State Death and Survival: Chinese and Mongol Extinction Politics in the Wake of the Qing Collapse

This article examines how late Qing and early Republican Chinese and Mongol elites debated the idea of collective survival following the Qing’s collapse. It considers ‘independence’ not as a move towards nationhood but as a solution discussed within a shared yet contested vocabulary of extinction and protection. Using print genres (such as translated histories, newspaper serials, etc.) and the 1912–13 telegrams between Yuan Shikai and the Bogd Khaan, it shows how reasoning about extinction involved three connected steps: recognising danger, naming the threatened group and justifying a protection strategy. Chinese reformers used concepts such as wangguo (state death) and shijian (history as a mirror), especially referencing Korea, to argue that only a successor state of imperial proportions could prevent dismemberment. Mongol elites, however, saw integration into the Republic of China as a form of extinction through assimilation by Chinese settlement, dispossession and administrative control, and viewed separation and, at times, Russian protection as ways to defend their nation, religion and territory. The Yuan–Bogd exchange demonstrates how the same precedent (Korea) and the same term (‘protection’) could lead to differing conclusions about which political form could sustain collective life.