Transcription
Mongolia is perhaps the most fascinating country in the modern world. First of all, it's huge; it's more than twice the size of Texas. If you placed it over the United States, it would basically cover the entire historical South, spanning from Philadelphia in the east to Dallas in the west.
But trapped in the middle of the Eurasian continent, Mongolia is surrounded on all sides by hundreds of kilometers of land separating it from the ocean, making it the largest landlocked country in the world that doesn't have access to an internal sea. In theory, Kazakhstan is substantially larger than Mongolia and technically also classified as landlocked, but Kazakhstan also enjoys a nearly 1900-kilometer-long coastline with the internal Caspian Sea, across which it can conduct maritime trade with Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkmenistan. Mongolia, on the other hand, possesses no such direct access to any large bodies of water.
Partially because of that, and a whole bunch of other factors, Mongolia is quite literally the emptiest country on the planet. You see, Mongolia has more than one and a half million square kilometers worth of land, which makes it the 18th largest country in the world in terms of overall area. But Mongolia also has a pretty tiny population of just around 3.3 million people who live across all of that land—basically the same amount of people as live around San Diego, California. Because of this, Mongolia's average population density is just around 2.1 people per square kilometer of land, which is by far the absolute lowest of any sovereign country in the world. For reference, that density is roughly a third lower than the countries with the second and third lowest population densities in the world: Australia and Namibia, both of which have large amounts of their territories covered with vast uninhabitable deserts. But Mongolia is somehow even emptier than all of this at first suggests. Australia has multiple large population centers, with five cities scattered around the country that have more than one million residents apiece, meaning the distribution of people around Australia is far more evenly distributed than it is in Mongolia. Despite how it appears, Mongolia is basically just one giant city-state with a ton of empty land around it that is cosplaying as the world's 18th biggest country.
The capital and largest city in Mongolia is Ulan Bator, and it's home to about 1.6 million people, which makes it actually a really big city. Ulan Bator is the core of the modern Mongolian state, and its population places it on a par with Barcelona, Spain. But the fact that this big of a city exists within Mongolia means that Ulan Bator alone is home to roughly 48% of the entire Mongolian population. This makes Mongolia one of the most highly centralized countries in the entire world. Because Ulan Bator only takes up 0.3% of Mongolia's land, you've got a situation where 48% of the population (1.6 million people) all live on just 0.3% of the land, while the other 52% of the population (1.7 million people) all live across the remaining 99.7% of the land. This means that Ulan Bator's massively concentrated population greatly skews the average population density across the whole country. So, when you exclude the city's land from the calculation, the remaining 99.7% of Mongolia contains an average population density of just 1.1 people per square kilometer—about three times emptier than Australia and Namibia on average. To put that figure into further perspective, 99.7% of Mongolia's land is nearly half as densely populated as the far northern region of Finland called Lapland, which stretches well above the Arctic Circle and is the least densely populated part of the European Union. It is across this vast empty stretch of Mongolia where roughly one-third of the population continues, to this day in the 21st century, to live a nomadic herding lifestyle that would, in many ways, remain familiar to the era of Genghis Khan more than 800 years ago.
So how did this situation in Mongolia develop and persist well into the 21st century? What is it about this country that has made it the emptiest in the entire world? To begin the explanation, you need to understand some things about Mongolia's geography and climate. The country's territory exists across most of the high Mongolian Plateau, a region of high elevation across Central Asia that is contained on all of its sides by even higher mountain ranges. The elevation across the Mongolian Plateau ranges from 1000 to 1500 meters above sea level, and Mongolia's borders within the high Plateau place it nearly 800 kilometers away from the nearest oceanic body of water, the Yellow Sea. Because of the Mongolian Plateau's high elevation and distance away from the Indo-Pacific, deep within the Eurasian Continental interior, moist monsoon winds that bring rainfall from the Pacific rarely, if ever, are able to carry all of their moisture all the way into the Mongolian Plateau. To the north, the Mongolian Plateau also sits immediately beneath Siberia, which dramatically influences its climate and ability to contain people. Beginning around every August, the days in Northern Asia steadily begin growing shorter and shorter as winter approaches, which causes the cold and dry air blowing into Siberia from the frozen Arctic Ocean to begin growing even colder. The air that then collects over Siberia then grows even colder than the air over the Arctic Ocean because the air over the Arctic generally forms over sea ice that radiates heat better than the cold tundra environment of Siberia does. Generally, from September to April, every single year, this collection of very cold and dry Siberian air and high atmospheric pressure gets transferred across Northern Eurasia and particularly gets pushed into the Mongolian Plateau. This means that winters in Mongolia are nearly always very cold and very dry. The cold, dry, and shallow air from Siberia plunges into the Mongolian Plateau's lower elevated river valleys and basins and then lingers there, generating brutally cold temperatures across