Chinese authorities have launched a campaign to change the term that people use to refer to Mongolian culture and to the cultural and historical heritage of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) in a move aimed at eroding Mongolian identity and sense of homeland.

The Chinese Communist Party’s new official term, bei jiang wenhua, meaning ‘northern frontier culture’, eliminates reference to Mongolians, one of China’s 56 officially recognised ethnic groups. Since July 2023, Inner Mongolia state media articles, official websites, party statements, party-organised children’s activities, and official social media posts have widely promoted the phrase. The party’s regional propaganda office has also founded an academic journal dedicated to ‘northern frontier culture’, and Inner Mongolia’s premier state-run academic institute has opened a ‘northern frontier’ research centre.

The adoption of the term appears to be part of the CCP’s growing campaign to weaken Mongolian ethnic identity and instead push a Han-centric national identity through the elimination of Mongolian language education and other measures.

Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the party has increasingly equated the culture and language of the dominant Han ethnic group, which comprises more than 90 percent of the country’s population, with being a loyal member of the ‘Chinese nation’ (Zhonghua minzu). It has aggressively pursued assimilationist policies throughout the country, especially in nominally autonomous regions including Xinjiang and Tibet, where the party views strong ethnic identity as a threat to its rule.

The CCP once praised Mongolians as China’s ‘model minority’ due to their early support for communist rule in exchange for recognition of the country’s first ethnic autonomous region with the right to a degree of self-governance enshrined in law—though never fully upheld. Even so, Inner Mongolia—home to more than 4 million ethnic Mongolians—has at times been the theatre of ethnic clashes between indigenous populations and the Han during decades of colonial rule, just as in other frontier regions like Tibet and Xinjiang. Clashes have broken out over land dispossession, polluting practices and discriminatory economic policies.

But in the past decade, under Xi’s leadership, the party’s tolerance for cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity within China has shrunk dramatically. The party shifted its focus to forcibly assimilating local populations and erasing their sense of belonging to a different ‘nationality’ (minzu).

The CCP Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Committee, the region’s top political body, launched the ‘northern frontier culture’ campaign in July 2023. The party committee called for ‘forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation’ by ‘establishing the “northern frontier culture” brand, according to a meeting communique released on July 6.

All sectors of society should ‘integrate’ the brand into ‘public cultural facilities, urban landmark buildings, tourist landscape displays, public landscape construction, and into the creation of cultural and artistic works’, Li Jiong, the party secretary of the local Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in the regional capital Hohhot, said in September 2023.

Picture: The Northern Frontier Intangible Cultural Heritage Exhibition, 20 June 2024, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, online

The purpose of the ‘northern frontier culture brand’ is to ‘educate and guide the people of all ethnic groups to firmly establish a correct view of the country, history, nation, culture, and religion’, Kang Jianguo, a researcher at the state-run Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in a 17 July 2023 article published in the region’s flagship party mouthpiece Inner Mongolia Daily.

‘Northern frontier culture’ was created through the ‘intermingling’ of different ethnic groups in Inner Mongolia, a process that ‘developed and consolidated the unity of the great motherland’, Kang wrote. Kang, who is Han Chinese, was appointed the director of the academy’s new Northern Frontier Research Center a few months later.

But what the party means by ethnic blending is the triumph of Han culture and the territorial claims of the Chinese state, experts say. The campaign is a clear message that the place where ethnic Mongolians live ‘is not the Mongolian homeland but rather an integral part of the People’s Republic of China, that this region has always been a multiethnic region fused together by the Han and the Mongols and other ethnic groups’, James Leibold, professor at La Trobe University and expert in China’s politics of ethnicity, race and national identity, told the Strategist. It’s ‘essentially erasing Mongol culture and history’.

By adopting bei jiang to refer to Mongolian culture, the party is repurposing an existing term. In the past, bei jiang has most frequently referred to northern Xinjiang, part of a formulation dating back at least as early as the Qing Dynasty to distinguish between the northern and southern portions of China’s westernmost region of Xinjiang. Prior to 2022, the year leading up to the official campaign launch, the use of bei jiang to refer to Inner Mongolia was relatively rare and bei jiang wenhua to refer to Mongolian culture virtually unknown. It’s ‘new terminology’ that is ‘completely made up’, Enghebatu Togochog, director of the New York-based Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center, told the Strategist.

‘This is part of the bigger overarching policy of inculcating a Chinese nationality common identity,’ Togochog, who is ethnic Mongolian, said. ‘To us, this is cultural genocide.’

