 It's my pleasure to welcome you all to today's lunchtime lecture. I'm Nathan Hill, I'm director of the Trinity Center for Asian Studies. And I would like to introduce today's speaker, who is Professor James Leibold, the head of department of politics, media and philosophy at Latrobe University in Melbourne. And he's, he's also a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. I think one can say one of the world experts in Chinese nationalities policy. And he'll be giving us this talk teaming Mongolia, Xi Jinping's agenda for coercive nation building in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region. Thanks very much, Nathan. Thanks for the invitation for the Trinity Center of Asian Studies for hosting my talk. This talk is really based on some new research that conducted looking at the implementation of Minzoo policies in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, and really builds on, I guess, over two decades of work trying to track changes in Minzoo theory, Minzoo policy debates. I'm, you know, I'm new to Inner Mongolia, I don't speak Mongolian. Lucky enough to travel there a couple of times when I was living in China, but I'm going to kind of steep learning curve here, but what I'm trying to do is apply some of the previous findings that I've been able to gain looking at policy debates as well as some of the more recent work I've been doing, looking at policy implementation in Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia. And part of my aim here is to widen out our perspective and to look at the way in which what's happening in China in terms of this kind of a slimmer to turn is occurring at different places and in different ways in different parts of China. So this is based on an article that's forthcoming in the China Leadership Monitor. I'm going to try to speak for 30 to 40 minutes, try to aim for 30 minutes. So we have plenty of time for questions and discussion. And I really want to kind of start with a kind of wider lens of looking at recent changes in ethnic policy before I kind of turn to the situation in Inner Mongolia. You know, language as I'm sure we all know and I know Nathan knows very well is really all about power. So my researchers have tried to really offer a close reading of Chinese language discourse on Minzhu, a term that is deeply polycelemic and highly contested. In fact, I would argue you could chart the kind of evolution of Chinese thinking on ethnic policies and theory in the PRC by looking at the altering glosses in English for this term Minzhu. Much of its history means it was translated as nationality, really giving a nod to the idea that China was a multi-nation state with 56 officially recognized nations. Yet these nations, of course, we're never equal in terms of size and power. Marking one of the fundamental tensions in China's approach for managing its ethnic diversity. It's got what my colleague Tom Mulaney called a kind of odd calculus of 55 minorities plus one supermajority somehow comprises one nation state. And that's really the key challenge that Chinese policy members has been dealing with. And of course that one supermajority, the Han is always function as a kind of core, the normative core, the standard for the nation, a kind of seemingly unmarked signifier of modernity and Chinese-ness. Yet until recently, you know, the so-called Minzhu went to you or the Minzhu question or problem was really viewed as a kind of long-term one with gradual uneven pace of development viewed as a kind of key to its solution. China was seeking unity through diversity, with the original emphasis really on this idea of diversity as a part of Fei Xiaotong's 1988 idiom of the Chinese nation's Duoyuan, which is an idiom of unity or the structure of unity and diversity. In order to safeguard this process of autonomous development, the party state adopted a range of policies in the 1950s. There were then institutionalized in the 1980s and in these policies really by international standards were incredibly progressive. The formal recognition of minority languages, cultures and religious practices, their constitutional protection for equal status to a system of regional autonomy that at least on paper promised to allow minority nationalities like the Mongols to be masters of their own home. And then third range of preferential policies, think of them as affirmative action policies to protect and support minority nationalities with their autonomous development. It was believed that by assisting with this development of minority nationalities. Of course, each according to their own pace and traditions, but China would slowly but surely move towards a collective sense of unity that national differences would disappear in the wake of class solidarity and kind of traditional Marxist thought. But of course, you know as as as China grew more powerful under Deng Xiaoping in its external environment altered so to do its means of policies, or what is now glossed as its ethnic policies with means who now rendered in English as ethnicity. Following the collapse of the USSR and in 91 a range of really influential scholar officials. Such as bed as my wrong, the United Front work departments to a tune, as well as Tsinghua