Da jia hao everybody and welcome back to the great proletarian cultural revolution podcast with your host Drew Smith once again broadcasting from the ancient city of Xi’an. It’s good to be back in the studios as always. So sorry for this episode coming out late, guys, but uh you know, past few weeks have just been a roller coaster at work and at home. Um and you know how it is. You just got to attend to the most important things in life sometimes.

Uh so our um I haven’t talked to you guys since April, so you know, our Mayday holiday was good. We had a fun little jaunt up to the mountains, the Qinling Mountains, and mostly just spent May working on administering and grading midterms. That always takes up a lot of time. Um and then um a few days ago I went on a trip to Liquan County which is an hour just northwest of Xi’an to enjoy seeing the Taizong Empress Mausoleum as well as uh Yuan Jia Cun which is a great little village where I got to enjoy some of the local Shaanxi cuisine and culture.

Um me and the Mrs. are also planning on uh travel plans for Beijing in July. My fiance’s cousin is getting married, so we’ll have two days with her family and 5 days to go sightseeing. So really hoping to finally finally after all these years get into the Mao mausoleum and see the great helmsman self in all his embalmed glory. And uh I want to also take a day trip out of the city to see the Ming tombs, which has always fascinated me since I was a little kid, as well as some maybe some of the great part parts of the Great Wall we’ve never visited before.

But speaking of the Great Wall, today we’re going on a journey beyond the Great Wall. I know that I was originally going to have this episode be about China and Albania during the cultural revolution, but I kind of fell into a rabbit hole about this and I just had to make this episode about this subject.

You see, today we’re going to go deep into the grasslands and steps thousands of miles from the big metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai. We’ll pay heading to the vast and mighty Inner Mongolia, the land of Chinggis Khaan, the land of yurts and horsemen, and we’ll be learning about how the great proletarian cultural revolution in Inner Mongolia unfolded.

Now, this will require a little more backstory than our episode about Tibet and Xinjiang, as I have to answer the question, what is the difference between the nation of Mongolia, or as it was known at the time during the Cultural Revolution, the Mongolian People’s Republic, and the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

So, let’s go back way back, back into time. So after the fall of the Mongol Empire and the Mongol Yuan dynasty that ruled over China in 1368, the Mongols were pushed back into the steppe lands that are today Mongolia and Inner Mongolia.

After 1635, the last Mongol Khan submitted to the rising Manchu rule, the Qing dynasty, which would conquer and topple the Ming dynasty in China some 9 years later. And annexed the Mongol lands into China, although allowed for a great deal of autonomy to a certain extent. Around the 1700s, famine and floods, big surprise, around China caused many Han Chinese to seek refuge in the southern areas of Mongol majority territories in the area that we know now today as Inner Mongolia.

When the Qing dynasty fell and the Republic of China was proclaimed, the Mongols proclaimed independence under the Bogd khanate which was able to seize territories of what is now the Republic of Mongolia and was during the Socialist period the Mongolian People’s Republic. The inner Mongol lands, however, had such a sizable Han and Manchu population that the Mongol princes in those areas were basically unable to throw their support in with the newly independent Khanate.

And well, to make a long story short, those areas split off into Chinese territory and they became what is today Inner Mongolia. All right, so fast forward to 1949. The People’s Republic of China has been founded and Inner Mongolia has been liberated from Japanese imperialism and Guomindang fascism. In 1949, a Mongol communist named Ulan Fu was head of both the party and government. Oh, and the army, I forgot, in Inner Mongolia, having joined the Communist Youth League of China in 1925 and cut his teeth at Yan’an in the 1930s.

Ulanfu/Ulanhu despite his communist credentials and highly sinicized upbringing. Indeed, Ulanfu could not even read or write Mongolian. He was particularly tenacious in his insistence on as much autonomy as possible for Inner Mongolia. Before 1958, the land reform in Inner Mongolia, especially during the period of 1956 to 1958, adhered to a policy from the party center that was referred to the as the Three Nos and Two Benefits.

Now what this meant was that there would be no struggle, no division of private property, no distinction of class composition and

there would be benefits to the interests of the herders and benefits to the interests of the ranchers who are basically in pre 1949 in Mongolia they were kind of like the kulaks or the rich peasants or the llamas in Tibet.

Um, even though Inner Mongolia was involved in more radical policies after 1958, the land reform was still very moderate, more than that of the rest of China. Very much like how Tibet’s democratic reforms lasted until 1965. For more information on that, please see the episode about Tibet and Xinjiang.

Now on the one hand it did allow for Mongol and cultural heritage to flourish after centuries of being under the Han chauvinist yoke. On the other hand it also sowed the seeds for the local party apparatus and army brass to be filled with Mongol nationalists.

Many party members in the grassroots and pastoral areas of Inner Mongolia were actually converted from the ranchers and continued to be the local elites in the new society because well, Inner Mongolia didn’t overthrow the ranchers and because of this, the class struggle in Inner Mongolia was at a serious impasse in 1966.

