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MongoliaChinese, Russians, and Others
The 1979 census identified the "nationality" of 5.5 percent
of the population simply as "other," an undefined category that
presumably included small numbers of Tungusic-speaking hunters
and reindeer herders in the northeast, some Turkic-speaking
Tuvins (see Glossary)
in Uvs and Dzavhan aymags, and, in
the Altai region, isolated clusters of Uzbeks and Uighurs (the
latter of whom--whose ancestors migrated north from Xinjiang in
northwestern China--grow irrigated rice in the relatively
sheltered Hovd Basin). The category also included Russian and
Chinese residents, whose national and legal status is, perhaps
intentionally, obscure. Mongolia's 1956 census counted Chinese as
1.9 percent and Russians as 1.6 percent of the population, but as
of 1989 no totals for those groups had been published since. The
United States Government in 1987 estimated 2 percent of the
population as Russian and 2 percent as Chinese.
Historically, the Gobi served as a barrier to large-scale
Chinese settlement in what was, before 1921, called
Outer Mongolia (see Glossary);
the unsuitability of most of the
territory for agriculture made southern settlement less
attractive. The small Chinese population in the early 1920s
consisted of merchants or peddlers, artisans working for Buddhist
monasteries or Mongol aristocrats, and a few market gardeners
near Ulaanbaatar (then called Niyslel--capital--Huree, or
Urga-- see Glossary)
and the smaller population centers of the Selenge
region
(see Religion
, this ch.). Many of the Chinese married or
formed liaisons with Mongol women. Their children, who spoke
Mongol as first language, were regarded as Chinese by the rules
of patrilineal descent common to both Chinese and Mongols. In the
early 1980s, Ulaanbaatar was reported to have a small Chinese
community, which published a Chinese-language newspaper and which
looked to the Chinese embassy for moral support. In 1983 the
Mongolian government expelled about 1,700 Chinese residents, who
were accused of "preferring an idle, parasitic way of life" to
honest labor on the state farms to which they had been assigned.
At the same time, ethnic Chinese who had become naturalized
citizens were reported to be unaffected. Because the presence and
the status of Chinese residents in Mongolia were politically
sensitive subjects, Mongolian sources usually avoided mentioning
the Chinese at all.
The same sources frequently referred to the Soviet residents
of Mongolia, but they always described them as helpful foreigners
who would return to their proper homes when their terms of
service were over. Most presumably were not included in the
Mongolian census figures. There were small numbers of descendants
of Russian settlers along the border, and the "national" status
of Buryat Mongols, Tuvins, or Kazakhs who at some point had
crossed the border from their home territories in the Soviet
Union was not clear. Thousands of Soviet nationals were working
in Mongolia as technical experts, advisers, and skilled workers;
they were a noticeable presence in Mongolian cities in the late
1980s. Erdenet, which was built around a joint Mongolian-Soviet
copper-molybdenum mining and processing complex in the late
1970s, had a 1987 population of 40,000 Mongols and 10,000 Soviet
workers on three-year contracts. In the 1980s, an estimated
55,000 Soviet troops were based in Mongolia, and some of them
worked on construction projects in cities
(see Threat Perception
, ch. 5). Although since 1920 many Russians have settled in the
Tannu Tuva and Buryat Mongol regions of Siberia across the border
from northern Mongolia, there has been no Russian migration to,
and settlement in, Mongolia.
Data as of June 1989
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