University's who on gum began to call for like an urgent rethink of China's Minzhu policies, in order to forestall what they believe would be an inevitable collapse of China along its ethnic seems like the USSR, or you believe that if it was the Soviet, they argued that current policies placed too much emphasis on Minzhu differences and peculiarities, and not enough on a shared belonging culture and identity without urgent nation building they argued China's was under threat. Huangang and Julian He put forward this idea of a second generation of ethnic policies, one that would remove administrative and institutional barriers to national cohesion and permit interethnic as well as interregional mobility in Mingling. The party state also believed that it was important to kind of scale back and ultimately eliminate Minzhu-based preferential policies, as it was argued, that these helped to strengthen ethnic attachments. Some even went so far to call for the entire elimination of the system of regional ethnic autonomy, which would require the revision of the Constitution and maybe even the repeal of the 1984 law on regional ethnic autonomy. Of course, ethnic, in their view of a new generation of ethnic policies, ethnic identities weren't to be removed completely. Rather, colorful costumes and songs like we see here in the children walking across the burdened stadium in 2008 could remain. But the focus really needed to be on a single shared Guozhu, and this is a term that Huangang and Huli and He turned back to, a concept that was first coined by Liang Chi-chao and then used quite frequently by Sun Yat-sen. In this idea of a Guozhu, I've kind of rendered in English in the past as a kind of state race, so I do think it has a racial eugenics element to it. The goal here was to achieve unity from diversity. As Professor Xiong-Hung Xin argued when he inverted Fei Xiaotong's formulation to E.T. Duoyuan, arguing that unity is foundational and diversity is derivative in a recent article. So against that backdrop, enter Xi Jinping's stage right in 2012. Now, like most policy areas, Xi really sought to put his own stamp on the Minzhu problem. And I've written about this in the past. He doesn't really come to the job with a lot of experience dealing with this issue. It'd be interesting who he turned to as an advisor. Long Huning clearly plays a role, but I also feel that people like Jue Chun also had the ear of Xi Jinping. And so he clearly borrows quite heavily from those advocating a second generation of political policies. But what we see is that it's not a complete match, a one-to-one. And in fact, he sought to kind of take ethnic policies in a slightly new direction, a real return to Mao in an emphasis on the importance of ideology, education, and culture. The superstructure, rather than base, was going to ultimately solve the Minzhu wenti. His self-declared new era required the adjustment of Minzhu work. One needs to realize that economic development alone would not solve the Minzhu question, but rather it required a focus on cultural and spiritual work. In 2019, Xi stated that cultural identity is the soul of the nation, the root of national unity. His concept of forging the collective consciousness of the Zhonghua Minzhu has been declared the kind of main line of Xi Jinping theory on nation building work in the new era. And this concept of forging collective consciousness, the key verb here really is this concept of Julao, which literally means to forge or to smelt, suggesting that the party state needed to adopt a really interventionalist approach to building collective identity in the PRC. And as a result, educational ideological work were really deemed the kind of main battlefield in the drive for cultural security, requiring party officials and educators to, in Xi's word, plant the seed of patriotism in the souls of every Chinese citizen from infancy and ensuring language, again, being very important, that Putonghua medium education was universalized, as was patriotic education throughout the entire country. It also required the promotion of inner ethnic mingling and mobility, a desire to really break down these autonomous regions. They could remain in name only. In fact, one of the things that Xi did was to state that the system of regional ethnic autonomy was a foundational principle of socialism with Chinese characteristics. It would stay, but it would stay largely in name only. And what was required was to, you know, to kind of transmigration of Han into the frontier and the movement of minorities out of these regions, you would break down the attachment that minority groups had with these regions and essentially render autonomy hollow. The term doi-yuen-yi-ti, this feishou-tong term, is actually still used by Xi and party officials. It's an incredibly resilient and a robust concept, but now is probably best translated as I've been playing with this multiple, beginning single essence or even out of many one, which is actually the same rendering of the Latin term e plervus unum, which is inscribed on the great seal of the United States. And in fact, much like the kind of China dream, one could argue this rendering of doi-yuen-yi-ti is clearly drawn upon the American