar contain a wide variety of
documents relating to Inner Mongolia in the 1920s, a few in Chinese, but the vast majority in
Mongolian. Access to these documents, while not completely free, was relatively open in the
11
"Inner Mongolia 1912: The Failure of Independence," Mongolian Studies 4 (1977): 56-92, especially, p. 86.
A valuable collection of Mongolian archival sources on the 1911 restoration of Mongolian independence has
been already published in Mongolyn ard tümnii 1911 ony ündesnii erkh chӧlӧӧ, tusgaar togtnolyn tӧlӧӧ temtsel:
barimt bichgiin emkhtgel (1900-1914) [The Mongolian people's struggle in 1911 for national liberation and
independence: a collection of documents, 1900-1914] (Ulaanbaatar: State Publishing House, 1982), and they have
been the object of fresh archival-based exploration in Urgunge Onon and Derrick Pritchatt, Asia's First Modern
Revolution: Mongolia Proclaims Its Independence in 1911 (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1989) and Mei- hua Lan, "The
Mongolian Independence Movement of 1911: A Pan-Mongolian Endeavor," Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard
University, 1996.
12
period 1991-92 when I was in Mongolia, and they supplied a dramatic contrast to the picture of
Inner Mongolian nationalism presented even by the seemingly primary-source material
published in the PRC.
The comparison of archives from Mongolia and memoirs and documents published in the
PRC show, as one might expect, that the supposedly unedited local historical materials have in
fact been pervasively re-edited to match the current historical narrative demanded in China. The
same can also be said of the much more limited materials published by the small Mongol
community on Taiwan. Various examples of these distortions will be offered below, but the
overall distortion lies in the false impression that pan-Mongolism—the idea that Inner
Mongolia and Mongolia proper (or Outer Mongolia) ought to be united in one fully sovereign
state—was a minority viewpoint, somewhat marginal to the more important point of division
that was created by the internal Chinese political division between the Chinese Communist and
the Nationalist parties. In reality, the real divisions among Inner Mongolian nationalists came
mostly from regional differences within Inner Mongolia, and pan-Mongolism was the only idea
held in common by all the revolutionary factions. It was the divisions of the Han Chinese
Communists and Nationalists which were in fact peripheral, although not entirely unimportant,
in the political life of the Inner Mongols. The virtual elimination of pan-Mongolism from the
contemporary PRC and Taiwanese picture of 1920s revolutionary activity is achieved not
only by selective emphasis and omission of persons and incidents, but also often enough by
outright falsification of the facts presented and the distorting inclusion of irrelevant persons,
incidents, and materials derived from the "master narrative" of party history.
Although these conclusions should not be surprising, they do bear repeating, given that
such PRC materials comprise the bulk of published source materials on Inner Mongolian
history available to researchers in Europe and America today. Such materials are, for those
who cannot control them with more-or-less freely-accessed archival sources, extremely
hazardous even for basic factual data, and totally unreliable when used to address the larger
issues of interpretation in Inner Mongolian political history. The aim of this paper is thus twofold: first, to assist those who can read Mongolian to access the archival sources by surveying
the type and nature of documents available on Inner Mongolian nationalism from 1921 to
1931, and second, to illustrate in some detail with the available documentary sources the
serious problems with much of the historical literature being published since 1979 in the PRC
on Inner Mongolia, and by implication elsewhere in China.
I.THE PEOPLE'S REVOLUTIONARY PARTY O F INNER MONGOLIA.
The focus of my research in Mongolia was on the history of those movements which
were eventually merged by the Comintern into the People's Revolutionary Party of Inner
Mongolia (PRPIM). This party had great significance, not so much for what it achieved—in
the end it achieved very little—but for the training and common experience it gave to a
generation of politically active Mongols.13
From 1924 to 1932, Inner Mongolia was situated in between two different revolutions:
the national revolution of China's Guomindang to the south and the revolution for Mongolian
independence led by the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party to the north. For those Inner
13
Documentation and a more extensive history of the People's Revolutionary Party may be found in Christopher P.
Atwood, "Revolutionary Nationalist Mobilization in Inner Mongolia, 1925-1929," Ph. D. dissertation, Indiana
University, 1994; Idem, "A Buriat Agent in Inner Mongolia: A.I. Oshirov (c. 1901-1931)," in Opuscula Altaica, ed.
Edward H. Kaplan and Donald W. Whisenhunt (Bellingham, WA: Center for East Asian Studies, 1994), 44-93; and
Idem, "National Party and Local Politics in Ordos, Inner Mongolia (1926-1935)," Journal of Asian History 20
(1992): 1-30.
Mongols who sought to abolish the archaic feudal system and achieve self-determination, the
two, whether in cooperation or conflict, formed differing models. Beyond both, however, lay the
ultimate revolutionary influence of the Soviet Union, which proclaimed that it had successfully
solved the questions both of internal reaction and foreign imperialism.
In 1924, when the Guomindang (GMD), the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party
(MPRP) and the Communist International (Comintern) all turned their eyes to Inner Mongolia,
many locally based revolutionary movements vied for the attention of these foreign patrons. The
alliance of these three patrons enabled the Comintern to force these local groups into a broad
coalition of Inner Mongolian revolutionaries, in the form of the People's Revolutionary Party of
Inner Mongolia (PRPIM), an alliance completed only on the eve of the party's first congress
(convened at Zhangjiakou on 13 October 1925). For two years the party struggled to build up a
political and military force capable of sweeping away the system of hereditary nobility and
replacing it with an elected all-Inner Mongolian government. The party worked under a security
umbrella provided by the Citizen Army (Guominjun) of General Feng Yuxiang, an ally of the
Soviet Union, and was able to put its supporters in effective control of several local governments,
especially in the western part of Inner Mongolia. The turn to military struggle made the party's
Central Committee dependent on Feng's headquarters, though, and became more questionable as
the revolutionary coalition's arch-enemy Zhang Zuolin drove the Citizen Army out of more and
more of Inner Mongolia. When the party center arrived in Ningxia in January 1927, and found its
influence in the Mongolian banners checked by the Citizen Army officers themselves, major
disputes arose in the Inner Mongolian party about the usefulness of Feng’s support.
In August 1927, at a Special Congress in Ulaanbaatar, this dispute about the usefulness of
alliance with Feng Yuxiang was swallowed up by an ideological split as the Comintern
representative forced the party left and elected a new Central Committee. As a result, the party
split into pro- and anti-Comintern factions, each proclaiming itself truly revolutionary and each
vying for the support of the MPRP in Ulaanbaatar. During the following year, 1928, as the
MPRP, along with the whole international Communist movement, was forced radically left, most
of the surviving areas of local party influence were destroyed, first by local resistance in Ordos
(southwestern Inner Mongolia) to coercion from the anti-Comintern faction, and second by illconceived insurrections in Khӧlӧn Buir and Urad sponsored by the pro-Comintern faction.
Meanwhile, the anti-Comintern Central Committee that had reorganized in Ningxia was finally
merged into the Chinese GMD, which vetoed any plan for Inner Mongolian autonomy as it swept
north from its bases in South and Central China. By the beginning of 1929, the remaining PRPIM
was a fully Communist-style party with its Central Committee in Mongolia's capital Ulaanbaatar
and its members in Inner Mongolia scattered in underground cells with little influence.
The PRPIM, now purged of most of its original leadership, pursued a policy of
underground party-building combined with a fierce ideological sectarianism that denounced as
frauds all Inner Mongols working legally. The Chinese National Government's purge of
Communists continued, and many PRPIM members were arrested as well. The strategy of
leaving the party's central organs safe in Ulaanbaatar while pursuing quiet, long-term infiltration
in Inner Mongolia was finally destroyed after only three years by the growing defensiveness and
suspicion of the Mongolian government and its Soviet patron. This suspicion was heightened by
the new Mongolian regime's loss of popularity in the fiasco of collectivization and by the
increasing aggressiveness first of China, and then Japan. This defensiveness meant that contacts
between Mongolia and Inner Mongolia were viewed ever more suspiciously.
As a result, in 1931 many of the party's youthful elements were arrested in a purge of
alleged Guomindang and Japanese spies. At the same time the Comintern essentially gave up
on the idea of an Inner Mongolian national revolution and promoted the merging of the existing
PRPIM organization in Inner Mongolia into an inter-ethnic struggle led by the Chinese
Communist Party. Most Inner Mongolian cells rejected this approach, however. Combined with
the step by step Japanese occupation from 1931 on, Inner Mongolian national revolutionary
movement entered a new period of isolation and persecution, combined with a creative
rethinking of the fundamental issues of Inner Mongolian politics.
The demands of the Inner Mongolian nationalists reflected the disintegration of the Qingdynasty system of conservative autonomy for Inner Mongolia, and its replacement by one of
simultaneous integration and marginalization following the New Policies from 1901 on. Under
the Qing, members of the Mongolian banners followed distinct career paths that did not intersect
at all with those of either the Chinese subjects or the garrison bannermen of China proper. The
New Policies, however, encouraged institutional and educational reform that developed a new
cadre of Inner Mongolian bureaucrats and politicians whose career paths followed those of other
Chinese professionals and politicians of the period: schooling in north Chinese cities and then, for
the most wealthy or gifted, in Japan; followed by employment in agencies created by the New
Policies institutional reforms, or the Chinese Parliament, and/ or professional associations.14 The
Mongols of eastern Inner Mongolia, and the Kharachin banners in particular, dominated these
new schools and the employment opportunities that arose from them.
This integration, however, contrasted with marginalization as the Mongolian banners'
land-rights were nullified by the administrative decisions of the New Policies and the
succeeding Republican government. In some areas, such as the Kharachin area of southeast
14
The career patterns and generational shifts are very close to those analyzed for Chinese bureaucrats and
politicians in Andrew J. Nathan, Peking Politics, 1918-1923: Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973), 8-13.
Inner Mongolia, Mongol landlords were able to sustain their position over their Han Chinese
tenants. Other pastoral areas with politically well-connected leaders, such the Kheshigten,
Chakhar, and Khorchin Left Flank banners, were also able to use their Beijing connections to
resist colonization, to a greater or lesser degree. Elsewhere, both to the east and to the west,
government-supported colonization provoked numerous rebellions. Inner Mongolian
populations, particularly those in the western part of Inner Mongolia, were increasingly
restricted to barren, semi-desert pastures. Here the educational policies of the New Policies had
no impact. Thus, while the New Policies integrated some Inner Mongols in the southeast into
the Chinese state as landlords and local officials pursuing educational and political opportunities
in Beijing, most of the others regions were integrated into China as impoverished animalproducts suppliers.
