Anran Wang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Research Institute for the Humanities, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Cornell University. His research interests focus on the intersection of ethnonational identity and communist ideology in modern China, Northeast Asia, and Inner Asia. His is currently working on a monograph manuscript titled “The Model Borderland of Maoist China: Identity Politics and Ideological Contentions in Inner Mongolia, 1945–1966.”
In the early 1960s, around the same time as tens of thousands of refugees ran or swam from mainland China to Hong Kong, several hundred Mongols from Inner Mongolia’s Hulun Buir area rode their horses to flee to Mongolia. Although the number of people who escaped in this direction totaled only a few hundred, three levels of party-state organs in Inner Mongolia were preoccupied with finding effective countermeasures to stop the waves of flight, which nevertheless persisted into the late 1970s. This research explores this hidden chapter in the history of Maoist China and the Cold War by investigating the causes and features of the ebbs and flows of Mongol flight, the rationales for local authorities’ tremendous efforts to try to stop them, and why those efforts eventually failed.
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