The following is a statement made by SMHRIC Director Enghebatu Togochog at "Celebration of Colonialism by China" Webinar hosted by Center for Himalayan Asia Studies and Engagement (CHASE) and Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) on September 28, 2022:

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to friends, listeners and viewers in different time zones!

First of all, thank you, Mr. Vijay Kranti and your colleagues for organizing this special Webinar, and providing me with an opportunity to talk about China’s colonial policies in Southern Mongolia.

As the Communist China is preparing to celebrate her 74th anniversary of the founding of the brutal regime, here I would like to list out her major atrocities committed in Southern Mongolia in chronicle order to give you an idea of how our sovereign nation has been reduced to merely a cultural entity.

In 1949, soon after her establishment, China annexed Southern Mongolia by force and called it “Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region” and promised “Nationality Autonomy”. The same model was later used in Tibet and East Turkistan.

The past 73 years tell us that the so-called “nationality autonomy” is a lie and what fate awaited us was nothing but a series of genocide, ethnic cleansing, political repression, economic exploitation, cultural eradication and environmental destruction.

All these atrocities are planned carefully and implemented in a systematic manner. For example:

First in the 1950s, the Chinese carried out a so-called “Anti-National Rightist Movement” to purge the Mongolian elites. Tens of thousands of Mongolians were persecuted;

Then the Chinese took away the military rights of the Mongolian after using the Mongolian cavalries to put down Tibetan uprising;

In the 1960s through 1970s, the Chinese committed their first massive formal genocide in Southern Mongolia. Entire Southern Mongolian population was targeted by this genocide campaign that was carried out in the pretext of “Purging the Member of Separatist Organization Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party”.

The Mongolians were tortured to confess that they are members of the national separatist group Inner Mongolian People’s Party, and forced to provide the names of all of their family members, relatives and acquaintances as the members of the alleged separatist group. In many cases, under unbearable tortures, those who exhaustively provided the names of the alleged members of the separatist group even confessed that their pets, livestock and household utensils are members of the Inner Mongolian People’s Party. Estimated 100,000 Mongolians were tortured to death, and a half million imprisoned, tortured and maimed. At that time, the total Mongolian population in Southern Mongolia was about 1.5 million. This means one out of three Mongolians was persecuted in this genocide campaign.

Once the Mongolian population is crippled, reduced in number, now it is the time for the Chinese to speed up their population transfer.

In the early 1980s, the Government of China purposed to migrate nearly a million Chinese peasants in a single wave into Southern Mongolia. In 1981, Mongolian students across the region took to the streets and said no to this policy. This was the largest student movement after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. After almost two months of protest, school strike, the student movement was crashed by the Chinese authorities.

Resistance never stopped. In 1990s, the Mongolian intellectuals and students rose up again and formed a number of underground organizations to fight for the national freedom. Among them, the largest and most well-known one was the Southern Mongolian Democratic Alliance whose goal is to fight for the total independence of Southern Mongolia and eventually to realize the dream of uniting with the independent country of Mongolia in the north. In 1995, the Chinese Government cracked down on this organization and arrested many of their leaders and members. Mr. Hada, President of the organization, was sentenced to 15 years in jail on charges of “separatism and espionage”. The vice president Mr. Tegshii was sentenced to 10 years in jail. Other leaders and members were also sentenced and sent to labor camps in shorter terms.

In 2010, Mr. Hada was supposed to be released after his full prison term, but the Chinese authorities moved him into another “black jail” and kept him there for another 4 years without any charge. In the same time, his wife and son were also arrested and sent to jail on multiple trumped-up charges. Until September 2020, Hada was under house arrest in an apartment owned and managed by the Chinese Puplic Security Authorities in Hohhot. Since then he has disappeared.

After cracking down on these resistance movements, starting 2001, the Chinese authorities started targeting to wipe out Mongolian traditional way of life. Two major policies were implemented by the Chinese Government. They are “Ecological Migration” and “Ban Over Livestock Grazing”. With these policies, the Chinese Government forcibly displaced the entire Mongolian herders from their ancestral land to predominantly Chinese populated urban and agricultural areas. Nomadic way of life was accused of being “backward” way of life and blamed for the environmental degradation that in fact was caused by the Chinese intensive farming and mining practice. According to the Chinese State Council, China launched a massive resettlement project to resettle the remaining 1.2 million monads by end of 2015. That means China has already put an end to the nomadic civilization within its borders by the end of 2015.

After taking away political rights and traditional way of life, now the Chinese government is targeting the Southern Mongolians’ last defense of national identity that is the language. Starting September 2020, the Chinese Government came up with a new policy called the “Second Generation Bilingual Education” whose goal is to completely wipe out Mongolian language, culture and identify from Southern Mongolia.

Entire Southern Mongolian population stood up to this new round of cultural genocide. Hundreds of thousands of students took to the streets, and millions of parents and teachers launched a total school boycott. Of course, the Chinese regime responded with a heavy handed crackdown. We estimate more than 10,000 Southern Mongolians were arrested, detained, imprisoned and placed under house arrest.

What followed this heavy-handed crackdown was a full-scale and full-speed cultural genocide campaign, the scope of which has extended far beyond the simple switch of medium of instruction from Mongolian to Chinese in schools.

On January 1, 2021, all government mouthpieces, including the Inner Mongolia Radio and Television Mongolian language services, were ordered to start replacing Mongolian cultural programs with Chinese ones in order to promote “the strong sense of Chinese (zhong hua) nationality common identity.”

