ABSTRACT
The late 1980s was a momentous period in world history, and like many countries in the world, Mongolia was caught up in it. 1 The country’s pro-democracy movement, which rose in momentum in the same period, was simultaneously an anti-Soviet colonial liberation movement, as it denounced Soviet exploitation, colonization and even genocide in the late 1930s. Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet détente was accompanied by the Soviet withdrawal of troops from Mongolia (Radchenko 2012), a rapid waning of the Soviet power, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Thereupon Mongolia lost its traditional guarantor of independence as much as it rejected it. What it meant for the new democracy was that it was left to face China alone, a historical nemesis, and a communist state that had just used its military power to crush its student movement in Beijing and the Tibetan rebellion in 1989. As Inner Mongols from China flooded into Mongolia, the sinicized demeanour and speech, perceived or real, of some of the visitors horrified the Mongols in Mongolia, serving as a mirror for the Mongols to see what a Chinese colonization might look like (Bulag 1998). They developed a profound sense of insecurity; Mongols were paranoid that an impoverished Russia might sell Mongolia to China, something called for by ultra-rightist nationalists such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s fall in fortune galvanized Mongolia to reshape its foreign policy as a matter of national survival.
