Can't Make It To Inner Mongolia? Try the Western Dakotas.

Can't Make It To Inner Mongolia? Try the Western Dakotas. 10/14/07
On the second day of our time in Inner Mongolia we took a day long tour to part of the grasslands above the city of Hohot （呼和浩特）. It was good to get out of the city and up into the mountains, but in fact once you get up in elevation to the grasslands you see that they look virtually identical to the high plains of the western Dakotas. The area has been badly short of rain for the past three years so the grass is in rather poor condition. Our tour guide for the day was a very energetic and interesting young woman of Mongolian ancestry who had lots of stories about history and customs of the local area. Like our cab driver from the previous day, she knew some Mongolian but didn't speak it fluently. We shared the van with 4 other folks from the northeast of China who were also there on vacation. The lunch we had was far more than the six of us could possibly eat and included two different kinds of mutton, both of which were very delicious.

The big thing on the grasslands that the tourists go up there for is horse back riding and it's a regular dude ranch atmosphere and that's where the locals make their money. Well, whatever. We coughed up a little more cash and went horseback riding. You had to pay for a guide too even though you could hardly get lost given that you could see so far and the horses sure as hell knew where to go back to get fed. Stupid me assumed that at least the guide would be a local Mongolian whom I could pump for some comments on the state of Mongolian culture in Han-dominated Inner Mongolia, but in fact he turned out to be a Han Chinese ex-farmer from the area of Taiyuan (太原) in central Shanxi (山西), about 8 hours southeast by bus. The conversation turned out to be interesting anyway. This fellow like so many others was dying to escape the drudgery of low income farming and was lucky to have someone introduce him to this better paying less strenuous job. Typical of rural folks, he was a man of very few words. We talked of farming in his native area and he confirmed that it's a “yellow earth” (黄土地) area, the fertile but dry soil that covers much of northern China. Thus, farming relies extensively on pumping ground water for irrigation and he acknowledged the need to go deeper for the water every year. He also confirmed what I had read in the local paper that the first phase of a huge south to north irrigation project was already beyong the experimental stage. (This is a project even bigger than the schemes we have heard discussed in the Duluth area about diverting Lake Superior water to southern states.) We talked of coal mining, which is big in his native area. He said the pay is good so many people go into it, but it's dangerous because "something's always exploding.” He said that he felt that indeed lots more people in China were “warm and full” (温饱) than before, but that it does not include all. He kept talking about the US as a “developed” country unlike China in almost fatalistic way. He was riding behind me most of the time so I didn't really get a good look at him until later and then saw that we was probably about 50 with the leathery face of someone who'd worked hard outside all his life. Now his whole immediate family lives up on the high plain and his two sons have even gotten into college though he was quick to add that the tuition was a big burden for a horse riding guide, on top of what he'd already paid to get then through junior and senior high school. (No free tuition anymore at those levels either.) But he agreed that this was an investment and he can probably expect that these sons will support him in his old age. I wondered what he might get of the 50 yuan/hr that we paid for the guiding; probably only a fairly small portion washes back to him. Anyway it is surely better than farming. He rarely goes back to his old home around Taiyuan these days.

After we got back from the horseback riding there was an exhibition of Mongolian wresting, but most if not all of the participants were Han Chinese including our former riding guide. Actually, it was rather interesting. Contestants wear a kind of loose leather vest and grab each other on the vest at the shoulders and try to take each other down by tripping and pulling down the opponent at the same time. Winners kept pairing off until only two were left. The champion was one pretty short fellow, who then took on any willing tourists including a few pretty tall Westerners and some husky Koreans, but he beat all of them even though some were easily 1/3 taller.

The whole experience invites comparisons to going to a Hawaiian luau in spite of the fact that bilingual education and the existence of an "autonomous region" should make the area of Inner Mongolia at least potentially more viable than US Indian Reservations in pre-casino days. However, the issue is overwhelmingly one of economics, not bilingual education, as explained in Vanishing Voices (Oxford University, 2000), one of several recent works on the ever quickening disappearance of the world's lesser spoken languages. Sticking with one's native language (even as a bilingual) makes little sense since it's either a waste of time or becomes an impediment to economic survival. It makes a lot more economic sense to speak the language of those with the jobs and/or commodify one's culture and package it for majority culture tourists. Minority culture becomes handicrafts, horse rides, or eco-tourism, all for sale. The North American illustrations of the process—back to the Dakotas—are perhaps the best, or at least most familiar. Indigenous cultures are first overwhelmed (if not outright attacked), then isolated into tiny islands, and finally given the option of total assimilation/annihilation or commodification. Well, perhaps the absolute final stage is having one's culture become a museum exhibit, be it in Hohot or part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. But from beginning to end the operative factor is economics. In North America, Native Americans hunter-gatherer land was taken by small scale European farmers, who were themselves later replaced by huge scale agribusiness and then perhaps by suburbs. The supreme arbitrator at every turn is profit, rewarded most generously to those who are best at turning land into bank accounts.

Driving from the low plains around Hohot up to the high plains, one can see why over the past few thousand years the Han Chinese and Mongols have fought over the low plains, which could be used equally well for pasture land or farming. It is at the northern edge of the yellow earth belt, and the Han there today grow corn in the lower areas or potatoes in the higher areas till the elevation rises and the yellow earth gives way to thin soils that can only support rough grasses. Thus, this area became the northern outpost of the Han sedentary agriculture-based civilization. This land could function just as well as low pasture for grazing animals at certain times of the year and quite attractive to a nomadic culture like the Mongols. In short, this little corner of the earth illustrates perfectly the Owen Lattimore thesis that the very productive and efficient Chinese agriculture-based civilization extended itself as far as it could from its original center to the northeast, the north, the northwest and west, its political and cultural boundaries becoming equivalent to the geographical boundaries to Chinese style farming.

On the way to the Hohot bus station the next morning to head out for Datong, I listened to the young male cab driver's rather interesting radio station. It was part of a syndicated chain of stations that broadcast simultaneously in about half a dozen major Chinese cities including Hong Kong. The music was very contemporary with some English words like “music radio” splashed in here and there for effect. It was definitely youth-oriented with phrases like 我要我自己的音, ‘I want my own voice.' The best example was a syncopated version of the old classic love song 忘不了‘I can't forget’ with a few phrases of breathy English right at the end. The golden hoards Genghis Khan meet the gold diggers of simulcast radio. And so it goes.