Han migration into Southern Mongolia did not happen by accident. It was a deliberate policy. As early as the late Qing dynasty, the Chinese imperial court viewed the Mongolian steppes as "wasted space" to be opened up for Han farming. But it was after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that mass settlement began in earnest.

Under Mao Zedong, the government launched campaigns such as "Opening up the Great Northern Frontier" and the "Sent-Down Youth Movement", which sent millions of Han settlers into ethnic borderlands—including Southern Mongolia. These campaigns were framed as development, but in reality, they were a method of consolidating political control and undermining Mongolian autonomy.

In 1947, when the so-called "Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region" was established by the Chinese Communist Party, ethnic Mongolians made up over 80 percent of the population in many areas. Today, Han Chinese account for around 80 percent of the region’s total population. Mongolians have been reduced to a marginalised minority in their own homeland. In major cities such as Hohhot, Baotou, and Tongliao, Mongolians often represent less than 10 percent of the population.

This demographic transformation has had devastating consequences. Traditional nomadic life has been uprooted. Grasslands have been ploughed up for agriculture or destroyed by mining operations. Mongolian herders have been forcibly relocated and stripped of their grazing rights, often under the pretext of environmental protection. Ironically, much of the ecological destruction has come from overgrazing by settlers and industrial overdevelopment, not from the traditional herding practices that sustained the land for centuries.

Mongolian-language schools have been shut down or converted to Mandarin-only education. Cultural practices have been turned into tourist spectacles—commercialised, hollowed out, and stripped of their original significance. The state promotes a superficial version of “ethnic harmony”, but on the ground, it looks more like cultural assimilation and control.

Han immigration into Southern Mongolia is not just a demographic shift—it is a form of colonialism. It reflects a long-term strategy by the Chinese government to erase Mongolian identity, seize land and resources, and impose Han-centred rule over a historically independent people. This is colonialism with Chinese characteristics, carried out not with guns, but with policies, slogans, and bulldozers.

Most of the world is unaware of this story. The Chinese state hides these policies behind carefully crafted language: development, unity, modernisation. But behind those words are real people—displaced, silenced, and struggling to hold on to their culture.

And yet, Southern Mongolians have not disappeared. We are still here. We speak our language, sing our songs, ride across the grasslands, and pass our history to the next generation. Every act of cultural resistance is a quiet refusal to be erased.

The grasslands may be shrinking, but the spirit of the people who belong to them endures.