6
Qing Environmentality
...more Chinese will come to our ancestral land, kick out the Mongolians,
destroy the environment and plunder the mineral wealth...This really is a
three-dimensional attack on us by the Chinese: they have destroyed our
land, polluted our air, and [are] now digging up what we have below
ground. What we will be left with is a barren land uninhabitable to
human beings.^1
“Bayaguut, a Southern Mongolian cyber dissident,” posted this grim
assessment in May of 2011 in response to the death of a herding activist.
The victim, Mergen, had been run over by a truck as he and fellow
activists were attempting to block a coal transport caravan trespassing
upon the pastures of the Right Ujumchin Banner. Five days after Mergen’s
death, another protestor, Yan Wenlong was killed by a forklift driver as
he demonstrated against a coal mine operation in Xilinhot on May 15.
The victims were both Mongols, the accused all Han Chinese. The con-
frontations and negotiations included burgeoning public protests, state
prosecution of the perpetrators, and online calls to mark the day of
Mergen’s murder on May 10 as an annual“Herders’Rights Day.”All
are part of a legacy of the unintended consequences of the borderland
environmental relations arising from the Qing unification of Inner Asia
and China proper.
Mineral extraction and livestock herding north of the passes seem no
more compatible now in the early twenty-first century than they appear to
have been in the mid–eighteenth when Han alkali diggers were spoiling
Mongol pasturelands in the Kododo lakes region. Then, as now, Inner
Mongolia’s resources both on and beneath the grasslands allow the
formation of networks that quickly become mutually exclusive and
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