model and a kind of idealized view of the American melting pot. So with that as a bit of background, what I wanted to do in kind of looking at the Inner Mongolia was just to use it as another example of look at the way which of these, this new policy agenda was being implemented in Inner Mongolia. Now, Inner Mongolia is not, it's not the Xinjiang is not Tibet. And that was my kind of starting starting points. And as I said before, I'm still on a learning curve here to understand, but clearly Inner Mongolia had a stronger level of autonomy than the other two regions. Clearly it was an area of concern for Xi Jinping. It was the first ethnic minority region he's visited. It's the only one he's visited twice. He's met numerous times with the Inner Mongolian delegation at the NPC. And this concept of Inner Mongolia as being a kind of model autonomous region was something first coined by Joanne Leibach in the 1950s. And it was sort of seen as a badge of honor. You know, the Mongols were the first to kind of join the PRC, but it's also been used often to castigate the region and Mongolian officials when they are believed or perceived to have failed to live up to this lofty title. And that's certainly what happened in 2020, August and September when a educational protest movement broke out. And we can see the party state, the system, the central party in particular coming down quite hard on Mongolian officials for not falling in line. So without going into detail, I think some of you would be aware of what prompted the language protests the party state tried to ram through a series of really highly contentious changes to the medium instructions as well as textbooks in the region's Mongolian schools. And as a result, parents took to the streets and students led a school boycott that really captured the attention of the international media. So in my forthcoming article, what I sought to try to understand is what really happened after the gays in the international community turned elsewhere. So I really wanted to kind of understand not what happened during the protest movement, but what happened afterwards and unpack what I argued is a kind of toolkit of control and transformation that Xi Jinping and the party center used to attain in our Mongolia. And so in the article, I look at kind of four features in particular, and I'll just go through each of them briefly. The first one is often the kind of knee-jerk response of the party state system when there's any form of instability that is to bring society under control. And under Xi Jinping, we've seen the party's mechanisms of control really strengthened with new innovations about human and automated forms of surveillance and control and real strengthening of the party at the grassroots. And that investment pays dividends when you have unrest like you had in 2020. And what we saw is that where possible, authorities first sought to incentivize compliance. There are a number of cases of them offering carrots for students to bring back fellow classmates into school. But when these carrots failed, the party state quickly turned to the stick in Tongliou city, which is home to over a hundred Mongolian medium schools with nearly half of the city's population being ethnically Mongolian. The police started posting CCTV photos on their Weixing account, calling on residents to dob in their fellow citizens for picking quirls and provoking trouble. I was really quite a gobsmacked when I found that these posts are still up on Weixing and haven't been taken down. And I mean, this is a series of surveillance footage of people looking for other civilians to sort of dob them in. As opposition continued to linger, the authorities turned to more blunt tactics, including the expulsion of students and the dismissal of their parents from state employment, the imposition of mandatory legal training, blacklisting, severing of social benefits, and even detention and formal arrest should all other efforts fail. And unsurprisingly, within two months, students were back in school, order was restored, and then the reeducation campaign began. And that's the more interesting part for myself, and it's sort of how do you elicit kind of slow change and rewire a society and its population over the long term. So in the immediate wake of the protests, you had both regional and central party officials like Shui Tai Feng and Wang Yang, castigating local officials, and talking about deep-seated problems in ethnic work and calling for a kind of urgent rectification campaign. And sure enough, in December, the new head of the Education Bureau, Huang Ya Li, launched a new ideological campaign around Xi Jinping's pet phrase of forging a collective consciousness of the Zhonghua Minzhu. And throughout 2021, I used a lot of Beijing posts to track this. You could see that staff and students across the entire educational system in Inner Mongolia were subject to a barrage of patriotic training and propaganda. Here is just one screenshot from a local news report where you can see students at the Tongliao Mongol Kindergarten School learning the spirit of revolutionary heroes who had died for the nation in the anti-Japanese resistance war in order to deepen their love for the