281. Mongolia’s Emergence
- Author:
- Peter Bridges
- Publication Date:
- 02-2021
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- American Diplomacy
- Institution:
- American Diplomacy
- Abstract:
- I had long been curious about Mongolia, a lightly populated country twice the size of Texas, which under Genghis Khan and his successors produced, in the 13th century CE, the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known—9 million square miles. For much of the 20th century people spoke of Outer and Inner Mongolia. The Inner was firmly under Chinese control. The Outer claimed independence but was in fact the first Soviet satellite state, the Red Army having expelled Chinese troops in the early 1920s. The country was almost totally isolated from the rest of the world. In 1939, Japanese forces advanced into Mongolia from China and were pushed back by Soviet forces, in battles that involved tens of thousands of troops but went almost totally unreported in the West. After World War II, Communist China sent twenty thousand or more “guest workers” into Mongolia. It was a prelude to colonization, as China had brought about in Inner Mongolia and would do later in Tibet and Xinjiang. The Soviets did not want a new Chinese state on their border. They and the Mongols managed to get the guest workers sent home. What I knew about the past of Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang came mainly from reading the work of three great explorers and travelers: Sven Hedin, Sir Aurel Stein, and the American diplomat William Woodville Rockhill, who once crossed Tibet on foot. (Henry Adams said that meeting with Rockhill was like having dinner with Genghis Khan.)
- Topic:
- Diplomacy, History, and Memoir
- Political Geography:
- Mongolia and Asia