In the western areas, particularly in Ordos and Urad, in the great bend of the Yellow
River, the advance of colonization and the forced retreat of the Mongols into semi-desert
pastures brought about a condition of virtual anarchy, in which the traditional banner yamens
were too financially paralyzed to protect the bannermen from attacks by bandits based in
neighboring Han Chinese and Hui counties and local Mongol strongmen fought for dominance
over the banners. To resist the yamens' acquiescence to colonization, banditry, and the rule of
strongmen, the bannermen in Ordos organized duguilangs or "circles," a form of vigilante
organization. The Inner Mongolian party from 1926 on found these duguilangs to be an easily
adaptable form of rural party organization. The difference in educational background, however,
created strong tensions in the long run.
The Russian-financed and operated Chinese Eastern Railway created a special situation in
far northeast Inner Mongolia, called Khӧlӧn Buir or Bargu. The railway facilitated a flourishing
animal products trade, mostly of wool and skins for the American market, and meat and live
animals for the local urban market. This trade in turn strengthened the economic position of the
Daurs, who built on their traditionally dominant official position in the banner hierarchy to make
themselves middlemen for the trade. Like the Kharachin, Kheshigten, Chakhar and Khorchin
Left-Flank Mongols of southeast Inner Mongolia, they also took advantage of the educational
opportunities in neighboring Chinese cities, but were never as deeply involved in Beijing politics
as those from southeast Inner Mongolia were. From 912 to 1920, the region had been
autonomous from China and closely allied to the theocratic government in Khalkha Mongolia.
Nationalist or secessionist movements in Inner Mongolia thus followed a similar pattern
j
.
.
.
.
.
to those in China's other Inner Asian territories. We can see two processes—traditional elites
seeking foreign power patronage and new modes of education producing "enlightenment"oriented elites—producing two distinct types of nationalist movements, each based in different
regions, or occasionally occurring successively in the same region. These correspond roughly to
the "aristocratic" and the "bourgeois" types of nationalism in Peter Sugar's typology, as long as it
is understood that bourgeois refers here not to owners of industrial or financial enterprises but
rather to teachers, students, caravan traders, and/or wealthy peasants.15
Externally supported secession led by traditional elites aimed to preserve social
hierarchies threatened by the New Policies and the Republican revolution. These movements
occurred on the borders of rival states: Russia's in Khalkha and Khӧlӧn Buir in Mongolia,
Britain's in Central Tibet on the Tibetan plateau, and Khokand's in Xinjiang's Kashgaria.16 The
15
Peter F. Sugar, "External and Domestic Roots of Eastern European Nationalism," in Nationalism in Eastern
Europe, ed. Peter F. Sugar and Ivo J. Lederer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 46-54. The
absence of significant bourgeois (understood in the Marxist sense as industrialists and financiers) support for
nationalist movements even in Europe is one of the maj6r conclusions of Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of
National Revival in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 133-36.
16
On Mongolia, see Urgunge Onon and Derrick Pritchatt, Asia's First Modern Revolution, and Melvyn Goldstein,
A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951. On Khokand and Kashgaria, see Saguchi Tӧru, "Revival of the White
other type, or 'bourgeois' movements, focused on "enlightenment" and the assimilation of modern
ideas. In Mongolia, southeast Inner Mongolia and Khӧlӧn Buir were the primary centers; in the
Tibetan lands, the areas of Batang and Litang in Khams and of Labrang in Amdo; in Xinjiang, the
Ili valley.17 In Khalkha Mongolia, where the Soviets in 1921 came to power in probably the least
"enlightened" areas of the plateau, an enlightenment movement had to be jump-started, largely
with the use of Southeast Inner Mongolian, Khӧlӧn Buir, and Russian Buriat modernizers.
The result of these regional patterns in China's border lands is that all three regions lacked
any unified nationalist movement. In particular, enlightenment nationalists, such as those of
eastern Inner Mongolia, did not have much common ground with popularly-based movements,
such as the duguilang movements in Ordos in the isolated west. This regionally-based
factionalism could only be overcome by the Comintern using its power to dispense material aid.
In this sense the history of the People's Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia closely parallels
Arif Dirlik's emphasis on the vital role of the organizational unity supplied by Soviet agents in
the development of the Chinese Communist Party. What the Comintern brought was not some
attractive doctrine, whether class conflict or "national self-determination," but a promise of
material aid and an insistence on organizational unity.18
At the same time, the Comintern repeatedly hesitated over allowing this aid to be
channeled through the Mongolian People's Republic. The chief Comintern agent for East Asia as
Mountain Khwājas, 1760-1820 (from Sarimsāq to Jihāngār)," Acta Asiatica 14 (1968): 7-20; Idem, "Kashgaria,"
Acta Asiatica 34 (1978): 61-78; and Kim Ho-dong, "The Muslim Rebellion and the Kashghar Emirate in Chinese
Central Asia, 1864-1877," Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1986.
17
On Tibet, see Heather Stoddard, Le mendiant de l'Amdo [The Beggar of Amdo] (Paris: Société d'ethnographie,
1985) and "The Long Life of rDo-sbis dGe-bšes, Ses-rab rGya-mcho (1884-1968)," in Tibetan Studies:
Proceedings of the 4th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, ed. Helga Uebach and
Jampa L. Panglung, (Munich, Kommission für Zentralasiatische studien, 1988), 465-71, and Nietupski, Labrang.
On Xinjiang, see Masami Hamada, "La transmission du movement nationaliste au Turkestan oriental (Xinjiang)"
cited above, and Justin Jon Rudelson, Oasis Identities: Uyghur Nationalism along China's Silk Road (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997).
18
Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (New York: Oxford University Press 1989).
a whole, Grigorii N. Voitinskii, in July, 1925, and the Soviet Politburo in September, 1928, both
tried to have Inner Mongolian activities placed directly under Chinese parties (the GMD in the
first case and the CCP in the second). In both cases those more closely involved were able to
override these decisions only by pointing out the Chinese parties' demonstrable weakness among
the Mongols in Inner Mongolia.19
At the same time, participation in the Inner Mongolian nationalist movement gave the
revolutionaries an increasing sense of trans-regional unity. The writings of the time show a deep
concern among party leaders like Mersé, a Daur from Khӧlӧn Buir, and among the "young
Mongols" (the post-1900 generation) from a wide variety of backgrounds to re-imagine Mongolia
as a national community in Benedict Anderson's sense.20 Particularly those born after 1900
showed a significantly greater degree of inter-regional networking. This greater inter-regional
identity was, however, still restricted to those who had undergone their primary education in
modern schools, whether in their own banners or in nearby Chinese towns. It thus included the
old southeast Inner Mongolian core of the new schools movement, Chakhar, and the Tümeds of
Hӧhhӧt, but excluded the isolated western areas of Ordos and Ulaanchab, whose political
horizons were still limited to their own banner.
0n Voitinskii's objections and their resolution, see Mongol Ardyn Khuwĭsgalt Namyn dӧrӧwdügeer ikh khural:
1925 ony yesdügeer saryn 23-arawdugaar saryn 1. Delgerengiü tailan [The Fourth Congress of the Mongolian
People's Revolu- tionary Party: 23 September-1 October 1925. Stenographic Report.] (Ulaanbaatar: State
Publishing House, 1978), 51, and Mongol Ulsyn arkhiwyn khereg erkhlekh gazar, Orosyn torün arkhiwyn alba
(ROSARKhIW) [Mongolian State Archival Administration, Russian State Archival Office], Komintérn ba
Mongol (Barimtyn emkhetgel) [The Comintern and Mongolia: A Document Collection] (Ulaanbaatar: Scientific &
Technological Information Co., 1996), 124, 125, 208, and Zhongyang Dang'anguan [Central Archives], ed.,
Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian xuanji [Selected Documents from the CPC Party Center], vol. 2, 1926 (Beijing:
CCP Central Party School Publishing House, 1989), 64-65. On the Politburo's bid to reopen the issue in 1928, see
Mongol Ulsyn arkhiwyn khereg erkhlekh gazar, Orosyn torün arkhiwyn alba (ROSARKhIW) Komintern ba
Mongol, 470 (#53, n. 1).
20
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). See, for
example, Mersé's survey of the Mongolia's situation as a whole in Menggu wenti [The Mongolian Question]
(Beijing: 1923), and the discussions among young Inner Mongolian nationalists in Ulaanbaatar recorded in the
"Protocols of the First Chapter of the Enlightenment Group" Central Historical Archives of the MPRP (hereafter,
"Party Archives"), fond [holdings] 7, towiyoog [roster] 1, khatgalamjiin negj [storage unit] 26: khuudas [page] 2230.
19
Thus, in early 1925, a short-lived Inner Mongolian Youth Party, with a strongly panMongolian program, came together without outside pressure. Although the leaders were in many
ways very homogenous—all under 30, almost all with Chinese names and educations, and mostly
simultaneously affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party—they came from virtually every
banner where the new school movement had taken root. But they still did not include anyone
from the Khӧlӧn Buir area to the northeast, in which a sense of being a part of the larger panMongolian movement did not negate a strong regional identity.
II. ACCESS TO THE ARCHIVES AND A CLASSIFICATION OF SOURCES ON THE PRPIM
AND ALLIED MOVEMENTS
There are two major archives on the twentieth century in Mongolia's capital of
Ulaanbaatar, the National Central Archive of Mongolia (Mongol ulsyn ündesnii tӧw arkhiw), and
the Central Historical Archives of the MPRP (MAKh Namyn tüükhiin tӧw arkhiw). The National
Archives of Mongolia contains four centers: 1) the Historical Archives (Tüükhiin arkhiw) based
on the Qing-dynasty archives of the amban in Da Khüriye (Urga), and of the two eastern leagues,
Setsen Khan and Tüshiyetü Khan;21 2) Modern Documentary Archives (Orchin üyeiin barimtyn
arkhiw), which contains documents of the theocratic government of 1911-1921, and of the
(figure-head) president and two legislative bodies (Ikh Khural and Baga Khural) of the
Mongolian People's Republic (1924-1992); 3) Scientific and technical documentary archives
(Shinjlekh ukhaany tékhnikiin barimtyn archiw); and 4) the Cinema and Film and Audio-visual
Archives (Kino, zurgiin archiw).22 Housed in a building on Youth Avenue (Zaluuchuudyn ӧrgӧn
21
Qing documents from western Mongolia were destroyed during the 1912 sieges of Uliastai and Khowd.
Ookhnoin Batsaikhan, "Mongol Ulsyn arkhiwyn khӧgjij irsen tüükh" [History of How the Mongolian State
Archives Have Developed], paper presented to the Conference on Mongolian Archival Sources, 24-25 October
1997, in Tokyo. The current director of the National Archives is Dr. Duutan J. Gerelbadrakh, who can be contacted
by mail at Ulaanbaatar-46, P.O. Box 339, Mongolia; by phone at (976-1) 324403 or 341526; or by email at
gerel@mail.parl.gov.mn. I would like to thank Ellen McGill for forwarding this information.