nation. This is what the propaganda package asserted. In the paper, I also provide some analysis of a leaked internal training pamphlet that was used as the key text throughout this educational campaign. Half of it is just filled with quotes from Xi Jinping, but the interesting pages near the back are quite explicit in warning local officials that they had fallen behind Xinjiang and Tibet in educational language reform, really kind of using this notion that they were supposedly the model ethnic region, but they were really falling behind the other regions. It also asserts quite clearly that unity is a pre-supposition and foundation of ethnic autonomy and also argues that no ethnic region belongs to a single ethnic group. So it's not really the inner Mongolian autonomous region, it's just a autonomous region of the Chinese nation. I also provide some coverage, only because I've recently managed to download them of a series of new readers on Xi Jinping thought which were introduced across all of China in September, along with new regulations requiring all kindergartens this one to use Putonghua medium instruction, which wasn't the case before. The readers, and I'm happy to send you your copies or show you where you can download them, they do make for a really interesting reading. There's four of them, depending on the level of the students. The middle picture here is the first lesson and page of the junior elementary version of the reader, where, as we can see Xi Jinping is front and center. And on this very first page, students learn, quote, we all Chinese, we all deeply love our motherland. As grandpa Xi Jinping says, love of one's motherland is the deepest and most enduring sentiment in the world, the source for achieving individual virtue and the foundation for rendering emeritus service. The photo on the far left is another screen from another lesson on what I call Xi's button theory, where students learn, quote, if you don't get the first button right in life, your value system will be deviant and your social orientation crooked. So as we can see in these textbooks and the larger education system in Inner Mongolia, it's really a push for both cultural and ideological conformity. So those two elements are simultaneously at play. The other element of the crackdown was purge of local officials. So recent research has really demonstrated that Xi has been effective in using both his anti-corruption campaign and personnel appointments to strengthen his personal authority and control over the party. This was also the case with frontier regions like Inner Mongolia, take for example, the current party secretary, Suretai Fung. So I've been a lot of time trying to understand Suretai Fung originally thought, well, he's described as a classmate, Li Keqiang. So maybe he's not Xi's man, but the more you dig into it, you can see that there are clear connections between Xi and Suretai Fung. So Suretai had served as Xi Jinping's deputy at the party school from 2007 to 2010. And then he was hand-picked to become party secretary of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in 2007, where he was praised for expunging overt symbols of Islam and retarding religious extremism and carrying out Xi's agenda for a sinicizing religion. And so at that time, there was real concerns that extremism was going to creep out of Xinjiang and Ningxia was seen as a really important battleground. So Suretai got this really important assignment and after two years of success, he was then tapped on the shoulder to go to Inner Mongolia. And I'm pretty convinced that was because she trusted him and she believed that he could go into the region and implement his nation-building agenda and really try to tame the region and bring it under closer central party control. But of course, he was not the only one active there in terms of purging personnel. Within months of the language protests, the Central Commission for Disciplinary Inspection launched what are called a routine inspection of the region resulting in the purging of thousands of senior Inner Mongol and Inner officials, both Han and Mongol alike throughout 2021. And so there's lots of evidence that you can bring to bear looking at this through a whole range of sectors. But one of the things you see is that of course, the bar for loyalty appears to be a much higher for Mongolian officials, particularly in the educational sphere. Take for example, Miss Gauwa who is a celebrated Mongolian educator who actually won a state award as a Hero Ethnic Unity in 2007 when she was a principal of the Tong Liao Mongol School and she helped to increase its student enrollment by five fold. She was eventually dismissed from her role as a party secretary at the Tong Liao Education Department in late December and then expelled from the party and convicted of corruption in June of this year. Similarly, the very high-profile chairwoman of the autonomous region, Bu Xiaolin, who is the granddaughter of the revolutionary and Mongolian hero, Ulan Hu, was formally stood down in August of this year after being largely absent from public life for over 10 months. Now, there was no reason given for Bu's removal but she wasn't of retirement age and it's possible that she'll be