the north of Mongolia that generally gets less severe the further south in the country you go. The median temperature across the country in January is -30 degrees Celsius, but that fact obscures the reality that freak cold snaps and blizzards can rapidly and unexpectedly happen pretty much anywhere in Mongolia during the long winter season, and temperatures can quickly shift on the order of 30 degrees Celsius in a matter of only 24 hours. Regional lows down to -40 degrees Celsius are common across the north of the country during the winter. All of Mongolia's rivers and lakes will freeze over during the brutal winters because of this phenomenon, and many of the smaller rivers will freeze solid down to their bottom, which makes Mongolia's rivers and lakes not very useful for transportation or irrigation throughout most of the year. Ulan Bator, the capital and largest city, is only free of frost for around three and a half months of the year, between the middle of May and the end of August, and the city's average annual temperature is just -2.9 degrees Celsius (about 27 degrees Fahrenheit), which makes Ulan Bator the coldest capital city on the planet. But that fact hides the reality that during the short Mongol summers, temperatures can also soar into unbelievable highs of up to 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) in the southernmost regions of the country and even 33 degrees Celsius (91 degrees Fahrenheit) in the capital.
Then, accompanying these temperature extremes during very long cold winters and very short hot summers is the further fact that Mongolia receives very, very little rainfall. The highly elevated Mongolian Plateau is surrounded by even higher mountains that block most rainfall from entering into it from nearly every direction. To the south, the towering Himalayas and the Kunlun Shan mountains block rain coming in from that direction; to the west, the Altai mountains do the same, in addition to the Mongol Altai and Gobi Altai sub-ranges further to the south. Moisture-rich winds blowing in from these directions pass over those mountains first and mostly deposit their moisture as snowfall on the sides of those mountains facing away from Mongolia. Then the winds are mostly dry by the time they blow over the Mongolian Plateau. Throughout the whole winter, between September and April, the dry, cold, and high-pressure air that blows into and then sits over the Mongolian Plateau from Siberia forces away any low-pressure, moist, and potentially rainy air, which keeps the skies clear and cloud-free throughout the whole season. This is why Mongolia is actually one of the sunniest countries in the world and averages around 257 very sunny and cloud-free days a year, lending the country its nickname as the "Land of the Eternal Blue Sky." But it also means that throughout the long winter between September and April, it hardly rains anywhere in Mongolia at all, and whatever precipitation they do get is usually just snow or frost that blows down with the winds from Siberia. Then, during the summer between May and August, when the high-pressure cold and dry system from Siberia weakens and retreats, some amount of rainy air is finally able to penetrate into the Mongolian Plateau from the north. This is why rainfall levels in Northern Mongolia are, on average, much higher than in Southern Mongolia. But it's important to understand that nearly all of Northern Mongolia's rainfall comes over a few months when the Siberian high-pressure system is at its weakest, between June and August. Outside of the summer months, Northern Mongolia receives hardly any rain at all and is basically just as arid as the rest of the country. And then, even during the summer months, rainfall is often unpredictable and difficult to count on. This effect has also contributed to the existence of the vast Gobi Desert across the southeast of the Mongolian Plateau—the sixth largest desert in the world—which is extremely cold and arid, and where parts of it will receive no rainfall at all for years at a time.
Overall, Mongolia has a very cold, dry, and windy climate. The southernmost third of the country is mostly a cold arid desert, while the rest is mostly cold arid steppe covered in seemingly endless grasslands with limited forest coverage in the north. Because of all these factors, only about 0.4% of Mongolia's vast amount of land is even considered arable and suitable for crop cultivation and agriculture. Excluding tiny Pacific island states and city-states, there were only three other countries in the world who have a lower percentage of arable land than Mongolia does: Djibouti, Iceland, and Oman. This also means that, despite being the 18th largest country in the world by overall amount of land, Mongolia also has less available arable land than Albania, a country that is more than 54 times smaller in overall area. That simply means that developing a large-scale settled agricultural society across the Mongolian Plateau is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Instead, the vast and wide-open empty steppes covered in grasses are far more ideally suited for herding and ranging livestock, which can more easily move around than settled farms and cities can. Nomadic herders can quickly take their livestock, families, and gers across the flat steppe to different areas more suited to the seasons. During the winter, herders will gather their livestock in valleys where the mountains around them protect them from the cold Siberian winds, and then during the summer they'll relocate to the wide-open grass-covered steppes to better feed their herds. This is all why, since time immemorial—for thousands of years—the people of the Mongolian Plateau have predominantly always been nomadic herders, and still to this day about 65% of Mongolia's land is used for pasturage and herding animals, and about a third of the population continue to live the nomadic herding lifestyle that all of their ancestors would have found pretty familiar, because it is simply the lifestyle that the unchanging geography and climate forces upon this part of the world.
