How CCP is ‘assimilating’ Inner Mongolia

The most decisive tool of assimilation has been language policy. Mongolian-medium education has been systematically dismantled, replaced with Mandarin instruction.

- KHEDROOB THONDUP

China's armed forces, the PLA. File photo

The CCP has assimilated Inner Mongolia by eroding Mongolian language, culture, and autonomy, while promoting a Han-centric identity under Xi Jinping's ethnic affairs policy.

This assimilation is less visible than in Tibet or Xinjiang, but no less profound.

Inner Mongolia was once held up as the “model autonomous region,” the first to be granted autonomous status under the PRC. Yet today, autonomy exists largely in name. The CCP has rebranded Mongolian culture as bianjiang wenhua—“northern frontier culture”—a term that deliberately strips it of distinctiveness and folds it into a broader Han narrative. This rhetorical shift mirrors the Party’s approach in Tibet and Xinjiang, where ethnic identity is reframed as a regional curiosity rather than a living tradition.