Collection of Speeches by General Teng Haiqing Regarding the Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (Volume 1)

The Mongolians have rebelled!"

On April 18, 1967, Teng Haiqing, acting under the orders of CCP Premier Zhou Enlai, led a military entry into the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Following Kang Sheng's instruction that "bad elements among the Mongols should be caught by the Mongols themselves," and operating under slogans like "dare to fight with bayonets" and "see red on the bayonets," he publicly called for "seizing power from the hands of the Mongolians" in 1968, employing mass violence against them.

After World War I, a wave of national self-determination swept the globe. The "Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party" (IMPRP) was established in Zhangjiakou to pursue the liberation of the Mongolian people. The party went underground during the Second Sino-Japanese War and resumed activities after the war, but was dissolved again in 1947, with many members subsequently joining the Chinese Communist Party. Unexpectedly, during the Cultural Revolution initiated by the CCP in 1966, a bloody political campaign known as "Digging out the IMPRP" swept across the grasslands. It scrutinized Inner Mongolia's history under Japanese colonial rule, labeling Mongolians as "collaborators" and "traitors," and framing their pursuit of national liberation as advocating for "ethnic separatism."

In 1968, after the CCP officially designated the IMPRP as an "illegal counter-revolutionary organization," the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Revolutionary Committee, headed by Teng Haiqing, launched the "IMPRP Purge Incident" under the banners of "striking against ethnic separatism" and "class struggle." They labeled former IMPRP members (whose party had long been forced into dissolution) and ordinary Mongolians alike as "IMPRP members." Mongolian elites were arrested and persecuted on a massive scale, branded as "Soviet revisionists," "Mongolian revisionists" (collaborators with Outer Mongolia), or "Japanese spies." The campaign specifically targeted supporters of the Mongolian leader Ulanhu with the goal of "digging out Ulanhu's black line and purging Ulanhu's toxic influence." Out of a population of approximately 1.5 million in Inner Mongolia at the time, 340,000 were arrested and over 20,000 died. This near-genocidal campaign and cultural erasure are comparable to the Katyn Massacre by Soviet Russia or the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot.

Beginning in March 1969, persecuted Inner Mongolians gathered in Beijing to petition the central government, carrying letters of complaint, appeals, personal belongings of the deceased, and instruments of torture. This coincided with the eve of the "Ninth National Congress" of the CCP. Mao Zedong decided to cool down the Cultural Revolution to ensure the congress could proceed smoothly. Under the pressure of these petitions, the CCP Central Committee issued the "May 22 Directive," demanding the rehabilitation of "good people" who had been wrongly harmed. The political wind in Inner Mongolia shifted overnight. Teng Haiqing became a target of public criticism, facing struggle sessions and the tearful accusations of survivors and the families of victims.

The unrest only quieted after the CCP ceded eastern Inner Mongolia to the three northeastern provinces and western portions to Gansu and Ningxia, restoring a "divide and rule" administrative style. Teng Haiqing was transferred to Shandong in 1975 to serve as Deputy Commander of the Jinan Military Region. After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the "IMPRP Incident" was rehabilitated and characterized as a historical error. However, Teng Haiqing never faced any criminal prosecution in his lifetime and passed away in 1997.

This book collects Teng Haiqing's speeches during his rule in Inner Mongolia and related documents from the late Cultural Revolution. Divided into three volumes, the text has been re-typed and formatted based on historical records. Volume 1 covers up to March 1968, the peak of the "Digging and Purging" phase of the IMPRP Incident.

The "Inner Mongolia Cultural Revolution Archives" series consists of five titles, including: "Government Documents and Leadership Speeches Regarding the IMPRP" (2 vols.), "Historical Evidence and Social Mobilization for Digging out the IMPRP" (2 vols.), "Report of Victims in the Tumed Left Banner of Inner Mongolia" (1 vol.), and "Records of Victims and Perpetrators in the Inner Mongolia Military Region" (1 vol.).