But herding and pastoralism within Mongolia is often a harsh reality. While the winters of Mongolia are usually very cold but also very clear without any clouds, blizzards and freezing rain are occurrences that can still always happen. When a blizzard sweeping through from Siberia is particularly bad, it can wipe out herders' entire flocks, either by causing them to directly freeze to death or by covering the grass that they feed upon with a thick layer of frost. During the particularly harsh winter between 2009 and 2010, freak blizzards in Mongolia wiped out more than 8 million of the country's livestock, and many nomadic herders lost everything they had and were then forced into starting a new life by migrating towards Mongolia's only major urban area: the capital, Ulan Bator. Such freak winter storms and associated droughts that can occur on the Mongolian Plateau have been further factors pushing the people of the plateau into a nomadic lifestyle for thousands of years. When a storm is bad enough to wipe out huge swaths of grass and kill large numbers of livestock, desperate nomads who lost everything will be forced into traveling somewhere else in search of greener pastures. The steppes of the Mongolian Plateau were really just a part of the greater, nearly continuous Eurasian Step that spans across nearly the entire Eurasian continent from Manchuria in the east to Hungary in the west. For thousands of years, nomadic horse societies could rapidly travel across the mostly flat Eurasian Step like it was the pre-industrial world's superhighway, and a climate-induced disaster in one part of the steppe would then force that area's nomads into traveling somewhere else across or even beyond the steppe. It is for this reason that, across human history, the great Eurasian Step became the source of numerous nomadic migrations and invasions from beyond it into the sedentary agricultural societies that developed all around the steppe, like Russia, Europe, the Middle East, and China, who variously bore the brunt of nomadic invasions like the Xiongnu, Scythians, and Huns in ancient times, to the later Turks, Mongols, and Manchu.
But in modern times, there are many recent man-made problems that have only exacerbated the long-standing climate problems to Mongolia's ability to raise livestock and contain people. Throughout most of the 20th century, Mongolia was ruled by an authoritarian Communist regime that heavily regulated the size of livestock herds that were allowed in the country, which maintained an element of ecological balance. But after the Communist regime suddenly collapsed in the 1990s, the economy became rapidly deregulated, and a capitalist open-market economy quickly took over in its place. This simultaneously happened just as the global demand for cashmere wool in the fashion industry began really taking off in the 1990s. Today, the global cashmere industry is a multi-billion-dollar business, and seeking to get in on the lucrative trend, many Mongolian herders, recently freed from the legal regulations of the Communist era, began switching from traditional sheep herds to goat herds that actually produce cashmere wool. Over time, Mongolia would rise to become the second largest producer of cashmere fibers in the world, providing around 40% of the entire global supply today. But doing so also came at a steep ecological cost. Goats, you see, are much worse for the steppe environment in Mongolia than sheep are because goats will more severely damage the grasses that they feed on. Goats will nibble at the roots of grasses while they eat, which prevents them from being able to grow back, while their sharper hooves, in relation to sheep, will further damage the upper layers of the soil, which will then be blown away by the omnipresent winds of the steppe. This phenomenon is leading to overall greater instances of dust storms, air pollution, erosion, and droughts across the country, which is making herding even more challenging than it was before. This, combined with the effects of global climate change, means that the inhospitable Gobi Desert is steadily expanding northwards, deeper into Mongolia, at a rate of about six to seven kilometers a year, and is thus steadily decreasing the amount of land in the country that is available to the nomadic herders. Extreme weather events in the country are growing more common, too. Up to the year 2000, there were around 20 extreme weather events (like droughts, blizzards, and extreme temperatures) that could be expected to take place in Mongolia every year. But since 2000, that number has roughly doubled to an average of more like 40 extreme weather events that can be expected per year. As time goes on in Mongolia, more and more of these extreme weather events on the growing Gobi Desert are forcing ever more of the nomadic herders of the countryside into becoming displaced. Historically, this kind of event would have likely triggered a mass nomadic migration out of the Mongolian Plateau that could have taken the form of an unstoppable horse invasion like under Genghis Khan. But in the modern era, it's forcing more of the nomads from the 99.7% of Mongolia's land to concentrate into the city of Ulan Bator, that takes up just 0.3% of Mongolia's land—a phenomenon that can be clearly seen around the city today in the suburbs built out of traditional nomadic Mongolian gers.
