Seeing environmental violence in deep time: perspectives from contemporary Mongolian literature and music

What does it mean to do violence in deep time? How is deep time evoked in our understanding of environmental harm? Environmental transformations have figured prominently in the recent history of Mongolia. Shifts in land use have been associated with severe pasture degradation, and the precarity of herding livelihoods has been a factor accelerating urbanization. Most recently, the intensification of mining activity has been a particular source of social and economic change. These contexts have led to a political and religious reevaluation of human relationships with the land. This article focuses on literary and musical interventions (particularly rap music in the first part of the article and the literary work of G. Mend-Ooyo in the later part) that draw attention to this changing relationship with the environment, which the article portrays as a potential rupture. We explore how these works domesticate deep time, nesting personal histories within the temporal depth of the landscape and crosshatching biographical, mythological, and geologic understandings of time. Yet we then see how this domestication comes to be threatened by developments that sever the relationship between people and land, leading to the disturbing prospect of being left stranded in the face of an inhospitable deep time

Literacy Under Authority: The Mongolian Cultural Campaigns

In the twentieth century, authoritarian states throughout Asia mobilized mass populations to adopt modern subjectivities and national identities. Literacy campaigns and the development of formal education systems were key strategies in shaping these subjectivities and identities, a social process that continues to have enormous material, affective, behavioral, and epistemological ramifications, even long after the eclipse of the authoritarian governments themselves. To contribute more to the understanding about how these massive social projects coerced and persuaded nonurban, pastoral, and semi-nomadic populations, this article explores the 1950s and 1960s Cultural Campaigns in the socialist Mongolian People's Republic (1924–90), which emphasized hygiene, health, literacy, and ideology. Oral history accounts document how the socialist Mongolian state infiltrated the private spaces of Mongolians and shaped their attitudes toward reading and writing and other desirable social goals. Additionally, these accounts suggest ways that pastoral Mongolians subtly resisted and challenged the authority of the socialist Mongolian state

Ethnic Integration and Development in China

This paper pursues an inquiry into the relationship between ethnicity and development in the largest authoritarian country in the contemporary world, the People’s Republic of China. It engages the theoretical literature on ethnic diversity and development in general, but also pays special attention to political economy logics unique to authoritarian systems. Focusing on the western part of China over a decade since the launch of China’s Western Development Program (xibu da kaifa) in 2000, this paper utilizes the data from two censuses (2000 and 2010) together with nighttime streetlight imagery data to analyze the overall relationship between ethnicity and development provision. It also analyzes changes in such a relationship during this period. The paper finds that ethnic minority concentration negatively correlates with economic development in both the years 2000 and 2010 across the western provinces. It also finds that counties in non-autonomous provinces, which are historically more integrated with the rest of China than autonomous provinces, have a positive and systematic correlation between changes in ethnic minority concentration and changes in development during the 10-year period. The counties in autonomous provinces, on the other hand, show the opposite trend. Using three case studies of Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, the paper concludes that although there is in general a tendency for ethnic minority concentrated areas to be less developed, ultimately which groups prosper more or less depends upon specific economic development and which political control logics the Chinese state implements

Strategic hypocrisy: the British imperial scripting of Tibet's geopolitical identity

The protests in and around Tibet in 2008 show that Tibet's status within China remains unsettled. The West is not an outsider to the Tibet question, which is defined primarily in terms of the debate over the status of Tibet vis-à-vis China. Tibet's modern geopolitical identity has been scripted by British imperialism. The changing dynamics of British imperial interests in India affected the emergence of Tibet as a (non)modern geopolitical entity. The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the twentieth century was the formula of “Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet's status, culminated in the victory of a Western idea of sovereignty. It was China, not Tibet, that found the sovereignty talk most useful. The paper emphasizes the world-constructing role of contesting representations and challenges the divide between the political and the cultural, the imperial and the imaginative

Co-optation & Clientelism: Nested Distributive Politics in China’s Single-Party Dictatorship

What explains the persistent growth of public employment in reform-era China despite repeated and forceful downsizing campaigns? Why do some provinces retain more public employees and experience higher rates of bureaucratic expansion than others? Among electoral regimes, the creation and distribution of public jobs is typically attributed to the politics of vote buying and multi-party competition. Electoral factors, however, cannot explain the patterns observed in China’s single-party dictatorship. This study highlights two nested factors that influence public employment in China: party co-optation and personal clientelism. As a collective body, the ruling party seeks to co-opt restive ethnic minorities by expanding cadre recruitment in hinterland provinces. Within the party, individual elites seek to expand their own networks of power by appointing clients to office. The central government’s professed objective of streamlining bureaucracy is in conflict with the party’s co-optation goal and individual elites’ clientelist interest. As a result, the size of public employment has inflated during the reform period despite top-down mandates to downsize bureaucracy.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116599/1/Ang, Cooptation & Clientelism, posted 2016-01.pdfDescription of Ang, Cooptation & Clientelism, posted 2016-01.pdf : First Onlin

通向“外亚”的“内亚”之路：“一带一路”与中国亚洲新秩序的构建,《文化纵横》2017年4月刊 (The “Inner Asian” Road to “Outer Asia”: One Belt One Road and the Construction of China’s New Asian Order. Wenhua Zongheng [Beijing Cultural Review], April issue, 2017.

［导读］“一带一路”战略的实施象征着一种全新的亚洲秩序，甚至世界秩序的建立，这促使我们重新考虑中国和周边区域的关系。在“亚洲的中国”议题之下，我们必须思考，要成为整个亚洲的领导者，中国与亚洲各个板块间的连接点在哪里？什么才是推进并领导亚洲命运共同体的基本动力和价值基础？在本文中，宝力格教授提出“内亚”与“外亚”的概念，试图将中国与亚洲的两元关系转变为中国、中国内亚和外亚的三元结构，将内亚边疆视作中国通往“外亚”的桥梁。只有真正给予内亚民族政治上的信任，承认并接纳其异质性和多元文化对中国的贡献，当今中国才能够在新的“天下体系”中真正成为中心，达到“四海无虞”之境界