Indeed, a few weeks before the cultural revolution was launched on May 16th, 1966, while Ulanhu was in East Germany leading a Chinese friendship delegation, Li Xuefeng, the first secretary of the CPC’s North China bureau came to Inner Mongolia’s capital of Hohhot for 3 days and addressed senior cadres and military officials. Li harshly criticized Ulanhu without naming him. He said, quote, “Inner Mongolia is like a pool of stagnant water. Its leader is like a walking dead man, never emphasizing class struggle.” Uh-oh.

On May 17th, 1966, the Inner Mongolia Daily published an editorial calling for the quote, "people of all nationalities in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to rise together and actively participate in this great socialist cultural revolution. Like everywhere else in China, Inner Mongolia was a clamor with the news that Mao was calling for a revolution within the revolution.

On May 22nd, the North China Bureau convened a marathon conference at the Qianmen Hotel in Beijing. The conference featured sessions focusing on specific provinces and metropolises within the North China region. Ulanhu was responsible for obviously organizing the Inner Mongolia session and Gao Jingmin was charged with running its day-to-day affairs.

For the first few days, the Inner Mongolia session studied the documents issued by the center, such as the May 16th circular and Lin Biao’s speech on May 18th, which discussed the plots and coups within and outside China, setting the ideological ground for the subsequent mass campaigns to be launched in Inner Mongolia and throughout the country.

On June 5th, loudspeakers informed students at that the Inner Mongolia Party Committee and the Cultural Committee led by Buhe were dispatching a work team to each of the seven colleges in the capital of Hohhat to strengthen party leaderships. All revolutionary students were ordered to welcome the work teams.

But as elsewhere in China, it became quite obvious very quickly that the work teams were under the direction of Liu Shaoqi and Ulanhu and were meant to stifle the cultural revolution, not help stoke the flames.

Many students grew fearful as work team members entered the department and began compiling lists of names. They classified students in three categories.

‘Revolutionary leftists’ who supported the party committee and denounced the red guards.

Middle elements who blindly followed the red guards but did not attack the party committee.

And ‘reactionary rightists’ who were diehard red guards and revolutionary rebels.

They began jailing and arresting anyone who opposed them trying to create something more akin to a top-down purge than a mass uprising. Eventually, Inner Mongolia University and Inner Mongolia Normal University, which at that time was called the Inner Mongolia Teachers College, were put under lockdown by the various work teams.

Meanwhile, in the halls of power on June 5th and 6th, Xie Xuegong, Wang Zaitian, who was a Khorchin Mongol, also known as Namjilserin, and he was also the secretary of the Inner Mongolia party secretariat, Quan Qingyuan, secretary of the Inner Mongolia uh party committee, Lei Daifu, member of the Standing Committee of the Inner Mongolian Party Committee, and others criticize Ulanhu.

Now, some of these high-ranking officials did indeed take the sight of the Red Guards, but others were simply throwing Ulanhu under the bus as a sacrificial lamb to save their own skins.

The question of Mongol nationalism and Han chauvinism was also put on the table. Li Gui, party secretary of the Hohhot municipal party committee, stated unequivocally, ‘as far as Hohhot is concerned, Han Chauvinism exists objectively and it is the main problem. Even some children are Han Chauvinist.’ And as you all see, this will become the big issue in the cultural revolution in Mongolia. And unfortunately, it is never entirely resolved.

On July 8th, Gao Shuhua and seven student leaders from Inner Mongolia Normal University escaped from the campus that had been put on lockdown by the work teams and traveled to Beijing to report to the North China bureau and central Cultural Revolution Group on the Cultural Revolution at their college and the activities of the work team.

Ulanhu’s opponents continued to demand that he confessed to all his crimes. In particular, Ulanhu refused to criticize the Mongolian People’s Republic, which was a Soviet client state at the time. That was the main focus of the criticism.

In this, Ulanhu finally buckled on July 2nd, 1966, and he made a full self-criticism of his Mongolian nationalism. On July 14th, the participants at recommended that the party center strip Ulanhu of all his party posts and all posts in Inner Mongolia and the North China bureau.

Indeed, he was stripped of his party membership, but he was allowed to retain his place as state governor of Inner Mongolia. And another interesting thing is that Ulanhu was also on the Tiananmen Square roster at the first Red Guard reception on August 18th of ’ 66. And he was at the National Day parade um on October 1st, 1966. So he was not fully down and out yet.

On August 1st, the work teams were ordered to pull out of Hohhat’s campuses. The students on the campuses erupted with chairs, shouting, “Long live Chairman Mao, down with the work teams.” And waving little red books in defiance. The work teams attempted to dig in for a few days and trumpeted the claim that they could not dissolve because they had unearthed a several hundred person anti-party clique in Hohhat labeling the rebels counterrevolutionaries and reactionary capitalist roaders.

Finally though, on August 4th, the Inner Mongolia Party Committee forced the withdrawal of the work teams from all the universities, but stipulated that one work team would remain at each teachers college and few other campuses to act as liaisons between the colleges and the party committee. And many of those ended up becoming the so-called quote unquote cultural revolution preparatory committees.