But in addition to increasing the frequency of extreme weather events and growing the Gobi Desert, climate change is negatively affecting Mongolia's ability to develop in other ways, too. Chief among these ways are the many problems posed to Mongolia's ability to develop by the layers of permafrost just beneath the country's surface. You see, nearly the entirety of modern-day Mongolia is covered by a layer of permafrost, where the subsurface soil alternates between freezing solid during the cold winters and thawing out during the hot summer. This is one of the most challenging of all of Earth's environments to actually build anything in because when permafrost thaws beneath construction projects built atop of it, the soil settles and can become unstable, which can cause the soil to sort of sink and sag, which causes whatever was built on top of it to become deformed. Building foundations can sink, apartment building walls can crumble, paved roads and airplane runways can develop cracks and become wavy and warped, and pipelines can burst and break apart, all as the soil beneath them thaws and crumples. Troublingly, Mongolia has been appearing to be growing even warmer than the global average since 1940. The average annual temperature in the country has increased by at least 1.8 degrees Celsius, which has not only increased the country's already stark aridity but also further increased the rate of its omnipresent permafrost thawing. This means that, without constant and expensive maintenance, the rate of damage that Mongolia's highways, railroads, pipelines, airports, apartment buildings, and other in-place infrastructure will suffer from the thawing permafrost is going to increase even further, which just further limits Mongolia's ability to develop itself and house large numbers of people in more urban environments outside of the capital.
Then there are multiple exacerbating historical factors stretching back well into the past that have even further negatively impacted Mongolia's modern population. In the early 13th century, Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes, and for generations afterwards the Mongols and their horses thundered all across and around the Eurasian Step, conquering everything in their wake. In so doing, they carved out the largest contiguous land empire ever seen in human history, spanning, at its zenith, from China and Korea in the east to Iran in the south and to much of Russia, Ukraine, and Poland in the west. But over time, from this apex, the empire quickly began steadily splintering into different sections as infighting between the Mongols themselves began to take hold. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty would continue ruling over China for nearly another century, until 1368, when they were subsequently overthrown by the Han-led Ming Dynasty. The Mongols who once ruled China then retreated back to the Mongolian Plateau of their ancestors and formed a rump state known as the Northern Yuan, which largely spanned over the modern-day country of Mongolia, Inner Mongolia (that's a part of China today), and parts of Southern Siberia that now belong to Russia. By the early 17th century, the Mongol Golden Horde that had ruled over Russia and the Ilkhanate that had ruled over Iran had each long since collapsed, and the Manchu tribes of Manchuria were beginning to consolidate their control over present-day Inner Mongolia from the Northern Yuan. By 1644, the Northern Yuan had splintered into various different independent khanates; the Russian Empire was expanding across Siberia; and the Manchu launched a full-scale invasion of the Ming Dynasty and overthrew them, subsequently leading to the establishment of the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty. From there, the Qing initiated a series of further invasions and conquests into what they called Outer Mongolia (in 1687), Tibet (in 1723), and into modern-day Xinjiang (by 1755). But as the largely Han Chinese soldiers began advancing further into the Mongol-ruled lands, a similar process began taking place as between the Europeans and the Native Americans in the New World. The Mongols, similar to many of the Native Americans, had never lived in cramped sedentary cities with their livestock and were permanently nomadic and on the go across the steppe, meaning that they had never lived with the same kinds of diseases that had long plagued the settled Eurasian cities for thousands of years. As such, the urban and settled Han Chinese had developed resistances to diseases like smallpox, just like the Europeans had. And so, when the Han Chinese marched deeper into the Mongolian Plateau in the later 17th century, they brought smallpox with them that devastated the local nomadic Mongolian populations who lacked any immunities to it, in much the same way that the Europeans brought smallpox to the New World and devastated the Native American populations. Due to the combination of smallpox, military violence, and deliberate genocide ordered by the Qing Emperor himself in 1755, the Qing Dynasty's conquest of the Dzungar Mongols in the 1750s resulted in an estimated 50% to 80% of the Dzungar Mongol population getting completely wiped out—somewhere between half a million and 800,000 people.
