East China Normal University’s first campus, the one I am studying at, is located on Zhongshan North Road (中山北路) in Shanghai. One subway stop away from ECNU is Zhongshan Park (中山公园) located unsurprisingly in Shanghai along Zhongshan North Road. Literally Zhongshan translates into English as middle mountain road, but Shanghai doesn’t have any mountains. To add to the confusion, other cities who both on the mainland and on Taiwan also have streets and parks named Zhongshan, even cities without any mountains at all. So what is Zhongshan and why do half the cities in the country feel the need to have something named after it. Zhongshan isn’t an it, he was a man who is more famous in English as Dr. Sun Yat-Sen (a man who I have written a bit about previously). While Sun Yat-Sen (孙逸仙) has become the most popular transcription of his name in English, in Chinese he is better known as Sun Zhongshan (孙中山). Sun is an interesting character in Chinese history partly because of his continued importance on both Mainland China and on Taiwan. Sun and his Kunmintang Party were the people who overthrow the last Emperor of China, Puyi, and put Dr. Sun in charge as the first President of the Republic of China. Unfortunately for the new President Sun, China was in the middle of decades of political upheaval. Sun spent much of his life in exile, fighting to take back control of China from various warlords, or trying to fix the mess that was the China in his day. Despite this, history views Sun quite positively; he has the almost unique distinction of having a good reputation in the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), the Hong Kong SAR, and the Macau SAR. Both the People’s Republic and Republic of China see Sun as a founding figure. The Republican government established by Sun still controls the Island of Taiwan and, up until the last Presidential elections there, his Kunmintang Party still controlled the government. On Mainland China Sun is seen as the “Forerunner of the Revolution” that paved the way for the Socialist Revolution of Mao and eventual perfect Communism. The result of this split reputation is that Zhongshan Parks can be found from Beijing to Taipei and Zhongshan Roads can be found from Shanghai to Macau. It is unlikely, dispute the best efforts of Beijing, that we will see the reunification of China soon, it is even less likely that we will see the complicated mess of Chinese entities adopt a common world view. Therefor it is likely that Sun Yat-Sen will keep his somewhat confusing reputation as a founder of two governments who don’t recognize each other, have different legal systems, and who claim each other’s territory.
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In my recent post about the inclusive religions of China, I mentioned Puyi (溥儀) who was the last Emperor of China and the only Emperor of Manchukuo. I realized that not everyone might have the context for what Manchukuo was and how did Puyi end up as its Emperor. In short, the Great Empire of Manchukuo (大滿洲帝國) was the Japanese puppet state set up in Manchuria, northern China, after the Japanese took the region form the Chinese in the early 1930s. Legally Manchukuo was a constitutional monarchy with the Concordia Association of Manchukuo (滿洲國協和會) serving as its only legal party; minority groups were permitted to have their own political organizations (there were actually two Jewish political organizations, the Betarim Jew Zionist Movement and the Far Eastern Jewish Council under the direction of Dr. Abraham Kaufman but I can’t find much information on ether) but they could not contest the rule of the Concordia Association. In practice, Manchukuo was never independent form Japanese rule: the Manchukian military relied on the Japanese military, Japanese officials wrote most of Manchukuo’s laws, and Manchukuo was a member of the Japanese backed Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In Puyi’s book From Emperor to Citizen he describes the Manchukian Privy Council Meetings where the Council would meet to agree that the Japanese wrote awesome laws and that Puyi should sign them without question. The Japanese also attempted to make Manchukuo more Japanese: Japanese was an official language of Manchukuo, a large number of Japanese settlers moved to Manchukuo, the Emperor of Japan Hirohito was equally revered to Emperor of Manchukuo Puyi (in Form Emperor to Citizen Puyi mentions that all classrooms in Manchukuo had portraits of both himself and Hirohito), the Japanese tried to integrate the Manchukian Imperial family into the Japanese Imperial family (Puyi discusses how the Japanese were able to get his brother to marry a distant relative of Hirohito and how they wanted him to marry a Japanese women), and (as I mentioned in the inclusive religions blog post) the Japanese attempted to get the Manchukians to worship Shinto gods. While the Japanese did attempt to preserve some elements of China, for example Puyi became Emperor because having the former Qing Emperor be the Emperor of Manchukuo would give legitimacy to the new state, I believe that Manchukuo would have gotten less and less Chinese as time went on. I do not believe that Manchukuo would have remained independent for very long if the Japanese won the Second World War, Manchukuo would have eventually been annexed into Japan like Taiwan or Korea. Today Manchukuo is not remembered well, Chinese historians will often call the Great Empire of Manchukuo something like the “Illegitimate Manchu State” or the “Manchu Puppet Government” and write about the war crimes that took place there. Since 2004, there are a small number of people in Hong Kong who claim to be the Manchukuo Temporary Government (滿洲國臨時政府), but they are kind of a Poe’s Law type entity where it is hard to tell if they are serious about reestablishing the Empire of Manchukuo, commenting on the modern Chinese government, joking, or are basically a bunch of Chinese political historical LARPers. Oh ya, if you are worried about poor poor Emperor Puyi don’t. He died peacefully in a Beijing hotel 1967 after being pardoned by the People’s Republic working as a gardener for the Beijing Botanical Garden (Puyi quite liked gardening and spent a good deal of his time as Emperor of Manchukuo gardening).
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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