How does Mongolia stay free between China and Russia?

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This is the script for my video posted on August 6, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

Mongolia is a genuine multiparty democracy wedged between two enormous authoritarian powers in the form of Russia and China. So how has Mongolia managed to stay free and independent?

Mongolia is in many ways a remnant of Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire that has survived even through centuries of foreign repression.

In 1691, the princes of Outer Mongolia submitted to Qing dynasty China at the Convention of Dolonnor. The region was more autonomous than Inner Mongolia, which was conquered earlier, was much closer to Beijing, and saw far more Han Chinese settlement.

The Gobi desert barred any large-scale Han agricultural settlement in Outer Mongolia, and though China tried to change this in the early 20th century, its inability to fully occupy and administratively integrate Outer Mongolia is the reason Inner Mongolia is part of China today while historical Outer Mongolia is not.

After the Xinhai Revolution toppled the Qing dynasty in 1911 and 1912, ending over 2000 years of imperial rule, Outer Mongolia declared independence, and Mongolia’s highest Buddhist authority, a Tibetan-born lama known as the Bogd Khan, was enthroned as head of state.

The 1915 Treaty of Kyakhta saw Russia and China recognize the region’s autonomy, but they did not recognize full sovereignty. Then in 1919, about 4000 Chinese troops invaded, abolished that autonomy, and placed the Bogd Khan under house arrest after capturing the city of Urga, which we now know as Ulaanbaatar.

Then came Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, sometimes called the Bloody Baron. A Baltic German aristocrat and White Russian general, the baron was in the middle of a violent campaign to destroy the Bolsheviks who had taken power in Russia and restore monarchies across Asia. In February 1921 he drove the Chinese out of Urga and put the Bogd Khan back on the throne.

The baron’s reign was short and brutal. That July, revolutionaries of the Mongolian People's Party, backed by the Soviet Red Army, took Urga from him. He was captured the following month and killed that September. The Bogd Khan remained a monarch with limited powers until he died in 1924, and at that point the party proclaimed Mongolia the world’s second communist state.

From that point forward, Mongolia had a lot of the same problems as the Soviet Union. Purges, repression, anti-intellectualism, anti-religious policies.

After a UN-supervised plebiscite in 1945, the Republic of China finally recognized Mongolian independence in January 1946, ending decades of claims on Outer Mongolia. But it didn't hold. In 1953, from Taiwan, the ROC abrogated its treaty with the Soviets and withdrew that recognition. Two years later it used its Security Council veto, the only one the Republic of China ever cast, to keep Mongolia out of the UN, and it only dropped its claim on Mongolia in the early 2000s.

Then in the mid-20th-century when the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union split from each other despite their shared communist ideals, Mongolia firmly sided with the Soviets, who deployed huge numbers of troops along the Chinese border from the 1960s through the 1980s.

But when the end of the Soviet Union finally came, a peaceful democratic revolution rolled through Mongolia, which led to the country’s first free elections and a new constitution. Former Soviet forces withdrew in 1992. But the collapse of Soviet aid triggered a severe economic depression that took over a decade to recover from.

When Mongolia became a democracy, it started building what it calls the Third Neighbor policy. The phrase came from a 1990 visit by US Secretary of State James Baker, and the logic behind it is simple. Mongolia has only two physical neighbors, so it set out to manufacture more. This means deliberately cultivating the US, Japan, South Korea, India and the EU through trade, aid, and defense cooperation, while also not joining multinational blocs like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or the CSTO.

But Mongolia is the world’s second-largest landlocked country, and its nearest sea access is 1700km away in Tianjin, China, or 4000km in Vladivostok if they want to rely on Russia instead. In practice, this means that exporting goods is difficult, and over 90% of Mongolia’s exports go to China. Imports are slightly more diversified but still heavily skew to the country’s immediate neighbors.

Russia supplies about 95% of Mongolia's refined petroleum products, and in 2026 after China restricted fuel exports, Mongolian officials indicated that that number will now be closer to 100%.

Mongolia is a member of the International Criminal Court, and even though the ICC issued a warrant for Vladimir Putin’s arrest, when he visited in 2024 Mongolia did not arrest him. It gave him an honor guard, and the following month the court found Mongolia in non-compliance. Mongolia didn’t hide why. It said outright that it couldn’t afford to jeopardize its energy supply.

The Ulaanbaatar Railway carries the large majority of Mongolia’s rail freight, and it's a 50/50 joint venture with Russia. It runs on Russian broad gauge rails, while China uses standard gauge, and the rail gauge a country uses determines how easily goods can cross a border. For decades that mismatch meant that Mongolian coal had to be trucked to the Chinese frontier rather than railed across it, though that’s beginning to change thanks to a new dual-gauge cross-border link under construction. The Soviet-era gauge break used to be a buffer against China, but Mongolia is now choosing to end it.

Mongolia has a population of only around 3.5m people, and as of 2022 about 27% of them were below the national poverty line. Nearly half the population lives in Ulaanbaatar, which means that the city’s dynamics have an outsized impact on the country overall.

Mongolia's wealth is in its minerals, and that is the core of China's interest here, alongside Mongolia's value as a buffer and as a transit corridor. Coal alone is more than half of everything Mongolia exports. Copper is next, at around a fifth. Then gold, with iron ore a minor share.

On rare earths, things are a little more complicated. Mongolia has no mines producing them and no processing capacity, but it does hold large estimated reserves that the US and UK have signed critical minerals agreements to reach. The rare earth deposits people are usually thinking of are across the border in China's Inner Mongolia.

In 2025 though, Mongolia did finalize an agreement with France for 1.6b dollars of investment into uranium mining, which Mongolia greatly benefits from economically while France benefits strategically, because it needs reliable sources of uranium outside of Africa.

Then there's the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline. The Mongolian section, called Soyuz Vostok, would run about 960 kilometers of a whole route spanning roughly 6700 kilometers from Russia to China. In September 2025, the Russian state-owned gas firm Gazprom announced a memorandum with China covering the pipeline and the Mongolian leg. But a memorandum is not a contract. Pricing and financing are still unresolved, and China has pointedly avoided calling it binding. Mongolia would collect substantial transit fees, but it also left the project out of its own 2024 to 2028 development plan. The fact is, the country is in no hurry to become a permanent corridor between its two neighbors.

So how has Mongolia stayed free? Well, geography helped because the Gobi kept it from being settled like Inner Mongolia was. Timing helped because it broke free from Soviet and then Russian influence at the one moment it was able. But the rest is manufactured, because it has built relationships with countries it doesn’t share a border with and refused to join anyone’s bloc. That buys it room to maneuver, but it doesn’t buy true independence, because it will likely always rely on Russia and China.

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