The first Red Guard organization was formed in Hohhat on August 19th at the number two wool textile factory, eventually becoming known as Geming Zhanxi, the revolutionary soldiers workers headquarters.

At the Teachers College, the earliest Red Guard organization was the Mao Zedong Thought Red Guard general headquarters. At a Hohhot mass rally on August 22nd, Inner Mongolia Party leaders Gao Jingmin and Wang Duo called on people to follow Chairman Mao to carry out the revolution. Smash the old world to build the new world.

By mid August, revolutionary networking had begun in Inner Mongolia and many Beijing red guards were moving into the region. Ulanhu and his so associates while having a lot of their power stripped they were still there hoped to play along with them and give them a moment of glory calm them down and then gradually ease them out of Inner Mongolia.

He gave them a warm reception much like uh much like the party brass and army brass did in Tibet and Xinjiang, but then encouraged them to move onward into other parts of China. When this did not work, he tried to redirect the struggle in another direction, attacking traditional Chinese and Mongol culture.

And what do you know? Tale as old as time. The cruelest, most violent and mindless acts in the destroy the four olds campaign in Inner Mongolia were conducted by students with good class backgrounds. Students who were part of loyalist Red Guard factions both from Hohhat and in Beijing.

Across August and September, the Red Guard and rebel worker peasant factions in Hohhat consolidated around the Huyisi, the Hohhat first headquarters. However, it was racked with conflicts between loyalists and rebels. And eventually, the loyalists split off to form the Hu’ersi, the Hohhat second headquarters, with these high-ranking cadre’s children vowing to honor their proletarian fathers.

A new umbrella rebel organization, the revolutionary rebel headquarters of red guards of colleges and schools in Hohhat was formed out of the rebel factions of the Huyisi and then consolidated into the Husansi aka the third rebel headquarters.

On November 24th, 1966, Hu’sansi organizations, including Dongzong, the most radical red guard group at Inner Mongolian Teachers College, and about a dozen other rebel organizations, staged a bold action, kidnapping the loyalist leader Wang Duo and taking him to Beijing to forcibly debate Inner Mongolia issues before the leaders in Beijing. Meanwhile, armed clashes erupted in Hohhat, spurred by loyalist Hongweijun forces. The Hongweijun Red Guards were the main uh Hohhat uh red guard group that received strong support from Wang Yilun.

In December of ’ 66, however, a series of meetings in Beijing solidified that the Central Cultural Revolution Group supported the rebel Husansi over the loyalists. And soon the rebel movements proliferated across the rural areas of inner Mongolia and among Mongols living around other parts of China. Now it is interesting that no organizations compared to say in Tibet were ever all Mongol or all Han either in principle or in practice. And um according to my sources the majority of Mongols were actually supportive of the rebels.

On January 25th, 1967, the January storm hit Inner Mongolia. Provincial uh level government buildings, the telegraph office, the railway station, radio Inner Mongolia, and the Inner Mongolia daily offices were seized by Husansi under the red banner as rebel Red Guards. Across the next two days, fighting between the PLA and the Red Guards filled the streets of Hohhat as the PLA Inner Mongolia military region, which was still heavily loyal to Ulan Fu, Ulan Hu, sorry, um attempted to quell the upsurge. In response, the Husansi staged a series of sit-ins and hunger strikes on campuses in front and in front of government buildings.

On the morning of February 5th, the military leadership issued a three-point ultimatum proclaiming that Husansi was counterrevolutionary and that the sit-in hunger strike was counterrevolutionary and that the students had to disperse or they would be severely punished. The rebels, however, defied the ultimatum and the sit-in continued. Han Tong, a fourth-year teachers college student holding a battery speaker in front of the south gate of the Inner Mongolia military region headquarters, was urging the crowd to be patient and hold the line.

Unfortunately, two shots rang out from inside the military region headquarters, and Tong fell.

The first few rows of rebels in front of the gate were workers of the August 18th Rebel HQ from the River West Company, whose 50,000 workers were involved in building missiles. As soon as the shots ranged out, the workers in front, most of whom were demobilized soldiers, realizing the danger of a blood bath, stood up and pressed backward, pushing the several hundred students behind them about 50 yards to the rear.

And according to one eyewitness, this action undoubtedly saved many lives. As Han Tong laid bleeding, the army encircled the rebels with armed soldiers and commandeered the hostel where the rebels were staying. Recognizing that the nature of the conflict had changed in essence that evening, the rebels halted the hunger strike and sit-in and withdrew from the army headquarters, preparing to take their case to Beijing.

Han Tong was rushed to a hospital where he died that evening. Han was the first student killed in cold blood by the people’s liberation army during the cultural revolution in all of China and became a martyr for the red guard movement. Zhou Enlai called the Inner Mongolian military region top brass and the leadership of the rebels and the loyalist organizations to the negotiating table in Beijing.

