Genghis Khan, Xi Xia Empire, and China

Mongolia has emerged as a new interest of mine. It does deserve a place in this China/Korea blog, given the influence that China/Korea have on Mongolia and vice-versa.

One of Mongolia’s most enduring legacies is most certainly Genghis Khan, an extraordinary character way ahead of his time. More than just a military conqueror and a war strategist, he was also the pioneer of modern management and globalization.

In his book, author John Mann noted that Genghis possessed the arrogance of someone who had been chosen to “unite, lead and conquer, who was justified in using every means to achieve Heaven’s purpose, and the humility of an ordinary man awed by the inexplicable nature of the assignment. It was this that lay at the heart of the paradoxical whirlwind of destructiveness and creativity, of ruthlessness and generosity, that constituted Genghis’ character.” (John Mann, Genghis Khan – Life, Death and Resurrection, Bantam Press 2004)

I was in China’s Ningxia province over a decade ago where I witnessed the ruins of the Xi Xia empire. As Mann noted, Xi Xia is hardly known to anyone beyond a few specialists because Genghis did his best “to wipe state, culture and people from the face of the earth. There is a case to be made that this was the first ever recorded example of attempted genocide.”

Xi Xia’s successor cultures, Mongol and Chinese, had no interest in saving its records, reading its script or preserving its relics. It took scholars of other countries, mainly Russia, to begin the work of decipherment and understanding.

It was only recently that the Chinese tried to gain leadership in this field, setting up a research institute, retrieving artifacts and restoring monuments.

“Only now is this ancient culture re-emerging into public gaze on the stage from which it was so violently ejected.”

The Chinese called the Xi Xia people Dangxiang (党项), while in Mongol they are known as Tangut.

As for Mongolian versus Chinese identity, let’s just say that history has made perfect delineation a somewhat difficult task.

As Mann noted, once upon a time, Mongolia and China were one, under the Mongols, who thereby became in effect Chinese. Since then, the Mongol empire has vanished and China “was also diminished in other ways.” Outer Mongolia – the Mongolian People’s Republic, as it became – “unfortunately slipped away from the family at a time of Chinese weakness in the early 20th century."

“But there are more Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, which is still part of China, than in Mongolia itself, which isn’t. So history’s underlying reality is best served by calling all Mongolians “Inner Mongolians” because to Chinese that’s where Mongolians come from. So therefore the troops that invaded Xi Xia in the 13th century were “Inner Mongolians”.

“There is one further dimension to this. The territory of Xi Xia overlaps present-day Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, all very much part of China. If the Tanguts were with us today, they … would be Chinese – never mind that their language was related to Tibetan, that they established their own state by beating off the Chinese and that they were virtually extinguished or absorbed before the emergence of a united China. They were, after all, blotted out by a Chinese people, i.e. the Mongols. So their position is unequivocally part of the great family of China as it emerged after 1949. Thus, by the ruthless application of hindsight, it is possible to see an extended struggle for control of Inner Asia involving three separate nationalities as a minor spat among members of the same family.”

Perhaps the Chinese will not agree entirely, especially with Mann’s further assertion that it is “a strange distortion of history” for China to “impose Chinese-ness retrospectively on a unique non-Chinese people who were ruled by Tibetans ... before they carved out their own kingdom.”

Mann also asserted that if by being a successful conqueror, “Genghis become Chinese”, and if as a result all Mongols are seen as Chinese, then China has a claim on Mongolia, independent though it is at present.