22
chӧlӧӧ) just south of the National University, the National Central Archive is open to all scholars,
Mongolian and foreign, with academic affiliations; in 1997 foreigners paid a fee of US $15 for a
year of access. The material on the period after 1921, while not extensive, contains some valuable
pieces of information and has been fairly thoroughly catalogued.
The Central Historical Archives of the MPRP, or Party Archives for short, contains all the
materials submitted to and issued from the Central Committee of the Mongolian People's
Revolutionary Party, as well as the record of the meetings of the Central Committee and its
various organs, such as the Presidium (Politburo after 1940). Since the MPRP, not the legislature
or the president, was the chief decision-making body from 1921 to 1990, the Party Archives are
the principal archival source for political history in that period. Until 1996, the archives were
housed in the Government Building north of Sükhebaatur Square. With the victory of the
Democratic Coalition over the MPRP in the 1996 parliamentary elections, the MPRP lost power
and removed its archives to its recently-built party building, west of the square, and between the
Opera and Ballet Theater and the Ulaanbaatar Hotel. With the transfer of the party archives from
a semi-governmental status to a private status as the archives of a now out-of-power party, legal
disputes have arisen between the MPRP and the new government, over whether the MPRP will
still be allowed to control access to the archives.
The official regulations on access to the archives in 1991-2, as excerpted for me by B.
Zorig, then (and in 1997) the director of the archives, read as follows:
Documents will be shown to persons wishing to study the archival documents, on
fulfillment of the condition of a letter stating the topic to be studied, the plan of study, and
approval from an official organization, and permission [from the archives] to allow study
of the documents.
Those who wish to study the documents shall bring an official document to the Central
Archives of the MPRP. The archival director shall receive the document, examine
whether the documents requested are or are not present, and whether they may or may not
be studied, and having formed an opinion shall acquaint the chairman of the Party's
Central Committee with the request and receive approval.
As is clear, the researcher must describe in detail the projected research, and the archives
reserve the right to evaluate any request. The need for approval from the party chairman
obviously allows political considerations to intrude on the process. However, the continuing
importance of good relations with the United States, Western Europe, and Japan for Mongolia's
foreign policy and the desire of the Mongolians to keep lines of exchange open with the
developed countries is a positive influence on these requests.
In 1991-2, I was affiliated with the Oriental Institute of the Mongolian Academy of
Sciences (MAS) as an IREX fellow, and through the good offices of that Institute (now the
International Center of the Institute of History in the MAS), I was allowed to enter the
Government House and given access to the party archives. After I described my topic to the
archivists, they prepared a list of relevant documents, which contained all or virtually all of
several files. I was then allowed to see, read, and copy by hand as much as I desired from any
material on that list. Photocopies could be made, for $4-$8 a page, which included the right to
reproduce the document elsewhere; the same tariffs applied for historic photos, of which the
archives also had rich files. Dr. John Gaunt, of Cambridge University, then doing research for a
dissertation on a controversial West Mongolian adventurer, Dambijantsan, executed in 1924, was
also allowed similar access to the party archives.
These very favorable conditions, however, do not seem to have been continued after the
move of the archives to the new party building. In 1997, I was in Mongolia for the Seventh
International Congress of Mongolists and wished to check up on some documents that I had not
accessed before. After several inquiries I was finally allowed to receive a photocopy of one of the
documents in question for US $35. Other foreign scholars with whom I compared notes
mentioned being allowed to view documents, but only with tariffs of US $30 per day of access.
My impression is that these new limits on access are based partly on a desire to raise money from
foreigners and partly on imitation of the Russian archives, which also closed up again after a brief
period of openness in the early 1990s (Mongolian archivists were trained in Moscow, and the
practices and tariffs of the Russian archives were repeatedly mentioned to me as models for the
Party Archives). It seems that at least until the legal questions between the government and the
MPRP are resolved scholars with specific requests for known documents will be accommodated,
although on a high price scale. As the quoted regulations make clear, the topic being researched
and the clout of the scholarly host organization in Mongolia are vital considerations.
During the Communist period, especially from 1945 on, Mongolian historians have
published many document collections based party and government archives. The collections, in
addition to being transcribed from the Mongolian script in use to 1946 to the Cyrillic script used
since then, have been often heavily edited, with crucial names and/or information being

Recently on the front page of Ünen, the official newspaper of the MPRP, J. Süren, apparently the new head of the
Party Archives, announced that "the Archives of the MPRP have been opened." The text of the article ran as
follows: "Based on the Government's 7th resolution of 1999, the archives of the MPRP, while being transferred from
the Government Palace to a special building, have been turned into an autonomous branch archive under the
National Archives. Recently according to the law of Mongolia on archives, the regulations on reading, studying, and
using the documentary material together with other reference matter covering the MPRP's history during the years
from 1921 to 1990 have been confirmed by the Ministry of Law, and been made open and transparent as other
historical materials. Beginning on the 15th of this month, it is not only possible to access its documents for a fee
through the library of the National Archives, but also this archive is to be made accessible by computer equipment."
(J. Süren, "MAKhN-yn archiw neelttei bolloo," Ünen, no. 10 (18956), Sunday, 15 Jan., 2000, p. 1). Evidently, the
MPRP has agreed to put material on the period before 1990 under control of the National Archives. This is certainly
a positive step, although it remains to be seen what the exact arrangements for access will be. I would like to thank
Ellen McGill for forwarding the text of this announcement.
omitted by ellipses. Even so, the republished records from the party congress, held yearly
between 1923 and 1928, however, proved extremely helpful. Also, when the Russian Office of
the State Archives sent copies of a large body of material relating to the Communist
International's activities in Mongolia, these were published in an invaluable and responsibly
edited volume, Komintérn ba Mongol (barimtyn emkhtgel) [Comintern and Mongolia: A
Collection of Documents]. Several documents, particularly from 1926 to 1928, give vital
information on Comintern policy toward Inner Mongolia.23
The materials (published and unpublished) available to me on Inner Mongolian nationalist
movements fall into roughly four groups:
1. Unification petitions;
2. Materials emanating from the leadership of the various Inner Mongolian parties
(primarily the PRPIM, but also the Inner Mongolian Youth Party, and several Bargu
organizations);
3. Materials on Inner Mongolian expatriates in Ulaanbaatar;
4. Local documents from Solon Banner (in Khӧlӧn Buir), Chakhar, and Urad Right Duke
Banner, along with material on the activities of duguilang leader Ȯljeijirgal and his
successors in Üüshin Banner (Ordos).
Materials external to the party, that is those emanating from the Mongolian People's
Revolutionary Party (MPRP) Party Central, the Comintern, and the Guomindang or Communist
party centrals have been published in small measure, and I have accessed some in the first
category in the Party Archives in Ulaanbaatar. However, I am not an expert in Chinese or
Russian archival sources, and aside from a few comments will leave this topic to others more
Edited by Mongol Ulsyn arkhiwyn khereg erkhlekh gazar, Orosyn tӧriin arkhiwyn alba (ROSARKhIW)
[Mongolian State Archival Administration, Russian State Archival Office] (Ulaanbaatar: Scientific &
Technological Information Co., 1996).
23
qualified.
Unification Petitions. In the years 1924 to 1925 a fair number of documents from the
Party Archives in Ulaanbaatar took the form of petitions or plans for immediate unification of
Inner Mongolia with the Mongolian People's Republic. These petitions have a great importance,
in that they are associated with the earliest political activities that led to the creation of the
People's Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia. Early examples are from Bai Yunti
(Serengdonrub), the Kharachin revolutionary and PRPIM chairman from 1925 to 1928, who went
to Mongolia in May 1924,24 from the Khӧlӧn Buir Daur Erkhimbatu and others in Ulaanbaatar,25
a group of PRPIM-sponsored Inner Mongolian students in Ulaanbaatar,26 members of the 1925
Inner Mongolian Youth Party in Beijing that the Comintern pushed into the PRPIM,27 and
several Ordos Mongols associated with the duguilangs.28 Even after the party was organized,
such petitions continued to be addressed, often by Inner Mongolians in Ulaanbaatar on quite
other business. One of the latest examples comes from 1928, when Murungga (Yue Jingtao), a
party leader and local elite member in Kheshigten Banner, responded to the party's troubles by
trying to interest the MPRP in a major military campaign to liberate Inner Mongolia.29
The wide variety of authors of these sorts of petitions makes it clear that pan-Mongolism,
or the unification of all or part of Inner Mongolia with the Mongolian People's Republic, was the
24
Party Archives, 7-1-20: 8-11 ("Tserengdongdub," representative of the Inner Mongolian People's Party to MPP
CC, 6 May 1924).
25
Party Archives, 7-1-32: 8-15 (Erkhimbatu and others to MPP CC, 20 January 1925).
26
Party Archives, 7-1-32: 16-17 (Tegüsbayar and others to MPRP CC, 25 April 1925). This petition was sent by
the first class of Inner Mongolian nationalist students recommended by the PRPIM for study in Ulaanbaatar. It is
typical that upon arriving they immediately issued a petition of unification, on the assumption, per- haps, that the
party elders had not dinned this idea into the ears of the Mongolian Party Central enough.
27
Party Archives, 7-1-26: 49-53 (Leaders of the Inner Mongolian Youth Party to the Central Committee of the
Great Mongolian People's Party, undated). Many of those listed in this petition, particularly Rong Yaoxian and Duo
Shou (Duo Songnian), have been canonized as Chinese Communist heroes and martyrs. The discovery of their panMongolian sympathies is one of the most dramatic ways in which the Mongolian archival material contradicts the
official Chinese Communist history of Inner Mongolia.
28
E.g. Party Archives, 7-1-32: 7 (Doodongündüb and Chunaijamsu to MPP CC, 1 June 1924); 7-1-26: 56-57
(Sodnamdongrub to MPRP CC, 18 June 1925).
29
Party Archives, 7-1-18: 49-50 (Murungga to Gelegsengge, 17 March 1928).
starting point of political activity among all revolutionary or nationalist Mongols of Inner
Mongolia, not only some. These sorts of documents are often similar in rhetoric to those asking
for naturalization into Mongolian citizenship. Most of those naturalization requests found in the
party archives are connected with Inner Mongolian political figures, although one is from some
Inner Mongolians already resident in Neislel Khüriye (Mongolian name for "Urga," 1911-1924)
but with no known connection to Inner Mongolian nationalist politics.30 Naturalization requests
were, however, normally a government function, not a party one, and it is to the National
Archives that we must turn for a large body of documents on naturalization, particularly of
Buriats from Russia, and, Inner Mongolians in 1945.