Across several days, the negotiations continually stalled with both sides pointing fingers at each other for Han Tong’s death. Zhou made an instruction to call both sides uh for both sides to call for a ceasefire with no denunciations by either side to be made on radio or in the press. No more mass demonstrations by either rebels or loyalists and no taking of prisoners. Neither side was happy with the results.

On March 1st, 1967, the Inner Mongolia military region moved to crush the small rebel opposition within its own ranks.

It sent armed troops to Beijing and arrested 16 soldiers who were members of the Army Rebel Organization Hongse Zaofantuan and took them back to Hohhat for punishment. The Hohhat steel plant, Hohhat Railway Bureau, Inner Mongolia Daily, and other units that had been in rebel hands were captured by the loyalist Red Guard grouping, the Hongweijun.

With military support, former leaders of these units who had been overthrown by rebels resumed power. Husansi and other rebels were harassed, beaten, and arrested by the army in Hongweijun.

With the city under martial law, one after another, rebel branches were sealed off by the military and police.

The army branded Husansi a counterrevolutionary organization once again and set out to destroy it. On the evening of March 7th, 10,000 loyalists affiliated with Hongweijun and Wuchanzhe Red Guard organizations with trucks, motorcycles, and jeeps encircled Husansi headquarters and the Inner Mongolian Federation of Trade Unions building which housed the headquarters of the six main rebel worker organizations.

Storming the building, Hongweijun and Wuchanzhe arrested staff members. The following day, the remaining Husansi and other rebel activists regrouped at Inner Mongolia Normal University.

There, armed PLA soldiers and Hongweijun immediately attacked the last remaining Husansi stronghold, which had been the center of rebel strength in Hohhat from the outset. That night, Inner Mongolia Normal University was put under siege, a siege that would last an entire month with several wounded on each side.

On March 30th, Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan met once again with a delegation of Inner Mongolia leaders along with the leadership of Husansi and Hongweijun.

The CCRG was adamant that the Inner Mongolia military region was to back down and Zhou Enlai ordered the military region to apologize. But with an eye to the region’s sensitive international position as well as its critical position in Chinese politics, he again insisted that the rebels had to protect the reputation of the army of inner Mongolia because of the fact that the Soviet army was in the Mongolian People’s Republic, he decided to tell the rebels to not topple any reactionaries within the Mongol military region.

On April 13th, 1967, he ordered the Beijing military region to send a small military force to take control of the Hohhat Railway, securing transportation between Hohhat and Beijing. The army arrived the following day on April 14th, and with the Inner Mongolia military still siding with the loyal lists and uh on a collision course with the rebels in the center, the incoming PLA soldiers were fully armed.

Notified in advance of their arrival by rebel representatives in Beijing, more than 40,000 rebels and supporters gathered at the railroad station that morning to welcome their arriving troops, shouting, “Long live the People’s Liberation Army. Long live Chairman Mao,” and setting off firecrackers. They cheered and cheered, overwhelmed at the hope that this would change their fortunes.

Rebels saw this as the advanced party of a military that they would hope would shift the balance from repression of rebels to supporting the new legitimacy.

Well, that will be remain to be seen. In response on May 4th, Teng Haiqing on the instruction of the state council and the Central military commission placed the Inner Mongolia Daily, Inner Mongolia radio station, public security bureau and Hohhat Telecommunications Bureau under martial law.

The following day, a fight between loyalist and rebel soldiers left 40 soldiers severely wounded and 14 hospitalized, most of them outnumbered rebel soldiers. On June 18th, 1967, the founding of the preparatory group of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Revolutionary Committee was announced.

150,000 people rallied on Xinhua Square in Hohhat, hoping that a formation of a revolutionary committee like that in Shanghai would bring peace between the Red Guards and the People’s Liberation Army.

In early October 67, an organization called ‘Ferreting out the traitor clique liaison office’ headed by the Mongol Ulaanbagan submitted the brief report of ‘On the big treasonous group harbored by Ulanhu Black Clique’ to the preparatory group of the revolutionary committee.

The report described the alleged traitorous activities of many Mongol leaders including Hafenga, Tegusi (Tögös), Wang Zaitian (Namjilseren), Wangdan (Vandan), Mulun (Mörön), and Yidaga (Yatga).

According to this report, many Mongol leaders were members of a secret inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, which was looking to overthrow the Chinese rule in Inner Mongolia and merge the region with the Mongolian People’s Republic.

Everyone in Inner Mongolia was familiar with the Inner Mongolia People’s Liberation Party, Na RandongInner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Party (Neirendang). It was a real actual organization during the Chinese Civil War and the anti-Japanese war. And they knew that Ulanhu, Hafenga, Tegusi, and other Mongol leaders had been members of that party before its disillusion and merger with the CPC in 1947.

But according to this report, the Neirendang had survived past this point as a secretive organization for Mongol nationalists and the entire Inner Mongolia Party apparatus was filled to the brim with this secretive traitorous clique. This report would have serious consequences for the cultural revolution as you guys will unfortunately soon to see.

On November 1st, 1967, the Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee was established with PLA General Teng Haiqing heading the committee. While the people of Inner Mongolia were overjoyed at the announcement, the standing committee was almost entirely military and party.

