The Chinese Cult of Chinggis Khan:

Racial-Genealogical Nationalism and Problems of National and Cultural Integrity

Uradyn E. Bulag

Department of Anthropology

Hunter College

Imagine throngs of Chinese kowtowing before the shrine of Chinggis Khan, the Mongol world conqueror, and worshipping him as a towering national hero. It would be readily imaginable had this happened during the Mongol rule of China in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries at the peak of the Mongol world empire, but Chinese piety to Chinggis Khan is a twentieth century phenomenon that shows little sign of abatement at the turn of the twenty-first century. It rests of course not on Mongol oppression, but serves the interest of contemporary nationalism. The Chinese worship of their nemesis, the paragon of nomadic powers that has constituted the ultimate Other of the Chinese for more than two millennia, goes against the finest grain of Confucianism – it is a cardinal sin to worship somebody else’s ancestor – and, at least at first glance, similarly defies the logic of modern nationalism. The Chinese cult of Chinggis Khan may be understood both as a state-nationalist attempt to accommodate minorities within China and as the exercise of a racial nationalism on the part of a victimized nation seeking to take revenge for the humiliations of Euro-American and Japanese colonialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This paper probes what may be called racial-genealogical nationalism by examining the global, historical and ideological processes whereby Chinggis Khan has been resignified in China from a barbarian chief and warmonger who brutally subjugated the Chinese nation to a Chinese national hero of world historical significance. This transformation also offers a seeming resolution of the profound division of humanity between nomadism and sedentarism. What does the juxtaposition of these racial and genealogical dimensions of the Chinggis cult tell us about the nature of Chinese nationalism in the new millennium? And how has it been shaped and received by both Chinese and Mongols? I will examine the positional responses of two sets of groups: First, there is the polarization on the one hand between diasporic Chinese who subscribe to Confucianism as authentic Chinese civilizational value as opposed to barbarism, apparently represented by Chinggis Khan, and on the other hand the Chinese nation-statism that places greater emphasis on the arts of rulership and power, and what may be called global Darwinism, than on finer points of morality. Second, I consider the polarization between minority Mongols in China who see in the Chinese worship both a demonstration of Mongol strength and historical legitimation and a more benevolent Chinese accommodationist policy, and Mongols in independent Mongolia (as well as many diaspora Mongols) who now view Chinggis Khan as their national hero, the historical figure who gave rise to the very identity of the Mongols, and who think that this Chinese worship amounts to a hypocritical imperialism. The conflictual passions this racial-genealogical nationalism aroused points to fundamental questions of national and cultural integrity - an area of nationalism studies that remains scarcely explored.