It was 1959, one year into the Great Leap Forward, one of the twentieth century’s boldest, yet most disastrous, utopian experiments. The Mao Zedong–initiated Leap sought to accelerate China’s economic growth and transform its society with the creation of communes in order to swiftly surpass the prosperity of the United States and the United Kingdom in a new socialist order. Instead, the Leap resulted in one of the deadliest famines humanity has ever seen. In the summer of 1958, in rural Hebei, as in much of rural China, the agricultural fields were deserted as many able-bodied men and women, and even middle school students, were dispatched for industrial work far from their villages. The primary task for most was to smelt iron, the symbol of scientific communism, not in giant factories but in homemade stoves scattered throughout the countryside. Heaps of useless jagged metal were produced while famine devastated rural communities as crops were left standing in the fields. Between  1959 and 1961 thirty million or more Chinese villagers died of hunger. 

Cheng Tiejun, the protagonist and coauthor of this book, was fourteen years old, a junior middle school student living with his mother and brother in a poverty-stricken North China village in Raoyang county, one hundred miles south of Beijing. His parents had divorced, and his father worked as a truck driver in Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR). With sharp cutbacks in middle school education in the countryside during the famine, his mother decided that Tiejun would fare better by moving to live with his father. At that time, hundreds of thousands of famine refugees also set their eyes on the Mongolian steppe to the north beyond the Great Wall on the Mongolian-Soviet borderland. The Chinese state turned back many. However, with an official letter from his commune and school, he was among the last to resettle in IMAR. 

Over millennia the region now called Inner Mongolia has been a point of intersection for the peoples of the Steppe and the Chinese, most of whom inhabited agrarian regions and cities to the south. With the rise of the Mongol world empire in the thirteenth century, China came under Mongol rule, and the area subsequently became part of the Mongol heartland following the building of a new Great Wall by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to prevent the Mongols’ reconquest of China. From the mid-seventeenth century to 1911, the Mongols were incorporated into the Qing Empire as subordinate allies of the Manchu rulers, but not without being divided into two conglomerations that eventually became Outer Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. From the late nineteenth century, Inner Mongolia became a destination for Chinese famine refugees and government-sponsored settlers who quickly outnumbered the native Mongol inhabitants. By 1949, at the founding of the PRC, with the Mongols constituting only about 14 percent of the region’s population, Inner Mongolia was a Chinese settler colony. 

In 1946, the post–World War II international settlement of the “Mongolian Question” included the Republic of China’s formal recognition of independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR, formerly Outer Mongolia), and Inner Mongolia was incorporated into China. With the founding of the PRC in 1949, Inner Mongolia was reconstituted as an autonomous region of China, tracing its origin to a Chinese Communist Party–led Mongolian autonomy established in 1947. In the early 1950s, the IMAR was a model for the system of nationality regional autonomy (quyu minzu zizhi), the PRC’s most important institution in the governance of the 60 percent of its territories inhabited by non-Han peoples including Uyghur, Tibetan, Hui, and Zhuang among the largest minority nationalities recognized by the Chinese state. 

Communist internationalism and Inner Mongolia’s geopolitical location initially produced high expectations for its political and economic prospects. Throughout the 1950s, it was a beneficiary of China-MPR-Soviet cooperation and aid, its steel industry, military industry, and urbanization all advancing rapidly along with agriculture and the pastoral economy. With a savvy and stable Mongol-centered leadership under the veteran Communist Ulanhu that enjoyed access to the highest Party leaders in Beijing, Inner Mongolia in the seventeen years from 1949 to 1966 was the PRC’s flagship experiment in promoting amicable interethnic relations and cooperation. This was the land where Cheng Tiejun arrived in 1959, and where he spent thirteen eventful years in what he called his second home.