The proclamation of Manchukuo

On 1 March 1932 a declaration establishing a new state in north-eastern China was published in Mukden. It was called Manchukuo (Manzhouguo, “the Manchu state”); its capital was to be Changchun, renamed Xinjing (“new capital”); and the first year of its existence was designated the year Datong, “Great Unity”. The declaration, issued in the name of the Northeastern Administrative Committee, spoke of the free will of thirty million inhabitants who were casting off the yoke of corrupt military rule and founding a state based on the “Kingly Way” and harmonious coexistence among nations. In reality the state came into being at the will of the Japanese Kwantung Army, which had been occupying Manchuria since September 1931, and every important decision of its authorities required the approval of Japanese advisers. On 9 March the last emperor of China of the Qing dynasty, Puyi, became head of Manchukuo with the title of Chief Executive (zhizheng).

From conquest to state

The officers who had planned the Mukden incident, Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, had initially thought of Japan annexing Manchuria outright. They soon realised that such a step would be unacceptable to the government in Tokyo, to the League of Nations and to the United States, which together with Japan had undertaken in the Washington treaties and the Pact of Paris to respect China’s integrity. As early as September 1931, therefore, the Kwantung Army staff concluded that it would be better to create a formally independent state under Japanese protection. Japan could then claim that it had not seized Chinese territory but had merely recognised the will of the local population, which had broken away from China of its own accord.

The stakes were high. Since the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905 Japan had held in southern Manchuria the lease of the Kwantung Leased Territory with Port Arthur and Dalny (Dalian), the South Manchuria Railway with its mines and steelworks, and the right to keep troops to guard the railway. In the 1920s it had invested more there than anywhere else abroad. The Great Depression, which hit Japan’s silk exports and ruined the countryside, made Manchuria regarded in Japan as the empire’s “lifeline”: a source of coal, iron, soya beans and land for the overcrowded islands. Ishiwara saw something more in it – a raw-material base for a future “final war” with the United States – and many General Staff officers also saw it as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. The new state was meant to serve all these purposes at once.

As the army occupied one town after another, the Japanese set up local committees and provincial governments there, headed by Chinese generals and officials willing to cooperate: Zang Shiyi in Liaoning, Xi Qia in Jilin, Zhang Jinghui in Heilongjiang. The head of Japanese military intelligence in Mukden, Colonel Kenji Doihara, took charge of the former emperor. In November 1931, taking advantage of riots he himself had instigated in Tianjin, he secretly spirited Puyi out of the Japanese concession in that city and took him by ship to Manchuria. The Japanese government, which officially had nothing to do with it, could no longer undo this. After the capture of Jinzhou at the beginning of January 1932 Japan controlled the south of Manchuria, and after the fall of Harbin on 5 February the north as well. When General Ma Zhanshan, the best-known defender of Manchuria, agreed on 14 February to cooperate, the way to the new state lay open. By the end of February regular Chinese resistance had collapsed.

Events now moved quickly. On 16 February in Mukden, in the presence of the Kwantung Army commander, General Shigeru Honjō, four generals – Zhang Jinghui, Zang Shiyi, Xi Qia and Ma Zhanshan – formed the Northeastern Administrative Committee. On 18 February the committee announced that the north-eastern provinces were severing their ties with the Kuomintang government and becoming fully independent. On 25 February the state’s name, flag, capital and era name were settled. The five-coloured flag, with a yellow field and stripes of red, blue, white and black in the corner, was meant to symbolise the slogan of “five races in harmony”: Manchus, Chinese, Mongols, Japanese and Koreans. On 29 February an assembly of representatives of various groups in Mukden asked Puyi to assume power, and the next day the state was proclaimed.

An emperor without an empire

Puyi was then twenty-six. In 1908, as a two-year-old child, he had been placed on the throne of China; in 1912 his abdication had been signed on his behalf; and in July 1917 General Zhang Xun had restored him to the throne for twelve days. Driven out of the Forbidden City in 1924, he had lived since then under Japanese protection in Tianjin, dreaming of restoring the Qing monarchy. Manchuria was the cradle of his dynasty, and in 1928 the soldiers of one of the Chinese generals had plundered the tombs of the Qing emperors near Beijing, which Puyi regarded as an unforgivable insult on the part of the Kuomintang.

The Japanese, however, had no intention of fulfilling his dreams. At the end of February 1932 Itagaki informed him that the new state would be a republic and that he would receive the title of Chief Executive, not emperor, and be addressed as “Your Excellency” rather than “Your Imperial Majesty”. Puyi protested. Itagaki let him understand that a refusal would be treated as a hostile act, but promised that the monarchy would be restored after a time. Puyi’s adviser Zheng Xiaoxu, who had been promised the post of prime minister, persuaded him to give way. On 8 March Puyi arrived in Changchun, and on 9 March, in the building of the former district office, he took the oath as Chief Executive of Manchukuo. Zheng Xiaoxu became prime minister, and the ministries were taken over by Chinese and Manchu generals, among them Ma Zhanshan as Minister of War.

