Collaborative Nationalism: The Politics of Friendship on China's Mongolian Frontier(Asia/Pacific/Perspectives)

Cosmopolitanism and friendship have become key themes for understanding ethnicity and nationalism. In this deeply original study of the Mongols, leading scholar Uradyn E. Bulag draws on these themes to develop a new concept he terms "collaborative nationalism." He uses this concept to explore the paradoxical dilemma of minorities in China as they fight not against being excluded but against being embraced too tightly in the bonds of "friendship." Going beyond traditional binary relationships, he offers a unique triangular perspective that illuminates the complexity of regional interaction. Thus, Collaborative Nationalism traces the regional and global significance of the Mongols in the fierce competition among China, Japan, Mongolia, and Russia to appropriate the Mongol heritage to buttress their own national identities. The book considers a rich array of case studies that range from Chinggis Khan to reincarnate lamas, from cadres to minority revolutionary history, and from building the Mongolian working class to interethnic adoption. So-called friendship and collaboration permeate all of these arenas, but Bulag digs below the surface to focus on the animosity and conflicts they both generate and mask. Weighing the options the Mongols face, he argues that the ethnopolitical is not so much about identity as it is about the capacity of an ethnic group to decide and organize its own vision of itself, both within its community and in relation to other groups. Nationalism, he contends, is collaborative at the same time that it is predicated on the pursuit of sovereignty.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Triangulating China's Ethnopolitics Part I: Subimperial Desires Chapter 1: Hunting Chinggis Khan's Skull and Soul Chapter 2: Lamas to the Rescue: Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism and Imperial Nationalisms Part II: Collaborative Nationalism Chapter 3: Friendship, Treason, and Collaborative Nationalism Chapter 4: Yearning for Friendship: The Political in Minority Revolutionary History Part III: Interethnic Intimacy Chapter 5: The Flight of the Golden Pony: Socialism and the Stillbirth of the Mongolian Working Class Chapter 6: Interethnic Adoption and the Regime of Affection Conclusion: The Specter of Interethnic Friendship Bibliography

About the Author :
Uradyn E. Bulag is reader in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Review :
Bulag's brilliant new book examines China's 'culture of intimacy,' in which minorities like the Mongolians and Tibetans are embraced in a suffocating hug. In a theoretical tour-de-force, Bulag overturns old conceptions of majority-minority relations, replacing them with a notion of society as a triadic space of possibilities. This is an essential book for understanding China, seeing it not as a unity but as a field of collaboration and contention. Uradyn Bulag, a distinguished ethnographer of Mongolia, explores emotional and political ties between Mongols and Chinese in this intriguing new book. Mongolia, as a former great empire that divided into an independent nation and a subordinated ethnic group within China, offers an unusual and fascinating case study that will interest students of nationalism and of Chinese history, as well as theorists of contemporary identities in the age of globalization. Bulag has succeeded in capturing—or recapturing—the significance of Inner Mongolia to the geopolitics of East Asia. In showing how virtually all twentieth-century regimes in Northeast Asia competed to appropriate the world-conquering symbolism of Chinggis Khan, and, paradoxically, the spiritual power of Lamaism, Collaborative Nationalism makes a case for Mongol agency in this exemplary study of the 'new’ political history.