Documents from the Inner Mongolian Party Centers. In the course of my research, I have
obtained a fair amount of material from the PRPIM Party Center. Other researchers have also
published some important documents, mainly publicly-issued manifestos or pamphlets. Other
pamphlets are available in Mongolian or Inner Mongolian libraries. It should be emphasized,
however, that the actual archives of the People's Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia, the main
organization of Inner Mongolian nationalists, have never been located. The first Central
Committee ended up in Ningxia (modern Yinchuan) and was then turned into a party branch of
the Guomindang in 1928. Perhaps its archives were centralized in Nanjing, and then followed the
Guomindang to Taiwan. It is just as likely, though, that they remained with Feng Yuxiang's headquarters in North China and were later scattered and destroyed in his defeat. The new Central
Committee that was formed in Ulaanbaatar in 1927 survived many vicissitudes but was
apparently abolished by the Comintern in 1933. Inquiries in Ulaanbaatar, and my survey of the
literature, show that no scholar from Mongolia or Russia has ever found or used the PRPIM
party center archives, if they still exist. The most likely guess of their fate was confiscation by the
30
Party Archives, 7-1-32: 1-2, 4-6 (6 August 1922).
security organs either in Moscow or in Ulaanbaatar.
The result is that most documentary records of the Party Central have survived through
being in some way related to the party's foreign patrons, particularly the Soviet
Union/Comintern, and the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party. I will address these two
sources in turn.
The documentary material from the Soviet Union that I have used is essentially that
confiscated from the Soviet embassy, in the raid by Zhang Zuolin's police in April 1927. This
material was rapidly published in Chinese and English under the lurid titles of Sulian yinmou
wenzheng [Collection of Documents on the Soviet Plots] and Soviet Plot in China, respectively.
Particularly important material includes reports from the embassy and Soviet military advisors on
the campaigns of fall 1925, which the party carried out in concert with Feng Yuxiang; further
reports on military training for the Inner Mongolians in Baotou in summer and fall 1926; and the
absolutely invaluable report by the party's Comintern adviser, the Buriat agent, A. I. Oshirov.31 N.
Mitarevsky's World Wide Soviet Plots32 also quotes from some relevant documents on these
topics. These materials have long been published and I will not discuss them further here. I will
only emphasize here that all the published documents on Inner Mongolia are unquestionably and
wholly genuine.33 I base this assessment on the thorough and detailed corroboration of their
contents by material in the party archives. It is unfortunate that these crucial documents, available
31
Soviet Plot in China (Beijing; Metropolitan Police Headquarters, 1928 [reprinted in Taipei, 1988, as Sulian
yinmou wenzheng huibian, vol. 7], 24-29, 72-75, 78-79, 101-116; Sulian yinmou wenzheng huibian
(Beijing::Metropolitan Police Headquarters, 1928), III, 44b-46b, 50b-52a, 52b-54b, 84a-b, IV, 1a-19a. An
invaluable aid for research in these documents is David Nelson Rowe and Sophia S.F. Yen, Index to Su-lien Yinmou Wen-cheng (Hamden, CT: The Shoe String Press, Inc., 1965).
32
Tianjin, n.d. See, e.g., pp. 10, 47,1102-03.
33
This, of course, was the conclusion of C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-yin How, who devoted many years to the
study of these documents, although they never edited any of those on Inner Mongolia. See C. Martin Wilbur and
Julie Lien-ying How, Missionaries of Revolution: Soviet Advisers and Nationalist China 1920-1927 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Julie Lien-ying How, Soviet Advisers with the Kuominchun, 1925-1926:
A Documentary Study in Chinese Studies in History, 19.1-2 (Fall/Wipter, 1985-86).
to the scholarly public for almost half a century, were never used by any "reputable" Englishlanguage researchers in the field of Inner Mongolian history.
The largest and most detailed source, however, about the People's Revolutionary Party
of Inner Mongolia is the Party Archives of the MPRP. The main limitation of these materials
lies in their restriction to documents that happened to be forwarded to the Mongolian People's
Revolutionary Party's Central Committee. In one way, this limitation is not so narrow as one
might think; the Mongolian leadership dealt with both Inner Mongolia, and Feng Yuxiang's
Citizen Army that patronized it, solely through the MPRP, with the result that virtually all of the
relevant material to be found in Mongolia at all is in the party archives, and relatively little in
the National Historical Archive.
The most common single type of document in the Party Archives consists of letters from
the Inner Mongolian Party Central, usually signed by both the chairman and the secretary of the
PRPIM Central Committee. From May 1925 to November 1927, these form a relatively
continuous series that give a detailed narrative history of the Party Center for that period. This
completeness stems from the Inner Mongolian party's close relations with its Khalkha elder
brother. After the splits in the Inner Mongolian party, and the fall of Dambadorji, however, the
volume of communication drops precipitously.
In Khӧlӧn Buir (also called Bargu), a nationalist party emerged even earlier, perhaps as
early as 1922. As I have noted, the Mongols and Daurs of this region were always wary of
merging their movement with a broader Inner Mongolian one. While secondary sources refer to a
message of congratulation on 9 May 1922, probably sent from Bargu, I was not shown any such
document in the Party Archives.34 There are several informative documents from Khӧlӧn Buir's
BNKhAU-yn Öwӧr Mongolyn ӧӧrtӧӧ zasakh oron [The Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of the PRC]
(Ulaanbaatar: State Publishing House, 1981), 28.
34
Eastern Border People's Party (Doronadu Kiǰaγar-un Arad-un Nam), which consist of letters
from that party's leadership to the MPRP party center. The earliest I have seen are from
December 1924, and the last, a protest from Mersé (Guo Daofu), who soon became first the
PRPIM's secretary and then its acting chairman, against being forced to merge the Khӧlӧn Buir
party with the PRPIM, dates from September 1925. I also found in the archives three other nonPRPIM letters from Mersé and another Daur leader, Fumingtai (Buyangerel). Dating from
September 1928, to January 1929, these letters deal with the aftermath of the disastrous
insurrection in Khӧlӧn Buir led by the pro-Comintern party branch. They were sent to the
Mongolian Party Central under the name of either the Eastern Border People's Party, or else of
the People's Revolutionary Party, or the Self-Education League of the Mongol Youth, all new
organizations created or recreated to adapt to the fast-moving events of what Bargus later called
the "Year 18 Revolution."35
I will now describe in some detail the record of official organizational and public material
left by the PRPIM itself. By official organizational documents, I mean decisions emanating from
a central collective decision-making organ, usually either a party congress or a presidium
meeting. By public documents I mean those documents that were issued by some party or
nationalist organization as public statements of party purposes or situation. These documents
have a relatively great importance for studying the evolution of the party, as they were
promulgated with considerable care and defined the party's line for a distinct period of time.36 By
35
Party Archives, 7-1-18: 45 (Buyangerel and others to MPRP CC, Sept. 14, 1928); 7-1-19:25 (Mersé to MPRP
CC, 28 Sept. 1928); 7-1-20: 21-23 (Mersé and others to MPRP CC, 9 January 1929).
36
Another, somewhat similar, type of source is the published individual works of leading party members. Mersé in
particular, under his Chinese name Guo Daofu, was a prolific author, publishing Xin Menggu [New Mongolia] and
Menggu wenti [The Mongolian Question] in 1923, Menggu wenti jiangyan lu [Lecture on the Mongolian Question],
in 1929 (reprinted by Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, Daur History and Language Research Association,
1987), and Hulun Beir wenti [The Khӧlӧn Buir Question] in Shanghai, 1931. An abridged translation from Menggu
wenti jiangyan lu is found in Kuo Tao-fu, "Modern Mongolia," Pacific Affairs, August 1930, 754-62. Other works
authored by Mersé listed in secondary sources but currently inaccessible to me include Nei Menggu minzujiefang
summarizing the sort of documents available, I hope to make clear where the available
documentation on the party is strong and where it is weak.
One of the surprising and frustrating aspects of studying this party, however, is the
relative incompleteness even of these documents, many of which were never intended to be
secret. Compared to what was known decades ago about the public documents of the Mongolian
People's Revolutionary Party, or the Chinese Communist Party, or the Soviet Communist Party in
the 1920s, the present record of the PRPIM is still very patchy. This very patchiness should
remind us of the degree to which Inner Mongolian nationalists simply lacked adequate
communications media to address their presumed constituents effectively. Even if the press had
not been tightly controlled, Inner Mongolia did not have a single newspaper or magazine with an
all-regional circulation that could have knitted the Inner Mongols into a single web of regional
public opinion.
Records of the manifestos and resolutions of some of the major congresses of the PRPIM
have found their way into libraries and archives, and a few have recently been published. Up
until the present, however, I have not been able to find minutes or stenographic records of any
Inner Mongolian party congress or meeting. The various accounts of what transpired at PRPIM
congresses, such as the First Congress, or the Special Congress of 1927, all depend entirely on
reminiscences or memoirs, some dating from contemporary documents, but most from long after
and demonstrably influenced by subsequent political events.
The first actual documented activity of the People's Revolutionary Party occurred in
yundong [The Inner Mongolian National Liberation Movement] and Menggu xin qingnian [Mongolia's New Youth];
see Dawor zu jianshi (Hӧhhot: Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, 1986), 119. Bai Yunti published the
forward to Menggu wenti, as well as a kind of political testimony in 1928 (see "Bai Yunti weiyuan duiyu Nei Meng
yilun zhi shengbian," [CEC member Bai Yunti's Defense of an Opinion on Inner Mongolia] Minguo ribao
[Republican Daily], 23 April 1928, 2). While these works are invaluable in giving a more extended picture of the
thinking of party leaders, none should be taken as giving a transparent account of party objectives.
Beijing in early December, 1924, with most of the subsequent leadership in attendance.37 The
only known decision taken at this meeting was to name the leadership and to dispatch
messengers to Mongolia (typically, this is how we know of the meeting). The first meeting of the
party of which we have the official record took place on 26 July 1925.38 For reasons unknown,
the record found its way in the original into the Party Archives.39 Also important for the history
of Inner Mongolian nationalism is an extremely detailed constitution of the Inner Mongolian
Youth Party (Dotoγadu Mongγol-un ǰalaγučud-un nam), organized in February 1925 by
Whampoa Military Academy graduates Rong Yaoxian and Bai Haifeng (Düürinsang).40
The famous first Congress of the People's Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia, held
for two weeks from 13 October 1925 on, issued its decisions in the form of a pamphlet,
Dotoγadu Mongγol-un arad-un qubisqaltu nam-un nigedüger yeke qural-a ča olan tümen
arad neyite-dür tungqaγlan ǰarlaqu bičig, "Manifesto of the First Congress of the People's
Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia to the broad masses." This pamphlet is found in two
versions, one a lithograph and the other printed on movable type. The printed version is
dated December 1925; Urgunge Onon has recently published a facsimile and translation of
the lithograph version.41 Another important document whose content was most likely fixed at
37
Party Archives 7-1-18:22 (Altan, Buyangerel, and Erkhimbatu to MPRP CC, 13 May 1925).
