The creation of Mengjiang

Many chronologies state that on 8 December 1937 Japan created the puppet state of Mengjiang in Inner Mongolia. The date circulates in English-language lists together with the claim that on that day Prince Demchugdongrub proclaimed the independence of Chahar and Suiyuan and signed agreements with Japan and Manchukuo. Neither Japanese nor Chinese studies of these events, however, know of any act of 8 December. Mengjiang did not come into being on a single day. It was the outcome of a process that began when Japanese troops entered Chahar in August 1937 and ended only on 1 September 1939. Its most important stage came at the turn of November and December 1937: on 22 November in Kalgan (Zhangjiakou) the three puppet governments set up by the Japanese in the occupied territories signed an agreement establishing the Mengjiang United Committee, and on 1 December a joint bank of issue opened there.

From Suiyuan to Kalgan

The Japanese had already tried to take control of the western part of Inner Mongolia in the autumn of 1936, using the Mongol army of Prince Demchugdongrub, known as De Wang, and Chinese collaborationist units. The Suiyuan campaign ended then in their defeat at Bailingmiao. The war that broke out after the Marco Polo Bridge incident gave the Kwantung Army a second chance. After the capture of Beijing the General Staff in Tokyo agreed to an operation in Chahar. A Kwantung Army battle group under its chief of staff, General Hideki Tōjō, and General Seishirō Itagaki’s 5th Division, advancing from Beijing, broke through the Chinese defences at the Nankou Pass and on the Great Wall in August. Kalgan, the main city of Chahar, fell on 27 August, and Datong in northern Shanxi on 13 September. De Wang’s forces, rebuilt after the defeat in Suiyuan and some 20,000 strong, marched with the Japanese troops. On 14 October the Japanese took the capital of Suiyuan, Guisui (today Hohhot), and on 17 October Baotou, the terminus of the railway from Beijing. At the same time other Japanese divisions were fighting for Shanxi, whose capital fell in November after the Battle of Taiyuan.

Three governments and one committee

In the occupied territories the Kwantung Army immediately set up local authorities answerable to Japanese advisers. On 4 September 1937 the South Chahar Autonomous Government was established in Kalgan, headed by a local merchant, Yu Pinqing, covering ten counties with some two million inhabitants. On 15 October the North Shanxi Autonomous Government, under Xia Gong, was proclaimed in Datong, ruling thirteen counties. Both were Chinese, since there were hardly any Mongols in these areas. To the Mongols the Japanese gave a third government. On 27 and 28 October a second Mongol congress met in Guisui, renamed Houhe after its Mongolian name, Kökeqota, and established the Mongolian League Autonomous Government. Its chairman was the aged Prince Yondonwangchug (Yun Wang), and its vice-chairman De Wang, who took over the chairmanship after Yun Wang’s death in 1938. The government replaced the Mongol Military Government set up in May 1936 and proclaimed as its principles “defence against communism” and “cooperation among nations”.

The three governments soon began quarrelling over money, the railway and revenues. For this reason, on 22 November 1937 their representatives signed an agreement in Kalgan establishing the Mengjiang United Committee (Mengjiang Lianhe Weiyuanhui). The committee took over common affairs: the railway from Beijing to Baotou, the post and telegraph, the currency, the salt, opium and tobacco monopolies, and the coal and iron-ore mines and power stations. The committee’s supreme adviser, a Japanese named Shōji Kanai, was recommended by the commander of the Kwantung Army, and Japanese advisers sat on each of its commissions. On 23 November the Bank of Mengjiang was founded; it opened its head office in Kalgan on 1 December and in 1938 introduced its own currency. On 27 December 1937 the Japanese formed, around the 26th Division at Datong, a separate grouping of troops stationed in Mongolia (Chūmō heidan), renamed the Mongolia Garrison Army in July 1938. From then on it was the real master of these lands.

The name itself was a Japanese idea. “Mengjiang”, in Japanese Mōkyō, means roughly “the Mongol borderlands”, and it was meant to emphasise that the territory was Mongol but also Chinese and Muslim. De Wang hated it. He felt that “borderlands” meant the frontier regions of China, not the Mongol state he had been fighting for. Although he stood at the head of the committee, he later recalled that he carried out its orders when they suited him and shelved the rest.

A state that was not

In December 1937, then, Mengjiang was neither a state nor even a single government. The Japanese General Staff did not want a second Manchukuo. In October 1938 Tokyo decided that Mengjiang was to have internal autonomy but remain part of a future Chinese federation subordinate to Japan, and must not become a formally independent state. Only on 1 September 1939, the day of the German attack on Poland, were the three governments merged in Kalgan into the Mongolian United Autonomous Government, commonly called Mengjiang, under De Wang’s chairmanship. From 1940 it was formally an autonomous part of Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government in Nanjing, and in 1941 it took the name Mongolian Autonomous State. No one recognised it as an independent state, not even Japan.

This “Mongol” entity was in reality Chinese. According to figures from 1939, of more than 5.2 million inhabitants some 150,000 were Mongols, under 3 per cent. For Japan, Mengjiang mattered in three ways. It was a strategic flank: from its steppes it was possible to threaten the Mongolian People’s Republic and Soviet Siberia, in keeping with the anti-Soviet logic of the Anti-Comintern Pact. It was a source of raw materials, above all coal and iron ore from the Longyan mine near Xuanhua, which was shipped to Japan. And it was one of the main opium producers in Asia. Under the supervision of Japanese officials – among them the future Prime Minister of Japan Masayoshi Ōhira, who worked in Kalgan in 1939–1940 – poppy plantations were established and the opium was sold in occupied China.

Significance

December 1937 was a time of victories for Japan. While the Bank of Mengjiang was opening in Kalgan, Japanese troops were advancing on Nanjing, and on 14 December, the day after its fall, the collaborationist Provisional Government of the Republic of China was set up in Beijing. Mengjiang was part of the same policy: instead of a single war for the whole of China, Japan wanted to break the country up into a series of governments dependent on it, each of which was to “fight communism” and “cooperate” with Tokyo. The policy did not bring peace, because Chiang Kai-shek’s government did not surrender and the puppet governments had no popular support.

Mengjiang survived until the end of the war. In the fighting at Khalkhin Gol, which began in May 1939 and ended in a heavy Japanese defeat in August, Japan learned that the road to Mongolia and Siberia was closed, and its expansion turned south. In August 1945, during the Soviet–Japanese War, Soviet and Mongolian troops entered Mengjiang, and on 23 August Chinese communists took Kalgan. De Wang fled to Beijing and in 1949 to Mongolia, which handed him over to the People’s Republic of China. Imprisoned until 1963, he died in Hohhot in 1966. His dream of a united Mongol state, for which he had entered Japan’s service, ended in a puppet entity in which the Mongols were a small minority.