In fact, no rebels were appointed to the standing committee of the revolutionary committee with only four Mongols elected to the entire revolutionary committee. Immediately the central task of the Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee became “Digging up (wa) Ulanhu’s Black Line, Eliminating (su) Ulanhu’s Pernicious Influence” or wasu campaign for short.

On November 27th, 1967, Jiang Qing called for a cleansing of the class ranks. And in in a speech where she said, “In the process of reforming and building the party, we must cleanse out traitors, spies, and those unrepentant people who have committed mistakes.”

The Wasu campaign was to become an extension of the cleansing of the class ranks campaign later in the year, but to a very violent and extreme extent.

On January 15th, 1968, the whole Hohhot mass dictatorship headquarters was established with the support from the Ferreting Out the Black Hands, Ferreting Out Hafenga, and Ferreting Out Ulanhu liaison stations. The Hohhat mass dictatorship headquarters would consolidate the Wasu campaign to be a mass investigation of and attack on anyone suspected of Neirandang membership.

One week before the lunar new year on January 3rd, 1968, three members of the Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee, Li Shude, Li Dechen, and Haoguang De took charge of the investigation of the Neirandang.

Each had de in their name, which means the virtue like Dao De Jing, the Daoist uh holy text. People ironically then called them the three virtues group ‘San De Xiaozu’

A mass of mass arrests ensued with many intellectuals and cultural figures detained for Mongolian nationalism. By this point, the rebel worker and red guard movements in Inner Mongolia had already become essentially paralyzed by the revolutionary committee.

Indeed, Husansi, Hohhat’s preeminent rebel organization in the years of ’ 66 and ’ 67 was a major casualty of the Wasu campaign. A few of its leaders had risen high, but it ceased to be a force to be reckoned with in Inner Mongolia politics in January of 1968.

By spring of '68, the Red Guards and other rebel organizations in Inner Mongolia had essentially begun to be disbanded. Most former Red Guards were sent to the countryside, while a small number were assigned jobs by the new leadership following the center’s intervention.

The few rebels who assumed positions in revolutionary committees were overwhelmed and outnumbered by military officers and former party officials, most of whom had supported the loyalists in earlier struggles. So once again, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

On February 4th, Teng Haiqing and Li Shude went to Beijing to report on Inner Mongolia’s Wasu and mass dictatorship campaigns. They were met by the leaders of the CCRG. As usual, Zhou Enlai cheered. Jiang Qing praised Inner Mongolia for digging out bad people in literary and artistic circles and exposing bad people and reactionary party organizations. However, Kang Sheng urged caution and the importance of bringing the Mongolian people to the forefront.

He said, "Ulan Hu’s influence is big, his poison deep, but first you must purge it in the army. On the one hand, criticize and struggle against Ulan Hu, but simultaneously expose and denounce Wang Yilan and Wang Duo so that the masses will know that we are not against the Mongolian people. Let the Mongols mobilize the Mongolian masses to ferret out and struggle against the Mongolian nationalists and the Han chauvinists.”

The remarks reveal Kang’s intuitive grasp of the ethnic character of the campaign and his ability to understand Han and Mongol tensions. With leadership in honor of Mongolia almost entirely in Han hands, Kang stressed the need to criticize Han leaders as well as Mongols.

However, Zhou Enlai as chair of the meeting shot this idea down and criticized it as enabling Mongol separatism. Essentially, Zhou basically said that Kong was enabling Mongolian identity politics in a sense.

Zhou sent the Inner Mongolia leadership on their way, giving the WASU campaign his stamp of approval. Oh, brother. On July 20th, a plenum of the Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee passed two key documents. One was opinion on the treatment of the Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Priority and Opinion on the treatment of the Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary League.

They were distributed throughout Inner Mongolia as documents from the International Revolutionary Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee numbers 351 and 352. The two documents established policies for screening quote black elements and the plan charted the anti-Neirendang campaign and ramped things up to the next level with roundups of ethnic Mongol party officials increasing more and more.

From July 68 onwards, digging up the Neirendang became a regionwide movement led by revolutionary committees at every level. The campaign marked a new phase of the cultural revolution in Mongolia.

One that screened every single Mongol, including many workers and peasants with no history of association with the Neirendang of the 1940s or indeed any political involvement whatsoever.

This campaign was taken up by activists who had once fought one another on behalf of or either the loyalists or the rebels now united in a campaign of terror that targeted Mongol cadres and rebels.

At the end of July, the party center sent military and worker propaganda teams to launch the down to the countryside campaign. They were ordered to discipline rebellious youth and tens of millions of middle school and university students were transferred to the countryside to receive re-education from the poor and lower middle peasants and the workers taking part in labor communes or in factories or mines.

Inner Mongolia was by far the most important frontier destination for sent-down youth.

Half of the 300,000 youth settled in agricultural villages and pastoral production teams. The others joined the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps under the Beijing Military Region, which in early 1969 took over remote state farms and labor camps.