Then, as the Russian Empire continued expanding across Siberia to the north, the Qing grew increasingly worried about the relatively sparsely populated hold over Inner and Outer Mongolia and began encouraging large-scale resettlements of ethnic Han to the Mongolian Plateau in order to reinforce their demographic hold over the area, which had the effects of spreading more subtle diseases like smallpox and also spreading and reinforcing a new religion to the area: Tibetan Buddhism. Over a process that lasted for centuries, Tibetan Buddhism began establishing itself as the dominant power on the Mongolian Plateau and largely replaced the secular authority of the previous khans. The Tibetan Buddhist Church eventually came into possession of an estimated 20% of Mongolia's entire wealth, and on the harsh Mongolian steppes where land was largely worthless, it was livestock, horses, and people who were considered to be far more valuable. Many of Mongolia's nomadic herders began dedicating their sons and their families to the various Buddhist monasteries, either out of personal religious conviction or in order to gain the favor of the preeminent legal and economic power of the steppe. By the early 20th century, there were hundreds of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries all across Mongolia, and an estimated one in three of all the men in the country were dedicated Buddhist monks who had sworn themselves to a life of celibacy, forsaking wives and children. That essentially meant that one in three men in the country had removed themselves from the dating and reproductive pool, placing even further constraints on the ability of the population to grow.
Then, in late 1911, a revolution within the Qing Dynasty led to the Empire's collapse and the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC). The independent Buddhist Church and clergy in Mongolia seized on the opportunity that the chaos provided by declaring the independence of Outer Mongolia as simply Mongolia, which for the next few years would be a theocratic Buddhist state. The Republic of China, insisting that it was the successor to the Qing Dynasty, refused to recognize Outer Mongolia's independence but was sort of forced into accepting it anyway because, by the 1920s, the Soviet Union to the north was getting established, and the Soviet Red Army was intervening in Mongolia to keep it independent. The Mongolian Communists ended up seizing power in 1924, and Mongolia was then transformed into essentially being a communist satellite state to the Soviet Union, out of reach from the Republic of China ever being able to reclaim it. The new atheist and communist People's Republic of Mongolia set about destroying the feudal Buddhist theocracy that had ruled the country just before it. By the 1940s, virtually every Buddhist monk in the country had either been killed by the Communists or apostasized from their faith; only one monastery in the whole country was allowed to remain open in the capital, and only a hundred monks were allowed to maintain it throughout the rest of the Communist era into 1990. The birth rate steadily increased in the country and peaked during the 1970s, when the average Mongolian woman was having 7.3 children. But after the Soviet Union began disintegrating in 1990, and the Communist regime in Mongolia that the Soviet Union supported subsequently collapsed, Mongolia underwent a similar economic and demographic shock as nearly every other post-Soviet state experienced, and the birth rate plummeted. By 2000, the average Mongolian woman was having 2.1 children, rather than just 7.3 thirty years previously. The rate of 2.1 children per woman has remained more or less consistent ever since.
Mongolia's low population and empty countryside have made it a susceptible target to its two significantly larger neighbors for hundreds of years now. Today, in the 2020s, Mongolia remains a very big but very empty country wedged in between Russia and China, who have each spent much of the past several centuries taking their turns controlling it ever since the Qing Empire's conquest of Outer Mongolia at the end of the 17th century. Mongolia has basically only been truly independent for very brief periods of time. The Qing directly ruled over what they called Outer Mongolia for more than 200 years, and then Mongolia only existed as a truly independent state from 1911 until 1924, when it then became a satellite state of the Soviet Union, which then lasted all the way up until 1990. It's only been since then—just a bit more than 30 years ago—that Mongolia has enjoyed its longest span of true independence in more than three centuries. Had Mongolia never become a satellite state of the Soviets in the 1920s, it's highly likely that the People's Republic of China would have invaded it and absorbed it into their Communist regime instead, as they did with Tibet between 1950 and 1951. The People's Republic of China only recognized Outer Mongolia's independence as Mongolia in 1949, as their victory on the mainland during the Chinese Civil War became imminent, and they really only did so to appease the Soviets who wanted to maintain Mongolia as their satellite state. The Republic of China, meanwhile, after retreating from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan, never actually recognized Outer Mongolia's independence until all the way up to 2002. Meanwhile, Inner Mongolia was never able to achieve the same kind of independence as Outer Mongolia did, and it has remained a core territory of various Chinese states ever since the Manchu and the Qing first began taking control of it in the early 1600s. Today, Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of the People's Republic of China, and there are actually more ethnic Mongols who live within Inner Mongolia than in the actual independent state of Mongolia: about 5 million in Inner Mongolia compared to the Mongolian state's 3.3 million. Despite this, however, the 5 million ethnic Mongols of Inner Mongolia are a minority in their own region because, due to centuries of Han Chinese colonialism and settling on the Mongolian Plateau from other parts of China, the Han make up about 79% of Inner Mongolia's population today, compared to the Mongols themselves at only 17%.