Party Archives 7-1-26: 1-8 (Decisions of the meeting of the presidium and candidate members of the Provisional
Central Committee of the PRPIM, 26 July 1925). There is a photograph of this meeting in the Party Archives, Fotofond, B3.01.
39
At least one public manifesto seems to have been published around this period. The National Library of Mongolia
has a card for Dotoγadu Mongyol-un Arad-un Yeke Qural-un beledkel-ün qural-ača neyite-ber tungqaγlan ǰarlaqu
bičig [Manifesto to the Public of the Preparatory Meeting for the Inner Mongolian People's Congress] (Catalogue
No.: 32Д; (51), Д-564). Most unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the item was not on the shelf. Nor was a date
given in the catalogue. I cannot help thinking that this "Preparatory Meeting" was connected to 1) the various
meetings in March of 1925 that the GMD organized as preparation for a National Congress in China, 2) the alleged
March meeting of the PRPIM mentioned by Bai Yunti, and 3) the Assembly of Mongolian Racial Revival
mentioned in the report to the Fourth Congress of the MPRP as a front organization helpful in generating interest in
the PRPIM's aims (Mongol Ardyn Khuwĭsgalt Namyn dӧrӧwdügeer ikh khural, 51.) If this manifesto is found in
some other library in China, or Japan, or Russia, it would be of some help in elucidating this early period.
40
Party Archives 7-1-26: 31-37 (Party Articles of the Inner Mongolian Youth Party, 9 February 1925).
41
Urgunge Onon, "The Proclamation of the First Congress of the People's Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia
38
this Congress is the party membership form, quoted from an Üüshin example in Altan'orgil’s
six-volume document series.42
During the following party campaigns in the Rehe area, the party issued a journal,
Dotoγadu Mongγol-un arad-un sedkül [Inner Mongolian People's Journal], and several
manifestoes and pamphlets. Of these, only two manifestos have been available to me. One
pamphlet, Öbӧr Mongγol-un ǰobalangtu bayidal [The Agony of Inner Mongolia] was published
with a Russian translation in 1983 by Sh. B. Chimitdorzhiev and S.D. Dylykov.43 Another
manifesto, a lithographed broadsheet, found its way both into the Party Archives and also into
the American diplomatic files forwarded by the U.S. Consul in Zhangjiakou.44 A copy of at least
one issue of the Dotoγadu Mongγol-un arad-un sedkül was once in the National Library of
Mongolia, but has since disappeared. There are still copies in China, although, curiously, no
Chinese secondary sources of which I am aware has made use of them.45
The next public documents come from the party's 1926 campaign in Ordos. Having
driven west from Rehe and Chakhar into Suiyuan, the party retreated into the Ordos
countryside. There they signed treaties with the rulers of Üüshin and Otog banners. Copies of
these treaties were forwarded to Mongolian Party Center and are currently in the party
archives. They were probably forwarded in order to demonstrate the moderation of the party,
to the Masses," Inner Asia: Occasional Papers 1 (1996): 79-88.
Altan'orgil, Kӧkeqota-yin teüken mongyol surbulǰi bičig [Mongolian historical sources of Hӧhhot], vol. 3, Anggiyin qaričaγ-a [Class relations] (Inner Mongolia Cultural Press, 1989), 510-16. The authors/issuers of this document
are listed as Serengdonrub (Bai Yunti), Mersé, and Alta, which fixes the date as between the First Congress (when
Mersé joined the leadership), and early 1926 (when Alta was kidnapped and murdered by bandits).
43
"Iuzhnaia (Vnutrennaia) Mongoliia pod gnetom kitaïskikh ekspluatatorov," in Sh.B. Chimitdorzhiev, Istorikokultur'nye sviazi narodov Tsentral'noï Azii (Ulan-Ude: Buriat Filial of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of
Sciences of the USSR, 1983), 119-37.
44
Party Archives 7-1-26: 63 (Special Inspirational Letter from the PRPIM CC, 20 December 1925); Records of the
U.S. Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of China, 1910-1929, roll 50, 893.00/7085 (Vice-consul E.
F. Stanton to Secretary of State, 13 January 1926).
45
The issues, originally available and used by some researchers in Mongolia, had been reported missing by the time I
checked. An Inner Mongolian biography of the duguilang hero, Öljeijirgal, entitled Gilalǰaγsan nigen nasu [One
Shining Life] (Üüshin, Shine Lama Memorial Monument Committee, 1985), has photographs of issues of the journal
on page 4 of its photographs.
42
as the MPRP was worried the Inner Mongols were being too harsh with thy nobility.46 Signed
almost on the eve of the anniversary of the first congress, these treaties were intended to set the
stage for a period of stability, in which a second congress could be called.
As it turned out, however, the party never managed to call its next, second, congress, as
1
far as I know. In October 1926 the party planned to hold the second congress, but in the event
the meeting was downgraded to an Yekhe Juu League Party Conference. A brief record of the
decisions of this assembly, including a unique, if short, record of the kind of question-andanswer session common in Mongolian party congresses of the 1920s, is recorded in A. I.
Oshirov's report of 7 December 1926. A report by the Ordos delegate to the Special Congress a
year later also gives some data on the conference.47 On 14 November another local conference
was called, "The Joint Party Congress of Yekhe Juu and Ulaanchab Leagues." Oshirov's report
again gives a brief record of the decisions, amplified by another anonymous Soviet report, and
by a summary from party chairman Bai Yunti (Serengdonrub) and secretary Mersé (Guo
Daofu).48 A third ad hoc congress was the 3 July 1927 "Special Congress of Representatives
from Yekhe Juu and Ulaanchab Leagues and All Party Members in Ningxia," called by Bai
Yunti to expel Mersé from the Central Committee. The text of this congress's decisions is
published in a 10 July 1927 pamphlet included in Altan'orgil's document collection from Inner
Mongolia, as well as in a report of Bai Yunti and Dechin to the MPRP Party Center now
preserved in the Mongolian Party Archives.49
The next major conference of the party, a "Special Emergency Meeting" that was later
46
Party Archives 7-1-20: 54--58 (Tripartite Treaties of Üüshin and Otog, 1 October, 10 October 1926).
Sulian yinmou wenzheng huibian, IV, 7b-8a; Party Archives, 7-1-26: 39 .r. (Mӧngke'ӧljei's report to the Special
Congress).
48
Sulian yinmou wenzheng huibian, IV, 8b-9b, 16a-b; Party Archives, 7-1-19: 44--45 (Serengdonrub and Mersé to
MPRP CC, 19 December 1926).
49
Altan'orgil, Kӧkeqota-yin teüken mongγol surbulǰi bičig, vol. 3, 524--27; Party Archives 7-1-26: 12-16
(Serengdonrub and Dechin to MPRP CC, 5 July 1927).
47
elevated to a "Special Congress," began on 8 August 1927. The lack of any detailed
contemporary record of this congress in the Mongolian party archives has hitherto greatly
hindered understanding of PRPIM history, as this congress was one of the most important
events in the party's life, when the old PRPIM leadership was supplanted by young Moscowtrained ideologues. The Party Archives in Ulaanbaatar contain the text of the report by the
Ordos representative to the Congress, Mӧngke'ӧljei, but no other major material.50
Providentially, however, the full text of the resolutions and directives of this crucial special
congress seem to have been preserved in a typescript held in the archives of the Institute of
International Studies of the MAS. Incorporated in a historical survey of Inner Mongolia written
by one of one of Mongolia's first diplomats, a Chakhar named S. Rentsensonom, this text
incorporates a complete Cyrillic-script transcription of the text of the congress's resolutions
with only slight modernization (Öwӧr Mongol for Dotood Mongol, for instance).51Another
document stemming from the Congress or shortly thereafter was Sengkeregülün uqaγulaqu
bičig [Letter of Enlightenment], a broadsheet ad- dressed to the Inner Mongolian people at
large.52
Strikingly, this Special Congress is the last known party congress of the People's
Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia held in Ulaanbaatar. When Bai Yunti and others rejected
this congress's legality and fled back to Ningxia, they established their own party center there.
They denounced the Special Congress and expelled its young student leaders in a manifesto
issued in Chinese and published in newspapers of Gansu and Shaanxi (that is, areas held by
50
Party Archives, 7-1-26: 38--41 (Mӧngke'ӧljei's report to Special Congress, August, 1927).
S. Rentsensonom, "Öwӧr mongolyn tüükhen amĭdral" [The Historical Life of Inner Mongolia] (dated 28
September 1970), typescript in the archives of the Oriental and International Institute, fond 2, towlyoog 4,
khatgalamjiin negj 4, 53-64.
52
Party Archives 7-1-26: 78-82 (Abstract of the "Letter of Enlightenment," undated). The title indicates that this
was only a summary of a longer item.
51
Feng Yuxiang). The Chinese text was also reprinted in a 1928 article by Bai Yunti in the official
Minguo ribao [Republican Daily]. The Patty Archives contain a Mongolian translation, made by
Altan, of this same article.53 The new Central Committee, now headed by Mersé and Korlô,
issued a rejoinder denouncing the Ningxia group and in turn expelling its leaders from the
party.54
The period of 1928 is one of major developments, as the Ulaanbaatar party center
sponsored rebellions in Bargu and Urad Right Duke Banners, while the Ningxia center was
absorbed into the Chinese Guomindang. It is here that the record is perhaps most frustrating, as
there are only three documents that shed any light directly on Party Center decisions. One is a
presidium meeting on 29 February 1928 of the new party center in Ulaanbaatar.55 In Ningxia,
the only official party center activity recorded from this period is a Provisional Emergency
Congress, held on August, 1928, to protest the annexation of the party by the Chinese
Guomindang.56 Another document from the Üüshin party branch, however, seems to have been
simply a transmission of directives from the Party Center, and may be included as a Party
Central document of this period; it is reprinted in Altan'orgil's document collection.57
After the failed rebellions of 1928, the Ulaanbaatar Party Center was rebuilt as a purely
Comintern-led party. This subsequent period has left little direct record, a lack that is less
frustrating than it might be, because what evidence there is indicates that little of importance
went on. The paucity of direct documents is also partially made up for by several long party
manifestoes issued in this period and available in libraries and published sources. Three
53
See Bai Yunti, "Nei Menggu Guomindang qinggong jingguo" [The Process of Purging Communists from the
Inner Mongolian Guomindang] Minguo ribao, 26 October 1928; Party Archives, 7-1-26: 67-69 (Manifesto of the
Inner Mongolian People's Party, 25 October [1927]).