The Construction Corps combined production and semi-military training under the control of uniformed PLA officers. Knowing nothing about Mongol politics, society, or culture, speaking no Mongolian, many and many deeply prejudiced towards the Mongols, ‘their heads were filled with tales of conspiracy and terrorism. And eager to prove themselves politically, these people took charge of cleansing the class ranks in many rural areas.’

All across Inner Mongolian, the revolutionary committees, the so-called 3 in-1 combination of revolutionary cadres, military and mass organizations, rebel representatives shorn of the support of rebel organizations that were everywhere disbanded, frequently found themselves marginalized or unable to compete effectively with their experienced and institutionally rooted political and military rivals. In the whirlwind of the Wasu campaign, the former rebels were caught in the crosshairs as the army and party decided to clean house across autumn of 68.

From the fall of ’ 68 to the spring of ’ 69, the Neirendang campaign mainly focused on alleged Mongol nationalism, but other class enemies, including Han and other nationalities like the Hui and Manchu, were also targeted. Most city and county level revolutionary committee litigators were labeled Neirendang elements in Hohhat. Ma Boyan, deputy commander and political commissar of the Hohhat military subdistrict attacked almost all leaders of the Hohhat municipal revolutionary committee including director Gao Zenggui, deputy directors Yue Ziyi, and Yang Hongwen, the party commissar.

In late November 68, Ma Boyan sent armed lawsuit activists to publicly humiliate the three men in mass assemblies. After the November clearances of municipal revolutionary committees of suspected Neirandang members, the Wasu campaign was almost entirely led by the PLA, albeit with the assistance of some civilian activists.

December 2nd, 1968, the Inner Mongolia Daily publishes the editorial broadly developed the cleansing of the class ranks in agricultural and pastoral areas and called for the digging out of the Neirandang even further. The editorial pushed each township and village to establish detention centers where they could extort confessions, mainly as you will see, through coercion and torture.

On January 1st, 1969, the People’s Daily, PLA Daily, and Red Flag published a joint editorial used Mao Zedong Thought to command everything, which sought to reduce the disruption of class struggle. It carried Mao’s newest directive

“In cleansing the class ranks. First, act quickly, and secondly, a pay attention to policy. In treating reactionaries and people who make mistakes, we must pay attention to policy. The scope of attack should be narrow but the scope of education should be broad. We must emphasize investigation." While the use of extorted confession as evidence must be prohibited. However, by this time, Mao’s directions had lost their power in Inner Mongolia. Local leaders frequently ignored them even while quoting his words. Certainly, Teng Haiqing did.

A few months later, the 9th Party Congress was convened in Beijing from April 1st to 24th. The ostensible goals of the 9th Party Congress were to bring the cultural revolution to a victorious conclusion and force reconciliation among antagonists on the basis of a of new revolutionary committee structures that would consolidate the military in position of primacy as well as anoint Lin Biao as Mao’s successor. Teng Haiqing, learning that a major policy shift would be announced at the Congress, was preparing to bring Inner Mongolia’s chaotic situation under control to avoid becoming a victim of the cent’s latest attacks. However, by then it was far too late.

According to a report put out by the Communist Party of China in 1980, the Wasu campaign had seen 16,200 people executed, 81,000 injured by torture, 346,000 imprisoned, and 1 million people had either been arrested or stripped of party membership by the campaign.

During the 9th Congress, Kang conveyed Mao’s supreme directive on Inner Mongolia for the first time. quote, “Inner Mongolia has gone too far during the cleansing of the class ranks.” Mao’s words reverberated throughout Inner Mongolia’s supercharged political milieu.

Mao’s muted signal to slow down the campaign created a panic among the officials and activists. After that, Kang Sheng ordered Teng Haiqing, Wu Tao, and Li Shude to conduct thorough self-criticism.

Mao and Kang’s report criticized the core of the Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee for dragging the PLA into the morass, destabilizing its internal unity and stability, leading quote some comrades to make certain mistakes in their works, emphasizing learning from the PLA so as to consolidate the unity between army and government and between army and people.

Thus, the summer of 69 was particularly difficult for Teng Haiqing. With the center’s verdict, he not only had to criticize himself in one mass rally after another throughout Inner Mongolia and faced thousands of angry and aggrieved victims, but he also found himself quickly losing control of the revolutionary committee.

While former rebels mobilized to criticize Teng, Wasu activists were divided into two factions, The pi-Teng ‘criticize Teng Haiqing’ faction and the bao-Teng ‘protect Teng haiqing’ faction or the May 22nd faction. So keep that in mind. Pi Teng faction May 22nd faction and the May 22nd faction took its name from the center’s May 22nd directive.

The pi Teng faction demanded that Gao Jinming replace Teng as the representative of the correct revolutionary line. Whereas the May 22nd faction held that the Neirandang mistake was made collectively. They insisted although Teng bore heavily responsibility, other leaders including Gao were not innocent. Simply put, the former favored Gao Jinming, the letter Teng Haiqing.

