Bulag Uradyn Erden. Collaborative nationalism: the politics of friendship on China’s Mongolian frontier

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010. — xviii, 283 p. — (Asia Pacific Perspectives) — ISBN: 9781442204331.In this book, I look at China’s ethnolitics through offering parallax visions of Mongol-Chinese relations. This book represents an effort to understand the historical path along which the Mongols arrived at their present state in China. It tries to comprehend the Mongol appeal to the Chinese imagination, to consider whether and to what extent such an appeal constitutes a resource for the Mongols, and whether and how Mongols have tried to appropriate it to their own advantage. Here I highlight not the well-trod terrain of a nation’s political pressure on borderland peoples to show loyalty to the national center but rather the ways in which the latter demonstrates its desire for the support of borderland peoples. I view this as an example of mimetic competition, or the memory thereof, to “appropriate” the Inner Asian heritage while progressively eradicating key markers of its distinctiveness such as language, religion, and, ultimately historical memory. The book tries to go beyond structural determinism that produces predictable outcomes for the Mongols by virtue of the “minority” position they occupy in today’s China. My interest lies in exploring how the concept of “the political,” that is, the distinction between friend and enemy (Schmitt 1996), may be understood in imperial, national, and ethnic perspectives. Imperialism, nationalism, and ethnicity will not be treated as morally loaded concepts or ideology to be denounced or resisted; rather they inform the structure of opportunities that the Mongols and other minority nationalities can seek to grasp.