54
Party Archives, 7-1-26:70 (PRPIM CC to the Guomindang Party of China and the Chinese Communist Party,
undated).
55
Party Archives, 7-1-26:20-21 (Protocols, 17th Meeting of the PRPIM Presidium, 29 February, 1928).
56
Party Archives, 7-1-26: 17-19 (Dechin and Togtakhu to MPRP CC, 24 August 1928).
57
Altan'orgil, Kӧkeqota-yin teüken mongγol surbulǰi bičig, vol. 3, 528-31.
pamphlets issued on 1 July 1929 from Dolonnuur cover the range of party ideology. They are
Dotoγadu Mongγol-un edügeki bayidal ba. tus nam-un ǰorilγ-a-yin tuqai tungqaγlan ǰarlaqu
bičig ("A Manifesto on the Present State of Inner Mongolia and This Party's Aims"), Kitad-un
üiledbüričin tariyačin-u qubisqal ba. Dotoγadu Mongγol-un arad tümen erke čilӧge-ben
temečigsen qubisqal- un tuqai ǰarlan uqaγulqu bičig ("A Manifesto on the Chinese Workers
and Farmers' Revolution and the Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Struggle for
Freedom"), and Bančin Boγda-yin tuqai uqaγulqu bičig ("An Exposé of the Panchen Lama").
All are (or at any rate, were) in the National Library of Mongolia, as well as being found in the
Party Archives.58 Another lengthy pamphlet, Öbӧr Mongγol-un aq-a degüü nar-taγan
uqaγuluγsan bičig ("A Manifesto to Our Inner Mongolian Brethren"), and dated 3
December 1929, has been reprinted in Inner Mongolia in an internal-circulation collection
of I documents on the duguilangs.59
In Ulaanbaatar, there is direct documentation of Party Center activity only for 15-16
July 1930. The Party Archives contains the protocols of a combined meeting of the Presidium
of the party and the Commission of the Youth on these dates, and some associated
documents. One of these documents mentions a plan for a special meeting (tusqai qural) to be
held in the near future.60 Another document, possibly also relating to preparations for this
conference, and dated 10 September 1930, is, the very last material to be found in the Party
Catalogue nos. 3-АXHД Д-564, 215,II;-564, and 215 Д -564, respectively. The Party Archives examples are
numbered 7-1-26: 64, 7-1-27:1-23, and 7-1-26:83, respectively. The Party Archives also contain the typescript
original for the printing of Panchen Lama pamphlet (Party Archives 7-1-26, PRPIM CC to the Inner Mongolian
masses, no date).
59
In Edünkesig, Buyan, and Dorungγ-a, Ordas arad-un duγuyilang-un kӧdelgegen­ü matériyal-un emkidkel
[Collected Materials on the Ordos People's Duguilang Movement], vol. 1, (n.p.: "Ordos History" Editorial
Committee, 1981), pp. 343-71. The author is listed as Temürktüü, most likely a pseudonym. The document's
inclusion in a duguilang material collection indicates it was originally recovered with other duguilang materials in
Üüshin banner.
60
Party Archives, 7-1-18: 54--53 (Protocols of the 3rd Meeting of the Combined Presidium of the PRPIM CC and
the Youth Bureau Commission, 15 July 1930); 7-1-19: 53 (Buyanbaatur to MPRP CC Propaganda Department, 16
July 1930).
58
Archives emanating from the PRPIM itself.61
As mentioned above, the reason for the paucity of documents after 1930 lies in the party's
changing relations with the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party. Before the Special Congress
of August 1927, these relations were close and intimate, with the Inner Mongolian party regularly
reporting its business and forwarding material to the MPRP's party central. After the special
Congress, and particularly after the fall of Dambadorji in the MPRP's Seventh Congress, the two
parties had only very weak relations.62 The balance of PRPIM documents in the Mongolian Party
Archives from 1928-1930 are mostly requests for occasional financial or other assistance,
particularly for Inner Mongolian party members either going on or returning from Inner
Mongolia. Since there are no documents from 1930 on, the Party Archives shed no light on the
eventual fate of the party.
Materials on Inner Mongolian Expatriates in Ulaanbaatar. Two particularly interesting
document sets in the Party Archives give glimpses of the life of the Inner Mongolian
expatriates in Ulaanbaatar. Since Ulaanbaatar was the temporary residence for most of the
party's leaders and a permanent home for many, this is an important part of the social history
of Inner Mongolian nationalism. The first group of document is the records of an
"Enlightenment Group'' (Gegerel bolbasural-un bülgüm), which young Inner Mongolian
party members (including the Party Center's new secretary Korlô) organized from at least 12
November 1928, to 5 January 1929.63 The minutes of the discussion sketch some of the
interests and preoccupations of young party members at this time, as well as the way in which
61
Party Archives, 7-1-19: 54 (Buyanbaatur to the MPRP CC, 10 September 1930).
See Mongol Ulsyn arkhiwyn khereg erkhlekh gazar, Orosyn tӧriin arkhiwyn alba (ROSARKhIW), Komintérn ba
Mongol, 312.
63
Party Archives, 7-1-26: 22-30 (Protocols of the First Chapter of the Enlightenment Group). Among the
interesting bits of information found here is the name of a young party member from Kӧkenuur (or Qinghai),
Bangdzid (khuudas 28a). The PRPIM always included the Kӧkenuur banners as part of the Mongols, but there is no
other information on any activity among the Kӧkenuur Mongols.
62
the young Inner Mongols preserved a social life separate from that of their elders.
It is this separate life that is the main topic of another, much larger, set of documents
emanating from Mongolia's Office of Internal Security (Dotoγadu-yi Qamaγalaqu Γaǰar).
Beginning at least as early as 19 July 1930, the Office of Internal Security began an extensive
investigation into Dorjisürüng (Wang Bingzhang), Altandorji (Fo Ding), and other Inner
Mongolian expatriates in Inner Mongolia. This investigation resulted in Dorjisürüng’s arrest
early in 1931. Surveillance continued and a further general investigation of Inner Mongolians
in Ulaanbaatar was ordered on 15 November 1932, aimed at catching possible accomplices or
inheritors of Dorjisürüng’s anti-Comintern line. I was allowed to see only one volume of the
resulting material, entitled "Investigation and Internal Ministry Information on the Situation of
Inner Mongolians in Mongolia, Vol. 2.”64 This volume itself contained almost 150 sheets,
and I could only skim them for useful points of information. The material does make clear that
as early as 1930, Inner Mongolian expatriates were under suspicion as possible agents from the
GMD and the reactionary Mongol dukes and princes south of the border (the focus on Japan
came only later), that a large number of Inner Mongolian youths were deeply dissatisfied both
with the Comintern's handling of the Inner Mongolian party and with life in Ulaanbaatar,
and that further information on the final end of the party will certainly be found in the
archives of the Mongolian security organs.
Documents from Local Party Branches. When we remember that the Party Archives are
"supposed" to contain only material addressed to the MPRP Party Center, we can understand
why we should not expect to find material from the local party cells or branches there. After
all, there seems to be no reason why these party centers should communicate directly with the
MPRP, by-passing the PRPIM Party Center. As with the actual party protocols, we can say,
64
Party Archives, 7-1-73.
however, that in practice this rule was not as neat as it might seem in theory. The party
archives do contain material deriving directly from party branches in Solon banner of Khӧlӧn
Buir, and the party branch in Chakhar, as well as material from leading party members in Urad
Right Duke Banner and the Ordos banners.
Three of the most useful documents in the Party Archives come from local party
branches. One comes from the Solon Party Committee in Khӧlӧn Buir around September
1927.65 The next was written by Engkhebayar, a figure who became enshrined as the tragic
revolutionary martyr of Urad Right Banner in Ulaanchab League.66 The last, and most extensive,
is a report from the Chakhar provincial bureau of the PRPIM delivered to Ulaanbaatar on 20
1
July 1930.67 All describe in greater or lesser detail the actual situa tion of the areas concerned in
regard both to party activities and the activities of the status quo political authorities. All lack
any specific organizational address, a fact that may be responsible for these documents
finding their way into the Party Archives.
The Ordos party activities, particularly in Üüshin, are uniquely well-documented. The
main archival sources on Üüshin come from the document collections published after the
Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia, first by Edünkesig, Buyan, and Dorungγ-a, and then
by Altan'orgil.68 Together these scholars have published thirty-eight documents covering the
period from 1927 to 1935, from the PRPIM's c ooperation in establishing a new regime under
Shine Lama Öljeijirgal to the final surrender of his successors. The Party Archives in
Ulaanbaatar also con tain a certain number of letters, reports, and debriefing notes from Ordos
duguilang leaders and members dating from June 1924 through to spring or summer 1930,
65
Party Archives, 7-1-26: 58-62 (Solon Party committee, report to comrades, undated).
Party Archives, 7-1-18: 32-36 (Engkhebayar, Current situation of Ulaanchab, 12 June 1928).
67
Party Archives, 7:-1-18: 56-60 (Chakhar aimag bureau report, 20 June 1930).
68
Edünkesig, Buyan, and Dorungγ-a, Ordas arad-un duγuyilang-un kӧdelgegen­ü matériyal-un emkidkel, vol. 1,
249-406; Altan'orgil, Kӧkeqota-yin teüken mongγol surbulǰi bičig, vol. 3, 584-604.
66
while the reports and correspondence of Oshirov and the PRPIM party center contains
invaluable information on Ordos in 1926-27. Although the extensive secondary histories of
Shine Lama Öljeijirgal and other local heroes share all the problems of other contemporary
Inner Mongolian sources, the Mongolian archival material does confirm the general reliability
of the texts in the document collections published in China. Added also to the other
documents on the duguilang movements and other topics published in the Edünkesig, et. al.
and Altan'orgil collections, and the numerous documents from the same area published with
translation and commentary by Antoine Mostaert, Henry Serruys, and Joseph van Hecken, the
Üüshin Banner presents a unique possibility for an in-depth, documented look at a
revolutionary seizure of power in an isolated pastoral society. While the diversity of Inner
Mongolian society would prevent us from making any easy inferences on the other rural areas
that were influenced by Inner Mongolian nationalism in the 1920's, such a study would be
valuable as a fascinating exercise in social history.
III. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ISSUES
As I noted in the introduction, the archival material on the PRPIM and other Inner
Mongolian party centrals is all the more important as there exist relatively few accurate
memoirs or interview materials about it in any source available to me. 69 Most of the main
members of the Central Committee died in the 1930s or 1940s by various causes, unnatural
69
One of the few memoirs from someone directly involved in party activities, and perhaps the only wholly unedited
one I have seen, derives from a lama in Khanggin banner and was published in a mimeographed series on Ordos
documents. See Sir-a ǰuu-yin Čoyimsun, "Önggeregsen üy-e-yin čuqum γool ǰoriltu-yin bayidal-un tobči teüke
bolγan bičiǰü beledken talbiγsan medegdel"[Information Prepared in Writing as a Brief History on Some Specific
Main Episodes in the Past], in Ordos-un arad tümen-ü duγuyilang-un kӧdelgegen-ü matériyal-un emkidkel
[Collection of Materials on the Duguilang Movement of the Ordos People] (n.p.: Inner Mongolia Yekhe Juu League
Archives, 1985-86), vol. 2, 12-29.
and natural. Altan (also Altan'ochir, or Jin Yongchang), a member of the party's first
presidium, survived into the "New China" and perhaps left some "confessions" to the local
branch of the Communist Party but, unlike many other such materials, they have never been
published. Only the one-time party chairman, the Kharachin nationalist Bai Yunti
(Serengdonrub), survived into the contemporary period, in exile in Taiwan. His accounts of
the period indeed formed the basis for a small number of articles published in Taiwan, but
they are unfortunately shot through with massive errors of fact and interpretation, errors which
through the biography of "Buyantai" in Boorman's and Howard's widely used Biographical
Dictionary of Republican China,70 have gained currency both in Taiwan and in the United
States. Even the name "Buyantai" (for Bai Yunti, a.k.a. Serengdonrub) here may not be
correct. While the Chinese Bai Yunti certainly sounds like Mongolian Buyantai, I have never
found a single case in any contemporary source where Bai Yunti used the name "Buyantai."
Rather, the sources always use either his Mongolian alias "Serengdonrub," or else his
Chinese name "Bai Yunti." The name "Buyantai" belongs in the archives not to Bai
Yunti/Serengdonrub, but to another Kharachin Mongol, known in Chinese as Yu Lanzhai or
Bayandai, and whose Mongolian name is erroneously given by a standard Inner Mongolian
source as "Bayantai"!71
70
Howard L. Boorman and Richard! C. Howard, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 1, Ai-Ch'ü
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), under Buyantai.
71
That Buyantai is not Bai Yunti, but rather Yu Lanzhai/Bayandai is demonstrated particularly nicely by Party
Archives 7-1-18: 41-44 (Mersé and Korlô to MPRP CC, 29 November1927) lists Serengdonrub [=Bai Yunti],
Dechin, Mandaltu, and Buyantai [=Yu Lanzhai] as separate persons. On Yu Lanzhai/"Bayantai," see the standard
Inner Mongolian account of the party in Hao Weimin, "Diyi, er ci guonei geming zhanzheng shiqi de Nei Menggu
renmin gemingdang" [The Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party in the First and Second Revolutionary
Civil Wars], in Zhongguo Menggu shi xuehui [The Mongolian Historical Society of China], ed., Zhongguo Menggu
shi xuehui chengli dahui jinian jikan [Collected Papers from the Anniversary of the Founding Congress of the
Mongolian Historical Society of China] (Hӧhhot: China, Mongolian History Association, 1979), 603 and the
Mongolian version, Odqonbilig [=Hao Weimin], "Ulus-un dotoγadu-yin nigedüger, qoyaduγar qubisqaltu dayin-u
üy-e-yin Dotoγadu Mongγol-un arad-un qubisqaltu nam," in Öbӧr Mongγol-un yeke surγaγuli-yin mongγol teüke
sudulqu tasuγ [Mongolian Historical Research Department of Inner Mongolia University], ed., Mongγol teüke-yin
tuqai ӧgülel-üd [Essays on Mongolian History] (Hӧhhot: Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, 1981), 405.
Since 1979, as I mentioned in the introduction, a large number of memoirs have also
been published in Inner Mongolia, from those Inner Mongolian nationalists who stayed on the
mainland after 1949. These memoirs, originally published mainly in the "Cultural and
Historical Materials" (wenshi ziliao) series and the "Party History Materials" (dangshi ziliao)
series, each issued for all the administrative units in China from national down to county,
have also been the basis for a plethora of secondary accounts. 72 While these materials often
contain interesting, important, and accurate information, they are deeply obscure on the topic
of the PRPIM Party Center's history.
To what degree does the archival information connect that of the memoir literature?
And what do these corrections tell us about the processes at work in correcting and publishing
the memoir literature? Both those memoirs based on interviews with Bai Yunti and those
published in Inner Mongolia share the following common flaws: exaggeration of the role of
those members who later remained faithful to the GMD or the CCP; exaggeration of those
founders' links with Sun Yat-sen or Li Dazhao respectively; and a pervasive minimizing of
the importance of pan-Mongolian sentiment in the party founding. The main difference
(besides the obvious difference in one praising the GMD and the other the CCP) is that
while the accounts in Taiwan focus purely on the Party Center and its Kharachin comrades,
those in Inner Mongolia focus mostly on party activities in western Inner Mongol ia and
virtually ignore the role of the Party Center.
To illustrate: Bai Yunti claims that the first Congress of the party was held in March
1925, not October, 1925.73 The documentary record makes it indisputable, however, that he
72
On these two series, see Clausen and Thøgersen, The Making of a Chinese City, 208-12.
This claim begins with Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 1, under
Buyantai, and is taken up by Julie Lien-ying How, Soviet Advisers with the Kuominchün, 1925-1926,23, and Wu
Xiangxiang, Minguo bai renzhuan [A Hundred Biographies of the Republic], vol. 14 (Taipei: Chuanchi Literature
73
confused the First Congress with another public meeting that seems to have taken place round
the same time. Why did he do so? The key factor seems to have been his need to drape
ostentatiously his leadership of the Mongolian party with the mantle of Sun Yat-sen's
approval. This approval was the only way he could shake himself loose from the charge of
being a "Mongol Bolshevik," a charge that in Guomindang politics after 1927 had similar
potency to that of being a "black radical" in American politics after 1968. By putting the
founding congress in March, he gained plausibility for his otherwise completely undocumented
assertion that his party was personally approved by Sun Yat-sen, who died that month.74 In point
of fact, as the archival record shows, the GMD approval for organizing a separate Inner
Mongolian party came only in July 1925, from the Beijing Political Council, and in particular
from its most active member, Li Dazhao, co-founder of the CCP.75 This was a political past
which Bai Yunti could not afford to admit after he joined the Chiang Kai-shek government
in late 1927.
Materials published in contemporary Inner Mongolia had other problems of distortion.
This distortion stems from three main factors: information drawn from participants only
peripherally involved, subsequent rewriting, and political bias.76
Publishing House, 1971), p. 170, among other writers.
74
Bai Yunti repeatedly claimed that Sun Yat-sen, on his death bed, sanctioned the PRPIM's First Congress, which
was then held on 1 March 1925. While this claim has unfortunately found its way into Taiwanese and Western
literature on the PRPIM (see the references in the note above), it has no basis and cannot be accepted. The main
problem with this story, of course, is that it depends on a falsification, either deliberate or inadvertent, of the date of
the First Congress, which certainly took place in October, long after Sun Yat-sen's death.
75
Party Archives, 7-1-23:11 (Gürüsede to MPRP CC, 22 August 1925). Gürüsede, then in Beijing to negotiate an
accord between the MPRP and the Guomindang, states that in July, 1925, Bai Yunti returned from Mongolia and
met with the Guomindang party member, Li Dazhao, the Comintern agent Oshirov, and the Soviet ambassador Lev
Karakhan. Only after these meetings did the Guomindang approved the creation of the PRPIM. Such a decision
must have been passed through the Guomindang's Beijing Political Council, whose titular chairman was Ding
Weifen, but which Li Dazhao effectively ran. See Chang Kuo-t'ao, The Rise of the Communist Party, 1921-1927
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1971), vol. 1, 337-38.
76
Of course these strictures do not apply to all oral historical or secondary historical material produced in the Inner
Mongolian Autonomous Region. Aradn-a, "'Mongγol ulaγantu'-yin kӧdelgegen-ü ǰegün qosiγun daki bayidal," Sine Barγu jegün qosiγun-u soyol teüke-yin material 1 (1985), pp. 106-30, for example is a superb piece of local
Firstly, the memoirs were recorded in the 1950s and later, when the main leaders of the
party were either dead, living in Mongolia, or living in Taiwan. Thus the Inner Mongolian local
historians have perforce often had to record the memoirs of people involved at only the lowest
level at the time. These figures tend to glorify the local leaders they knew and ignore the role of
the Party Center which was directing those local leaders and hence doubly removed from the
sources of the oral historical material. Thus the sources for the main articles on Engkhebayar
were ordinary soldiers in the party's new militia, Engkhebayar's son (a child at the time of his
death), and a neighbor.77 When biographies of the local martyr Engkebayar and of the
Communist Party martyr Li Yuzhi, both mid-level PRPIM members, describe the plundering of
the PRPIM's troops by bandits, they glorify the role of their respective heroes, but do not
mention that the group plundered was the PRPIM's Party Center, including Bai Yunti,
Murungga, and others.78
Secondly, the memoirs have usually been rewritten, even in the original published
accounts. This rewriting involved, for example, supplying absolute dates, cross-references to
contemporary political events, interpretations of actors' motives, and so on. In many cases it
seems that both those writing their memoirs and their local-historian assistants have been as
hindered as much by sheer ignorance of the real historical context as from any political intent.
historical writing by the son of a strong opponent of Mersé and the revolutionaries, which is impressively
confirmed by oral historical materials collected among former revolutionaries in Mongolia.
77
Nasunbayar and Tuγurbin, "Engkebayar-un 'Ulaγan nam'-du orolačaγsan aǰillaγ-a-yin tuqai teüke-yin matériyal-un
emkidkel" [Collected Historical Materials about Engkhebayar's joining and working in the 'Red Party']
Bayannaγur-un teüke-yin matériyal [Bayannuur League Historical Materials] 4 (1985): 1, 13, 17, and Engkebayar,
"Engkebayar-un 'Ulaγan nam'-du orolačaγsan aǰillaγ-a-yin tuqai teüke -yin matériyal-un emkidkel-i üǰegsen-ü
qoyinaki-yin tӧrӧgdel," [Some Final Impressions after Reading the Collected Historical Materials about
Engkhebayar's joining and working in the 'Red Party'] Bayannaγur-un teüke-yin matériyal 4 (1985): 25.
78
Nasunbayar and Tuγurbin, "Engkebayar-un 'Ulaγan nam'-du orolačaγsan aǰillaγ- a-yin tuqai teüke-yin matériyalun emkidkel," 15-17, and Zhonggong Nei Menggu zizhiqu weiyuanhui dangshi ziliao zhengji yanjiu weiyuanhui
[Party History Materials Compilation and Research Committee of the CCP Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region
Committee], Nei Menggu yinglie zhuan [Biographies of Inner Mongolia's Glorious Martyrs] (Beijing: CCP Party
History Materials Publishing House, 1989), 12-13. On the event as seen in archival sources, see Christopher P.
