evidence: Russia took over its Siberian branch, while Outer and Inner Mongolia were now part of the Qing Dynasty. To keep promoting division among Mongols, the Manchus introduced the name Outer Mongolia to distinguish northern Mongolia from Inner Mongolia. [...] Today, Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of China, while its brother, Outer Mongolia, is an internationally recognized state. This status quo represents both achievements and frustrations from the perspective of Inner Mongolian nationalism. During the Cultural Revolution of China, at least 22,000 Mongols were killed, and Buddhism, their predominant religion, was crushed. In the last two decades, due to the poor economic conditions and lack of employment opportunities in rural areas, Mongols in China were pushed to urban areas, while Han Chinese miners moved into the grasslands to dig out the rich resources that lie underneath. What we do not hear on the news as much as we should is the fact that the new language program is pushing traditional Mongolian script towards the brink of the abyss. Currently used only in Inner Mongolia, it is the only script written vertically and left to right. The independent country of Mongolia had tried multiple times to reintroduce the traditional script, but it failed. The Buryats and Tuvans will probably never even try to readopt the Mongol script, as most of them are already abandoning their respective spoken languages in favor of Russian.