A huge scandal engulfed The Inner Mongolia Daily not long after I was hired. Our editor-in-chief, a dislikable Han man who bossed his Mongolian colleagues around, also ran a state real estate company, which was awarded a large contract to service our staff quarters. (Like most state-funded bodies, the newspaper owned an apartment complex, where senior employees were given flats.) He embezzled some 157 million RMB this way between 2010 and 2013. His mistake was to appoint, as an overseer, his own nephew, a bully who withheld salaries from the maintenance staff, one of whom killed him with an axe. The murder investigation led the police to the scam, which led, in turn, to the editor’s suspension. When word got out, a few Mongolian readers were so happy that they lit firecrackers outside the premises.

This was an 11-storey building on the south side of Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia¹, one of China’s five autonomous regions. It was all steel and glass, very modern. In the lobby on the ground floor, there was a big, plastic sculpture on the wall, which read, in Mandarin: “If you don’t occupy the ideological battlefield, someone else will.” The remaining floors were divided between the paper’s Mandarin and Mongolian editions.

I wrote for The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly, the weekend supplement, housed on the eighth floor. Every Monday, at 9:30 AM, we gathered for an editorial meeting, where the team leader asked reporters for ideas. My first meeting was a blur. Someone said, “I want to interview X.” Someone else said, “I want to write about Y’s economic development.” It went on like this for an hour, and by the end, I had not said a word. A few days later, a junior editor from The Daily, taking pity on a newcomer, invited me along on a reporting trip to an ethnic Korean village in the eastern stretches of our autonomous region. “There will be many interesting people for us to interview,” he said. “You can follow my lead.”

The trip was disastrous. Recalling it still makes me flush with embarrassment. Before our first audience with the township’s party secretary – the highest-ranking local official – all the travelling journalists went to a restaurant to drink baiju, which was too strong for me (only hardened middle-aged people drink this liqour). I was completely intoxicated by the time we met the great man. This problem recurred on that trip: we would drink, then speak to farmers; drink again, then speak with restaurateurs, and so on. Since I did not know how to hold my drink, how to say no to drinks, or how to do journalism after drinking – an art my older colleagues had mastered – every meeting was wasted on me.

I returned to Hohhot violently ill. When my editor asked me to file a draft, I knew I was in deep trouble. My notes were worthless, and so was the internet: Google is banned in China, and Baidu had very little information on ethnic Koreans in Inner Mongolia. My first draft was so bad that the editors summoned me to the meeting room for a dressing down. “What are you trying to express?” they asked. “What was your purpose in speaking to these people?”

It was an inauspicious start to my journalistic career. The editors froze me out. For a whole year, I did not write a single article. All morning, I played video games, and, in the afternoon, I trudged to the office just to show my face. Around 4:00 PM, I made a beeline for the office basketball court, with another young reporter who had also been cast out. At home, my mother, who worked for The Daily, made elliptical remarks like, “People are reading the magazine.”

Eventually, I purchased a Chinese edition of The Wall Street Journal’s guide to feature writing. (I remember one piece of advice: “Do not use adverbs.”) Based on its directions, I wrote a piece about the travails of my childhood best friend, who had moved to Buenos Aires after high school because his grades were too low for a good university. He lived among the Fujianese community there, overstayed his visa, and eventually returned seven years later without much money. My editor was surprised and impressed. At the time, Chinese journalists hardly covered the diaspora. The Weekly printed the piece, and it launched my career – which came to an end five years later, in 2020, when the government abruptly shuttered the magazine.

Our family has come a long way in a few generations. My father’s father was a shepherd; he kept a pack of some 30 dogs. An avid hunter, he killed wolves, eating their hearts for dinner and washing the meal down with their blood. By the 1960s, when my father was born, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had set up good village schools across Inner Mongolia. (I am not above recognising their achievements.) As the first child in the family to be educated, you can imagine how hard he studied.

My mother was also a good student, although her motivations were different: during the Cultural Revolution, she failed to become a Red Guard. (Apparently, she was disqualified because her house had a single wooden cupboard.) After that, she was excluded from all the fun activities – pioneer team, dancing team, struggle sessions – which left her plenty of time to study.

When the Cultural Revolution ended, Deng Xiaoping reintroduced standardised college entrance examinations, which had been suspended for 12 years. (My maternal grandmother announced: “From now on, being rich is good, and being poor is bad!”) Both my parents got good scores and were admitted into colleges in Hohhot, where they studied the humanities, rather than practical subjects like medicine and engineering. This may be because intellectuals were still respected in the early 1980s, the start of the Reform Era (in my opinion, the best period of socialism in China). All college graduates were guaranteed a state job. That the son of an illiterate shepherd could attend university proved that our nation was advancing.

