The Transnational Transwar: Japanese Imperialism and the Origin of Autonomous Regions in Modern China

• In Event: Minority Report: Ethno-Nationalism and Japanese Imperialism in the Sino-Soviet Borderlands, 1919-1949

Abstract

Since its establishment in 1949, the People’s Republic of China maintains that it has stood as the antithesis to the Japanese occupation that had preceded it. The creation of Inner Mongolia as the first ‘modern’ autonomous region in China, however, reveals the tangled relationship between Japanese strategies towards minorities and the nationality policy of the Communist Party. While recent scholarship traces a direct lineage from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region back to CCP ideology, it precludes the possibility of alternate visions of autonomy that emerged during an era of collaboration under Japanese imperialism.

In considering this transwar period as a transnational phenomenon, this paper turns to the career of Khafengga and his cohort of ‘Young Mongols’ who campaigned for ethnic autonomy from the 1920s to 1940s. A Khorchin Mongol who first took part in the Barga Rebellion, Khafengga traveled to Moscow for university and then worked for the Japanese administration in Manchukuo, including serving as a diplomat to Tokyo. His most significant activities during the occupation included collaborating with Japanese social scientists on economic surveys that defined Khinggan Province as a conceptual blueprint of the autonomous region to come. After decolonization and civil war, Khafengga claimed to have held revolutionary beliefs all along and assumed deputy chair of the regional government, second to Ulanhu. By examining the fraught nature of imperial communism on the frontier, this paper argues that the origins of the PRC’s nationality policy also date to the Japanese experiments of the 1930s and 40s.

Author

• Sakura Christmas, Bowdoin College