The pacification of Manchukuo

Some chronologies state that on 4 November 1932 Japan began a counter-insurgency campaign in Manchukuo, known as the pacification of Manchukuo. It was not that simple. Fighting against the Chinese resistance in Manchuria had been going on since the autumn of 1931, and the Japanese and their puppet state waged expeditions against “bandits” – as they called all armed opponents – from the spring of 1932 until 1942. The sources point to no decision or operation that began on 4 November 1932 specifically. The date does, however, fall in the hottest period of this war: in the autumn of 1932 the Kwantung Army, freed from the summer floods, went over to a major offensive which by February 1933 had broken up the largest Chinese volunteer armies. The date of the previous year may have found its way into these chronologies: on 4 November 1931 Japanese troops clashed on the Nen River with the forces of General Ma Zhanshan, which opened the way into northern Manchuria.

A state without subjects

On 1 March 1932 the Japanese proclaimed Manchukuo, and on 9 March Puyi, the last emperor of China of the Qing dynasty, was installed at its head as regent. Officially, the fighting in Manchuria had ended at the end of February. The troops of Zhang Xueliang had already withdrawn south of the Great Wall, and the generals who remained in Manchuria had surrendered or gone over to the new state. In reality the Kwantung Army controlled only the towns and the railway lines. In the countryside, in the mountains and forests of Manchuria, hundreds of armed bands were active.

The resistance movement was highly varied. It was made up of remnants of the Mukden army that had not withdrawn south, peasant self-defence units, traditional brotherhoods such as the Red Spears and the Big Swords, whose members believed that spells protected them from bullets, and also ordinary bandits – known in Manchuria as honghuzi, “red beards” – who joined the fight against the invader. The Chinese called these forces the volunteer armies of resistance to Japan. According to Japanese estimates, in the summer of 1932 as many as several hundred thousand men may have been under arms in total, but these figures are highly uncertain, and most units were poorly armed and lacked a common command.

The most dangerous opponent for the Japanese proved to be General Ma Zhanshan. In the autumn of 1931 he had put up resistance on the Nen River; in February 1932 he went over to Manchukuo and became its minister of war, but at the beginning of April he fled Qiqihar with money and weapons and called once again for resistance. In south-eastern Jilin the National Salvation Army of Wang Delin, a former bandit and officer, was operating, and in the mountainous east of Liaoning the army of Tang Juwu, which took Tonghua in May. In August 1932 huge floods on the Sungari and the Nen paralysed Japanese operations. The guerrillas then struck at stations and trains, and even at the outskirts of Mukden and Harbin.

Pingdingshan

On 15 September 1932, the day Japan signed a protocol with Manchukuo recognising the new state, a guerrilla unit attacked by night the coal mines at Fushun, owned by the Japanese South Manchuria Railway. Five Japanese were killed, including the mine director, and some of the installations were burned. The next day, 16 September, soldiers of the local Japanese garrison, deciding that the inhabitants of the nearby village of Pingdingshan had helped the attackers, herded the population beneath a cliff, opened fire on them with machine guns and finished off the wounded with bayonets. The village was burned, and the bodies were buried by blasting the escarpment.

The number of victims is disputed. The Chinese side speaks of around 3,000 killed, the Chinese tribunal in Shenyang in 1948 accepted a figure of more than 2,700, and Japanese researchers estimate the dead at 400 to 800. What is known is that the victims were mainly women, children and the elderly, and that only a handful of villagers survived. In Japan the press was forbidden to write about the crime. The Pingdingshan massacre foreshadowed the methods the Japanese used in Manchuria in the years that followed: collective responsibility, the burning of villages and executions without trial.

The autumn offensive

At the end of September, in western Heilongjiang, the troops of General Su Bingwen mutinied and took several hundred Japanese civilians hostage in Manzhouli and Hailar. Ma Zhanshan joined them, and their units attacked garrisons around Qiqihar. In October the Kwantung Army, commanded since August by General Nobuyoshi Mutō, and with it the Manchukuo army, began a series of operations. In mid-October Tang Juwu’s army in eastern Liaoning was broken up; then the area between Mukden, Changchun and Jilin was cleared, and on 6–20 November Manchukuo troops conducted a separate operation west of Mukden.

The largest was the expedition against Su Bingwen and Ma Zhanshan. At the end of November nearly 30,000 Japanese and Manchukuo soldiers, including the Japanese 14th Division and Mongol cavalry, struck along the Chinese Eastern Railway. Aircraft bombed Hailar, which the Japanese occupied at the beginning of December, and on 5 December the remnants of Su’s and Ma’s forces crossed the Soviet border. In January 1933 Wang Delin and other commanders from eastern Manchuria also crossed into the USSR. By the end of February 1933 the large volunteer armies had ceased to exist. Some of their soldiers made their way to Rehe (Jehol) province and fought there during the Japanese offensive of 1933; many returned to banditry or dispersed among the villages.

Japan presented these operations as a fight against banditry and a restoration of order for which the inhabitants ought to be grateful. To a world that was just then reading the report of the commission headed by Victor Bulwer-Lytton, this was supposed to prove that Manchukuo was a state capable of providing security. The report, published on 2 October 1932, meanwhile concluded that the new state did not enjoy the support of the Chinese population.

A war that lasted ten years

The destruction of the volunteer armies did not end the resistance. After 1933 the struggle was carried on by smaller units, increasingly Communist ones. The Chinese Communist Party was at first hostile to the volunteer armies, but in the mid-1930s, in line with the Comintern’s new policy, its units merged with the remnants of other groups. In 1936 the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army was formed. Its most famous commanders were Yang Jingyu and Zhao Shangzhi, and many Koreans fought in its ranks, among them the young Kim Il Sung, later the leader of North Korea.

The Japanese and the Manchukuo authorities responded with increasingly systematic methods. From 1934, in areas of guerrilla activity, peasants were moved into so-called collective villages surrounded by walls and moats, and their former homes were burned to cut the guerrillas off from food and information. A system of collective responsibility of families and neighbours was introduced, the police and the Manchukuo army were expanded, propaganda teams were sent out, and guerrilla leaders were bought off or killed. At the same time, from the autumn of 1932, settlers began arriving in Manchuria from Japan – at first armed groups of former soldiers, who were settled on land taken from Chinese peasants. In February 1940 the Japanese cornered and killed Yang Jingyu, and by 1942 the last larger guerrilla groups, including Kim Il Sung, had withdrawn to the USSR.

Significance

The pacification of Manchukuo was Japan’s first large counter-insurgency campaign in China and a school for the methods the Japanese army later used throughout occupied China, up to the scorched-earth policy in northern China in the early 1940s. Keeping order in Manchukuo required the constant presence of large forces, and the Kwantung Army, expanded to several hundred thousand men, became one of the most important forces in Japanese politics.

The flight of Chinese commanders and Communist guerrillas to the USSR was a reminder that Manchukuo shared a border thousands of kilometres long with the Soviet power. Tension along that border led in 1938–1939 to the clashes at Lake Khasan and at Khalkhin Gol. For the Chinese, the struggle of the volunteer armies became a symbol of the resistance that the government in Nanjing had failed to offer. The slogan of recovering the “three north-eastern provinces” accompanied Chinese policy until 1945, when the Red Army occupied Manchuria and Manchukuo ceased to exist.