However, some victims sought personal revenge, directing their fury at Teng Haiqing and his henchmen. Inner Mongolia began to fragment into pro and anti-Teng camps. The anti-Teng camp consisted primarily of Mongol victims of the Wasu campaign, while the pro Teng camp centered mainly on Han military and civilian followers.

Those who saw this as the best hope for maintaining their personal power and defending themselves against reprisals from the Mongols. This division as well as the earlier division between Pi Teng and May 22nd factions and the center’s continued support for Teng despite their vocal criticisms of his policies left rehabilitation an empty promise.

Violence and confrontation between the two factions became a serious problem.

Teng Haiqing and his followers, aware of the explosiveness of the situation, retreated. They quickly closed all Wasu offices and many people who had been prominent in the campaign fled or went underground.

Sent-down youth disappeared from the localities where they had committed excesses and atrocities. But it was more difficult for local cadres and activists to leave.

Eventually, Teng Haiqing transferred hundreds if not thousands of PLA officers who had engaged in torture to new positions in Hubei and Shaanxi. An estimated 800 WASU activists among PLA officers were transferred and continued their careers smoothly.

The Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee sought to prevent victims from settling scores in a new wave of vengeance. The Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee proclaimed that all Wasu files were to be burned publicly under police guard.

Each unit was ordered to burn all of its files and no one was permitted to read or take them. Within about a week, every unit’s files were burned.

On July 23rd, 1969, the center made a shocking decision in response to the turmoil. It dismembered Inner Mongolia. In fact, it divided three of the eastern counties, Hulunbuir, Juu’uda, and Jirim to respectively the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning.

In addition, Ejine and Alasha right counties were transferred to Gansu province and Alasha left Banner to the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Military in those areas were transferred to different military regions, Shenyang in the northeast and Lanzhou in the northwest, severed from the Beijing military region.

On September 5th, 1969, directed by the center, the members of the Inner Mongolia class of the Mao Zedong thought study classes at the Beijing Air Force Institute prepared the urgent telegram to the whole region’s revolutionary people of various nationalities. Issued on October 4th with Mao’s direct orders, it urged people to be alert of the possibility of Soviet Mongolian invasion and warned of anarchy.

And uh two points about this are particularly significant.

First was the demand for the immediately dismantling of all coordination offices, fighting corps and other mass organizations that cut across the trades and professions.This reflected the center’s concern that rebels who had been dispersed and confined to individual work units might again unite to form alliances to seize power a la 1967 January storm.

Second, it endorsed the revolutionary 3in-1 combinations that had co-opted rebels into revolutionary committees, a process that subordinated them to the leadership selected by the center dominated by the party and army.

Reiterating Mao’s words, the revolutionary committees are good. It rejected any pretext to storm the revolutionary committees, beat up Revolutionary Committee staff, occupy Revolutionary Committee offices, loot, stash, or steal Revolutionary Committee documents, seals, property, or equipment.

By December 19th, 1969, the center intervened directly to control of fractious Inner Mongolia, proclaiming a new form of zoning and comprehensive martial law. It replaced the Teng leadership with a powerful new military leadership headed by Zheng Weishan, commander of the Beijing military region, a close associate of Lin Biao and Chen Boda, as well as Jung’s deputy, Du Wenda.

A new martial law run military regime was imposed throughout Inner Mongolia.

Under martial law during January of 1970 and across May 1971, 11,106 Inner Mongolia cadres were detained and dispatched for rectifying thought and unifying understanding to various locations in Hubei, Shaanxi and Beijing, collectively known as the Tangshan study class. To ensure that the center kept full control, classes were held outside of Inner Mongolia under the auspices of the Beijing military region.

At the end of April of 71, after a year and a half, classes became more relaxed. In May, the leaders outlined the next stage. Each participant of the Tangshan study classes would write a self-evaluation after each level, beginning with class and continuing up to platoon and company had to finish a collective summary and evaluation of each individual job assignments and such that would be made from May 13th to May 18th. A few weeks before the Tangshan study classes members returned, the third party congress of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region was held in Hohhat.

You Taizhong, commander of the 27th Army and deputy commander of the Beijing military region, was elected first secretary, concern currently serving as the chair of the Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee.

Martial law in Inner Mongolia was terminated on January 12th, 1972, but the withdrawal of military personnel proceeded very slowly in some areas, dragging on into the summer of ‘72. In August of ‘72, Mao decided to end military control nationwide as new party committees were reestablished to strengthen the party’s control of the army.

And at this point, I will say this, the early '70s did see a lot of positive transformation in Inner Mongolia. To improve rural health care, the party center ordered the transfer of urban physicians to the countryside and launched the barefoot doctors movement, providing uh a lot of great medical training to rural medics.

This brought a large amount of modernized healthcare to the remote glasslands of Inner Mongolia. The economy was good too with agriculture and industrial production booming after 69. For all the horrors of the Wasu campaign, the standard of living and quality of life for the peoples of Inner Mongolia did improve significantly across 1970 through 1976.

Unfortunately, as with all stories of the cultural revolution, things came to a tragic end for the revolutionary left.

