Inner Mongolia in the Philosophical Optics of Spatial Marginality Discourse

The relevance of the article is due to the spatial turn in the humanities which has fundamentally reoriented scholarly understandings of spatial marginality, moving away from economic and geographical determinism to conceptualizing it as a complex product of cultural and symbolic construction. The aim of the article is to identify and analyze the discursive mechanisms of constructing spatial marginality using the example of Inner Mongolia, China, as a complex, historically changing phenomenon. The stated goal predetermines the tasks: 1) to identify the mechanisms of discursive construction of Inner Mongolia as the Borderland in the imperial period; 2) to analyze the transformation of the Province mode in the republican period; 3) to trace how, after 1949, the Periphery and Province modes became dominant, conditioned by the logic of socialist construction; 4) to formulate the concept of integrative marginality as a hybrid regime of territory. The research materials include a corpus of official narratives of the Chinese authorities (government documents, legal acts, policy directives, and political rhetoric), as well as a wide pool of foreign and Russian works on the history of the integration of Inner Mongolia. Methodologically, the study utilizes a critical discourse analysis of official state narratives spanning three distinct historical-political formations — the Qing Empire (since 1636), the Republic of China, and the contemporary People's Republic of China — as well as a decomposition method based on the adapted version of Vladimir Kagansky's cultural landscape matrices model. The result of the study and its key empirical and theoretical contribution is the development of an original four-modal analytical model of spatial marginality and the formulation of its central theoretical concept integrative marginality, describing a sustainable reproduction of the subordinate status of Inner Mongolia through its gradual incorporation within the “homogenous” Chinese Nation. The study concludes that during the imperial period, marginality was constructed primarily through the Borderland mode, based on a Sino-centric perception of the region as a dangerous Other. During the republican period, the crisis of central authority led to a fierce struggle to define the Province mode, making the region a field of clashing external interests. With the establishment of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the logic of dual—economic and cultural-political — integration became dominant. The current stage is characterized by the formation of a hybrid regime of integrative marginality, where the full administrative-economic inclusion of the region is combined with the persistent reproduction of its symbolic subordination through the combination and fusion of all four modes.