My father, a Mongolian Studies graduate, was hired to teach at Inner Mongolia University, and my mother, who studied journalism, became a reporter at The Inner Mongolia Daily. Four decades later, they were employed in these same institutions. Say what you will about state socialism, but it provides workplace stability.

In 1989, soon after I was born, my father was arrested. He does not speak about this period – that is the way in our culture – but I understand he got swept up in the Tiananmen Square movement, which had reached even the remotest corners of China. In Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, demonstrators swarmed through the streets and squares, demanding autonomy for their ostensibly autonomous regions. I’m told my father painted a pro-democracy slogan on a public building. He was imprisoned for two years.

One evening, when I returned home from nursery, there were two bald strangers in our living room: my father and his brother, also a protestor, had their heads shaved in jail. My mother made a huge feast, at least 10 dishes, to celebrate their release. To their credit, the university rehired my father, though as a librarian, not as a professor. If you go to prison, it’s natural to lose your job.

When I was a child, my mother would take me along on her reporting trips to remote villages. We travelled by the party Jeep, which was a rare sight in rural Mongolia: people came out of their huts to gawk at the vehicle. On weekend afternoons, she would sit at her desk, draft her articles, and then bike over to the office to hand them in to her editor. If I dwell on this memory, I can convince myself that she liked her line of work. Then I remember she remains a low-level reporter. Only party members are given promotions, and she never joined the party.

Unlike my parents, I was an average student, more interested in video games than lessons. But I had one advantage over my classmates. In college, my father had befriended a visiting American scholar, a man named Stephen, who taught him some English. Thereafter, he kept up his studies on his own, became fluent, and eventually wrote three books in Mongolian about English grammar. From a young age, I learnt the language from him.

My college entrance examination score was mediocre: 439/750. But this was the late 2000s, well into Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao’s programme of liberalisation. To keep the economy growing, the state needed to produce white-collar employees with money to spend – and that, in turn, required college graduates. A beneficiary of this ‘grade inflation’, I was admitted into Inner Mongolia University. My wife, who studied hard, went to Beijing Normal University – a rare achievement for a Mongolian.

I chose to study anthropology, more or less arbitrarily. A friend of my father’s had established the new department, which meant I had a benefactor there. The curriculum, you might say, was of two minds. There were courses like ‘World History’ and ‘Introduction to Cultural Anthropology’ as well as others like ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ and ‘History of the Chinese Communist Party’. All counted for the same number of credits. Mostly, I skipped class and played basketball.

Along the way, I also became an avid reader. In the library, I would wait for copies of The Southern Weekly, which was basically the CCP’s version of The New Yorker. It published long, narrative stories – ‘features’ in Western parlance. I particularly admired a journalist named Li Haipeng. Once, he wrote a profile of Cai Li, a weightlifter who fell on hard times in retirement, could not find a job and eventually died from bad health. Without spelling it out, Li showed how the state was responsible for the his death. I remember the article’s title: “Death of a Weightlifting Champion”.

It was possible to cover such stories back then, as the Hu-Jiang reforms extended to press freedom. Many regional publications were established, and even minorities – Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians – were given their own dailies. We got a long-form publication, too: The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly. I’m still not sure what accounts for that privilege.

After graduating in 2012, I worked at a construction site, then at a travel company that catered to rich Han people – a dead-end and frequently absurd job. (One businessman, hoping to start a new life in the US, requested that we exclude his wife from their green card application and instead list his mistress. The office went silent; we were struggling not to laugh.) In 2014, when my mother informed me that positions had opened at The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly, I promptly applied, without any relevant experience. All Chinese media is state-run, which is to say, salaries are good, pensions do not dry up, and you won’t be fired, no matter how little work you do.

I sat for the entrance examination, and somehow, I made the cut. No clips required. A few weeks later, our office hosted a banquet to welcome the 32 new hires. (If I recall correctly, more than 1,000 people applied.) Lots of eating and even more drinking. One of the editors gave a rousing speech: “This is a big platform; if you are serious about journalism, you can achieve a lot. Only in China does one have such opportunities.” I looked around the room and told myself I would be the best reporter in the cohort. I was 25. I was very happy.

