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The cult of Ulanhu in Inner Mongolia: history, memory, and the making of national heroes*
URADYN ERDEN BULAG^
Introduction
Inner Mongolia is fatefully linked with a Mongol called Ulanhu (1906-1988), the `red son of Communism', who led it into the Chinese jurisdiction in 1947. The Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is now seeing its 50th anniversary, a history that has long left behind intriguing questions: how is Ulanhu judged by Mongols? Is the incorporation into China beneficial or non-beneficial to Inner Mongols? My tentative answer is that Ulanhu has been both misunderstood by his fellow Mongols and distrusted by Chinese officials. This answer is far from conclusive, and is likely to be controversial. I will not embark on a complex project of making quantitative assessment of the Mongols' opinions so as to take the pulse of the social tendencies of the Mongols; rather I will focus on a phenomenon emerging in Inner Mongolia in recent years, that is, an attempt by both Mongols and Chinese to set up a cult of Ulanhu. I argue that this cult does not signify Mongols' celebration of their identity in Inner Mongolia, or for this matter in China, but it is a carefully orchestrated drama to negotiate and bargain with the hegemonic state of China. In this paper, I hope to show that the making of an ethnic hero in China is not simply a matter of nationalism (which the modernist theorists like Gellner (1983) argue to be a political programme to make the nation congruent with the state). Since nationalist sentiment is untenable in public discourse, the struggle of minorities (I here follow Havel's (1985) thesis on post-totalitarian politics) takes the form of appealing to the very state institution that suppresses the minorities.
Ethnic leaders like Ulanhu had worked hard to institutionalize a state mechanism in which he himself and the minority people he represented could be accommodated in China without being overwhelmed. With time, Ulanhu himself became a state leader (guojia lingdao ren), and the result of his efforts, law of the nationality regional autonomy (hereafter autonomy law) became a part of the Chinese constitution. Appealing to Ulanhu's `soul and spirit', recognizing him as a state leader, emphasizing the autonomy law as a state institution, and demanding...