Mongolia Lies in the Heart of Asia

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian 

The Mongols were once a power to be reckoned with. Under leaders like Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, and Timur (Tamerlane), they conquered huge swaths of Europe and Asia, including much of China, Russia and the Middle East, during the 13^th and 14^th centuries.

The empire, though vast, did not last, and by 1691 Mongolia itself had come under the rule of China’s Qing dynasty

In 1911, as the Chinese Empire disintegrated, Outer Mongolia declared independence from Beijing. (It was called Outer Mongolia, to differentiate it from Inner Mongolia, which is today an autonomous region of northern China, with a majority Han Chinese population.)

Mongolia became the world’s second Communist country, after the Soviet Union, in 1924.   Though it was never incorporated into the USSR, the Mongolian People’s Republic was controlled from Moscow.

In the 1930s, Mongolia served as a bulwark against the Japanese, who had conquered large areas of China. Large-scale battles between Japanese and Soviet forces took place on the border between Mongolia and Japanese-occupied Manchuria in the summer of 1939, in which the Soviets prevailed. 

So even after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, Japan never joined the war against the Russians.

Though the Communists took power in China in 1949, Mongolia remained a Soviet puppet state, and Moscow stationed troops in the country when the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s led to Russian-Chinese skirmishes.

In 1990, as Russia was itself abandoning Marxism-Leninism, Mongolia dismantled its Soviet-style one-party system in favour of political and economic reforms and multiparty elections.

The Communists, renamed the People’s Party, retained power, though, until defeated in 1996. They again formed the government in 2000-2004 and 2008-2012. Since then, the country has been governed by the Democratic Party.

A landlocked country of 1.56 million square kilometres, situated between China and Russia, Mongolia consists mostly of steppe and desert. 

A third of the population of three million lives in the capital, Ulaanbaatar (also spelled Ulan Bator), while around 40 per cent of the country is nomadic. Buddhism is the predominant religion.

Vast quantities of mineral wealth have made it a target for foreign investors, transforming the tiny but fast-growing economy, which rose from a GDP of $1.1 billion ten years ago to $11.7 billion today. 

This rapid change has taken place against a backdrop of political wrangling and government pledges to tighten control over the country’s assets.

The country’s parliament, known as the Great Khural, chose Chimed Saikhanbileg as prime minister in November 2014 after his predecessor and fellow Democratic Party member Norov Altankhuyag lost a vote of no confidence over allegations of economic mismanagement.

Mongolia’s economy has been hit by the crash in commodities prices and a steep drop in foreign investment, which in the first three quarters of 2014 slumped 59 per cent.

Saikhanbileg has been trying to rejuvenate the economy through foreign investment in the mining sector.

 The biggest chunk of that investment will come from a proposed expansion of the giant Oyu Tolgoi copper mine. A two-year dispute over the mine with Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest mining companies, was finally settled in May. 

Saikhanbileg’s message for investors was that his country is “back in business.”