Except: one thing nagged at me. It seemed not quite right, in fact vaguely embarrassing, that I’d joined my mother’s workplace. (I now know the English word for this issue: nepotism.) Those misgivings proved naive. In time, I learnt the other 31 all had ‘family connections’ at the publication. 

The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly had many merits, but independence was not one of them. We were an official publication of the CCP’s Inner Mongolia branch. All our work went through the party. What does this mean? To begin with, we were expected to interview as many state employees and upstanding citizens as possible: township secretaries, police officers, agricultural managers, educators, librarians, scientists, authors and so forth. In fact, the party provided us with an annual grant to fund these stories. Since the money was not carried over to the next year, we made sure to spend it.

Of course, this wasn’t the only kind of journalism we did. But the party was usually involved. Say there was flooding in a remote area. Rather than go there to conduct my own investigation, I would visit the local party office, show my press certification, and express an interest in covering the floods. If they approved, the party would plan my travel itinerary, book my train tickets and hotel rooms, and arrange for a minder, who would meet me at the station, take me to my hotel, buy me a few drinks, and then steer me away from the victims and towards the party workers overseeing relief.

I hasten to add that the system was not foolproof. You could find room to manoeuvre. The more you drank with the minders, the more affable they tended to be. If you promised to praise their office or salute their regional economic development, they might allow you to follow your own leads.

The Weekly mostly stayed away from politics. Our subjects were sports, business, youth, arts, and above all, ‘human interest’ (the changing lifestyles of herders and farmers was a favoured topic). At the Monday meeting, you would pitch a story; Tuesday and Wednesdays were for tracking down your subject and interviewing them; and on Thursday, you filed your copy. Week after week.

For my part, I profiled a fair number of interesting characters. Let me list some: a group of Iron Girls – a more accurate translation would be ‘Iron Maidens’ – who had been mobilised to do hard labour during the Cultural Revolution (imagine the Chinese version of Rosie the Riveter); an enforcer of the one-child policy who conducted forced abortions on pregnant women; a shepherd who had converted his yurt into a hotel room – like AirBnB – for rich people from Hohhot; an inventor who patented an automatic iron gate for a sheep’s pen, which shepherds could control from their car; employees of a government bureau for stamping out religious belief; a 106-year-old lady searching for her son, who was kidnapped by Kazakh bandits during the civil war. I even ran a series on the dating lives of young Mongolians – an idea I copied from The New York Times’ ‘Modern Love’ column.

Possibly my biggest hit was a piece about the tails of Mongolian sheep. This part of the animal is widely used in local cooking, and even given to babies to suck on. People used to think that it was unhealthy, since it was largely made up of fat. But then a scientist at Inner Mongolia Agricultural University proved that it contained nutrients usually found in fish. After reading the story, a man set up a business selling preserved Mongolian sheep’s tails. It still exists and is doing well.

I was certain my piece would win first prize, or at least second prize, at our annual in-house journalism awards. But the accolades went, as they always did, to untalented toadies who drank with senior editors. Alcohol, it cannot be stressed enough, is central to journalism in Inner Mongolia. You drink at lunch, after work, and most of all on reporting trips, which are extended benders, courtesy of regional propaganda officers who consider it their duty to inebriate visiting journalists. I remember one time, in Tongliao City, a party official took 10 reporters to a banquet hall and invited his mistress along. He was 50 or 60 years old; she was much younger. He addressed her as his “big sister” and made us toast to her.

Once a year, a staff member was nominated to go on a ‘subscription trip’ through the autonomous region. At each leg of this pilgrimage, they met with party officials for boozing. We sat at the edges of our chairs, gingerly resting our glasses on the palm of one hand and supporting them with the other – a sign of respect. The more we drank, the more subscriptions they ordered for their department. Since the state was paying for everything – your travel, the drinks, and not least, the subscriptions – there was no reason to stop. Not that the officers read our magazine. Some of them struck deals with paper recyclers, who pulped copies on arrival.

I once accompanied our own magazine director, a man close to retirement, on a subscription trip. At 8:00 AM each morning, without fail, he knocked on my hotel door and shouted: “Hey, wake up, it’s time for drinking!” He wanted me to down baiju with breakfast. I refused. As a compromise, we settled on beer.

The drinking came to an end in 2020. That March, Min Jin (中国民主促进会), literally the “Chinese Association for Promoting Democracy”, one of the various pseudo-parties controlled by the CCP, released a statement warning that an unnamed region was misusing its “excess” sovereignty. It was not hard to guess whom they were referring to. Tibet and Xinjiang had already been taken care of; now it was our turn.