“Learn Chinese and become a civilized person” has been an official slogan publicly promoting Chinese supremacy over Mongolian language, culture, and identity. Slogans of “mutual interaction, mutual exchange and mutual assimilation of all ethnic groups to firmly establish the Chinese nationality common identity” have been aired repeatedly from television and radio stations across the region.

In a move to justify the total elimination of Mongolian languages from the entire educational system in Southern Mongolia, the Chinese National Congress announced recently that “education in minority languages as local legislations stipulated is unconstitutional,” according to the Chinese official press People’s Daily. This overwrites Article 4 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, which states, “All ethnicities have the freedoms and rights to use and develop their own spoken and written languages and to preserve or reform their own folkways and customs.”

Local authorities in the Autonomous Region reacted promptly to implement this directive. Classes on Mongolian culture and history taught in Mongolian in local schools are considered to be “underemphasizing the Chinese nationality common identity and deliberately overemphasizing [an] individual ethnic group’s ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘ethnic sentiment,’” and hence are removed from the curriculum across the region.

In an effort to completely block all avenues of learning Mongolian, on January 9, 2021, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Department of Education issued a document banning “any school from gathering students to offer extracurricular learning courses or teaching new courses. It strictly prohibited middle and elementary school teachers from organizing or participating in any training organizations outside the campus or any paid make-up courses organized by teachers, parents and parents’ committees, or inducing students to participate in any paid make-up courses organized by themselves or others; introducing student sources and providing relevant information to any training organization outside the school campus is strictly prohibited.”

Flagrant cultural annihilation is most visible in the series of arts and cultural performances put together by the Chinese authorities for the Mongolian Tsagaan Sar, the traditional Mongolian new year. Peking operas have replaced the traditional Mongolian art performance in TV programs.

The most sacred Mongolian sites, like Oboo, a stone altar devoted to the worship of Eternal Sky and local gods, have also been targeted by this campaign. Chinese traditional performers like Yangge dancers have frequently shown up on Oboo sites to mock the Mongolian Oboo ritual ceremony.

Sculptures of Mongolian historical figures have been taken down and smashed; signs in Mongolian have been  removed from schools, buildings, streets, and parks.

Mongolian publications are banned altogether, and Mongolian books are taken down from bookstore shelves. Printing and copy services on the street are ordered not to provide services of printing and copying any materials in Mongolian. Postal and courier services are instructed not to deliver any Mongolian books and publications.

On the official front, a region-wide intensive training program was launched. According to the Inner Mongolia News official website, the first session of the Region-wide Educational System Special Training for the Firm Inculcation of the Chinese Nationality Common Identity started on December 8, 2020. Although the exact details of the training and the total number of trainees remain unknown, the report confirmed a three-phase training program will be completed by the end of March 2021. Other regional and local news revealed that the synchronized training sessions were held in all schools, colleges, and universities throughout the Autonomous Region.

A 47-page internal document entitled “Propaganda Pamphlet for Inculcating the Chinese Nationality Common Identity to Push for the Usage of Nationally Compiled Textbook and National Common Language Education” was issued by the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Department of Education in January 2021. According to a trainee who asked not to be identified, all the lectures, discussions, reflections, and quizzes are centered on this document.

Quoting Xi Jinping’s remarks, the document “urges the masses to communicate and train together to take up the work of interfusing the feelings, to strive hard to create a social condition of living together, learning together, working together and enjoying together, and urges all ethnic groups to accept the great mother country, Chinese nationality, Chinese culture, Chinese Communist Party and the socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The document also warns the Southern Mongolians that “the wrong path of narrow nationalism can easily lead to the return of separatist tendency.”

Another trainee who managed to leave China and arrived in the United States recently told us that he and all of his Mongolian coworkers were forced to receive this training for two months. During the training, they had to denounce their “narrow nationalism” and “nationalistic feeling” and embrace the “Chinese nationality common identity.” They were required to provide all of their social contacts and the details of their social media activities to the authorities. Toward the end of the training, they were forced to confess their supposed “mistakes,” including their past gatherings where they wore Mongolian traditional clothes and sung Mongolian songs. They were warned that these mistakes went against the spirit of “Chinese nationality common identity.” They had to answer multiple questionnaires designed to assess their “ideological improvement.” One of the questions, the trainee said, was, “How many Chinese friends do you have?” Those who answered “none” or “few” participated in extended trainings before they were qualified to “graduate.” Before the release, all trainees signed a paper promising that they would not engage in any activities highlighting “Mongolian characteristics” or expressing “nationalistic feeling.”

From what is happening to the Uyghurs and what is happening to the Mongolians and Tibetans, it is apparent that the Chinese authorities are engaging in different forms of genocide campaigns on multiple fronts. While in East Turkistan, millions of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples are locked up in concentration camps, in Southern Mongolia, a full-scale cultural genocide campaign is taking place. In Tibet, a similar campaign has been launched to eradicate the unique Tibetan

culture and religious belief. Whatever form the campaign may take, the ultimate goal of the Chinese authorities is the same: wipe out the language, culture, and identity of these three peoples and force them to adopt the so-called “zhong hua,” or, simply put, “Chinese” nationality. This goal is publicly stated and advertised by the Chinese Government across China.

This is the tragic history of a sovereign nation under the Chinese colonial occupation.

Thank you!

Enghebatu Togochog

Director

Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC)