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The Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (IMPRP), founded in October 1925, was an early Mongol nationalist party with ties to both the Kuomintang and the Comintern. In May 1947, under CCP direction, it dissolved and its members joined the Chinese Communist Party — a full twenty years before the 1967 "dig-out" campaign; the party had long ceased to exist legally and organizationally.

In May 1966, Ulanhu — the Party's highest-ranking ethnic Mongol cadre, first secretary of Inner Mongolia and regional chairman — was toppled, accused of running an "independent kingdom" and "ethnic separatism." His fall cleared the way for a purge of Mongol cadres.

In January 1967, PLA Lieutenant General Teng Haiqing (Han Chinese), commander of the Inner Mongolia Military District, took charge of the region under military control. Teng needed a "class enemy" to establish authority and crush the Mongol cadre system built around Ulanhu — "digging out the Inner People's Party" became his instrument.

Teng Haiqing was the direct initiator. In November 1967, at a core-group meeting of the Inner Mongolia Revolutionary Committee, he claimed the region harbored a "new Inner People's Party counterrevolutionary clique headed by Ulanhu, built up over twenty years" that must be "deeply dug out." This expanded the target from the already-fallen Ulanhu to the entire Mongol cadre corps.

Kang Sheng (adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Group) endorsed the purge at the central level, lending it Beijing's legitimacy.

The campaign was approved by the CCP Center — not a local improvisation but a centrally sanctioned political purge.

Execution fell to the Inner Mongolia Military District and revolutionary committees at every level. In 1968 the "dig-out" spread from Hohhot and Baotou to every league, banner and county. "Dig-out offices" and "special case groups" proliferated; schools, factories, offices and monasteries were converted into detention points.

The logic was extraction by torture: detain first, torture the victim into "confessing" IMPRP membership, then force them to name "accomplices." Since confessing alone was never enough — one had to implicate others to survive — the net expanded geometrically. The Inner Mongolia Party Committee's later summing-up admitted Teng Haiqing and his people "confused right and wrong, fabricated charges out of thin air, and used every appalling, savage torture to extract confessions."

Notably, the overwhelming majority of those "dug out" were ethnic Mongols — a campaign in the name of "anti-Party" struggle that functioned as an ethnic purge of Mongol cadres and intellectuals.

Figures for the IMPRP purge are among the most disputed in Cultural Revolution research. Competing accounts:

Partial regional breakdowns (from victim families and local materials; excluding Alxa, Zhaowuda, Hinggan leagues, Hohhot, Baotou and military systems — the true total was higher): Xilingol League 1,863 deaths; Yikezhao League 150,000 "dug out" (21% of its 740,000 population), 1,260 deaths; Ulanqab League 1,686 deaths; Jerim League 3,900 deaths; Hulunbuir League 2,307 deaths. All unverified.

Torture in the IMPRP purge is extensively documented in Cultural Revolution literature. This site includes only categories corroborated by multiple sources or cross-confirmed between academic works and victim testimony — no sensational detail:

• Interrogation torture: tiger bench, lever-pressing, hanging beatings, electric shocks, branding irons, bamboo nails under fingernails — confirmed as widespread by the Party summing-up, victim memoirs, and scholarship alike.
• Degrading abuse: multiple victim testimonies and research literature document sexual humiliation and violence against women. This site confirms the category's existence as multi-sourced without reproducing case-level graphic detail.
• Guilt by association: families of the labeled suffered collectively — children barred from schooling and jobs. Ting Mao's "over a million implicated" refers to this.

Open opposition during the campaign was nearly nonexistent — questioning the "dig-out" in 1968 risked being labeled IMPRP oneself. What is recorded:

• Some veteran cadres: per victim memoirs, cadres who had witnessed the 1947 dissolution privately said "the IMPRP has long been gone — what is there to dig?" but dared not say so publicly.
• Zhou Enlai: some accounts say Zhou expressed restraining views on Inner Mongolia's excesses, but took no open action to stop them. Single-source; unverified.
• Rehabilitation-era correctors: after 1979, cadres overseeing Inner Mongolia's rehabilitation (e.g., Zhou Hui) systematically redressed the purge — post-hoc correction, not resistance during the campaign.

More "opposition" lies in decades of petitioning by victim families. Groups like the "32 widows petition delegation" kept demanding a full accounting after the 1980s; their statistics (see table above) carry popular memory.

After 1979, during "Boluan Fanzheng," the purge was systematically redressed. The Inner Mongolia Party Committee confirmed it a "gross miscarriage of justice," restoring reputations, back pay, and jobs. But rehabilitation stayed at the organizational level:

• Teng Haiqing faced no legal consequences: per multiple accounts, he was never tried or punished for the purge because the CCP Center credited his past military service. Some subordinates received disciplinary sanctions; one senior Mongol aide was sentenced to 15 years.
• The truth was never fully disclosed: no complete list of the dead and disabled has been published; league and banner archives remain largely closed. Researchers piece together the picture from fragmentary official disclosures, victim testimony, and overseas scholarship.
• Ulanhu's rehabilitation: Ulanhu himself returned to work in 1973 and later became a vice-chairman of the NPC Standing Committee. But responsibility for the systematic persecution during his fall was never clearly assigned.

The Cultural Revolution's worst frame-up by scale: at 480,000 labeled per the Party's own summing-up — exceeding Inner Mongolia's total CCP membership of ~430,000 — a "counterrevolutionary clique" larger than the Party itself. The absurdity is itself evidence of extraction by torture.

A wound in ethnic relations: nominally an "anti-Party" purge, it struck Mongol cadres, intellectuals, and herder elites. The collective trauma runs deep in Inner Mongolia's Mongol community and is indispensable background to later unrest — see Inner Mongolia Protests (2011, 2020).

A template for "trumped-up" persecution: presume an enemy (a party dissolved twenty years earlier), manufacture "evidence" through torture, then use the "evidence" to prove the presumption. This conclusion-first, evidence-later pattern recurs across Cultural Revolution frame-ups.

October 1925: the Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party was founded in Zhangjiakou; Yun Ze (later Ulanhu) and other young Mongols were early members. The party advocated Mongol autonomy and dealt with both the Kuomintang and the Comintern; it was the main political vehicle of the Mongol national movement from the 1920s to the 1940s.

1945: after Japan's defeat, the Mongol autonomy movement revived, with IMPRP members among its backbone. May 1, 1947: the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Government was founded at Ulaanhot (Wangye Temple) with Ulanhu as chairman; that same month the IMPRP dissolved and its members joined the CCP. From that day, the IMPRP ceased to exist as an organization — the essential premise for understanding the 1967 frame-up: what was "dug out" was a party dissolved twenty years earlier.

May–August 1966: the Cultural Revolution began. Ulanhu, first secretary of Inner Mongolia, was accused of running an "independent kingdom" and practicing "ethnic separatism"; he was stripped of his posts and confined in Beijing. The regional Party committee was reorganized and large numbers of Mongol cadres were investigated as the "Ulanhu clique."

January 1967: Teng Haiqing, commander of the Inner Mongolia Military District, took over the region's revolutionary-committee preparatory group and imposed military control. Through the spring and summer, factional fighting gave him the pretext to crush rivals and turn the guns on Ulanhu's former apparatus.

November 1967: at a core-group meeting of the regional Revolutionary Committee, Teng formally declared that a "new Inner People's Party" counterrevolutionary clique headed by Ulanhu existed and must be "deeply dug out" — the "dig-out and purge" (wasu). The Inner Mongolia Daily whipped up the atmosphere; the dig-out became the region's overriding political task.

From December 1967: Kang Sheng and other Central Cultural Revolution Group figures repeatedly endorsed the "deep dig," as did Xie Fuzhi. Central backing turned a local campaign into a "centrally approved revolutionary action," and any doubt became a question of political loyalty.

Throughout 1968 the campaign peaked. Every league, banner and county set up "dig-out offices" and special-case teams; offices, schools, factories and pastoral communes ran detention points. At Inner Mongolia University, Inner Mongolia Normal College and Inner Mongolia Medical College, masses of teachers and students were labeled "IMPRP"; in pastoral areas, herders were concentrated in so-called study classes that were in fact detention camps. Under torture, confession lists snowballed — one person "named" ten, ten named a hundred.

Late 1968 to early 1969: persecution reached its zenith. Whole work units and villages were "dug out"; deaths surged. Some local case teams openly threatened to beat people to death to show "results."

May 22, 1969: according to archival material cited by Yang Haiying and other researchers, the CCP Center issued an instruction acknowledging that the dig-out had been gravely over-expanded, ordering an end to coerced confessions and the release of the wrongly detained. The campaign wound down, but many detainees were not freed until the second half of 1969 — and many had already died in custody or been permanently disabled.

July 1969: the Center redrew Inner Mongolia's boundaries: Hulunbuir League went to Heilongjiang, Jerim League to Jilin, Zhaowuda League to Liaoning, and the Alxa and Ejin banners to Ningxia and Gansu. The region was drastically shrunk — widely read as a deliberate fragmentation of the Mongol homeland, reversed only in 1979.

Late 1969: Teng Haiqing was transferred out of Inner Mongolia without any sanction. 1973: Ulanhu returned to work. 1979: amid "Boluan Fanzheng," the regional Party committee fully rehabilitated the purge's victims and the detached leagues and banners were restored to Inner Mongolia. 1980: the Supreme People's Procuratorate indictment confirmed 346,000+ framed and persecuted and 16,222 persecuted to death; the Special Tribunal's verdict named Kang Sheng and Xie Fuzhi as responsible — but both were dead or beyond actual prosecution, and Teng Haiqing was never tried.

How the dig-out worked on the ground explains why the numbers spun out of control. First, quota logic: dig-out offices at every level treated "how many IMPRP members unearthed" as a political achievement; units that produced no "results" risked being suspected of "rightist softness." Second, rolling confessions: case teams were not satisfied when a victim admitted membership — to pass, one had to name "superiors" and "accomplices." Confessions were never cross-checked, so lists grew geometrically. Third, institutionalized collective punishment: spouses, children and relatives of the labeled were registered as suspects or "children to be re-educated," barred from schooling, military service and jobs — an entire family's file poisoned for generations.

The victims' composition reveals the campaign's nature. Per the regional Party committee's later review, the overwhelming majority of those "dug out" were Mongol cadres, teachers, doctors and herders. Many had been children in 1947 — some were born after the IMPRP dissolved, making membership a chronological impossibility — yet were tortured into "confessing" all the same. One Mongol professor at Inner Mongolia University was branded an "IMPRP backbone" on the sole evidence of having joined a Mongol cultural association in the 1940s. Review files are full of such cases (case-level details derive from review archives and memoirs; per our single-source rule we describe categories rather than naming each case).

One prominent victim whose name is documented is Temur Bagana, a founding-generation IMPRP member who after 1947 served on the regional government; arrested and tortured during the dig-out, he died during the campaign (per Yang Haiying's edited volume The Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party and other Mongolian-studies works; sources differ on the exact date — unverified). Ulanhu's eldest son Buhe (later a vice-chairman of the NPC Standing Committee) was also struggled against and investigated. A number of department-level Mongol cadres died in custody; no complete list has ever been published.

Women's suffering was long overlooked. Multiple victim testimonies and academic studies record that female detainees, beyond the standard tortures, were routinely subjected to sexual humiliation, and that some families concealed the true cause of death for decades out of shame. This is one reason death estimates diverge so widely — a substantial share of deaths never entered any count.

Unlike other famous Cultural Revolution frame-ups, the IMPRP purge is nearly absent from China's official public narrative: school textbooks omit it, official Party histories dismiss it in a line as a "frame-up manufactured by Kang Sheng and others," and the lists of victims, the dead, and the case archives have never been systematically released. Hohhot has no official memorial or museum for the purge; families' commemoration has remained private.

Systematic research has been done mainly overseas. The volume The Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, edited by Yang Haiying, an ethnic Mongol scholar at Shizuoka University in Japan, assembling archives, testimony and statistics, is among the most complete studies; Mongolian-studies scholars in Mongolia, Europe and North America continue the work. Domestic scholarship (such as Hao Weimin's History of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region) offered archive-based figures, but the archives were never fully opened to researchers afterward, making verification impossible.

Open questions include at least: where is the complete list of the dead and disabled, and when will it be published? Why were Teng Haiqing and other principal perpetrators never held legally responsible, and how were the boundaries of accountability drawn in the 1980 trial? And what was the long-term demographic impact of the 1969 territorial dismemberment, which officials have never assessed? Until the archives open, these questions can only be pieced together from family memory and overseas research — which is why this page presents competing figures side by side, each with its stated methodology.