Mongolia Study_4.pdf

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Chapter 2. The Society and Its Environment
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A balladeer playing a Iwo-stringed morin huur
IN 1986 MONGOLIA CELEBRATED the sixty-fifth anniver-
sary of the revolution that had begun the transformation of a tradi-
tional feudal society of pastoral nomads into a modern society of
motorcycle-mounted shepherds and urban factory workers. The
reshaping of Mongolian society reflected both strong guidance and
a high level of economic assistance from the Soviet Union. The
relations between Mongolia and the Soviet Union have been ex-
tremely close. The ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party
has so faithfully echoed the line of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union that some Western observers have doubted the real-
ity of Mongolia's independence.
From Ulaanbaatar, however, issues of autonomy and the path
of social development are seen differently. Of all the peoples of Inner
Asia—Uighurs (see Glossary), Uzbeks (see Glossary), Kirghiz,
Tibetans, Tajiks, and others—only those in Mongolia retain any
degree of independence. As a small nation of barely 2 million
people, caught between two giant and sometimes antagonistic neigh-
bors, China and the Soviet Union, Mongolia has had to accom-
modate itself to one or the other of those neighbors. Twice as many
Mongols live outside the boundaries of Mongolia (3.4 million in
China and .5 million in the Soviet Union), as live within it, and
the fate of the larger Mongol population of China, who have be-
come a 20 percent minority in the Nei Monggol Autonomous
Region—once part of their own country—demonstrates that alter-
natives to the pro-Soviet alignment might well be less attractive.
In the opinion of most Western observers, most Mongolians tradi-
tionally have tended to view the Soviet Union as a model of modern
society, and the Russian language has been the vehicle for the in-
troduction of science and modern technology and for contacts with
the larger communist world.
Mongolia in 1921 was an exceptionally economically undeve-
loped society in which nomadic herders, illiterate and marginally
involved in a market economy, constituted most of the population.
They supported some petty nobles and a large number of Bud-
dhist monks. The society's dominant institution was the Buddhist
monastic system, which enrolled much of the adult male popula-
tion as monks. Such limited commerce as existed was controlled
by Chinese merchants, to whom the native nobility was heavily
in debt. The only avenue of mobility and escape from broad and
ill-defined obligations to hereditary overlords was provided by
59
Mongolia: A Country Study
entrance to the Buddhist clergy, whose monks devoted themselves
primarily to otherworldly and economically unproductive pursuits.
The population appears to have been declining, because of high death
rates from disease and poor nutrition, the large proportion of celi-
bate monks, and high levels of infertility caused by venereal disease.
Against such a historical foundation, claims that contemporary
Mongolia represents a completely new society are quite plausible.
In many ways, the society has been transformed, and in the 1980s
rapid social change continued. The ruling party saw the nation as
having leaped directly from feudalism to socialism, bypassing the
capitalist stage of development. Many of the forms of socialist
organization, particularly in the rapidly growing urban and indus-
trial sectors, appeared to be direct copies of Soviet models, with
some modification to fit the Mongolian context. The population
has nearly tripled since 1920, as the government pursued a pro-
natal policy rare among developing nations. Mongolia's herds of
livestock, which outnumbered the human population by at least
ten-to-one, had been collectivized, and herders in the 1980s worked
as members of pastoral collectives that drew up monthly and an-
nual plans for milk and wool production.
By 1985 a slim majority of Mongolia's population was urban,
working in factories and mines, and increasingly housed in Soviet-
model, prefabricated highrises. Public health and education had
been the objects of intense development, which by the 1 980s had
produced vital rates approaching those of developed nations and
nearly universal literacy among the younger generation. Much of
Mongolia's industrial development and urban growth has taken
place since the mid-1970s and has been so recent that the country
was only beginning to recognize the problems attending rapid in-
dustrialization, urbanization, and occupational differentiation.
The drive for modernization along Soviet lines has been accom-
panied by an equally strong, but much less explicitly articulated,
determination to maintain a distinctive Mongolian culture and to
keep control of Mongolia's development in Mongolian hands.
Although the topic was politically sensitive, Mongolia's leaders were
nationalists as well as communists, and they aspired to much more
independence than was permitted to the "national minorities" of
the Soviet Union and China with whom the Mongolians otherwise
had so much in common.
Geography
Landforms
The
terrain is one of mountains and rolling plateaus, with a high
degree of relief (see fig. 4). Overall, the land slopes from the high
60
A balladeer playing a Iwo-stringed morin huur

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