Ties that bind and gag
Parshotam Mehra

Sino-Mongolian Relations 1949-2004.
by Shakti Madhok.
Reliance Publishing House, New Delhi.
Pages 246. Rs 260.

In the heart of Asia stretch two vast and empty lands, Tibet and Mongolia: with an area of 1.2 m sq km, the Tibet Autonomous Region has a bare 1.8 m population, while Mongolia’s 1.5 m sq km is home to less than 3 million persons. Both nations have exercised (and still do) a profound impact on their populous and powerful neighbours (Tibet on China and India; and Mongolia on China and Russia).

In the 7th century, a Tibetan empire took over vast stretches of China; in the 13th century, Mongol warrior Genghis Khan’ held China and much else besides in his grip. His successors from the Yuan dynasty ruled China for almost a hundred years (1270-1368). Both lands have close ethnic and cultural linkages, besides deep religious bonds, for Buddhism (more loosely Lamaism) holds them together. In both countries, the Dalai Lama is held in deep veneration.

The long-lived Qing dynasty in China (1644-1912) gradually absorbed Mongolia using the Tibetan bond of the Lamaist church in taming the fractious Mongol tribes. By the time the Chinese empire wound down, their spiritual-cum-temporal ruler, the Bogdo Huthukthu, forged a close liaison with the nobility, while Tsarist Russia, for its own good reasons, lent a helping hand.

In the event, Outer Mongolia successfully revolted (1921) against a ramshackle Republic of China that had succeeded the Qing in the wake of the October (1911) revolution. With Moscow’s active support, it emerged as the Mongolian People’s Republic (1924), a Soviet satellite, virtually independent of China.

In consonance with their economic policies, the Soviets promoted rapid urban and industrial growth, but in a pastoral economy, desertification, overgrazing and mining activities had a most negative impact. Soil erosion increased, and with harrowing results.

Another outcome was that the Mongol economy was now closely knit with Moscow’s overall plan for the Soviet Union. In the event, when the latter disintegrated (1990-91), the impact was most disastrous, with Mongolia left to its own devices; its free market and extensive privatization of the formerly state-owned economy creating no end of problems.

In the meantime, the country’s two powerful neighbours still exercise a virtual stranglehold. Mongolia purchases nearly 80 per cent of its petroleum products and a substantial amount of electric power from Russia, while China is its chief export partner and the main source of its "shadow" or "grey" economy.

The book covers a little over half a century of Mongolia’s recent history (until 1991), as part of the larger whole of the USSR; for the succeeding little over a decade, an independent player. Though technically free after the 1945 plebiscite, when it sundered all ties with China, it remained a Soviet client state. Even today, the Soviet hangover in the ex-Communist Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party wields considerable authority for the present regime (2004- ), which is a result of its uneasy alliance with the rickety Democratic Union Coalition that had, in 1996, worsted its rival in the electoral sweepstakes.

The study divides the forty-odd years of MPR’s relations with China into three parts: years of "transition" (1949-62), of "turmoil" (1963-76) and of "mixed signals" (1976-90). By the end of 1962, the MPR began to display "steadfast loyalty" to the USSR; that "polemical exchanges" between the PRC and the Soviets continued till the death of Mao (1976); that all through the 1980s, "whatever be the reason", Ulaanbaatar continued its "hardline approach" towards Beijing.

This raises the more relevant question as to whether the MPR could have during these fateful decades taken an independent "China line". Hardly. For its position as a satellite apart, China’s "expansionist designs" and its "mistreatment" of the Mongol minority acted as powerful deterrents. It was only in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) that a Sino-Soviet thaw on Mongolia started emerging and enabled nonnalisation of relations between Beijing and Ulaanbaatar.

An academic from Delhi University, Shakti Madhok’s book rests squarely on her doctoral work. Contemporary history is a difficult genre, nor does a thesis automatically translate into a book, the requirements in each case being different. If only she had invested more time and effort, Madhok’s study would have shed a lot of its flab and research baggage apart from its innumerable errors of omission and commission to become an easy, pleasurable read. A couple of good maps would have been a great help, as also an index. The best part is that Indian scholarship is now venturing into fields that had hitherto been terra incognita.

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