A stand selling books in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. [Derik van Zuetphen/flickr] some rights reserved.Twenty years is a long time in anyone’s life. Most people can reflect on what they have achieved since 1996 – work done, books completed in the case of writers, countries travelled to, children born and growing up. In 1996, I was ending my time as an English teacher in Hohot, the provincial capital of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China. Since then I did my PhD, joined (and left) the UK's foreign office, became a university professor in Australia and then London, and have written dozens of columns for openDemocracy. For pretty much anyone twenty years is plenty of time to map out accomplishments, challenges, and, of course, the inevitable failures that happen too.
For one man who I met in Inner Mongolia just a year before I left, however, the last two decades have been, and continue to be, a story of simple incarceration. Hada was an ethnic Mongolian bookseller whose shop I used to visit for materials to try to start learning Mongolian. His was one of the few places in the city that had this sort of thing. It also had the mandatory portraits of Genghis Khan, and the usual iconography of Mongolian identity. But as he and his wife were keen to tell me, despite only about 10% of the region categorised as being of Mongolian ethnicity, its history, culture and landscape were still distinctive, and that is what people like him were attempting to maintain.
Evidently the authorities didn’t regard his ideas as so benign. In summer 1995, shortly after a visit from a British journalist covering what they somewhat excitedly described to me as a "major underground separatist movement", over 250 people were rounded up. Hada was the most prominent. But there were plenty of teachers, students and others. The one common factor was that they were all Mongolian.
