Documenting life, culture, memory & human rights in Inner Mongolia, China. Amplifying ethnic Mongol voices.
Interviews & submissions: [email protected]
China has one primary Mongolian music app: Eghshig. After the 2020 language protests, Beijing didn't just close the schools — it came for the playlist. In 2022 the app removed 200+ songs by Mongolian artists Dedema and Tengger. That was only the start. 📷: PEN America / SMHRIC
Bainu means "how are you?" in Mongolian. It was China's only Mongolian-language social network — some 400,000 users, mostly in Inner Mongolia, living their digital lives in the mother tongue.
On August 23, 2020, Beijing blocked it.
📷: Bainu app listing (file photo)
He spent 20 years recording survivor testimonies of the purge that killed at least 27,900 Mongols in Inner Mongolia. No publisher would touch it — so historian Lhamjab Borjigin self-published in 2006.
In 2019, the book earned him two years in jail.
📷: SMHRIC, via Bitter Winter
In 2020, a Mongolian teacher named Ulaantuyaa was detained in Inner Mongolia for urging her community to protest a new rule phasing out Mongolian-medium teaching. She defended her mother tongue. The state treated that as a crime.
📷: RFA file photo