Inner Mongolia has become China’s model of assimilation

BAYIN was three when he moved from the eastern grasslands of Inner Mongolia to Chifeng, a city of some 1m people. Like hundreds of thousands of ethnic Mongolian pastoralists forced to settle by the government, his family has gone from rural yurt to urban block of flats within a generation. Bayin, who is 32, moves seamlessly between staccato Mongolian and tonal Mandarin. In many ways he exemplifies the successful assimilation of China’s 6m ethnic Mongolians, most of them in Inner Mongolia in China’s north.

Yet Bayin lives largely within a Mongolian world. He designs Mongolian robes for a living and wore them to get married in 2012; of his 300 or so wedding guests only a handful were Han, the ethnic group that makes up more than 90% of China’s population. His daughter attends a Mongolian-language kindergarten. He likes to watch videos of Mongolian life in the 1950s.