Real power, however, was secured for the Japanese. In a letter to General Honjō dated 10 March 1932 Puyi agreed that Japan would be responsible for the state’s defence and security and would manage its railways, ports, waterways and airlines, that Manchukuo would bear the cost of maintaining Japanese troops, and that Japanese would be appointed to posts in the administration. The key institution became the General Affairs Board of the State Council, which was run by Japanese from the start. Every Chinese minister had a Japanese deputy who took the decisions. The commander of the Kwantung Army was at the same time Japan’s ambassador to Manchukuo and its de facto viceroy.

The world and Manchukuo

The new state had some thirty million inhabitants, the overwhelming majority of them Han Chinese. There were few Manchus, and the Japanese, not counting the army, numbered several hundred thousand. Formally it comprised the three north-eastern provinces and the province of Rehe, which the Japanese did not occupy until 1933. The Chinese government regarded it as a puppet and never accepted its existence. As early as 7 January the United States had proclaimed the Stimson Doctrine, announcing that it would not recognise any situation brought about in breach of the Pact of Paris. On 11 March 1932 the Assembly of the League of Nations, convened in Geneva over the fighting in Shanghai, adopted this principle as an obligation on all members of the League.

Tokyo, too, was in no hurry to grant recognition. Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai wanted an understanding with China and feared a break with the League. On 18 March his government merely took note of the notification of the new state’s founding. On 15 May 1932 Inukai was shot dead in his residence by young naval officers. The government of Admiral Makoto Saitō yielded to pressure from the army and from public opinion, inflamed by the victories in Manchuria. In June parliament unanimously called for the recognition of Manchukuo, and on 15 September 1932, in Changchun, the commander of the Kwantung Army, General Nobuyoshi Mutō, and Prime Minister Zheng Xiaoxu signed the Japan–Manchukuo Protocol. In it Japan recognised Manchukuo, and Manchukuo confirmed all Japan’s rights and interests and agreed to the stationing of Japanese troops on its territory. This happened a few weeks before the publication of the report of the League of Nations commission headed by Lord Victor Bulwer-Lytton. In the spring the commission had visited Manchuria and spoken with Puyi, with Itagaki sitting beside him. The report of 2 October 1932 concluded that Manchukuo had not arisen from a genuine and spontaneous independence movement but owed its existence to the presence and actions of Japanese troops.

For a long time almost no one apart from Japan recognised Manchukuo. El Salvador did so in 1934, and some sources also mention Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Contrary to a widespread belief, the Vatican did not establish diplomatic relations with Manchukuo; it merely appointed a representative for the Catholic missions. The Soviet Union maintained consulates and in 1935 sold Manchukuo its rights to the Chinese Eastern Railway, but it formally undertook to respect Manchukuo’s territorial integrity only in April 1941, in exchange for a similar Japanese undertaking regarding Mongolia. The breakthrough came only with the alliances Japan concluded in the second half of the 1930s. On 29 November 1937 Fascist Italy recognised Manchukuo, on 2 December 1937 Francisco Franco’s Nationalist government in Spain followed, and on 20 February 1938 Adolf Hitler announced in the Reichstag that the Third Reich would recognise it too. On 12 May 1938 Germany and Manchukuo concluded a treaty of friendship. Hungary joined them in 1939, and during the war so did Germany’s satellites and the occupied countries of Europe, as well as the states dependent on Japan.

Significance

Manchukuo was the first puppet state of a new kind: formally independent, with its own government, army, currency and flag, but in fact ruled by a foreign army. Japanese propaganda presented it as the birth of a new civilisation in which the peoples of Asia, under Japanese leadership, were jointly building a paradise of the “Kingly Way”. In practice it became the raw-material and industrial base of the Japanese war machine, a field of colonisation for hundreds of thousands of Japanese settlers, for whom land was taken from Chinese peasants, and a place of mass repression. Near Harbin operated Unit 731, which carried out criminal experiments on human beings. Japan later repeated this model in other parts of China, creating one dependent government after another, up to Wang Jingwei’s government in Nanjing in 1940.

The proclamation of Manchukuo sealed Japan’s break with the Versailles–Washington system. When in February 1933 the League of Nations adopted the Lytton Report and refused to recognise the new state, Japan left it. Manchukuo was the starting point for successive expeditions deep into China that led to war in 1937, and its borders with the USSR and Mongolia saw bloody clashes in 1938 and 1939. Recognition of Manchukuo became for Japan a measure of friendship, which is why it was Italy and Germany, ready to pay that price, that became its allies. The state that was meant to be a model of Asian unity ceased to exist in August 1945, when the Red Army overran it within a few days. Puyi abdicated and was taken prisoner by the Soviets.