Today, the former Outer Mongolia and present independent state of Mongolia remains a very small nation of only 3.3 million people wedged in between the giants of Russia (with 146 million people) and China (with more than 1.4 billion people), in a situation that has often been referred to as sharing a den with a bear and a dragon. To make matters even worse for Mongolia's perspective, they remain extremely reliant on both the bear and the dragon to survive. 98% of Mongolia's oil and gasoline resources are simply imported from Russia, while 90% of Mongolia's exports by value are all sent south to China. The overwhelming majority of all of Mongolia's raw cashmere wool and their raw mineral resources (like coal, copper, iron, and gold) all get delivered to China for further processing in Chinese factories, meaning that Mongolia is overwhelmingly dependent on Russia for their energy needs and overwhelmingly dependent on China for their primary export market. As the extent of cooperation between China and Russia continues growing, the walls around Mongolia are closing ever further inwards. Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Mongolian government has remained officially hesitant to offer up any kind of condemnation or concern. As Europe began ending their imports of Russian oil and gas, Russia has been forced into a position of increasingly shifting their fossil fuel market towards China, which will involve the construction of a brand-new natural gas pipeline set to begin construction next year (2024): Power of Siberia 2. Once completed, it will, for the first time, directly connect the energy-hungry Chinese economy with Russia's enormous natural gas fields in the Yamal Peninsula that were previously fueling the European Union. The most direct path for this new pipeline to take will travel from the Yamal Peninsula across Siberia and across Mongolia towards China's huge urban cities of the North China Plain. Mongolia really had no other choice but to accept that the new pipeline would travel over hundreds of kilometers of their mostly empty territory. It will ultimately help Russia acquire more revenues in the face of severe Western financial sanctions while providing China with a more direct land route for their energy needs, giving the Chinese Communist Party more flexibility when dealing with their ultimate foreign policy objective of establishing firm control over Taiwan. You see, the primary issue that the People's Republic of China is concerned about is that if they were to launch an invasion of Taiwan, the United States Navy may intervene against them and decide to blockade the narrow Malacca Strait, through which the People's Republic currently imports some 70% of their petroleum and liquefied natural gas supply, primarily from the oil and gas-rich states of the Persian Gulf. Right now, a successful American naval blockade of Malacca would cripple the Chinese economy and their ability to wage war. But the more that China can reduce their dependence on maritime energy imports through this strait by opening up more land-based energy imports like the pipelines being built directly from Russia to China through Mongolia, the better China will be able to endure a hypothetical American naval blockade, and the better the People's Liberation Army and Navy will be able to perform during an attack on Taiwan.
As Russia grows increasingly authoritarian with overt military aggression in Europe, and as China remains very authoritarian itself with a potential attack on Taiwan looming, for how much longer can Mongolia truly be said to have a completely independent foreign policy from both of them? If they refuse to allow pipelines to be built across their territory from Russia towards China and refuse to build more railroads exporting their own mineral resources to China, then what would likely happen to them? After seeing that the Russians have had no qualms with invading Georgia and Ukraine, propping up a separatist movement in Moldova, and intervening in Syria, and after knowing that the People's Republic of China likes to see itself as the natural successor state to the former Qing Empire (and then Mongolia used to be known as Outer Mongolia and was directly ruled by the Qing for centuries, and for decades longer than even Tibet and Xinjiang were, which the People's Republic had no problem incorporating into their state long ago since they didn't have any protections from the Soviets), were Mongolia to refuse all cooperation with China and Russia, it is likely that Mongolia's 3.3 million people and its vast empty lands would simply be taken over by force once again, just as they were more than 300 years ago. And that is why, effectively, Mongolia has no other choice but to tread very lightly in the years ahead as they continue balancing between the bear to their north and the dragon to their south.
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