Mongolia's Emergence.

AuthorBridges, Peter
PositionPersonal account

Title: Mongolia's Emergence

Author: Peter Bridges

Text:

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.)

When I joined our embassy in Moscow in 1962, Mongolia was slowly asserting itself, taking advantage of the growing quarrel between its neighbors and sometime hegemons, Russia and China. Mongolia joined the United Nations in 1961, and other governments began to consider entering into diplomatic relations with it. The UK was the first major country to do so, in 1963, and the United States did so finally in 1987.

1963 Attempt to Visit Mongolia

One day in 1963 my counterpart in the Japanese embassy told me that Mongolia, the new UN member, was to host a United Nations seminar. Japan had no relations with Mongolia--but my friend had gotten Tokyo's approval to attend the seminar in Ulaanbaatar as an "observer." We sent a cable to Washington, proposing that I too go as an observer, as an add-on to a planned trip to Siberia. This would not amount to our diplomatic recognition of Mongolia. No, said the Department of State. You can debrief the Japanese...

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