Owen Lattimore

At the Crossroads of Inner Asia

FOR more than half a century all writers have described the Chinese Inner Asian province of Sinkiang as a vacuum which was being filled competitively from China, India, and Russia. The Sinkiang of today, teeming with its own nationalism, can no longer be considered a vacuum; and the most important aspect of its position is that it stands between a Communist-dominated China and a Communist-controlled Soviet Union. Until this change took place, British policy in Sinkiang was directed partly from London, partly from Britains position as the imperial power ruling India. British policy alternated between two aims: that of establishing a sphere of influence, especially in the Kashgar region and the Tarim Basin, tacitly conceding to Russia a sphere of influence in the Ili Valley and Jungaria, and that of cooperating with the Chinese authorities and supporting the full claims of Chinese sovereignty, thus indicating that the extension of Russian influence would be undesirable. In the last years of Kuomintang rule, and after Britain negotiated withdrawal from India and Pakistan, British policy settled down to the second of these two alternatives, because the British interest is to prolong a relatively weak Chinese overlord rule in Inner Asia rather than to accelerate the development of a strong Russian overlord rule, or overriding interest. In the same period Russia and its dominions in Asia passed from a centralized imperial rule under the Tsars to a federated structure of Soviet Communist Republics. China began its revolutionary changes before Russia but completed them later. Before i9ii the authority of the Manchu Empire had been weakening both in China and in the frontier territories and in i9ii it was overthrown. From I9I2 to I926 China was a republic in which power was divided between war lords; there was no firm central authority either in China or in the frontier territories.

Religion and Revolution in Mongolia

pletely destroyed in Mongolia in the twenty years from I192I to 1940o, and may be expected to disappear even more quickly in Tibet-partly by state appropriation of its sources of revenue, and partly by just withering away. How did it happen? Until recently there was no answer, unless one resorted to cliches about the ruthlessness of atheistic communism. European scholarship had been more concerned with doctrine, mysticism, and iconography than with the crass details of the money needed to build and maintain monasteries.

The Phantom of Mengkukuo

AUTOMATICALLY, by the invasion of Manchuria in I93I, Japan became committed to the invasion of Mongolia. A great part of Western Manchuria belongs to the Mongols. They once held about a third of the territory of Manchuria, almost the whole of Jehol, and reached to within a hundred miles of Mukden and within a few miles of Harbin. Hsinking, the present capital of Manchukuo, stands on former Mongol territory. Today, the Mongols retain only about a quarter of the territory of Manchuria and Jehol combined. The process by which they lost the rest of their land began at least i50 years ago, but antagonism between Manchurian Mongols and Manchurian Chinese has been acute for only about thirty years. In the beginning, the Chinese did not seize Mongol territory, but permeated it. To an important extent, this early colonization was encouraged by the Mongol princes, who enriched themselves by allotting part of the land of their banners or principalities to Chinese tenants, under a system of perpetual lease, thus endowing themselves with permanent rent-revenues. As a result, parts of the Mongol tribal principalities which adjoined the Chinese regions of Manchuria were transformed. The common people settled down to farming, like the Chinese. Mongol and Chinese villages were established side by side, and were ruled by a new kind of upper class-Mongol princes who had become largely indistinguishable from Chinese landlords, and Chinese landlords wealthy and powerful enough to act like local chieftains. Railway building in Manchuria blotted out this kind of colonization. The Chinese no longer came in by permeation, to settle beside and among the Mongols, but in a flood which swept the Mongols out and gave them no chance to settle down to farming. Power passed from the princes who manipulated the tribal ownership of land to the Chinese officials who controlled the railways. The most powerful of these officials became regular barons. A general who controlled a strip of railway and a corps of troops could do as he