A rumour soon went around that the party planned to ban Mongolian-language education at its next annual conference. Imagining that we could influence state policy, we ran an interview with a linguist about the importance of native language education. I volunteered to help two senior editors with the task; it seemed important to take part. Before we published the article, they removed my name to protect me.

The post received more than 100,000 clicks within three days – before an unnamed party official called the office and ordered that we remove it from the website, which only made people more angry. As talk about the proposed language law spread, so did opposition to it. Petitions with red fingerprints started flying around. Students delivered piles of letters to party branches. Bands announced they would only sing in Mongolian. Wrestlers refused to compete for China. Delivery guys put signs on their bikes that read: “Save Mongolian”. I was deeply touched. Who knew people were so passionate about our language?

The CCP took great pains to deny all these rumours. When people rang the Beijing Education Department to ask if they were cancelling Mongolian language education, officials always responded: “No, no, nothing like that is planned!” (Some of the callers recorded these conversations and posted them on WeChat.) Around this time, a possibly apocryphal story began to spread about an official from the education ministry in Beijing who had visited the region. Dining at a local restaurant with his Mongolian colleagues, he took umbrage at the menu. “Why is this dish called Mongolian pie?” he asked. “Why do you have to bring ethnic matters into food. This is the same pie I eat in Beijing!”

Right before the new semester began, the Inner Mongolia Education Department announced that all school instruction would henceforth be in Mandarin, or as it is known in China, Pu Tong Hua (现代标准汉语), literally “National Communication Language”. Attendance levels dropped so fast that the state issued an ultimatum: any student who did not turn up within two weeks would have their school registration cancelled, barring them from ever resuming their education. Student who convinced their friends to return were promised 200 RMB of cafeteria credit. Many of the students who did go to school protested on campus. My wife, who was teaching English to high-schoolers, sent me a video of students raising their hands and chanting: “Mongolian is our language, and we will be Mongolian to the death!” I don’t understand where these kids learnt to protest.

Directors of state-funded companies threatened to fire employees whose children boycotted school. As a result, many couples obtained sham divorces, so the parent without the state job could keep ‘custody’ of the child.

At the time, we Mongolians were foreigners in the great Chinese commons that is WeChat. Since our language was not properly incorporated into Unicode, we could not type directly into the platform. Instead, we used a dinky notepad app, took screenshots, and sent them as image files. This helped during the protests, when the state was hampered in its surveillance efforts.

I joined several staffers in boycotting the office for a month, until they threatened to fire us. Back at work, when a Mongolian colleague asked me to look at an article on his computer, I came across a document titled “Confession”, which I opened, though I obviously should not have. The gist was as follows: ‘The party invested greatly in me, prepared me for a career in journalism, but I failed to reciprocate. I deeply regret participating in such activity, and I promise to never do so again. For now, I will only do my work.’ Who was I to judge him? He had two children and a wife to support.

My father had written several angry articles on his WeChat, opposing the language policy. For this crime, he was summoned five times to the Inner Mongolia University Discipline Committee; the sixth time, the main CCP Discipline Committee came calling. Expecting another prison term, he took down his articles, deleted his WeChat account, and transferred all his money to my mother’s name.

On the last night of October, I received a phone call from an unknown number. Without any preliminary greeting, a woman asked: “Is this Su Yingbao?” (That is how they translate my name in Mandarin.) She went on: “Tomorrow, at 10:00 AM, please be at the conference room on the sixth floor to meet with the Party Discipline Committee.”

The next morning, the conference room was at capacity. The entire staff may have been called in. A camera was rolling, and an audio recorder had been placed at the centre of the meeting table. Suits of the Discipline Committee stood silently by the window. A man at the table, with the mediocre face typical of a senior party official, asked us to take a seat. Because of extreme political wrongdoing, he began, our media house was to receive three punishments: The Inner Mongolia Daily’s website would be shuttered; its WeChat account would be deleted; and The Inner Mongolia Life Weekly was to be folded, without a final issue or public statement. Several of my colleagues broke down in tears.

Re-education began that afternoon, in the same conference room. It was led by a Han journalist at The Daily, who was a close friend of my boss. Until that day, she had never so much as spoken of Han-Mongolian relations. (In fact, none of the Hans I knew cared for this subject.) Now she began by asking: “How many Han friends do you have?” After we each gave a number in turn, she embarked on a long, fiery lecture, explaining why it was a grave error to grant our region autonomous status in 1947, why our language was ‘backward’ and incapable of scientific discourse, and other abstruse matters.

