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CHRISTOPHER P. ATWOOD, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia's Interregnum Decades, 1911-1931. 2 vols. Leiden/Boston/Koln: Brill, 2002. Pp. 1168. $203.00.
The linkages and ideological pathways between programs of social revolution, nationalism, and modern state-building in early twentieth-century China have become increasingly elucidated over the last decade in western scholarly literature, particularly in the research of such scholars as Prasenjit Duara and John Fitzgerald. Christopher Atwood's Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia's Interregnum Decades, 1911-1931 is a pioneering effort which situates political developments in early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia in this theoretical context. The author has produced a richly detailed and theoretically satisfying account which comprehensively illuminates a complex period of history in an important multi-ethnic frontier region of the modern Chinese nation-state.
The end of the last empire to rule China, the Qing, in 1911 left its former subject peoples with the troubling legacy of its territorial form. Despite the claims of Chinese nationalists, the former Qing territory of Outer Mongolia (i.e. Mongolia north of the Gobi desert) had already declared independence and in 1925 it became the first Marxist-inspired revolutionary state in Asia. Meanwhile, south of the Gobi and immediately to the north of provincial China, another relic of Qing administrative geography, Inner Mongolia, fell under the control of the Chinese Republic.
Atwood argues that the different forms of Inner Mongol political action...