Denny Roy* wonders if anything can save Mongolia should China decide to add it to its expanding territorial claims.
Many Mongolians fear China will eventually take over their country. They are right to worry.
Mongolia is structurally vulnerable. It is a large chunk of land (four times the size of Germany) with a sparse population of three million.
It is surrounded by two much larger and more populous countries and it has considerable economic value.
It is rich in mineral wealth, including coal, copper and uranium.
The Chinese are big users of coal, are net importers of copper, and need outside supplies of uranium to fuel their growing number of nuclear power plants.
Since the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Mongolia was briefly independent (until 1919), seized by China (1919-1921), liberated by White Russia (1921), then made a satellite of the Soviet Union (1921-1990).
It broke free of the crumbling Soviet empire at the end of the Cold War and became a non-aligned democracy via a bloodless revolution.
Since then both Beijing and Moscow have tolerated an independent Mongolia because it forms a convenient buffer between them.
The question then, is whether Beijing would ever decide to annex Mongolia. There are several reasons why it could happen.
Possessing Mongolia would solve the problems that an independent Mongolia poses for China.
Mongolians having their own country across the Chinese border is an obstacle to China’s project of assimilating its own ethnic minority populations.
Mongolia sustains and inspires Mongolian nationalism among ethnic Mongolians who make up the Chinese Province of Inner Mongolia.
In June Beijing announced plans to curtail the use of the Mongolian language in favour of Mandarin in Inner Mongolia’s schools.
Citizens of Mongolia protested in cultural solidarity with their cousins in China (pictured).
The former Mongolian President sent a letter to Beijing calling the language policy change an “atrocity.”
Independent Mongolia has established a cordial bilateral relationship with the United States as part of its ‘third neighbour’ policy, which aims to cultivate counterweights to Chinese influence.
The links with the United States are threatening to China in two ways. Mongolia is a ‘NATO partner country’, participates in joint training and educational activities with the United States and has contributed troops to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Also the US-Mongolia links emphasise the two countries’ shared interest in democracy.
Since the Chinese Government views the promotion of democracy as a US effort to overthrow its rule, in Beijing’s eyes Mongolia is a potential outpost of subversion on the Chinese border.
The transparency and accountability required by liberal democracy also interfere with China’s preferred modus operandi of corrupting the elites of partner countries to pave the way for bilateral business deals.
An independent Mongolia represents a strategic space that a potential adversary of China could fill.
Chinese remember that the Soviet Union placed troops and weaponry in Mongolia during the Cold War, and that a Soviet-Mongolian army entered China from Mongolia in the waning days of the Pacific War in 1945.
Chinese irredentism, or Chinese expansion in the guise of irredentism, applies here.
Chinese people commonly think Mongolia historically belongs to China.
The old Republic of China constitution, still in use on Taiwan, includes Mongolia as part of China.
In other areas bordering China, Beijing’s claims have increased in recent years.
As late as the 1940s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership said Taiwan should be independent; today’s CCP says Beijing should rule Taiwan.
Serious Chinese interest in the South China Sea followed after survey results in the early 1970s indicating substantial hydrocarbon reserves.
Early this century, a Chinese Government-supported research project asserted that in pre-modern times northern Korea was part of the Chinese empire, implicitly laying the basis for a Chinese claim on what is today North Korea.
In 2013, Chinese official media reported two Chinese scholars and a Chinese general questioning Japan’s sovereignty over the Ryukyu Islands that includes US bases on Okinawa.
This year China enlarged its claim on a disputed part of its border with India to include the entire Galwan Valley.
If China moves in, the Mongolians should not count on their ‘third neighbour’ rescuing them.
The United States did nothing to turn back Russia from seizing Crimea or occupying eastern Ukraine.
America abandoned its Kurdish allies in Syria in 2019.
It is almost impossible to imagine US forces attempting to militarily intervene in a land war against China in a region deep inside Asia surrounded by Chinese and Russian territory and airspace.
What about the second neighbour? Up to now China’s interest in maintaining good relations with Russia has deterred China from annexing Mongolia.
The balance of power between China and Russia, however, is shifting in China’s favour.
Russia, with an economy no bigger than Italy’s and its dependence on Chinese investment, is becoming the little brother in this relationship.
If China’s relative economic and military growth continues, Beijing may soon be in a position to demand that Moscow acquiesce to China swallowing Mongolia.
Unfortunately for Mongolia, the strongest argument against a Chinese annexation is that Beijing already controls the country through economic domination.
China takes in 80 per cent of Mongolia’s exports, provides vital direct investment, and hosts Mongolia’s economic connection to the outside world in the form of a rail link to the Chinese port of Tianjin.
China has not hesitated to use its economic leverage to punish Ulan Bator over political issues in the past, such as when Mongolia hosted the Dalai Lama.
In the pre-modern era, Mongolia presided over the largest empire in human history, which included China among its conquests.
Its precarious national security situation today represents perhaps history’s most extreme reversal of fortune.
*Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Centre in Honolulu. He specialises in strategic and international security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. He can be contacted at [email protected].
This article first appeared on the Pacific Forum website.
