About Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly

Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly

The Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly was a historical minority-affairs publication of the Republic of China, published in Nanjing. In Chinese it was Meng-Zang Zhoubao. It was founded in Nanjing by the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission and Central Propaganda Committee system, and it was published in Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan. Academic research records its successive forms as weekly, ten-day, semi-monthly and monthly editions, and its role as the first such trilingual frontier paper. It was closed and historical, and this profile is written in the past tense: the Weekly was the Nanjing government's paper for the Mongolian and Tibetan frontier, and it became an important source for the study of modern Mongolian literature and of Republican frontier policy.

The Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission

The Weekly's publisher was the institution the Republic created to govern its Inner Asian frontier. After the fall of the Qing, the new republic inherited the Qing's responsibilities for Mongolia and Tibet, first through a Bureau of Mongolian-Tibetan Affairs and then, under the Nanjing National Government, through the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, a body of ministerial rank whose chairman sat among the leading organs of the Executive Yuan. The commission handled relations with Mongolian princes, leagues and banners and with Tibet, at a time when Outer Mongolia had declared independence, Tibet was governed in practice from Lhasa, and the frontier's future inside the Chinese republic was contested. A government that claimed the frontier needed to speak to it, and print, in the frontier's own languages, was one of the few instruments that could reach it from Nanjing.

A Trilingual Frontier Paper

The Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly combined Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan languages in a single publication, a combination no earlier Chinese government paper had attempted in this form. Research on the paper describes it as the first trilingual frontier paper of its kind: an official publication that did not merely translate Chinese announcements, but carried material in Mongolian and Tibetan scripts for Mongolian and Tibetan readers, alongside the Chinese text read by officials and settlers. The trilingual form was itself a political statement. It presented the republic as a union of peoples whose languages the central government recognised in print, even as the same government sought to strengthen its rule and management of the frontier minority areas whose loyalty the paper was created to secure.

Founding under the Nanjing Government

During the period of the Republic of China, in order to strengthen the rule and management of the frontier minority areas, the Nanjing government established the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission and worked through the Central Propaganda Committee to deal with the affairs of the frontier areas. Faced with the turbulent political situation and the special circumstances of the border areas, the two organs realised the importance of combining political and ideological work to strengthen propaganda management, so they established the Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly. Scholarly work on the commission records one of its early Tibetan specialists, Kelsang Tsering, who was recommended to the commission by the Panchen Lama, appointed in 1928 as head of its Tibetan Affairs Office and as vice-editor of the commission's journal, the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Weekly. The appointment shows the paper at work from the commission's first years, edited with the help of frontier intermediaries whom Nanjing needed as much as they needed Nanjing.

Suspension, Resumption and Six Names

Under the influence of external factors such as war and power struggle, the Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly experienced a process of ceasing publication, resuming publication and changing its name many times. In all, it appeared in six forms: the Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly, the Mongolian and Tibetan Ten-day Publication, the Mongolian and Tibetan Monthly, the Mongolian and Tibetan Ten-day Publication again, the Mongolian and Tibetan Semi-monthly, and the Mongolian and Tibetan Monthly. Because the Weekly was the first to be published, scholarship uses Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly as the collective name for all six forms. The instability of the title mirrored the instability of its world: the Japanese invasion, the removal of the government from Nanjing to Chongqing, and the struggles within the frontier administration repeatedly interrupted a paper whose readers were scattered across the most contested territory in Asia.

Literary Pages: Prose, Poetry and Translation

The Weekly was not only a bulletin. A full academic study of the paper takes the literary works published in the Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly as its main research object, analysing the prose, poetry, fiction, literary criticism and translation works the paper carried. Its pages formed a literary space in which Mongolian and Tibetan themes, authors and translations met Chinese readers, and Chinese literary forms reached frontier readers in their own scripts. For a government paper, that literary investment had a purpose recognised by its publishers: culture and education were instruments of integration, and a frontier reader who read the republic's paper for its poems and stories was also reading its politics. The study concludes that the paper's literary pages are an indispensable and important material for the study of the history of modern Mongolian literature.

Themes: National Unity and Enlightenment

The Weekly covered a wide range of literary works containing advanced ideas such as appealing for national unity, attaching importance to cultural education, and promoting minority enlightenment and development, ideas the scholarly study describes as having a certain progressive significance and epochal significance for their time. Its editorial project joined three messages: that Mongols, Tibetans and Han belonged to one republic; that education and cultural development were the frontier's path forward; and that the central government's care, expressed in the frontier's own languages, answered the separatist appeals reaching Mongolia and Tibet from abroad. Read critically, the paper is evidence of the Nanjing government's frontier imagination; read on its own terms, it was a genuine, if official, attempt to create a shared printed public sphere across the republic's languages.

The Paper and Frontier Communications

The Weekly belonged to a wider commission effort to bind the frontier to the capital with modern communications. Between 1934 and 1937 the Nationalist government in Nanjing commissioned the engineers of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission to devise two separate Morse codes for the Tibetan and Mongolian scripts, rendering them into dots and dashes for telegraphy, before the government abruptly cancelled the project in 1937. The same Kelsang Tsering who had served as the paper's vice-editor was, by 1934, the commission's chief investigator in Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai, and his report proposed a five-point programme to develop frontier infrastructures, including the Tibetan Morse code. Print and telegraph were twin projects of the same administration: the Weekly carried Nanjing's words to the frontier on paper, in three scripts, while the engineers worked to carry them by wire in two of them.

Readership and Distribution

The paper's intended readers were the frontier elites and the officials who dealt with them: Mongolian princes, banner officers and students, Tibetan officials and traders, the commission's own staff and representatives, including the Tibet Bureau Office established in Nanjing in 1931, and the Chinese officials, teachers and soldiers serving in the border provinces. Distribution across such distances, to readers of three scripts, was the paper's permanent practical problem, and one reason its frequency shifted so often between weekly, ten-day, semi-monthly and monthly forms. What survives most completely is its printed record, preserved in libraries and studied by scholars of the frontier, of Mongolian literature and of Republican propaganda, for whom the complete run documents both what Nanjing said to the frontier and what frontier writers said in its pages.

Legacy for Frontier and Literary Studies

The Mongolian and Tibetan Weekly left a legacy disproportionate to its interrupted life. It was the first trilingual frontier paper of the Republic, a publishing experiment that recognised, in print, that the republic could not speak to Mongolia and Tibet in Chinese alone. Its six successive forms chart the fortunes of the Nanjing government's frontier policy through war and political struggle. Its literary pages preserve prose, poetry, fiction, criticism and translation that scholars now treat as a significant contribution to the development of modern Mongolian literature, and its official pages preserve the vocabulary of national unity and minority education with which the Republic addressed its Inner Asian peoples. Published in Nanjing in Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan, the Weekly remains a primary source for anyone studying how the Chinese republic imagined, and tried to hold, its frontier.