Han Chinese in Mongolia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Chinese in Mongolia have not been very well-documented. Their national and legal status is, perhaps intentionally, obscure.

Mongolia's 1956 census counted Chinese as 1.9 per cent of the population, but as of 1989 no total had been published since. The United States Government in 1987 estimated 2 per cent of the population as ethnic Chinese.

Historically, the Gobi served as a barrier to large-scale Chinese settlement in what was, before 1921, called Outer Mongolia; the unsuitability of most of the territory for agriculture made southern settlement less attractive.

The small Chinese population in the early 1920s consisted of merchants or peddlers, artisans working for Buddhist monasteries or Mongol aristocrats, and a few market gardeners near Ulaanbaatar and the smaller population centers of the Selenge region.

Many of the Chinese married or formed liaisons with Mongol women. Their children, who spoke Mongol as first language, were regarded as Chinese by the rules of patrilineal descent common to both Chinese and Mongols.

In the early 1980s, Ulaanbaatar was reported to have a small Chinese community, which published a Chinese-language newspaper and which looked to the Chinese embassy there for moral support.

During the period of Sino-Soviet tensions, relations between Mongolia and China deteriorated. In 1983, Mongolia systematically began expelling some of the 7,000 ethnic Chinese in Mongolia to China. They were accused of "preferring an idle, parasitic way of life" to honest labor on the state farms to which they had been assigned. Many of them had lived in Mongolia since the 1950s, when they were sent there to assist in construction projects.

At the same time, ethnic Chinese who had become naturalized citizens were reported to be unaffected. Because the presence and the status of Chinese residents in Mongolia were politically sensitive subjects, Mongolian sources usually avoided mentioning the Chinese at all.