given some kind of ceremonial role. But it's quite clear that she was clearly demoted either because she didn't implement this policy strongly enough or that somehow she was resisting it. And there she joins two former Mongolian chairs of the region, Yang Jing as well as Batar who have been dismissed from public office under Xi Jinping. So it was a real attempt here to remove particularly senior Mongol party officials who were deemed as being disloyal to Xi Jinping. Bu Xiaolin was replaced by another Mongol official, Wang Lixia, who had spent most of her career actually outside of the region, suggesting a kind of concerted effort to weaken the links between Mongolian officials in the autonomous region with, as I said, loyalty really emerging as the key determinant of promotion in Xi's China. Finally, the last element I look at is what I call the kind of weaponizing of law. One of the reasons why Inner Mongolia was one of the last frontier regions to adopt Putonghua medium education is it's really strong tradition of Mongolian medium education which was really underpinned by a strong legislative foundation. Reid, if you get a some chance, the 2005 regulation on the Mongolian written and spoken language work, which stipulates quite clearly that written and spoken Mongolians should be the lingua franca of the region and that it is quote an important tool for exercising autonomy. A more recent regulation 2016, regulation of ethnic education also codifies really strong administrative as well as financial incentives to support Mongolian medium education. So it was quite clear after the crackdown that these two laws could not stand. And in fact, in January of 2021, the legislators affairs committee of the National People's Congress made a ruling that these regulations and other regulations like that were in violation of article 19 of the PRC constitution, which calls for the promotion of Putonghua. So with the laws rendered null and void, the regional government then drafted two replacement laws that it tabled recently for consultation. And these new draft regulations on education and the promotion of Putonghua will go into effect on 1st January, 2020. And they mandate that schools adopt the correct view of country, history, nation, culture and religion and promote Putonghua as the foundation of the region's education system. The regional government also enacted a new set of regulations promoting national unity. It revised its civilized behavior regulations, which are quite remarkable actually in government just about every facet of life, but also wrote into it Xi's concept of forging a collective consciousness of the Chinese nation. And the theory could lead to the punishment of anyone who was not demonstrating a firm footing of that theory. And then finally, they also revised quite recently there's a lot of change, a lot of legislative change in a very short period of time, a change to the extra point system on the Gaokao where ethnic minorities used to receive extra points that essentially going to be phased out in a short period of time, winding back these minority preferential policies that is another key element of Xi Jinping thought on nation building in the new era. So just sorry, some concluding thoughts before I finish up. So the Chinese Communist Party has long used a carrot and stick approach to ethnic governance. Under Xi Jinping, we've seen the party center turning to more coercive methods of control and homogenization as its tolerance for diversity, Wayne. The emphasis is really on standardizing and normalizing Beijing's controls across the nation while also creating a uniform set of ethno-cultural norms in frontier regions like Inner Mongolia. As a result, Mongolian identity, like those of other non-Hong Kong communities in China is slowly but steadily being hollowed out. This sort of slow violence is chiefly structural and not really defined in any single event or policy action. Rather, it's particularly outside of Xinjiang, it's really the kind of glacial drip and largely hidden altering of what it means to be a citizen of China and the norms that define that identity. Of course, ritualized performances of exotic ethnic otherness remain often through fetishized costume, song and dance assemblages performed for the voyeuristic pleasure of visiting Han officials and foreign tourists. Meanwhile, in the main stage, Mongols and other indigenous communities are being taught to dress, act and speak in accordance with Xi Jinping thought in state schools. Yet as I pointed out before, I think it's so important to keep in mind that Inner Mongolia is not Tibet nor is it Xinjiang. Regional variation remains and so do local forms of resistance. Xi's mandate for cultural nationalism and ethnic assimilation has been rolled out at different paces and under different local circumstances. In Inner Mongolia, at least until recently they did exercise a greater degree of autonomy than those risk of regions where national security fears propelled a more heavy handed and securitized approach to stability maintenance and nation building. The party's methods in Inner Mongolia are far more subtle and less visible. Making them, I would argue, more insidious to ethnic cultural diversity