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).
1 Comment
Gramma M
3/6/2017 07:12:21 am
Very interesting bit of Chinese/Japanese history. No doubt that if Japan had won WW2 it would have been quickly absorbed by them. Love reading your posts.
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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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