Revolutionary nationalist mobilization in Inner Mongolia, 1925-1929

This dissertation aims both to challenge the instrumentalist conception of ethno-national conflict and to produce a satisfactory narrative of hitherto largely unknown events in Inner Mongolia in the 1920s.; The instrumental view of nationalism sees ethno-national communities as being created only in the process of modernization. In the prolegomena, I challenge this view and show how commonly-held group stereotypes of Chinese and Mongols, intensified by disparities in modernization, generated powerful anxiety about survival among the Mongols, which in turn fueled ethnic conflict. These stereotypes supplied the Mongols as a whole with a common language of racial anxiety and group entitlement. At the same time, 'advanced' groups among the Mongols, especially the Kharachins and Daurs of eastern Inner Mongolia, played a crucial role in organizing nationalist movements such as the People's Revolutionary Party of Inner Mongolia (PRPIM), which was the main vehicle of revolutionary nationalist politics in Inner Mongolia from 1924 to 1931. Disparities between 'advanced' and 'backward' groups within the Mongols also played, however, an important role in disrupting the Inner Mongolian nationalist movement.; In Parts I to III, I reconstruct a narrative history of this party from 1925 to 1929. I first examine the attempts of the party's Chinese-educated leadership to mobilize rural Mongols in 1925 and 1926. Secondly, I show how the 1927 party split between pro- and anti-Communist factions was also a response to conflicts between the East Mongolian nationalist party leaders, who thought in all-Mongolian terms, and western Inner Mongolian supporters who shared their anxieties over the future of the Mongols but did not have the same modernizing and all-national perspective. In the third part, I examine two Mongol uprisings in 1928 and show again how mobilization based on common subscription to ethnic anxieties was blocked by disagreement over the conception of the Mongol nation.; The conclusion examines the failure of this period of nationalist mobilization. I argue that the ethnic and political context in which the Mongols operated inclined them towards purely secessionist politics which had little chance for ultimate success.