15 years ago today, a Mongolian herder named Mergen was killed by a Chinese coal truck. I built an interactive map of every mine that has come for the same land since. 423 named. 4,843 visible from satellite. 10,000+ counted.

I measured every People's Daily front page for the last 17 months, to the pixel. A single article has not exceeded 16% of the page in that window — unless the subject is Xi Jinping. open.substack.com/pub/soyonbo/...

Bill Bishop flagged it. I checked the data. He was right. 人民领袖 ("People's Leader") is trending back into Chinese state media — a Mao-era honorific that's been off-limits since 1978. Full analysis in today's Sinocism. Data via PropagandaScope. sinocism.com/p/the-people...

PropagandaScope in Newsweek. Our data shows China's "ethnic unity" slogan is amplified up to 15x more in minority regions like Xinjiang, Tibet, and Southern Mongolia compared with the national People's Daily. This is what the platform was built to reveal. The data is public and growing.

"Soul Casting": Leaked Document Reveals How China Controls What Minority Students Read open.substack.com/pub/soyonbo/...

I obtained an internal Party document from Inner Mongolia University, stamped "strictly prohibited from external distribution," that details 19 directives for eliminating the Mongolian language. The original Chinese PDF is also available for download. open.substack.com/pub/soyonbo/...

Using his new PropagandaScope tool to monitor 28 provincial Party newspapers, @soyonbo.bsky.social examines how Xi Jinping's new Party education campaign to promote a “correct view of political achievement” has been discussed to varying degrees across the PRC.

I built PropagandaScope, a website that automatically scans party newspapers across 20 Chinese provinces to measure how political keywords propagate through China's propaganda system. propagandascope.org/about

"Mongolian is a backward language, it can only describe nomadic culture like cows, sheep, or grassland." - my re-education teacher in 2020

"The online space has become our very last [classroom], museum, and community hall,” journalist @soyonbo.bsky.social tells PEN America. #InternationalMotherLanguageDay

The Japanese version is out! courrier.jp/news/tag/lon...

Thanks to PEN America. When a language is taken away, it’s not just words that are lost, it’s memory, connection, and the ability to speak.

What is happening to #Mongolian #language and culture online in China? pen.org/inner-mongol... via @penamerica.bsky.social #minority #langsky

Grateful to collaborate with Professor Leibold on this work. What mattered most in this process was taking policy discussions out of abstraction and grounding them in lived institutional realities. It is an honor. madeinchinajournal.com/2026/01/20/r...

pen.org/report/inner... This new report from PEN America matters because it moves beyond policy language and looks at how repression actually works inside institutions. Highly recommended.

Signal and Southern Mongolia open.substack.com/pub/soyonbo/...

"The Weekly printed the piece, and it launched my career – which came to an end five years later, in 2020, when the government abruptly shuttered the magazine." —Soyonbo Borjgin for the first issue of @equatormag.bsky.social

Mongolians in Exile Welcome U.S. Senators Introducing Bipartisan Bill to Address Human Rights Violations in Southern Mongolia. For decades, many Mongolians have faced relentless efforts to erase our language, traditions, and way of life. From the closure of schools teaching in our (thread)