Irredentism Meets Gerrymandering: Contests for Inner Mongolia’s Territorial Boundary

As the very first ethno-territorial autonomous unit of the Chinese party-state, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region represented the Chinese Communist Party’s experimental attempt to implement its ethnopolitical principles. In the process of determining the appropriate administrative boundary of Inner Mongolia, the identification and categorization of relevant ethnicities and the assignment of marginal and transitional territories became a contested issue. This study compares the multiple occasions of Inner Mongolia’s expansion from the early 1950s to 1956 and a failed attempt at more local level in 1958 to examine the causal factors behind the shaping and hardening of Inner Mongolia’s administrative boundary. It is based primarily on prefecture- and county-level archives from multiple parts of Inner Mongolia, many of which had never before received scholarly visits.

This study argues that Inner Mongolia was able to expand its territory and annex most historically Mongol areas in China due to a coincidence between different intensions of the Inner Mongolian leadership and Beijing. The Mongol leadership of Inner Mongolia harbored an irredentist pursuit to unify Mongol areas of China, which was their second-best goal when unification with the Mongolian People’s Republic could not be achieved. Beijing, on the other hand, employed a gerrymandering tactic seeking to limit the power of the Mongol leadership by letting Inner Mongolia incorporate demographically diverse areas. The joint efforts of the two parties and particularly their ostensible adherence to the principle of ethno-territorial autonomy fomented a similar irredentist pursuit among the Daur people, a Mongolic people whom the Chinese state categorized as a distinct ethnicity. Seeking to elevate their autonomous banner to the higher-level autonomous prefecture under Inner Mongolia and annex the neighboring counties of Heilongjiang province, the Daur endeavor happened to coincide with Beijing’s ideological turn, which subjected the Daurs to sever attack and suppression during the Anti-Rightist Campaign.