in China over the long term. And I'll end there and welcome your comments and questions. Very near the end there, you made the point that maybe more soft policies are more effective. If I were a friend of Xi's, let's put it this way, I would caution that if you overplay your hand it might dialectically produce the opposites of your intended goal. Do you think there's any, like, do you think that's a consideration at all or? I think the Chinese approach to governance has always been quite methodical with the long-term view. But at the same time there has been a kind of frustration continually with the Leninist party system that because it's so complicated, so bureaucratic, you know, has different, you know, often conflicting interests built into it, but sometimes the system itself becomes a bit gummed up and less effective. And so when the Parshay system perceives there to be a kind of existential threat of sorts, it often resorts to this kind of campaign style governance that does lead to more extreme policy responses that commit devastating consequences. And I think that's what we saw in the case of Xinjiang, there was this real perception of fear that the region was spinning out of control, that you had all these terror attacks that she at that time was in the early years of his rule, didn't want to look weak. And so you have a pretty extreme policy response of the rounding up and mass internment of Uyghurs in these reeducation camps. That's quite an extreme policy response that I don't think is the party's preferred mechanism of transforming its ethnic minority populations. Really, if you look at its approach to this issue, say over the last decade, 15 years, the more I study it, the more I see kind of Xinjiang as the outlier, the exception, the preferred approaches is a softer, less overtly coercive approach. I think the party state always prefers if it can to use carrots over sticks. And in the case of Inner Mongolia, you really, with the exception of that real intense crackdown in September, late August, it's been coercive, but not overtly coercive. It's subtle through the change to the legal system, purging people, new appointments, a bit of ideological campaign mixed in to kind of slowly bring the region to bear. And so I think that's the preferred mechanism, but of course it also, there's regional dynamics at play and here I haven't completely gotten my head around this, but there's something about Inner Mongolia that where Xi's control is quite weak. I actually think his control in all the frontier regions when he came to power was quite weak. The frontier regions have long been seen as breeding grounds of the Tuan Pai, this party school faction. And so when it comes to power, none of these people are really Xi's men in those areas. And so it's been a slow process of kind of finding officials that he trusts and removing others that he didn't trust. And I think in particular Inner Mongolia appeared to be one that was really resisting more so than say, certainly Xinjiang was brought under strong control under Xinjiang war and as was Tibet where he was previously. So yeah, there's something different about it. And I guess that's what one of the things I'm trying to do with my current research is really look beyond, look at the diversity of the way policies are implemented across China as it relates to ethnic issues of hoping to look at the South of China. I mean, I haven't done anything yet. I mean, looking at Yunnan or Guangxi to get a sense of what the dynamic is down there. This seems classic. I'm a historian of colonialism and this seems kind of classic colonial behavior. You know, the, the British in Ireland or plenty of examples of colonial powers promoting their language of the expense of indigenous language, but it can be for reasons of just kind of chauvinism of, you know, just genuinely believing that their language is superior and their culture is superior. Or it can be an explicit effort to suppress the native language because it's seen as a source of subversion. What's the balance, do you think, between those two motivations for, for Beijing here? Do they, do they, is their long-term plan for no one to speak any ethnic minorities, any ethnic minority languages because that's a possible route to subversion or is it just they want everyone's first language to be put on hold because that's the, the national language? I think Isabel's a bit of both. It's usually the case. There's definitely chauvinism at play, a belief that, you know, Chinese cultural norms are superior. There's a long, held belief that, you know, ethnic minority cultures and languages and religious traditions are somehow kind of backward. You know, there's this trope going through that, you know, that you can't learn modern sciences in Uyghur or Mongolian, you know, that if you really want to bring China into, into modernity, you know, the vehicle has to be put on hold. But, you know, in fact, most colloquially, most people refer to it, you know, as Hanyu, you know, the Han language, you know, which kind of gives the way that the fact that what we're talking about here is not the common speech. It's the language of the majority, but there's also that concern of subversion that