Atwood, “Revolutionary Nationalist Mobilization in Inner Mongolia, 1925-1929,” vol. 1, 383-87.
Only comparison with genuine archival material can separate the wheat from the chaff here.
Thus, in one of the above accounts of Engkhebayar's activities in Urad, a crucial role in
forcing Engkhebayar to try to flee to Mongolia is assigned to the news of Chiang Kai-shek's
anti-Communist coup d'etat in Shanghai on 27 April 1927.79 The wide variety of contemporary
PRPIM archival sources, however, despite commenting at length on the changing situation in
China, never once mention this coup. In Inner Mongolia, as the archival sources make clear, the
attitude of Yan Xishan, who was actually occupying the Baotou-Urad area, and of Feng
Yuxiang, who was the immediate China-side patron of the PRPIM, were infinitely more
important than that of Chiang Kai-shek, yet neither Feng nor Yan are mentioned in the memoir
account. Only in historical hindsight‒hindsight that the editors, if not those recalling the history
themselves, inserted into the oral historical record could one possibly see Chiang's coup d'etat as
relevant to Inner Mongolian history. Needless to say, when these accounts are used to build
secondary syntheses, the problems compound themselves.
Finally, as is only to be expected, the materials issued in the Inner Mongolian
Autonomous Region all follow a distinct political-historical line. Setting aside the obvious valuejudgments and partisanship, this line's chief factual assertion is that there was a significant body
of young Inner Mongolian "leftists" and Communists who were not pan-Mongolists, but rather
looked to Li Dazhao and the Communist Party of China for leadership. This pervasive
assumption is wholly disproved by the contemporary documents. Comparison with archival
material demonstrates how this dogma is woven into the memoir material through distortion of
emphasis, discreet omission of vital facts, and outright factual error.
Thus when the memoirs of Kui Bi (a.k.a. Urtunasutu) and a biography of Saichungga/Ji
79
Nasunbayar and Tuγurbin, "Engkebayar-un 'Ulaγan nam'-du orolačaγsan aǰillaγ­a-yin tuqai teüke-yin matériyal-un
emkidkel," 14, 18.
Songling written by his classmates describe the trials of "Communists" (that is, Kui Bi and
Saishingga) at the hands of the conservative PRPIM leader Sainbayar, they both create the
impression that their protagonists were Chinese Communists pure and simple. Kui Bi speaks of
going to Ulaanbaatar to get in touch with "the organization." The organization here is not, as is
implied, either the Comintern or a Chinese Communist Party branch, but the PRPIM Central
Committee.80 Saishingga's classmates turn the PRPIM's military school that Saishingga attended
in Jingpeng (modern Kheshigten banner) into a fictional "Linxi Military Academy"—which
Saishingga is said to have headed under the direction of Li Dazhao!81 Several biographies, short
and long, have been published about the Tümed Communist martyr Duo Songnian (Duo Shou),
but none of them breathe a word about Duo's role in organizing the Inner Mongolian Youth
Party, whose very constitution proclaimed its aim to be the formation of a unified all-Mongolian
republic.82
The truth, as I have emphasized above, is that all significant revolutionary groups and
personalities in Inner Mongolia in the 1920s, whether it be the first party chairman, Bai Yunti,
Shinelama Öljeijirgal and the Ordos duguilangs activists, or the young Mongol Communists, are
80
Kui Bi's Mongolian name, Urtunasutu, is not given in any of the many biographies of this prominent Chinese
Communist, nor is his Chinese name found in any archival source I have seen. That the two names refer to the same
person, however, is evident from a comparison of versions of the story of Saishingga and Kui Bi's escape from
Ordas to Guisui in 1927. While the episodes are essentially identical in the secondary and primary sources, the
secondary ones refer consistently to ' Saishingga/Ji Songling and Kui Bi escaping together, while the primary source
refer , to Saishingga and Urtunasutu doing so. See Kui Bi, "Yanzhe dang zhishi de' fangxiang zou" [Going Along
the Line of the Party Directives] in Nei Menggu dangwei dangshi ziliao zhengji yanjiu weiyuanhui bangongshi
[Office of the Party History Materials Compilation and Research Committee of the IMAR Party Committee], ed.,
Nei Menggu dangshi ziliao [Inner Mongolian Party History Materials] (Hӧhhot: Inner Mongolian People's
Publishing House, 1988), 114; Zhu Riming and Bai Fushan, "Nei Meng geming xianqu-Ji Songling" [Pioneer of
Inner Mongolian Revolution], Wulanchabu wenshi ziliao [Ulaanchab Cultural and Historical Materials] 3 (1985): 12; Party Archives, 7-1-73:131-32 (Office of Internal Security report on Inner Mongols in Mongolia, 15 November
1932).
81
Kui Bi, "Yanzhe dang zhishi de fangxiang zou," 114--15, and Zhu Riming and Bai Fushan, "Nei Meng geming
xianqu-Ji Songling," 1. Linxi is a Chinese county neighboring the Mongolian banner of Kheshigten.
82
See e.g. Ho Wéi Min, Sung Güwé Či, and Ĵin Dzi Čiyan [Hao Weimin, Song Guoqi, and Jin Ziqian], trans.
Bayar, Düwé Süng Niyan [Duo Songnian] (Inner Mongolia People's Publishing House, 1983), Zhonggong Nei
Menggu zizhiqu weiyuanhui dangshi ziliao zhengji yanjiu weiyuanhui, ed., Nei Menggu yinglie zhuan, 1-7, and
Hao Weimin, "Diyi, er ci guonei geming zhanzheng shiqi de Nei Menggu renmin gemingdang," 602.
on archival record in the 1920s as supporting the immediate unification of Inner Mongolia with
the MPR and the formation of a greater Mongolia, independent from China. The younger
Chinese-educated Mongols who were members of both the Chinese Communist Party and the
1
Inner Mongolian Youth Party, such as Dorjisürüng (Wang Bingzhang) from Kharachin and the
Tümeds Rong Yaoxian and Duo Songnian (Duo Shou) differed only by being more vehement
and impatient in their pan-Mongolist petitions. Although Rong and Duo are treated as
Communist martyrs, their entry into politics was baked on pan-Mongolism, something
systematically excluded even in book length treatments of their lives.
Modern Inner Mongolian historiography, even that of nationalist movements, is thus
animated by the same two-fold concerns that Søren Clausen and Stig Thøgersen found in the
historiography of Harbin: proving both that the subjects of these "peripheral" histories are part of
China, and that Chinese history needs to take into account the history of the “periphery.”83 Just
as in the case of Harbin, however, such an agenda cannot be boxed off as a purely
historiographical issue. To a large extent, retrospective accounts of the history of Inner
Mongolian nationalism portray it as coming out of and returning into the larger history of the
Chinese revolution, because that was the history of protagonists themselves.84 For Bai Yunti as a
Guomindang elder statesman in Taiwan, or for Kui Bi in the leadership of the Inner Mongolian
Autonomous Region, the pan-Mongolism of the PRPIM in the 1920s was a part of their past that
they needed to reject in order to make a sensible narrative of their own lives.
The same is true of the lack of attention to regional differences in the historiography of
the Inner Mongolian revolutionary movement. Clausen and Thøgersen note that the "most
83
Clausen and Thøgersen, The Making of a Chinese City, xii-xiii, 9-10, 215-16.
On the final merger of the PRPIM with the Chinese Communist Party, see Christopher P. Atwood, "The East
Mongolian Revolution and Chinese Communism," Mongolian Studies 15 (1992): 7-83; and Idem, "The Japanese
Roots of Conimu- nist Nationality Policy in Inner Mongolia," paper presented at the Association for Asian Studies,
Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., 7 April 1995.
84
significant dividing line in the writings on Harbin's history is drawn between Chinese and
foreigners, and competing affiliations to ethnic groups, religious societies, or native places are
systematically downplayed."85 In current writings on Inner Mongolian history, nationality, i.e.
the line between Han and Mongol, is added into the mix as a major social cleavage, yet the
difference from Harbin history is less than one might suppose. The difference between Chinese
(Zhongguoren) and foreigners is still seen as the most important dividing line, complemented
but not replaced by the nationality difference of Han and Mongols, while sub-ethnic, religious, or
native place ties within the Mongol nationality are almost completely ignored. In the latter case,
however, we see that the archival documents are no more helpful than subsequent memoirs,
indeed sometimes less so. The downplaying by oral historical sources of ties that might divide
the Mongol nationality is deeply congruent with the historical actors' pan-Mongolian ideology
that viewed with suspicion any affiliations that competed with the national identity of Mongol.
Once again, what appears at first as a purely historiographical issue is seen on deeper inspection
to be intimately linked to the protagonists' self-understanding of their own role in history.
IV. CONCLUSION
The documentary record of Inner Mongolian nationalist movements thus presented is a
mixed picture; while it certainly contains some frustrating holes, I have obtained far more
primary sources than I ever expected to find when I first began the idea of writing a history of
the party twelve years ago, in 1987. Few major gaps remain in the history of the period 1924
through 1930. Perhaps the most frustrating part of the record is the still-significant lack of the
personal memoir and private letters that give history elsewhere the feeling of real human
85
Making of a Chinese City, 215 (cf. p. 68)
experience. As I have noted above, this lack must be also related to protagonists' own view of
themselves as being animated purely by national and public factors far above petty ties of
kinship, marriage, and native place. The problem with oral-historical material published in the
PRC detailed above should make one very cautious about exploiting these sources to supply
the vivid anecdotes or personal viewpoints so missing elsewhere in the record.
The archives help only tangentially in understanding the final liquidation of the party, a
topic which remains shrouded in speculation. It may be something of a consolation for the coldhearted historian that while that liquidation was a great blow for those who had hoped to
liberate Inner Mongolia from alien oppressors, it was ultimately of little historical significance.
With few exceptions, those who did not escape Ulaanbaatar before 1930 never returned to Inner
Mongolia. The vast majority, indeed, never survived the Great Purges.
From 1924 to 1929, a whole generation of Inner Mongolian agitators, both young and
middle-aged, acquired political experience and knowledge of Mongol areas outside their own
homelands through the vehicle of the PRPIM. They and their pupils formed the core of the
Mongol cadres employed by the Guomindang, the Japanese, Prince De, and finally the Chinese
Communists. Although the pan-Mongolist cause that initiated their entry into politics failed, the
party that they and the Comintern created in 1925, remains the seminal episode of modern
Inner Mongolian political history.
Christopher P. Atwood teaches Mongolian history at Indiana University.
I