Our instructor then handed out reading material: pages and pages filled with quotes from Xi Jinping. No one else was featured, not even Chairman Mao. The text was called Jin Ju (金句), which translates to “Golden Sentences”. It was laid out like the Bible or Quran. Verse 17, Chapter eight: Xi on ethnic minority issues; Verse 21, Chapter 12: Xi on party construction. For the rest of the day, we went around, one by one, reading these ‘Golden Sentences’ aloud. That evening, when I told my parents what happened, they said it reminded them of the Cultural Revolution. During such periods, good people transform into “political animals” overnight.

The re-education lasted for a month. Each morning we reported to the office and sat in the conference room from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM, reading and re-reading these ‘Golden Sentences’ and occasionally discussing them. It was boring rather than scary. Remember, this is not Xinjiang.

Staffers at The Weekly were then given two options: to serve as translators for Han journalists, who were being flown in to run The Daily, or to move to the production department to help with proofreading, printing and such, mostly on the night shift. I chose the former and began to dream of leaving.

Meanwhile, the party’s new instructional programme was rolled out. One evening my four-year-old son returned home from school and showed me a photo: “Baba, do you know who this guy is? It is Grandpa Xi.”

There wasn’t any particular reason to go to the US, but it seemed like the obvious choice, especially since I knew some English. At the very least I expected to secure a job. My wife applied to a teaching programme at New York University, and I to Columbia Journalism School, not that I knew much about it.

In addition to an English-language exam, they required a personal essay, a form in which I had no training. To learn how to write it, I bought a book by a Columbia journalism professor named Alexander Stille. The Force of Things is a family history: by reading his grandparents’ diaries and letters from the 1930s, Stille describes how they fled antisemitism in Russia and then Italy, eventually arriving in the US.

This got me thinking. Inner Mongolians were also being persecuted; I’d learnt about my father’s time in jail by reading my mother’s diaries and letters, and, like Stille’s grandparents, I too wanted to move to the US. I wrote an essay about these similarities, gathered other documents (including my university transcripts, featuring “Mao Zedong Thought”) and sent it all in. I was accepted.

There was still the matter of money. We first approached my wife’s father, a very rich party official, but he flatly refused to help. Then we turned to my parents, who sold one of the two houses the state had awarded them at a heavily subsidised rate, which brought 1.4 million RMB, enough to cover our tuition and flights.

After graduation, I was one of a handful of students in my cohort who didn’t find a job: American editors were unimpressed by my clips from The Inner Mongolian Life Weekly. Since then, I have variously worked at coffee shops (one fired me after three days); delivered packages for Amazon (peeing in a plastic bottle, as I rushed to stay on schedule, is as sympathetic as I have ever been to the CCP’s Marxist propaganda); and served as a paralegal at a Han law firm, until the office racism got the better of me (“Do you know how to ride a horse?” “Do all Mongolian men have four wives?” “Is it true that, in Inner Mongolia, citizens are legally allowed to commit one murder?”). The closest thing I had to steady employment was part-time work writing reports about the CCP’s treatment of minorities for Voice of America (VoA) and PEN America. I had hoped that one of these might turn into a permanent job. But earlier this year, when Elon Musk took an axe to these institutions’ budgets, my funding was frozen. I was DOGE’d.

When I left China in 2021, I didn’t think I was leaving for good. But two years ago, after I gave an interview to an Irish journalist about the suppression of the Mongolian language, party officials turned up at my parents’ house, with a bowl of fruit, and suggested they hand over their passports for safekeeping. (After months of squabbling with the authorities, my father had his passport returned; my mother’s remains out of reach.)

I am the first member of the Borjgin clan to be raised in a city. When I was growing up, relatives from the countryside would visit our flat in Hohhot and marvel at my good fortune: “Behold Soyonbo, our urban son!” Now I am the first member of my family to live in the US. But I am not certain any of them will ever be able to visit me here.

1. “Inner Mongolia” is the Chinese government’s official term for the province. “Inner” implies the existence of an “outer” – which in this case is the independent nation of Mongolia. By suggesting that independent Mongolia is outside China, the government is also suggesting that the nation needs to be brought inside. This is why Mongolians reject the term “Inner Mongolia” and stick with the traditional “Uvur Mongolin” or “Southern Mongolia”. Our implication is that North and South should be united as a separate country.