On November 12th, 1976, shortly after Mao’s death, the call to clean house of anyone supportive of the gang of four was heard. It began with arrest arrest of rebel leader Liu Litang from the Hohhat railway bureau. And indeed historian and one-time Red Guard leader Gao Shuhua later called that day ‘the doomsday of the rebels’.

In short order, all former rebel leaders were uh arrested regardless of their positions, including many who had gone into hiding in other provinces. For example, Li Feng, who led the Inner Mongolia Party Committee work units red flag headquarters, was arrested in Heilongjiang. Wang Zhiyou, the August 18th leader from River West Country, was arrested in Nanjing. And Huo Daoyu, leader of the Hohhat Jinggangshan Red Guards in Hubei.

Later that month, Hao Guangda and Nasanbayar, two former rebels and ranking members of the revolutionary committee, were detained by the cleansing of the Gang of Four office. Most rebels were sentenced to 5 to 10 years of imprisonment, and many more people were expelled from the party or dishonorably discharged from the army for supporting the leftists in the Inner Mongolia apparatus.

The following year in 1977, Zhou Hui became the party secretary of Inner Mongolia.

He was a Jiangsu native acting as party secretary of Hunan Province in 1959 when he was punished by Mao for supporting Marshall Peng Dehuai’s criticism of the Great Leap Forward. In his 9-year tenure as party secretary of Inner Mongolia, he was instrumental in introducing the household contract system which demobilized the people’s communes with family farming and free market throughout rural China boosting agricultural productivity and rural incomes in subsequent years.

But the logic of agriculture and animal husbandry were profoundly different for Inner Mongolia. Dividing the grasslands into minuscule private plots of fence land with hundreds of sheep and goats eliminated the possibility of the seasonal migration that was the heart of the pastoral economy. The result was the massive desertification of the grasslands with devastating impacts on the pastoral economy and herder incomes.

Zhou Hui’s failure to appreciate both the imperatives of agriculture and pastoral production and the ethnic complexity of Inner Mongolia precipitated a new round of ethnic conflict which many argued across the 1980s was actually worse than the Wasu campaign.

And that dear listeners is where our story ends. So I will say this: how do we sum up this whole thing? Let’s sum up the whole things. I have a few thoughts. I will say this in the defense of many of those who took part in the lawsuit campaigns is that there was actually some evidence that the Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, the Nandong actually did still exist into the late 60s.

Um especially among the uh you know the good old boys club, the rancher kulaks. So there actually may have been a degree, a grain of truth to the Neirandang and Wasu campaigns. In fact, some of the Chinese scholars of the cultural revolution who I’ve spoken to over the past month say that they believe that the Neirandang did in fact exist during that time but that it was highly exaggerated.

It was highly exaggerated. That’s what they were saying. As one of my uh colleagues said, it is clear that this organization was real but did not and could not have had so many members in reality. So we can say that the purge carried out in inner Mongolia was far too harsh.

Also, I would say that another reason that things got so bad in Inner Mongolia was that, like in a lot of provinces in China at the time, they failed to go with the Maoist dictum that the party controls the gun.

The gun must never be allowed to control the party. That’s what Mao always said. But the fact of the matter is, as you guys have seen, is that across the cultural revolution, the gun always ends up controlling the party in Inner Mongolia. Now, I know that the party center was terrified of the prospect of a Soviet invasion via the Warsaw packed aligned Mongolian People’s Republic, but they didn’t struggle against them at all.

The price that was paid was just not worth it in my opinion. Hopefully in future revolutionary societies, we will look back at the story of Inner Mongolia during the cultural revolution as an example of how not to conduct a cultural revolution among places with large amounts of oppressed nationalities and instead turn to the more positive examples of Tibet and Xinjiang. All right, guys. Well, it’s Friday night.

Um, and uh we’re probably going to either order pizza or get some late night snacks, something like that. So, I’m going to wrap this up. I hope you found it as interesting uh as I did. This looks into a lesser known aspect of the cultural revolution.

At the end of this month, we will be returning to our chronological episodes where we will be covering the screeching climax of the Red Guard movement, the 100 day war at Qinghua University. You won’t want to miss it, my friends. So from the ancient city of X’ian I say Zai jian.

Sources for today’s episode include

A Chinese Rebel Beyond the Great Wall: The Cultural Revolution and Ethnic Pogrom in Inner Mongolia by Cheng Tiejun, Uradyn E. Bulag and Mark Selden.

The Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia by Paul Hyer and William Heaton.

Records of victims and perpetrators in the Inner Mongolia military region during the Cultural Revolution compiled by Yang Haiying.

Records of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia compiled by TJ Cheng.

Storms of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia. An oral history of a rebel leader by Gao Shuhua and Cheng Tiejun.

Digging for historical evidence and social immobilization of the Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Party compiled by Yang Haiying.

Government documents and leader speeches on the Inner Mongolia People’s Revolutionary Party compiled by Yang Haiying.

And the cultural revolution in Inner Mongolia, the oral history of a rebel leader by Gao Shuhua.

All right, y’all. Have a good day. Zai jian