The term has also recently appeared in Heilongjiang, a far northern province that borders Inner Mongolia and has a very small population of ethnic Mongolians and ethnic Manchu.

The campaign has swept through the region’s museums, universities, institutes, schools, and even art shops.

Picture: Tumuji Middle School in Zalantun, Inner Mongolia, launched the ‘Northern Frontier Children’s Hearts to the Party’ June 1 celebration event, in June 2022, online

In October 2023, Zheng Chengyan, vice director of the Inner Mongolia Museum, wrote in an essay posted to the Inner Mongolia culture and tourism department website that ‘northern frontier culture as a regional culture has been jointly created by all ethnic groups in the northern frontier region since ancient times and is an important part of Chinese culture’.

In addition to its new studies centre, the Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Sciences hosted an academic seminar on northern frontier studies in April 2024, requiring that all research papers submitted for the conference ‘adhere to the principle of forging the sense of shared community of the Chinese nation’. The same month, the party’s regional propaganda department sponsored the establishment of a new academic journal called ‘Northern Frontier Culture Research’.

Official websites and organizations have also changed their branding to align with the campaign. The banner atop the Inner Mongolia party committee organisation department’s website now reads ‘Northern Frontier Pioneer Net’. The name on the official media accounts of the state-run Inner Mongolia Women’s Federation is now ‘The Voice of Northern Frontier Women’.

In April 2024, a junior high school in Baotou, a city in central Inner Mongolia, held a northern frontier-themed reading activity, hosted by the local party committee and education department.

Shops selling traditional Mongolian art and handicrafts seem to be a target for the campaign as well. In July 2024, the owner of a shop in Baotou selling Mongolian silver jewelry told the People’s Daily: ‘I want to do the utmost to showcase these exquisite works to more people, allowing them to appreciate the allure of northern frontier culture.’

The Chinese government has recently adopted similar terminology shifts in Xinjiang and Tibet. Chinese state media and other official communications in both English and Chinese now often refer to people in Xinjiang as ‘Xinjiang people’ (Xinjiang ren), rather than referring to their specific ethnicity such as Uyghur, Kazakh, or Han. For example, this social media post by official newspaper the Global Times refers to Uyghur children as ‘Xinjiang kids’ and ‘children in China’s Xinjiang’ rather than calling them Uyghur.

Chinese authorities have also begun using the term ‘Xizang’ instead of ‘Tibet’ — Tibetans’ preferred name for their homeland — in English-language state media and other official communications, after an official white paper issued in November 2023 used the new formulation. ‘Xizang’ is the Chinese term for the region known in English and internationally as Tibet, which is not used in Chinese. Tibetan activists say the push is part of Beijing’s attempts to weaken international recognition of a separate Tibetan identity and further assert China’s sovereignty over the region.

So far, ‘northern frontier culture’ appears almost exclusively in Chinese, with only a handful of English-language references. That suggests it is, for now, aimed at shaping the attitudes of a domestic audience, rather than a foreign audience.

Ethnic Mongolians comprise about 18 percent of Inner Mongolia’s population, with Han Chinese making up about 79 percent. While 18 percent might seem comparatively small, it amounts to more than 4 million people, which is more than the entire population of the bordering independent country of Mongolia, which has 3.5 million people. Inner Mongolia is also the last region in which traditional Mongolian script is widely used and understood. The country of Mongolia adopted Cyrillic script in 1946.

Language is a core part of the campaign—and not just when it comes to terminology. The CCP began rolling back minority language education in Xinjiang and Tibet in the 2010s. Inner Mongolia did not change its education policies during that decade, and Mongolian remained the primary language of education in many schools for Mongolian students in the region. But in 2020, the CCP expanded the plan for ‘national unified Chinese textbooks’—meaning the mandatory adoption of Chinese-language textbooks—to all regions with large minority groups, including Inner Mongolia. The change was met with the largest protests Inner Mongolia had seen in decades, which the government swiftly subdued.

‘At the start, they [the government] said they would be switching from Mongolian to Chinese for only a few select subjects, but that turned out not to be true,’ says Togochog. ‘Mongolian language is now taught as a foreign language once a week, Mongolian students and children are barred from learning any subject in Mongolian anymore.’

The plan’s roll-out was completed in October 2023, just a few months after the launch of the ‘northern frontier culture’ campaign.

‘What’s happening in Inner Mongolia,’ James Leibold said, ‘is crucial to understanding the intention of the party in continuing to carry out its settler-colonial project in the borderlands.’