this language, you know, because a lot of these minority communities have diasporic populations across the border. So it can be used as a language of subversion and splitism, you know, with Xinjiang and Uyghur. You've got concerns about, you know, Arabic and, you know, somehow that would feed into kind of the global jihadist movement that, you know, we don't know what these people are saying on their online chats. And so I think both those things are certainly at play. And there's been a real concerted effort to, you know, push the universalization of Putonghua under Xi Jinping. This was not a, even though, you know, it is, you know, it was in the Constitution in Article 19. I mean, the Constitution itself is contradictory because I forget the, is it Article 4, the article, it talks about ethnic minority rights, says they have the right to promote their languages. And so there's this indoor contradiction within the Chinese Constitution. And in the past, you know, there was an acceptance that minority languages were accepted and should be allowed to be used, you know, that they had to be used in government and legal terms in autonomous regions. But we've seen a real push to universalize Putonghua and really to kind of push out minority language education that really, you know, we can really mark that with the arrival of Xi Jinping because, you know, going back to the thing I was saying before, the importance of ideology education, this is seen as a real key issue under Xi. Urbanization is a key policy. It has numerous elements to it, clearly as an economic component to it, but it's also a cultural component to it. And there's, you know, an environmental component to it. But for minority communities, whether it be Mongols or Tibetans, it's really about taking them off their land, bringing them into cities where they can, you know, receive state education, be incorporated into social services, state surveillance, and to kind of sever that connection between the land, the identity and the culture. That's been happening quite extensively in Inner Mongolia. It's a long source of tension. I mean, you had protest movements back in the 1930s about the destruction of the grasslands. It's intensified, particularly as you noted through mining, you know, which is a massive revenue generator for Mongolia, which is, you know, one of the strongest economies in China, but it's a great source of tension between, you know, the indigenous community and the Han settler, colonial machine. Just a side note on Wolf Totem, a fascinating book which I've read, actually a big part of that. You've got to read the Chinese as well, because the Chinese has a long kind of appendix, which makes a fascinating reading. In a kind of formal life, I spent a lot of time in chat rooms amongst Han extremists. I kind of think of them as kind of Han nationalists that inhabited parts of the cybersphere. And they were incensed by this book, Wolf Totem. They argue that this was an example of, you know, the minority communities preparing for kind of genocide that they completely bought into the fact that, yeah, they were sheepish, you know, they've got it up on us, you know, they've got this martial tradition. And what was needed to fight against this is kind of a new generation of barbaric, nomadic invasion of China. And these people were completely opposed to many of the ethnic policies that then were critiqued by people like Mao Rong in Huangang. There was a lot of resistance to these policies amongst ordinary Han citizens who saw them as undermining Han privilege and power. And, you know, so in addition to being a kind of intellectual move to rethink and political move to rethink ethnic policies, there's a deep kind of social element to it as well that we see anywhere you have tensions between majority and minority populations. I think you're completely right. I mean, I think sometimes, because it's what we do, at least it's what I do, we look at what's happening in autonomous regions to minority communities to these sites that this is part of a kind of wider agenda of thought and behavior control. It's about, you know, it's about shoring up the control of the party state system and ensuring she is at the very center of that and stamping out any forms of resistance, but also transforming China and Xi's own image, regardless of whether you're kind of, you know, a Han middle class person in Beijing or, you know, a peasant in Hubei or a Uyghur in Kashgar. Of course, the requirement for change is a lot higher in those communities that are seen as having kind of a low suger, you know, sort of low bio quality, like, you know, Uyghur farmers, but, you know, the desire for transformation is there and it's there across the board. But we also appreciate that kind of the local dynamics as well, you know, there are common trends here, but, you know, she doesn't, you know, he's not so powerful that he can control all of China, you know, with a click of a mouse, at least not yet, and there's tremendous kind of regional variation across China and it's a vast country with an incredibly complex bureaucratic system. Thank you very much for this super interesting talk and discussion and also for staying up so late on our behalf.